The Last Stormlord

by Glenda Larke

  “They tole you that?”

  Taquar smiled, a touch of nastiness in his satisfaction. “A rainlord can be very persuasive, Shale. Anyway, what I learned leads me to suspect that you were to be their secret stormshifter, the one who could save them if their Time of Random Rain didn’t work out to be as successful as they hoped.” He shrugged. “It’s the only thing I can think of that even begins to explain what happened.”

  Shale stared at the two bowls on the table. One was filled with water; the other was empty.

  “Look,” said Taquar.

  Shale watched as the water in the first bowl flowed out, seemingly of its own accord, into the second bowl.

  “That,” said Taquar, “is the simplest of all exercises. Learn that, then you will move on to these others.” He indicated a jumble of items on the table. He selected one, a twist of glass tubing that stood several handspans high. It was made up of tubes of a variety of sizes and shapes, connected one to another by a series of open bowls and chutes and stepped slides. “You have to get the water from top to bottom and back again without spilling it,” Taquar said as he poured water into the top. “As you can see, that means either pushing it uphill or controlling its speed as it comes down. Not as easy as it looks.” As he spoke, water began to move at a measured pace through the tubes.

  Shale gazed, mesmerised by its passage. “You are doing that?” he asked, awed.

  “Indeed. Any rainlord can do this. As will you, in a matter of weeks. You will learn to manipulate water, not just move it. Like this…”

  A drop detached itself from the water in the bowl. It moved into the air and hovered above the table. Then it jumped to the left, slowly skated sideways to the right and moved in a loop before it dropped back into the bowl. “Control, Shale, is just as important as the ability to move it. Before I leave, I will run through every piece of apparatus here. That will give you enough to work on while I am gone.”

  Shale’s heart lurched. “Leave? Gone?”

  It had never occurred to Shale that he was going to be left in this place. On his own.

  Taquar looked at his horrified face and gave an exasperated hiss. “Shale, I can’t take you to Scarcleft. You must be strong in water-power and able to defend yourself against attack before we reveal your existence to the world. I don’t know how old you are, but you must be at least fourteen by now, surely. Quite old enough to manage on your own. You will be safe. No one knows you are here. If anyone does come, you will feel them coming because you can sense their water, and you can retreat into this inner room with the door closed. No one can open the grille except rainlords, and none will come this way.”

  “Defend myself? How, by chuckin’ water at them?” Shale asked, saying the first words that came into his head.

  One of Taquar’s eyebrows shot up. “So,” he drawled, amused, “the Gibber cub has a modicum of spirit, after all, eh? No, Shale. There are other ways we have of defending ourselves. Ways you will eventually learn when you are old enough. Until such time, you will remain here. Safe.”

  “And you reckon I’ll be able to move clouds one day?” Doubt and elation jostled in his mind.

  “If you work hard at the exercises I give you, certainly.”

  “I’ll be pissing waterless!”

  Taquar glared. “Watch your language. Vulgarity is the mark of the inarticulate. We will start on the exercises tomorrow. I will leave the following day. Do you have any questions?”

  “Uhuh, yeah. I wanna know why this rogue rainlord asked for help from a Reduner sandmaster, and why a sandmaster gave it. Don’t make sense t’me. I reckon Reduners don’t much like anyone but themselves. That’s what they say—used to say—in m’settle.”

  Taquar’s grey eyes flashed, but Shale could not read what the emotion was.

  “Not so dumb, are you?” he said flatly. “Good.” He leaned forward, once more pinning Shale down with his stare. “A rainlord is only one man. He can only do so much by himself. He needs powerful friends. Armed men to back his ambition. Yet no sane Scarperman would follow him if he told them he planned to kill other rainlords and prevent the training of a new stormlord. But there are other people out there who aren’t so sensible, underlings who are discontented about their status, who will listen.”

  “Reduners?”

