Source

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter 6

Section 1

Summer.

Upriver.

Tanekhet . . .

Where do I start?

Crying; laughing; blinking at blots on this pen-killing excuse for paper that has more ruts than a Kora road. If I could tell you, if I can halfway manage to convey this to you.

#

This is ridiculous; I shall start where I ended. In the prison, that day after a quarter’s worth of waiting; when I had just decided we must act.

And been pre-empted in mid-scratch as the usual brangle of mid-afternoon jackal-baitings that I had ignored in my self-absorption became a howl and thud and awful masculine grunt.

I remember now, I threw the whole writing apparatus in the mud and jumped.

But it was Zuri, not  Sarth, who had Keraz rammed in the slop-corner behind her and the arch-slob felled in front of her, teeth bared, every muscle shouting, Come on, and I’ll massacre you!

She was actually grinning. Zuri, who watched Amberlight die and never flicked a lash.

I have to reconstruct the rest;  the bar-gate, open, jackals six-deep in the gap, my own folk making the other side of the crescent, shoved back by the monster’s crash. Shoulders I parted with one desperate lunge, only to be yanked up in mid-leap.

Sarth’s hands that grabbed me. Alkhes’ voice, strained almost beyond recognition, that hissed in my ear, “No!”

No intervention from one without fighting skills. No intervention at all, because nothing and no-one would stop Zuri now.

She must have kicked again. Somewhere over the kidneys, and then used the manacle-bight on his neck. I deduced this from where his hands went, over the wheeze of his breath.

Before he grumbled like a woken elephant and heaved, limb by limb, from the mud.

Zuri waited for him. Head cocked, teeth still bare, that grin, pure berserker, on her face.

He rubbed his back. He was a huge oaf, over six feet and broader than a warehouse door, and little enough was fat. We had had cause to fear his forays. It was he who half-killed Azo.

I make no doubt he could feel the quiet; the hungry silence behind him, a pack watching a challenged lead-wolf. He gave his kidneys one last rub; then he spat in the mud.

“All right, girlie,” he said. “End of watch.”

All the jackals shivered in their filthy boots, such a susurrus of bloody-minded joy I knew this was more than custom; it was a ritual. A familiar ritual, the one they had been longing for.

Zuri grinned harder. “Big boy,” she said. “Keep it up.”

I saw his cheekbones go dirty purple, but nobody, our side or theirs, dared a sound. They had cleared the doorway before he lumbered near enough to shove.

#

What point then in descanting upon imminent ruin, in spending time on curses or questions or lament? As little as in asking the cause. One more insult to Keraz, always their favorite butt, one verbal or physical obscenity more than Zuri would stand. I ought to have been paying attention. Now it was too late. Either we would lose my right arm, our trouble-Head, or we would call Wonsa’s attention in a way he could not overlook.

Whether from intimidation or anticipation, the jackals did not meddle when we women got together in the council corner. Not that we said much. A few words of tactics between Zuri and Azo, lost on us. A few mumbles from Sunya and Deor about what the rest should do, a shattered silence from Esrafal. An attempt at apology from Keraz. What more to say? We had no weapons. We had no way of getting any. If Zuri won, we had one hope, and that was to break out immediately.

If Zuri lost?

I am not sure if that was worse than the prison in Amberlight. I do know I have never before been in council, and had no word, no scheme, however crazy, no goal, no subterfuge, to offer my House.

We sat so long the men came over. That the jackals made no protest said just how bad it was. We huddled in our dirty stinking cumbered ring under the torchlight, stunned; mute.

And then Ahio, next to me, sat up, and said, “What became of Dinda’s statuette?”

#

Natural enough for the shaper to think of it. Natural enough that all our jaws dropped. I must have looked sillier than Zuri. Ahio glanced around us, half diffident, half abashed.

“I only thought . . . that would be strong enough.”

Strong enough to prove a weapon, strong enough, in the right hands, to knock a building over, to blow a city wall down, to blast a road clear out of Cataract.

