"Comfort? Riches? We have already lost those things," Senya wailed. "We're stuck in this room hiding and scared, and by now there's probably Reduners in my bedroom pawing all my things. Jasper's a nobody-worse than a nobody! He's going to die, just like Daddy and Grandpa! And then where will we be?" She dissolved into a storm of weeping.
Her mother made no effort to comfort her. The man who lay in front of the Cistern Chamber's main door to the street wore a tunic with a reeve's insignia. He had been speared in the back. Jasper was overwhelmed with the stench; the man must have been dead some time, lying out in the heat until nightfall.
Out in the darkened city, there was an odd smell in the air, all-pervading: a strong mix of rot, cooking meat, smoke and acridity. Jasper coughed as he stepped into the street, but there was no one to hear him. He stood still for a moment, pushing his water senses ahead. It was difficult; at a distance, all water tended to merge. Was that a man in a nearby house or someone walking in the street parallel? He couldn't tell.
He sent his powers back to the cistern to change water to vapour-easy enough when he was not dealing with salt water-then wisped it out through the doors and into the open air. A cloud formed, white and damp and thick. He wrapped it around himself as he descended towards the lowest level, so that he trailed mist like an ethereal spirit from another world or a shimmering sand-dancer, perhaps, walking the deserted streets.
When he reached the thirty-seventh level, he took an outside staircase going up to a rooftop. Even though there was no light, he sensed there were people there, including children. That, he decided, ruled out the possibility of Reduners. Nonetheless, he was cautious and paused before setting foot on the walled flat rooftop. His lamp revealed a couple and two children aged about six and eight. They were huddled together sleeping, well wrapped in rough bab-fibre blankets against the bitter cold of a desert night. All Scarpen people, by their colouring. No one to fear. He released some of his hold on the vapour, allowing it to disperse and become less obvious in the night air.
They feared him, though, when he woke them. They stared, their eyes round and terrified, their arms clutching at one another. "There's no need to be frightened of me," he said softly. He held the lantern up so that they could see his face. "Do you know who I am?"
The man shook his head.
"I'm a rainlord," Jasper said. "I've come because I want to know what is happening in the lower levels of the city."
"Rainlord!" The man looked shocked. He knelt, scrambling out of his blankets. "Please, m'lord, don't stand there like a practice butt for the spearing. They may see you!" He spread the blanket out on the rooftop. "If the lord'll sit hisself-" He turned to his wife. "A drink, a drink!"
She rose to obey, too shocked to speak. Jasper knew enough to be aware that he must accept the water they gave him, no matter if they could ill afford to spare it. He sat and inclined his head in acceptance. "Your name?"
"Chellis, rainlord, shoveller at the smelters, outside the walls."
Jasper gave a swift look around. There was no furniture, none. Just the blackened mud-bricks at one end of the roof that served as a fireplace, the four dayjars, the woven sleeping mats that doubled as shelter from the sun when strung from balustrade to balustrade. A man so poor he could only afford a rooftop for his family, but at least he had water entitlement. He worked, and he had the right to live on the thirty-seventh level.
"I want something other than water," Jasper said softly. "Information. I want to know everything that happened today."
In the end, Jasper was surprised to find out just how much the man did know. The townsfolk had found numerous ways to exchange information, the linked houses and common rooftops having become news routes. Streets were left to the Reduners, but the townsfolk commanded the rooftops, and those who could read and write would throw a note across the road to the house opposite, passing on information.
The first part of the attack had been bad, even though they'd had warning. When the ziggers came, Chellis and his family had pulled the bab matting over themselves. Successive waves of ziggers buzzed them for the next few hours, defeated by the tough matting. Eventually they left the petrified family alone to find easier prey.
By mid-morning of the next day, Chellis had heard Reduners in the streets, shouting in their strange accents. One of them came up the stairs and dragged Chellis out to help clear the streets of bodies, and that was what he'd done for the rest of the day. It had been a horrible job. Not everyone had heard the warning. Not everyone had heeded it. Many of the dead were his neighbours, people he had known all his life. Many were children, killed when ziggers entered windows through open shutters.
The corpses had to be piled up on the back of packpedes and carted outside the city, where they were burned on a pyre.
Jasper felt sick. "Oh-oh, sweet water, that's what I can smell!" Human flesh cooking.
Chellis nodded, then continued with his tale. He told of how he had seen fighting, of how he had seen the last of the city's guard overwhelmed by frightening numbers of Reduner warriors and their ferocious mounts in the streets of the city itself, right to the walls of Breccia Hall. "Must of been rainlords there," he said. "I saw Reduners fall with the water sucked out of 'em. Saw 'em with dried-up eyes-hundreds of 'em, as blind as sand-leeches in their holes. The Reduners kill 'em, y'know, the blind ones. Slaughter 'em, their own tribesmen."
"Have you seen the rainlord prisoner?"
"The highlord? They strung 'im up in a cage over the South Gate. Every time we went out with the bodies and came back in, we had to go under 'im. Could hear him moanin'. And I saw blood drippin'. Then by nightfall, didn't hear no more. Reckon he died."
Jasper shook his head. No. Not Nealrith. He refused to believe it. "Where are all the Reduners now?" he asked.
"Big camp outside the walls. Hear tell they don't like roofs over their heads, Reduners. Then there's a ring of guards along the city walls and a second ring around Breccia Hall and the waterhall. They haven't broken into Level Two yet. And none of us can leave the city 'cept under guard to work for them red bastards."
Jasper thanked the man for his information and hid some tokens from his purse under the mat he was seated on. As he stood up to go, Chellis pointed to his lantern. Jasper had turned the wick down low, but it still burned. "Careful with that, my lord. Don't know why 'tis, but the ziggers like the light."
"What makes you say that?"
"I saw a lot of bodies today, my lord. More than one should see in a whole lifetime, I reckon. Most of them had zigger holes. But time and again, I saw more ziggers burned up against a lamp glass than holes in the man that had held the lantern. So many of the little buggers! I reckon they got attracted by the light. Be careful."
"I'll bear that in mind. Thank you, both of you. You have served the Scarpen and Breccia well today." Formal language, suitable for a ruler. All he had to offer, but perhaps it helped.
Back on the street again, he headed for the fortieth level and the South Gate. It was exactly as Chellis had described: a cage swinging in the gateway, just high enough for a man to walk under without ducking his head. At this time of night, of course, the gate was closed. Several Reduner guards lounged by the postern, clearly visible in the light of the torches in the wall brackets. Harder to see, but present nonetheless, were the guards at their posts along the top of the wall, two men every thirty paces or so, silhouetted against the starlit sky. So many of them. And not, surely, because they expected attack from outside; these were to keep Scarpermen from leaving the city, to stop rainlords and reeves escaping.
To stop Jasper Bloodstone.
His lamp extinguished, his mist dissipated so he could watch, he flattened himself against the wall of a house at the corner of the street, until he was sure he had seen or sensed all there was to know nearby. The guards were inattentive, talking about the day's events in the language of the Quartern, describing how this one had died or how they themselves had killed. Laughing about the man swinging in his cage. One of them jabbed his chala spear through the bars. "Is dead, you think?"