  “Some Reduners, yes. The men who attacked Wash Drybone are from a tribe on the dune they call the Watergatherer. Sandmaster Davim is a young warrior with ambition. We in the Scarpen have heard rumours that this man hankers to free all the dunes from any reliance on the rainlords or stormlords of the Scarpen. He thinks the dune tribes are better off in a Time of Random Rain. He seeks to lead all the Reduner people as nomads, the way they were once before. We thought no one would want to follow a man with so foolish a dream. But if he was allied to a rogue rainlord and they had in their hands the next stormlord—yourself—well, that could be another tale.”

  And Mica was in the hands of this man. Shale felt he was suffocating in horror. Mica, how will I ever save you?

  “When I arrived at Wash Drybone Settle, I saw Davim’s men still looting. He’d gone, though.”

  Shale struggled to understand. “They didn’t snuff you?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Why not?”

  “A rainlord with a cage full of ziggers and the powers of his rank is a man to be feared. I could have killed any one of them. In fact, I did, to make the others talk. That was how I knew what direction you had been taken in and where you were headed. That’s how I knew they were Davim’s men.”

  Shale looked disbelieving. “You speared them all?”

  “I have no need of such bloody methods. I merely took their water. And killed the ziggers they were rash enough to threaten me with. But enough of this conversation. It is time for you to go to sleep. Tomorrow we will start your teaching in earnest.”

  He stood, indicating Shale’s bed. “Don’t forget to clean your teeth as I showed you.”

  Shale nodded absently. Somewhere in the back of his mind a thought troubled him, something about his rescue by Taquar, but he shrugged it away. He was just grateful that it had happened.

  Took their water.

  He would remember those words. Just as he would remember the name Davim. And Nealrith. Nealrith, highlord. And one day he would seek his revenge.

  His justice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Scarpen Quarter

  Warthago Range

  Scarcleft mother cistern and surroundings

  That night, Shale cried himself to sleep.

  He took care Taquar did not hear him, as he was sure that the rainlord would not approve. Shale was not afraid of Taquar, not the way he had feared his father. The man had no wish to hurt him, he felt sure. But he could wither with a look, and Shale dreaded seeing disapproval in that judgemental gaze. At the first sign of a quivering lip or indecision or fragility, Taquar would raise an eyebrow and look at him—and it was a look that quelled emotion, that forced the masking of fears. Inside, he felt as if he had been reduced to a toddling child once more. In private, he cried, tearless sobs of grief. He’d lost all the family he had ever had. Even Mica was gone. The thought of that swelled inside him like a canker about to burst.

  In the morning, Taquar looked at him in distaste as he swung himself out of bed. “You are feeling sorry for yourself, lad,” he said. “Be grateful that you live when others have died.”

  “They were m’fam’ly,” he muttered.

  Taquar’s expression was pure surprise. “You don’t grieve for them, surely? You said your father beat you and your mother never did much for you, either. Your brother still lives, as far as you know. Your sister was just a babe.”

  Shale frowned at him. “She was m’sister,” he said, thinking that was sufficient explanation.

  Taquar shrugged. “Doubtless I do not know how you feel. I do not have a sister. And please remember not to slur your words. Copy the way I speak.”

  Shale pressed his mouth cl
osed and went to wash.

  After breakfast, Taquar sat him down at the table with the two bowls of water.

  Shale stared at them resentfully. “What am I s’posed to do?”

  Taquar sat opposite and reached across to tilt the boy’s face up with his hand. “Before we start, I think I know what’s bothering you. You think it’s all your fault people died, don’t you?”

  Shale nodded, but in his heart he knew it was a lot more than that. It was everything. It was losing the only two people who had ever loved him: Mica and Citrine. It was fear of dying, fear of being hunted like an animal, fear of being gutted on a spear. It was fear of becoming what he was supposed to become, a stormlord.

  Taquar did not notice his hesitation. “Well, it wasn’t your fault. Nealrith or some other traitor was responsible, plus Sandmaster Davim and the men who followed them. You did nothing to deserve what happened to you, nor are you responsible for what happened. The only thing you have to do is to be worthy, so that they didn’t die in vain. If you become a stormlord, then you become the saviour of a nation—of all the Quartern. And you can’t even begin to imagine how many people that is. More than you’ve ever seen in your whole life.”