Zuri looked at me. All of them looked at me, I who knew both the overall picture and the finer details, I the supposed House-head, I whose brain had finally recovered circulation. Sweet Work-mother! what a fool I felt!

“It would have gone dead; during the siege.”

Of Amberlight. He had been negotiating the winter before, ahead of time; it must have faded by that summer’s end.

Esrafal said, “What happens when they … die?”

“They just sit there. The great kingdoms, Dhasdein, Verrain, bury them. In a special, sacred ground.”

Zuri, whose intelligencers knew every domestic palace detail for the River’s length.

“And in Cataract?”

It was Ahio who breathed it. It was all our eyes that spoke the unbelieving, incredulous response, the more impossibly kindling hope.

“After he died,” Azo tiptoed word to word, as if the very walls were holding their breath, “it wouldn’t have been . . . put away.”

“Nobody,” Ahio, sitting straighter, holding her own breath, “here’d dare fiddle with it.”

Not even Wonsa. The silence concluded that for us, as if it, too, had forgotten to breathe.

“So it’s still—” “If we could just—” “It might—”

All their eyes returned to me. I could feel their hearts sink, as I dragged out the words.

“I’ve never heard of one revived.”

Silence. Sinking like a holed ship. Before Sunya shifted feet with a jerk in the mud and spoke.

“And there’s never been a seed before. Or men,” how did she hold her voice straight? “that could touch it, or dreams that it sent. You said, It would get us out.”

Again the eyes came back to me. How was I to say, This is less than a dream? Far less a valid, even a crazy hope?

Zuri read me fastest. She had construed my assent so often before, for so many lost, lunatic enterprises, it came as no surprise when she straightened her shoulders and said casually, “Then we’d best get going now.”

She meant, before the fight.

“But how do we . ..?” Quiran will blurt a question more often than anyone else. Perhaps his medical work has given him some standing in his own mind.

Zuri grunted, already turning to study the bars. Azo had moved to her, Deor and Sunya shifting in step. If they were not troublecrew, they were Navy. They understood the tactics of assault.

“Wait.”

Zuri did check. All the women did, taken by surprise.

“I think that one’s mine.”

He said it so quietly. So coolly. Except that if you knew him, you could read the jaw’s rigidity, and if you had the right angle, see the sweat already beading his temples, under the night-black hair.

“No!”

That time I jumped myself. I have seen Sarth in wrath and outrage and deadly menace. I never heard him sound like that.

“I must! It’ll be in the tyrant’s quarters, the treasury, the personal shrine, it can’t be anywhere else. None of you’ll get that far. I ’m the only one who might—!”

Sarth took him by the elbows and bore him back against the wall. Alkhes is a soldier and a street-fighter and trained troublecrew, and he might as well have fought an avalanche.

“I said, No.”

Even I knew better than to interfere.

“Sarth—”

Sarth stared down at him. I do not know how that tower stillness can convey so much. Absolute blankness; total silence; a volcano ready to burst.

I would not have dared to speak. But Alkhes shook his hair back and all but threw it in that face.

“This time it’s my turn.”

Sarth’s jaw muscle jumped. I heard Alkhes catch his breath. They glared at each other, and I read the past slashed like a pair of swords between those battling eyes.

You can’t do it, Sarth was saying. You have only one way into the tyrant’s palace, and it will give Wonsa a message he cannot mistake. I will not let you cold-bloodedly hazard yourself, all too possibly sell yourself into your worst nightmare, into what has too often become truth. Where you may all too possibly suffer more than violation, or torture, or death itself.

There is no choice, Alkhes’ midnight stare retorted, for that very cause. Nobody else has my leverage. Not even you, who have done this for us once. Nor will I shirk a burden twice.

Without looking away, he said, “Tellurith?”

I could not reply. I could see how his throat had set; I could imagine what filled his memory, feel the speeding of his heart. If I was all but panicked at the thought, what must he feel?

