The Last Stormlord

by Glenda Larke

  Jasper stared at him helplessly. He wanted to ask, If the Sunlord is so powerful, why did he need a human as an intermediary? But he suspected he would not receive an answer that satisfied him. He couldn’t see much difference between magic and the Sunlord’s gift, but he had a suspicion that arguing the point with Nealrith would get him nowhere.

  Ryka laid a hand on Nealrith’s arm. “Rith, you can hardly blame Jasper for the gaps in his religious knowledge. You remember what the remoter areas of the Gibber were like, including his. They were so ignorant of Scarpen faith that some thought we were gods.”

  The highlord drew in a calming breath. “I remember. I can certainly see that his religious education has been inadequate.”

  “I can teach him,” she offered.

  “You? Would I use a cistern of water to bring life to embers? I will arrange with Lord Gold for him to have private lessons at the temple with a waterpriest teacher.” He glanced at Jasper. “Lord Gold is the highest-ranking priest. The Quartern’s Sunpriest.”

  “And Terelle?” Jasper asked. “Won’t you send someone to look for her?”

  “Our informants can’t find her, and if they can’t, I’m sure we couldn’t. I don’t think we should try. I’m sorry.”

  Buffeted by guilt and worry, he subsided into a miserable silence as Nealrith continued. “Let’s deal with the reason—reasons—I asked Ryka and Kaneth in this morning. Firstly, the gaps in your education, Jasper. Besides the religious ones, I mean. I think you do not have sufficient time to attend the Water Sensitives Academy on Level Three, as we all did—not with the water exercises you have to practise. So I’d like you to work with Ryka.”

  Jasper swallowed his irritation and hid a scowl. He liked Ryka, but it would have been nicer to have been asked rather than told.

  Nealrith continued, unheeding. “Another gap is in your ability to protect yourself. If you can’t kill the rainlord way, then you need to learn swordplay. That’s where you come in, Kaneth. I want you to teach him.”

  “Sword or scimitar?”

  “Both.”

  “There’s a difference in the way you use them?” Jasper asked.

  Kaneth nodded. “Scimitars work better for slashing, and slashing works better when you are riding a pede. But Rith, why don’t you ask a professional sword master? I may be both skilled and experienced, but like any rainlord, I rely on my water skills in a real fix.”

  “Because I don’t want too many people to know that Jasper is special. Nothing must get back to Davim that would make him wonder if Jasper and Shale are the same person. Give your lessons inside Breccia Hall—the reception room is big enough.”

  Kaneth shrugged. “All right.” He grinned at Jasper. “Don’t worry, I do know the basics. It’ll be fun. Granthon doesn’t want me out looking for Reduner marauders any more anyway, and teaching you beats spending my time checking for leaks along the tunnel.”

  “Good,” Nealrith said. “I will take the mornings for water skills. You two share the afternoons. Work out a schedule and get back to me. And you’ll have religious classes and driving lessons on alternate days.”

  Jasper brightened. “Oh! I can learn to drive a pede?”

  “Well, I wasn’t talking about a donkey.” When Jasper looked blank, he added, “It’s a rare animal they use a lot for carrying loads in the land across the Giving Sea. They have some in Pediment.” He smiled suddenly, banishing his habitual look of worry. “Let’s go down to the hall stable. I want to show you something.”

  * * *

  They all left the room together, but Kaneth and Ryka headed home while Nealrith led Jasper through a network of courtyards, archways and passageways to the stables. When they arrived there, Jasper looked around with widening eyes. There were six myriapedes, each with its own immaculate stall. Several stable boys were busy grooming one of the animals while it tore and masticated a mixture of saltbush and desert root, its numerous pairs of mouthparts audibly grinding and ripping the vegetation into smaller and smaller pieces.

  Waterless damn, Jasper thought, these pedes live better than even Palmier Rishan did back in Wash Drybone!

  “Some of our animals are out being used, of course,” Nealrith said. “And our packpedes are always stabled outside the city walls. Anyway, this is the beast I want you to have a look at.” He pointed to the end stall, where a half-grown male myriapede looked out over the door of its stall. “He’s for you.”

  “For me to ride?”

  “More than that—he’s yours.”

  Jasper blinked in amazement. “To own? You’re giving me a pede?”