  Shale couldn’t control himself well enough to risk speaking. He wanted desperately to please this man who had saved him. Who had such expectations. And yet…

  “Shale,” Taquar continued, more gently this time, “we who are rainlords or stormlords, we have to make sacrifices. For without us, thousands of people would die of thirst and hunger. We have to put them before our selfish needs. What I ask of you—what the Quartern asks of you—will never be easy. If I appear hard or unfeeling, that is the reason. You are one of us and must grow up to be a man of honour.”

  Shale wasn’t quite sure that he understood the meaning of the word “honour,” but he nodded anyway.

  He was glad when Taquar changed the subject and returned to his lessons on moving water.

  He tried. He worked at it all day, trying to send the water from one bowl to another. For the first two hours, nothing happened, except that he became frustrated and helpless. He didn’t know how he was supposed to do it, and the water never budged.

  Halfway through the morning, Taquar came to sit at the table. “Close your eyes, Shale, for a moment,” he said.

  Shale did as he was asked.

  “What am I doing with the water?”

  “You’re pourin’ it into that plate thing.”

  “Not into the other bowl?”

  “Nah.”

  “No, not nah. And yes, you are right. How do you know?”

  He thought about that. “I can feel the shape of the water.”

  “Good. You can open your eyes.” Taquar poured the water back into the bowl. “From now on I want you to think of the water as a shape, not as something in a container. I want you to change the shape, with your mind. Change it so that it will come out of this bowl and drop into the other.”

  Shale sighed and tried again.

  He still had not raised as much as a ripple on the surface of the water by lunchtime.

  When Taquar once again approached him, he cringed.

  “It will come,” Taquar said. “You can’t expect to have it happen all at once. It takes years to learn how to be a rainlord, years more to be stormlord. One step at a time.”

  Shale looked at him in wonderment.

  Taquar must have understood something of his surprise because he added, “You won’t get beaten by me, lad. Not when you do your best to please. Anyway, take a rest. Here, eat this.” He handed him food in a bowl.

  Shale stirred the mixture and tasted it carefully. “That’s real good. Highlord, what’s—what’s Scarcleft like?”

  “Large. Larger than anything you’ve ever seen.”

  Shale reduced the idea of large to something he could understand. “Twice as large as Wash Drybone Settle?”

  Taquar threw up his hands. “Waterless heavens, lad, but you are ignorant.” He rose and went into the storeroom and came back with a book. He undid the ties that kept the parchment pages in place between the end-boards, and turned the first pages over to find what he was looking for. “Here, this is Scarcleft.” He pushed the page over to Shale. It had a woodcut picture and some writing underneath.

  Shale studied it but had trouble understanding the drawing. Finally he realised he was looking at a settle of enormous proportions, tipped down a hill slope that was many times higher than the banks of the wash back home. He had seen slopes like that only on his journey to the waterhall. “Whassit say unnerneath?”

  “What does it say underneath?” Taquar corrected.

  Carefully Shale repeated the words.

  “It says that this is Scarcleft, a city of the Scarpen Quarter.”

  Shale wanted to ask more, but he sensed that there was a limit to the amount he could pester Taquar at any one time and have him remain pleasant. The rainlord was already beginning to sound bored. He abandoned the idea of another question and said instead, “I wanna—”

  “I want to—”

  “I… want… to learn how t’read.”

  Taquar stared for a moment, considering. “That’s an excellent idea. It will give you something else to keep you occupied while I am gone. It’s easy enough.” He indicated some of the writing on the open page. “Each one of these marks is the sign for a sound. We call them letters. There are forty-eight of them. Learn them all, and you can read. Look.” He dipped a finger in one of Shale’s bowls of water and drew a letter in water on the table. “This is the letter we call ‘shi.’ It says the first sound in your name. And this symbol is the second sound, and this the third. Sh… ay… el. Shale.”