“Tel?”

A soldier’s voice. More than a soldier’s voice. Once he had been Iskarda’s Chosen, however crookedly Iskarda rolled the dice; once he had stood as a king, who dies to save his House. That place, that demand, was in his inflection now.

I swallowed twice, and managed a gulp. Before I got out, “Sarth.”

He looked at me. May I never, whatever my perfidies, meet such a look again.

Very carefully, Alkhes put up his hands. Took Sarth by the wrists and, unresisted, drew his shoulders clear of that prisoning grasp.

I do not know what that look said: Forgive me, Be kind, Don’t make it worse? Trust me? Let me die if I must; so long as I pay my debts?

Sarth’s mouth crimped. I felt Zuri wince with me, as he freed his hands. Then he jerked Alkhes to him and gave him a hug that must have crushed his ribs, and added thickly, “Take your own advice.”

I remember thinking, once Alkhes would have died, sooner than bear a man’s embrace. Let alone hug him, openly, passionately in return.

#

I must have been terrified. It is difficult to remember now. Looking back, it seems we were all amazingly calm. We agreed like sleepwalkers that it must start now, to give Alkhes all the time possible before the end of watch. As if he would unquestionably succeed. As if Zuri would as certainly win her fight. As if we would all meet again, simply as women in a marketplace. From start to finish a harebrained, rackety, lethal card-house of dovetailing impossibilities, and we set about it as if it were ordinary routine.

Easy as firing a light-gun up.

I don’t know, Tanekhet. I can hear you ask, with the skinning knife turn in your voice and the light sharp as Riversend winter in those forest-green eyes. I don’t know how this was possible, I don’t know if Ahio thought of it, any of it, by herself. How in the Mother’s name am I to tell?

All I know is, Alkhes hugged me too, and kissed me, more than desperately. Before he walked across, almost steadily, and rattled the gate in the bars.

The jackals must have had a good gossip-net, for either they had heard the end of things in hall, or someone had been talking since. Because they leered and spread their usual smut; but when he said, “I want to see the Ruler,” they spluttered and muttered; but they sent a messenger almost at once.

We had only to wait, then. With Alkhes in our midst, Sarth and I at his shoulders, the others pressing close, as if to armor him in thought, if nothing else . . . I know I could not bring myself, at the last, to share a physical touch. The line of his back said, too clearly, This is all that I can bear.

When the messenger returned, he did not look around at us; just walked forward steadily, oh, sweet Mother, how too, too steadily; a small, bedraggled figure with the bearing of a king, as they led him away.

#

Believe it or not, but the next part was easier. We had chosen to throw; now we had only to do our best with our own dice.

The Mother knows that was hard enough, not least for Zuri’s part. Triple-seasoned troublecrew, going to meet a man twice her size and thrice her weight and guaranteed the dirtiest bully in Cataract, and she carried on like a maiden before festival night. I could not get the grin off her face. And I dared not shout at her, Zuri, this monster is going to kill you without the most impossible luck, he won’t do it gently and we will have to stand and watch! But all she would say was, “We’ll take care of it.”

She did have instructions for us. We were to stay absolutely clear of the fight, and we were to remain hair-triggered for the slightest chance at the main target; because whatever happened elsewhere, the keys were what mattered most.

“Miss those and the whole thing’s a waste.”

She told me that. Those spring-snow gray eyes alight, actually alight. I have never, ever seen Zuri animated. I cannot remember seeing her look happy, in the length of my life.

“Doesn’t matter how you do it. Insult, tease, wave your boobs at ‘em, bash ‘em if they’re inside, pick a pocket through the bars. Mark the key-carrier the minute they come down, and don’t take your eyes off him. No matter what I do.”

That last, she aimed at Sarth. Who stared back at her, topaz eyes smoldering, that tower aplomb straining at the edges, beginning to look a killer at last.

