Always her thoughts returned to the same thing: how had he known her name?
"How much will the sea urchins be?" she asked.
"Two tinny each." He reached into his belt and extracted sufficient coins. "No paying more, although he sure to ask. Come straight back after; no loitering. Need purple for painting I make for merch on fourth level."
"Can I come with you?"
He shook his head. He had not taken her uplevel once, and she wondered if he ever would.
She said, "They say that there are enforcers on the streets looking for waterless outlanders."
His features sharpened in distaste. "Barbarians," he muttered. Once again he dug into his purse. "Here." He gave her a squashed piece of parchment, much folded and grubby about the edges.
"What is it?"
"Pass for an artisman's assistant. I bought. Anyone be stopping ye, show, yes?"
Relieved, she took the parchment, and her palmubra hat from the hook, and left the room. There was a skip in her step as she went down the stairs. She enjoyed the freedom of being out in the streets and no matter how many times she went to the bazaar, she always saw something new. Not even the thought that there might be blue-uniformed enforcers out looking for outlanders could dim her enjoyment, not with the parchment safe in her waist pouch.
The bazaar was a haphazard conglomeration of stalls, all roofed with bab-leaf thatch and separated into narrow alleyways. Goods spilled out on the ground or were stacked up to the thatching or even hung from a network of ropes that looped across the laneways. Away from the sun, it was cool and dim in the heart of the bazaar, and it was easy enough to lose one's way. The laneways smelled of spices, bab-palm oil, herbs and medicines-a tangle of odours and perfumes jostling for dominance. Gunny sacks of speckled fire-peppers, blue stamen spice, dried fruit and roots were jammed in with dried lizard skins, pebblemouse fur and fish bones. Globs of amber-coloured resin, for glues and turpentine and lacquer, were heaped up with shards of desert crystals said to cure bad luck, back ache and skin diseases.
And through it all came the sounds of stallholders enticing customers: "Look, madam, would you not like a ribbon for those lovely curls?" "Unguent to grow back hair on that bald head, merch?" "A shred of keproot to drive away your cares, broker?" "Ointment to whiten the skin, girlie?"
Terelle found Abel the bigger's stall tucked between a barber's shop and a fortune teller's. Abel sold sea produce: salted fish, pungent shrimp paste, fermented crab-meat, dried seaweed. In amongst seashells and cuttlefish skeletons-said to be nourishing food for ziggers-she found the urchins, but it took much bargaining before he would part with them for two tinnies each.
"You're from that old codger with the funny clothes, aren't you?" he asked as he wrapped the urchin shells in a yam leaf. "He's 'bout the only person who wants these things nowadays. T'other folk stopped buying frivolities like purple urchins long ago." He handed over the parcel, then exclaimed, "Lord above! What's that racket?"
Terelle turned to see. In the covered laneway between the stalls, several of the stallholders and a number of customers were trading insults with six people dressed in the robes of waterpriests.
"Good folk, make sacrifices," one of the younger priests was saying with youthful earnestness, "for if you do not return a little of your daily water to the soil, the Sunlord will surely punish you!"
The barber, a portly man with no hair at all on his head, waggled a finger at the man who had spoken. " 'S all very well for you-you're not waterless like us Thirty-sixers! Every drop we can buy is precious. We don't have any to chuck away. Water sacrifice is for the rich." He turned his head and spat into the dust.
"Hand in jar with the reeves, you wilting waterpriests," a woman agreed.
The oldest of the priests raised a hand in protest. "Madam, madam, please. We counsel you all for the good of your souls. Do not the Watergiver's writings say that 'he who shares his water with the land will live'? But it's more than that, for the Watergiver also speaks of times of drought when every man, woman and child must give water to the sun lest the Sunlord turn on them to chastise their lack of faith. And has he not turned on us, good people? Not enough rain falls in the hills-"
"Ain't that the Cloudmaster that's turned on us then?" someone called from the back of the crowd that was gathering.
There was scattered laughter.
"Go take your preaching back to those that can afford you!" someone cried.
Abel the bigger leaned forward and said quietly in Terelle's ear, "Best be gone, lass. These things have a way of turning ugly these days, alas. Neither priests nor reeves nor enforcers have many friends on the Thirty-sixth of late."
Terelle thanked him and pushed her way back to the open streets beyond. The last thing she wanted was trouble. Uneasy, she turned her thoughts to what was really bothering her: Russet. His secrecy. His refusal to tell her how he had known her name. Sands, she thought, there are no shadows in my future now. Why can't I be satisfied?
But she wasn't. That night she asked Russet yet again how he had known her name, and whether he had known her mother.
"Be not time for ye to know such things," he said.
"I need to know," she said.
His sharp little eyes glared at her. "Trust your teacher," he said.
"I'd trust him more if he told me the truth!" Infuriatingly, his next words were laced with condescension. "All in good time. When ye be older."
"I am old enough right now."
"Ye be old enough when I say so, child!"
She returned his glare with one of her own. Soft-voiced, he reminded her, "Ye can't be leaving. Nowhere to go."
The petty meanness of his statement left her furious. Trouble was, it was true. She needed him, and because of that, he could do what he pleased. She fell asleep that night thinking that her future was still a place where freedom was an illusion. All she had done was exchange a decorative cage for another, plainer one. Several hours later she woke, aware she was alone in the room. She raised herself on one elbow, not knowing what had awoken her. The door was open a crack and the sliver of light that squeezed through told her someone had lit an oil lamp in the communal hallway that ran past all the upstairs rooms. Broad and airy, it overlooked the road through a series of archways. Terelle and Russet prepared their paints there, Lilva the madam sat there when her daughter or her son brought home clients to their room, Cilla did her weaving, Rhea sewed the beadwork she sold uplevel.
Terelle peeped around the curtain to look at Russet's sleeping pallet. It was empty. She padded to the door and put her eye to the crack. He was painting by the light of a lamp, totally absorbed in what he was doing. She stood, watching him, baffled. In the dim light, she could not make out the subject matter, and in the end she returned to her bedding knowing only that this must be a painting he wanted to keep secret.
When she finally went back to sleep, she had a nightmare in which Huckman and Russet were inextricably blended into a single menacing customer of Opal's snuggery. He was demanding that Terelle be made to paint her own first-night in graphic detail. She was protesting, her terror absolute, her heart beating wildly-and then it was morning.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Scarpen Quarter Warthago Range Scarcleft mother cistern Shale slept most of the day and woke in the late afternoon with the memory of turbulent dreams in which Mica was killed, over and over again. And then came his memory of the reality, worse because it was true.
Citrine.
He touched his chest, expecting to feel again the stickiness of her blood. And woke more fully when his hand encountered the unfamiliarity of his clothes.