  Shale’s mind blossomed with the concept. So that’s what reading was! Suddenly something that had always seemed so arcane was within his reach. He pointed to the words under the picture. “Which one says Scarcleft?”

  “That one,” Taquar said, pointing. “There are quite a few books in the storeroom. You may look at them while I am gone. Make sure your hands are always clean, and always tie the end-boards back on when you finish.” Quickly he sketched four more letters on the table and explained the sounds they represented. “I’ll teach you some more tomorrow before I leave, if you can remember these,” he said. “Now, finish your meal.”

  The next morning, when Taquar left, Shale watched him ride away with a growing sense of disbelief. The rainlord really was leaving, taking his ziggers with him. And he, Shale, was going to have to spend his time alone, unprotected.

  It felt strange.

  It wasn’t that he had never been alone. He had, often—whenever he went into the Gibber to collect resin. The open space of the Gibber he had regarded as friendly; even its trackless and waterless nature had not scared him. He could always sense where the settle and the wash were. He could sense the water in the cisterns, in the ground. The familiar had never been far away. Sometimes he had worried about the people he might meet out there, but he’d never feared the place itself or the loneliness of it.

  But now he felt trapped.

  The grille was closed and he had no idea how to open it. What if Taquar never came back? The food would not last forever, and he had nothing he could use to force open the grille.

  And what if his enemies came? What if Davim came?

  He stood at the grille and watched as the speck that was Taquar and his pede grew smaller and finally vanished into the stony soil and dry gullies of the Scarpen.

  I have got to find the way out of here, he thought. He considered the pipes into the—what was it called? Tunnel?—and shivered. If he tried that and got stuck halfway… No, I have to find out how to lift that grille.

  But as hard and as long as he studied it, he couldn’t see how it was done. All he knew was that it had something to do with moving water. Controlling water, that was the key. He had to learn, and learn quickly.

  He went back to the table and the two bowls, one full, one empty.

  Taquar had ac
tually not given him good advice: he had told him to concentrate, but in concentrating, he lost his affinity with water. It was not until he realised that the secret was focus and relaxation, not concentration and stress, that he could ripple the water at will. The next day, he slopped some of it from one bowl into the other, and he smiled for the first time since Citrine had died.

  After that he relaxed still more. No one came to threaten him; there was no pressure from anyone to perform. Taquar was not there to watch his every move; he could advance at his own pace, to suit himself.

  He was lonely. Without Mica he was bereft, and the pain of loss was welded onto him, part of his being. He knew what Taquar had said was true: the horror at Wash Drybone Settle had not been his fault. Yet it was still a tragedy that was undeniably linked to his gift, and that motivated him. If he could become a stormlord, then he could undo some of the damage. He could free Mica.

  He spent hours moving water drop by drop from one bowl to the other. He slopped it, dribbled it, splashed, wasted it—but gradually he moved it. The day he moved the entire contents from the first bowl to the second in a steady stream he celebrated by going for a swim.

  Within a day of Taquar’s departure, he had found being cooped up in the rooms a physical irritation. He wanted more space, and so he gravitated towards the waterhall every evening. The rock walls of the cavern rose sheer from the water’s surface in several places, which meant he couldn’t walk around the lake. He could sense its depths—cold, bleak and dark—and one part of him was wary. He remembered the power of the rush down Wash Drybone, the way he had lost himself. Mostly, though, this still water held no fears for him. It fascinated. Its power, its weight, its immensity—his bodily need of it. He understood it, recognised it so easily, felt kinship with it. He knew, without consciously dwelling on it, that he himself was mostly water.

  For the first few days he just looked. The lake, so large and still, seemed a sacred thing, not to be taken lightly. Now, though, he was a mover of water, a rainlord, and he saw it differently. He remembered how good it had been to submerge himself in water that day with Mica, and now it felt right to do it again. And so, to celebrate his success, he walked into Scarcleft’s drinking supply.