She choreographed us too; Navy and troublecrew nearest the door, Keraz and I farthest back. I have seldom felt so useless; but Zuri only shook her head. “Brains and boobs,” she said, and grinned. Nor have I heard her be so crude. “You’re the brains, Ruand. Keraz is the tender spot. Keep ‘em both out of reach.”

I understand now why troublecrew wear those solid breastbands, and why they claim to fear hand-to-hand work less than a man. The Mother knows, I have seen Zuri fight before; yet when I let myself think of the ground, so unhelpful to the lighter combatant, the chains she wore, so easy for a stronger foe to grab, the dicta I had overheard troublecrew rehearse for years, that fighting a man you must never come to close quarters, never let yourself be caught. When I considered what must be her opponent’s experience in such battery . . .

I will confess it, Tanekhet. I did not only fear. I cursed. I blasphemed the Mother, and most of all I damned the qherrique, that had got us into this viper-pit and would not get us out. If I live, I remember vowing, there will be such a reckoning as will make you long for the questions and indictments you have drawn from Sarth.

How long until watch-end? At most, a couple of hours from the original clash. As Zuri said, after Alkhes . . . left. Long enough. Bless the Mother, at least, that I had no time to wonder what might be happening up in the tyrant’s palace, in some silken-sheeted bed, on some barbaric Heartland animal-skin rug. I had to focus my own wits on shucking off the stench of mud and mildew and human filth and death and excrement, and getting the best vantage point to watch the stairfoot; and the men who would emerge beyond the bars.

The pair left on watch had, again most unusually, withdrawn into the stairwell, so the sound was their one herald. Mutter, clatter, tramp. A great many, far too many booted feet. And the voices; a blood-hungry, brutal masculine crowd.

I think that is the one moment that I have truly, honestly regretted losing Amberlight.

Then they had debouched onto the patrol-way along the bars; five, ten, fifteen, twenty, near the entire jailcrew, grinning and jeering and pouring mouth-filth worse than ever before.

Zuri had choreographed the arrival too. She was lolling on the shelf, right opposite the door, with her feet on Deor’s thigh and her head in Keraz’ lap. When the uproar reached crescendo, she looked round and yawned. Then she patted Keraz’ cheek, lifted herself on an elbow and drawled, “Oh. You’re here.”

If her opponent ever had battle-skills, they were not based in subtlety. I suspect, thinking back, that he had relied on brute force all his life. He sneered and shouted something about her girlie-sluts, but his cheekbones had darkened, even by the murky torch-glow. He yelled again, and gestured to the man beside him to open the bars.

Zuri swung herself languidly upright. Stretched, showing the line of her breasts through a once immaculate shirt. The mere sight of a woman moving like a woman was enough to set the jackals off. Zuri grinned and said, “Well, big boy. Coming in?”

He growled at her. She moved forward, and we shifted behind her, Keraz sliding down the shelf to me, Quiran and Herar close next to us, Deor and Sunya beyond, Sarth and Ahio on the other side, Azo right at Zuri’s back. The cell was all of ten paces across, perhaps thirty long. Zuri took three steps forward and posed with shoulders back, breasts out, pelvis thrusting, one hand on a hip. I never saw anything less like troublecrew ready-stance in my life.

Whatever else he recognized he must have known that. His face congested. He shouted at the farthest minions to bring the torches up.

Zuri grinned at him again. The bars groaned open he stepped inside. The key-bearer was right beside the door. He made to shut it, and Zuri looked past the monster and drawled, “Think he’ll be safe?”

They both turned purple. Then the monster made one furious gesture behind him, the key-bearer flung the gate wide and stood straddle-legged in the gap.

And the monster charged.

He was damnably fast. Zuri had been looking past him and I nearly screamed at what I thought a fatal lapse. He was on her before I had my breath and he grabbed her, landing on her, hands slapping for her throat as they went full length in the mud.

I did not see what happened. I doubt anyone saw. A thrash of limbs and torsos and flying mud in a tangle of heavy cross-laced boots, leather trousers tough as armor, leather belly-support, huge heaving glistening back, Zuri completely out of sight. Sarth on tiptoe with murder unveiled in his face, Deor and Sunya focused like guns to fire.