  “Not me, personally. Every rainlord has his own, bought with Quartern taxes. This one will be fully mature in about two years, but he is ready to be ridden and trained now.”

  “You bought it for me?”

  Nealrith’s gaze flicked away as if he was embarrassed. “Er, no. Not originally. I bought it for Senya. But she has shown no interest in it and does not want to learn to drive. Tomorrow morning, be here at dawn and you can have your first lesson.”

  Jasper turned back to the pede. He extended his right hand, slowly, towards the animal’s mouthparts, giving it time to accustom itself to his smell. The feelers whipped forward, the sensitive tips seeking him out, running over his face, his hands, his clothing.

  “Thank you,” he said to Nealrith, his delight shining through the restraint of his reply. “I have never really owned anything before. Unless you count my clothes, of course.” And once I had a piece of bloodstone.

  He was stroking the pede and saw neither the pity, nor the ache that immediately followed it, on the highlord’s face.

  “Why do you think the Gibber folk are darker skinned and poorer than Scarpen city folk?”

  Ryka’s question stymied him, as her questions often did. She stimulated and challenged him, goaded him to think, really think about things, especially about why the Quartern was the way it was.

  “I don’t know,” he said, feeling foolish because he had never thought about it before.

  “History, Jasper. History. Listen: once, when the Giving Sea was no more than a gully, our ancestors, yours and mine, were outlanders who came here from the places on the Other Side. When they came, they pushed out the folk who were here first, forcing them north.”

  He was astonished. “You mean Reduners once owned the Scarpen?”

  “The Scarpen and the Gibber. Most Scarpen folk won’t believe that, but I think it is true. The people who came, they wanted the wealth of the land—the minerals and the gemstones—and they were willing to fight to get it. There were many more of them than there were Reduners, and in those days the Reduners had neither pedes nor ziggers. Back then, there was always water to be found, because it rained at certain times of the star cycle, and the gullies and washes ran with water every year for tens of days at a time without fail. Even in between the rains, there were pools to be found. There was no need of stormlords, or so the myths and legends say.

  “Then something went wrong. We don’t know what. The rains began to disappear, year by year, yet the Giving Sea rose up and flooded the land between us and the places we had come from. The waterpriests tell us it was punishment for our sins. On the Other Side, cities were washed away by the ocean. People there died in the thousands, their cities ruined and drowned. For a long time, we aren’t sure how long exactly, we were cut off. Here the land was so dry that many—perhaps most—people died. Those who were left became nomads, copying the Reduners. They adapted. This became known as the Time of Random Rain.

  “But most of our history was lost. Life was hard. The only memory people held on to, because it was important to them, was that once they had been miners and traders in minerals. They called themselves by the names of the rocks and the stones and the gems, so that they would never forget. Gibber folk were, I think, more miners than traders; Scarpen Quarter folk more traders. It was from Portennabar and Portfillik that the ancient routes ran across what is now the Giving Sea to the Other Side
.

  “It was during the Time of Random Rain that the Reduners—then living in the dunes—tamed the pedes and ziggers they’d found there. Because of those, they dominated the Quartern and built a culture based on slavery of the conquered. The Time of Random Rain lasted until the Watergiver came and taught some water sensitives how to be stormlords and rainlords.”

  “How do we know the Watergiver was real?”

  “The waterpriests have religious texts that tell the story. They say the texts were inspired by the Sunlord and therefore must be true.” She smiled slightly. “That’s an argument based on its own circular logic, of course, but don’t tell them I said that. How are you enjoying your religious classes, by the way?”

  He pulled a face. “Not much. I—I find it hard to believe all the things Lord Basalt tells me. He says I should have faith, but he doesn’t really explain things. Then he gets angry if I ask why.” He considered the matter. “Terelle always used to make libations to the Sunlord. I thought it was a waste of water. She said it was easier to believe than to question and that it made her happier to believe than to doubt, but for me it’s the other way around.”

  “If there is one thing I have discovered,” she said, “it’s this: it is impossible to force belief on yourself. It doesn’t work, any more than someone with a deep faith can suddenly throw it all away because someone asks them to. Nealrith never doubts. You doubt all the time. And so do I. Kaneth doesn’t think about it and isn’t interested. By the sound of it, Terelle doesn’t think about it much, either—but she does the opposite: she accepts. There is room for us all, but unhappily, the really religious feel obligated to save the endangered souls they are sure the rest of us have, without realising how impossible it is to believe when you just don’t. I am not sure who is to be most pitied, those troubled by our damnation or we who have to live believing we end with death.”