Azo with a knee between the giant’s shoulderblades and the manacle-bight brought down twisted and rigid as a bludgeon across his neck.

The monster’s body sagged. Then it convulsed.

Zuri came uppermost on his lunges, tucked closer than a leopard in the disemboweling clutch. No face, no hands, a mere line of tucked-in head and arched straining back. He reared over face-up in the mud, and he was making noises I never heard come out a human mouth. Azo leapt aside and in again and the sound went up an octave. He thrashed like a crippled bull and for an instant the torchlight showed me his face.

She had gouged both his eyes out. Then I can only imagine that she must have … bitten off his nose. His hands had missed her throat and caught her manacles and he was trying to pull her off him but she had a loop round his bicep so that every heave dragged her closer.

And her head—her teeth—were in his throat.

I don’t know what Azo did. Something to his privates, something involving another twist of chain, probably, I think now, just a distraction, or something to pin him so he could not roll Zuri back underneath and still crush her to death. His torso bucked, his legs beat like a monstrous toddler’s, but Azo’s grip was more than he could fight.

I did not think you could find a vital vein or artery in such a monstrous throat. Not with human teeth. Really, they tell me, it is not the opening that matters, it is the pressure. On the brain-feeding arteries, which was where Zuri’s hands were. Hands hard as iron from years of unarmed combat, far stronger than most men’s, let alone most women’s grip. She only used her teeth to be sure he could not throw her off.

The monstrous body fell back. Zuri came up off him on one elbow like a cobra, and smashed the other across the front of his unprotected throat.

She jerked the chains free, then. She still had a knee in his solar plexus. He was thrashing, spasming in near disabled agony, the great hands grabbed; she twisted clear and came upright on the lunge, and kicked him. Twisting to put the whole force of her body behind it, driving her foot edge-on right up under the chin.

The head flew back for all its size. There was a hideous clicking crunch.

The body thrashed again, but this time it was a purely muscular reflex. Zuri stood away. The great limbs trembled and quivered into subsidence, and the foul air suddenly brought me a new, sharper stench.

I remember my mouth was wide open, my throat dry, my heart pounding as if to burst me, every muscle aquake; I had not drawn breath when Sarth’s arm plucked the key-bearer from the gateway and smashed his head into the bars while Ahio ripped the keys out of his hand, snap!

Something else snapped too. As Sarth dropped the suddenly limp body and dusted his hands together Ahio threw the keys clear across the cell.

I caught them. It is the marvel of my life, Tanekhet. I caught them, just like that. Slap of greasy revoltingly warm iron and rattle of thirty separate hafts stinging on my fingers, and not a moment to think.  

Sarth was almost out the gate. Azo and Zuri understood. Herar understood too, for a sudden male hand wrenched me from the shelf and as Keraz landed beside me Zuri and Azo swept straight out the doorway, two mud and blood-stained furies bearing down on the jackals, who had not yet absorbed their champion’s fall.

Sarth went with them. I had one glimpse of his shoulders, the thrust of a charging lion. Deor and Sunya pushed Ahio aside and threw themselves after. I heard the noise Sunya made. A leopard’s short, coughing snarl. Herar was shoving us forward, Quiran and Chenath right behind, I twisted the keys underhand the way Zuri herself had once shown me and struck with the protruding wards at some belated jackal’s face.

When the metal slashed his knuckles he squealed and fell back. Deor crossed before me, swinging chain like a broken cable, and the three men our side the gate broke and ran.

In the midst of literal murder, Zuri must have noticed that. She shouted something, and my husband, my gently bred Tower-man, flowed like running death up the steps.

Zuri and Azo had the others yarded behind a tumble of fallen shapes; all three troublecrew had struck to kill, and the Navy women had not been behind. Sliding round to the stair-side, Zuri waved her hands. She did it quite gently. But the grin on her bloodied lips would have terrified a war-god, and the jackals pissed themselves trying to get inside the bars.

She yanked the door to and pulled the keys away from me. I was there when she wanted them. I must have had the brains for that. The gate shut with a swing-bar, a latch and padlock. Azo thrust a loop of chain over the latch, lest any of them try to storm it while Zuri sorted the key out. But she had watched the process too often to mistake.

We were all gasping, wheezing, panting, eyes bulging from muddied, bloodied faces, the bloodlust staring in our eyes, whether we had killed or not. My House-folk. My trouble-Head, right beside me, stinking and shuddering and wheezing like a rowing-slave, but with the terrible grin, at last, fading off her face.

“Zuri . . .?”

I could just hear myself. Her eyes turned. Amid the muck, they recognized me. She grinned again; a different grin, the twisted, acknowledging survivor’s grin that was, in its own way, an accolade.

I put my arms around her and she fell against me, and it was only Azo’s clutch that kept us out of the mud.

Sarth was there when we straightened up. Breathing hard too, but without the look of a wakened sleeper like the rest of us. He nodded to Zuri; coolly, once.

Zuri nodded too. Took a long breath, and started moving us toward the steps.

Behind us, the jackals had also revived. Overtaken events. A solitary voice bawled, “You bloody, cheating bitch!”

A chorus overrode it. They slammed themselves against the bars and howled like very beasts.

Zuri wheeled and stalked back. Instant hush. She grinned, showing them her bloodied teeth.

“What, did you think we’d fight fair?”

With the indescribable contempt of Amberlight troublecrew, who trained to fight women as dangerous as themselves and men much larger, their entire lives.

It came out hoarse. Now I looked, I could see, under the mud, that there actually were marks on her throat. He must have got one hold at least, and how she ever got it off . . . Perhaps that was when she gouged his eyes.

She swept that stare past them, and her lip lifted again, savagely as Wonsa’s own. Then she grinned once more, somewhere between a jeer and that berserker’s smile, and lifted a hand to the supine corpse.

“You did know how to fall,” she said.

#

The first thing we understood, after Zuri herded us up into stench-free, intoxicatingly open air, was the dark. I do not know why we had not expected night; I suppose watch-changes meant so little, down in the pit. So we were all gawping like off-work miners in the entryway when Zuri tweaked the keys from me and began trying the nearest doors.

Hunting smith’s tools to get off our chains. She had noticed where they were taken; troublecrew cunning, troublecrew wits. I was still staring into the starry dome that opened over us, still reading off the beloved reclaimed constellations and identifying a third quarter, before the late-rising moon, still savoring the scent of Cataract suppers that floated over the citadel wall, thoroughly dubious meats thick with fiery spice, still orienting myself to the citadel space. That light-riddled shape to the left was the back of the central hall, the garrison, and perhaps the honor-guard at dinner, was the rumor within. The shadow to our right, behind the jail-adit . . .

Was moving. Azo whipped in front of me, Sarth shoved me back and I felt his side vibrate to a silent growl. Zuri yanked the nearest non-combatant back. Stopped dead. Produced a thread of whisper.

“Alkhes?”

He came out of the dimness like a half-embodied ghost. Drifting with the silence of troublecrew, slow and mindless as a sleepwalker, a white blur of face blotted by the chasm of eyes, the night-swallowing fall of hair. He had his hands up and out like the ancient statues of an offering-bearer, and for an instant all of us recoiled. It had come too pat, too eerily; for an instant I really did think he was the revenant of a man already dead.

Then Ahio made a grunt that Sunya strangled in her throat. Sarth hissed and snatched.

He stood meek as a sleepwalker in Sarth’s grasp. A chink in the hall-back threw a renegade shaft of light that drowned in those black, blind, unblinking eyes. Sarth caught his breath and shook him and the light flicked what was in the outheld hands.

Ahio captured it, motion quick and involuntary as Sarth’s. Cupped it, as we held them in the shaper’s shops. No mistaking the upright triangle of skirts lifting to the narrow waist, the inverted triangle of upper torso and lifted arms and atop that, the open triangle of the helical thunderbolts. Gray and glistening as solidified mist, a fore-arm, half an armslength high.

A nation-leader’s statuette.

Zuri drew an audible breath and spun on her toes. Azo and Sunya and Deor revolved with her, it was no harder for me to guess her thoughts. Here we were havering atop a jail-break, still too hobbled to run, stuck in the citadel’s heart, no idea of patrols, routines, guards. Or the state of the tyrant himself.

Beside me Sarth was touching, handling as gently as if he held another statuette. I heard him say, just under his breath, “Aglis?”

Alkhes did not reply. But I saw the shadow shift, as he took the half-step forward and buried his head against Sarth’s chest.

Zuri said something as inaudible and wrenched at the keys.

Eventually she found the door. Bless the Mother, pincers make far less noise than hammers, and Chenath and Herar had muscles as well as wits, to give the troublecrew help. But I knew what, above all, Zuri would want. The minute she finished with me I groped over and slid my own hand up Alkhes’ back.

“Caissyl?”

He moved a little; a soundless: I hear. By no means, It’s all right. But we could not delay any longer. I said against his ear, “Wonsa . . . is he . . .?”

He lifted his head from Sarth’s protection and spoke aloud at last, a voice as numb, as empty as those eyes.

“He’ll be no problem to us.”

I had no time. No, I did not dare ask any more. And Ahio was at my elbow, all but vibrating, prodding on breath’s edge, “Ruand?”

Two lunacies had succeeded. Why not the third? I felt inside my shirt for the little, hoarded, still half-decent pouch.

The seed was warm in my palm. I cupped it, and reached for the statuette.

Then I spoke as I never addressed the qherrique in the length of my life, Tanekhet. Come on, I said, you treacherous whoring bastard, if you want me to go on with this . . .prove it now.

Nothing changed.

I had time to ease out the over-held breath. Time to re-draw it for obscenities that would have scalded a devil’s ears. The true blow had not fallen when Esrafal on Ahio’s other side jumped as if pinched and burst out, “Sing what?”

Before our mouths shut she spluttered again; then gulped and muttered, “Sing, Ruand. All of you, sing.”

She hummed a note and tapped a chain against its links, and sang what was undoubtedly the first thing into her head, an ancient Amberlight plainsong used to invoke River-rise.

I could feel Zuri gaping too. To sing qherrique is the cutter’s or shaper’s avocation; private, utterly personal, never done except by a single woman, seeking that one specific assent. Esrafal flapped her hands at us, reached a line’s end, and fairly spat out, “Sing!”

We sang. Or muttered, trying to keep it under our breaths, half of us missing words and most of us off the tune, but even the men’s deeper mumbles rumbled underneath.

The seed burned up, waking, rising, a miniature moon that dyed my fingers like candlelit wine. I jiggled it one-handed as the most arrant imbecile, wanting to howl, What next?

What except set it, like a coal to wood, against the statuette?

And it happened. I felt it happen, the way you used to feel it, working a block in the shaper’s shop. The light’s advent, the glow strengthening, the heatless, moonburn, holy fire.

The shadows came out around our feet as if we were standing stones with a moonrise inside. Far whiter, far purer, far steadier than any fire or candle, a beacon of the impossible raised in a scarecrow congregation’s midst. I had time to see the eyes, the parted, worshipful lips. Before I gave Zuri a frantic glance, and she threw an eye at the hall, then down the hill, and jerked her chin. And I started to walk.

Crisis or not, trust Zuri to be devious. She had pointed me toward the citadel’s northern wall. The quickest way across the city toward Upriver. The cataracts. The Jump-up Cliffs.

By some miracle, the palace had no outer patrols. The darkness parted round us like the bow-wave of a ship, and by some other uncovenanted miracle the citadel’s internal traffic was quiet; I can only suppose they had all gone to eat. We marched along the blank palace wall, I was never so glad for Cataract’s building style; the wall turned, the hill sloped down to lighter dark. A hand gripped my elbow and pulled me up.

“That.” Alkhes said, his eyes blacker than ever as they caught the qherrique light, the hair a night-shroud over them, and the expression blank as its dark. “That first.”

He was pointing at the palace. When I stared, he shook my arm as if I ought to understand. The eyes kindled then; a conflagration in some unfathomable inner space.

“Burn it,” he said.

I thought I knew what he meant. I thought I understood, too well, the note on which he added, “He deserves that much.”

The palace was timber above the plinth. A risk, yes, but as much of a diversion. Zuri’s expression told me that.

I had never, will you credit, actually ‘used’, for want of a better word, a statuette. How do rulers apply them, I wonder? Do they look outward, or in? Do they ask assent, as at the mother-face, or commune as with the block, or point the things like guns and aim?

I was painfully prosaic. I turned its face to the palace, and concentrated on the thunderbolts.

Probably anything would have done. But the assent surged through me as it does with a big light-gun. And like a light-gun, the thunderbolts fired.

Crossed beams, thin and slicing as the deadliest of swords, converged at the point I had chosen, high in the timber wall. Biting deep, and deeper, until the smoke came, and then the blackening, and then the gout of crimson, stabbing flame.

Beside me Alkhes said, “Again.”

Five blazes he had me kindle, and I still do not know why the guards did not pour out like prodded wasps. I do not ask you to believe it, Tanekhet. But believe this. We were half-down the slope, me with the statuette’s beacon dragging our scarecrow comet-tail, before the wall ahead rang to the first appalled shout.

I think they took it for a demon, or a visiting god, or just a particularly venomous ghost. I do know I was never more glad for the superstition of most Heartland folk; for the four sentries ran like hares, just as we heard the hilltop buildings raise the alarm.

Zuri was at my elbow. The qherrique caught the beast’s savagery in her eyes. She jerked her chin at the wall and bade me as she would her own troublecrew, “Get it down.”

Solid cedar trunks, planted who knows how deep? The rest of us weaponless, murder woken behind. I aimed the statuette and gave it Zuri’s order, with a waking savagery of my own. Break it, I said, and I remembered how the hill blew up at Amberlight. Blow it away.

And it did.

That time it was raw power, a blast that nearly kicked the statuette out of my hands. It lit the compound like a lightning flash, and it blew three full-grown cedar trunks to splinters the way a smith’s hammer pulverizes a tooth.

There was, amazingly, almost no sound. So we could tramp quite calmly through the breach, for Zuri to slide away ahead of us, with an upward glance that told me she was going to blind-stab by the stars, while Azo and Sunya and Deor dropped back, each nursing a handful of shucked chains, to cover our backs.

I doubt anybody had time to reel at the portent we had wrought. We were too busy breaking our shins in the abominably rutted alleyways and straining to keep Zuri in sight, and in my case, worrying about Alkhes. The mere fact that Sarth had not gone with Zuri told me the condition he must be in.

And we were lucky, too, that the citadel folk entangled themselves in the fire, so it must have been some time till the routed sentinels even made themselves heard; long enough to take us half across the city, before the hounds marked our trail.

I heard Ahio grunt as she grabbed my arm to avoid the consequences of another rut; carrying the statuette I was all but blind. Then her arm stiffened, and above the nearby cursing and panting I too caught the clangor of beaten gongs and ululating Heartland wails that fountained from the citadel. Taken up ahead, as the city wall sounded the alarm.

Zuri stopped with a particularly pungent curse. Her eyes met mine; trouble-Head’s consultation, brief as it was perfunctory. I nodded, and she dived back into the dark.

Our one best chance to get clear unhampered: make for the wall and hope, again, to blast our way out.

 
© 2010 Sylvia Kelso

  Jupiter Gardens Press

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