  She touched his hand in commiseration. “If I were you, I’d play the hypocrite. Pretend you believe; it makes them happier. One day, who knows, maybe it will all make sense to you, but if it doesn’t, you will at least be in a position to tell them you think it’s all about as real as a sand-dancer.”

  He pulled a wry face and decided she was right. “We’ve got off the subject,” he said. “About why the Gibber is so much poorer than the Scarpen.”

  “Not entirely. It’s connected. The priests say it was because the Watergiver went first to the Gibber, but they laughed at him and drove him out. So the Sunlord punished them by making the sun hotter and the washes of the Gibber the last places to be given regular water.”

  She laughed at Jasper’s disgusted face and continued, “It took generations for the stormlords and the rainlords to refine their skills, to nourish enough water sensitives to bring the Scarpen back from the edge of disaster. At the same time, they had to battle the Reduners for their freedom. In the meantime, the Gibber suffered. The Reduners raided the Gibber Plains, too, just to make it worse.

  “Eventually there was controlled rain, and the Other Siders built ships to come to us, so there was trade once more. We defeated the Reduners, and there were no more raids, but by that time, your people were so poor that you’ve never quite caught up.”

  “And our darker skin colour?”

  “The religious texts say it was the Sunlord’s mercy, to save you from his burning heat, since you had to spend so much of your time looking for food on the plains and fossicking for resin and minerals to trade.”

  Religion again, he thought with a sigh. Things would be so much easier if I could believe it all.

  She continued, “If we believe the priests, it was the Watergiver who changed everything for the better in the Scarpen. He not only showed us how to use a water sensitive’s power to make and break the clouds, he gave us the skill to kill using our water-powers. That gave us the edge we needed to send the Reduners back to the dunes. The pedemen of the Red Quarter have hated us ever since.”

  He stared at her, not bothering to hide his astonishment. “But that must have been almost a thousand years ago! They still hate us after all that time?”

  “Men have long memories for slighted pride.”

  That’s ridiculous, he thought. Then he remembered the bitter dislike in Davim’s eyes. The cold core of fear inside him grew. Confound Ryka; the more he learned from her, the more uneasy he felt. Nothing was as simple as it had been once, when all he had to do was keep out of the reach of Galen’s fists and somehow earn or steal enough food and water to fill his belly.

  “The Reduners don’t believe in the Sunlord, of course,” Ryka continued. “They have their dune gods, one for each dune. They say their gods speak to the tribes, using a language only the shamans understand.”

  Jasper snorted. “So a dune shaman could be a very powerful man.”

  “Indeed,” she agreed blandly. They exchanged a smile.

  “What about the Alabasters? Where do they come from?”

  “Ah. There you have an intriguing mystery. No one knows. The Reduners call them the forbidden people, but they can’t say why. And the Alabasters themselves don’t say. Or won’t. I have interviewed many of them, trying to find out, and I have the feeling that they do know. We have a saying here, ‘to keep a secret as well as a ’Baster.’ ”

  “What do you think?”

  “They have their own language, although they don’t speak it any more. They use it to read and write, though. To me that means they were one of the original people, like the Reduners. I think they know far more than they say. They are cultured, and I suspect they have a written history they don’t care to share. But I am just guessing.”

  “You like them.”

  “Yes, I do. They are gentle and generous. We need more people like them, not fewer.” Her tone was troubled as she added, “Ah, Jasper, sometimes I think the world we are heading towards needs much more than we know how to give.”

  His lessons with Kaneth were exhausting, but fun because they were unpredictable. Better still, he found he had a talent for combat. He enjoyed the physicality of it and liked nothing more than repeating moves over and over until they were graceful and instinctive.

  Sometimes Ryka or Nealrith would come to watch the lessons. Nealrith evaluated his progress with a practised eye and offered advice. Ryka just watched Kaneth.

  And Jasper wondered about the dread he sometimes glimpsed in her gaze when she looked at her husband. He didn’t think anyone else noticed, but he was an expert at seeing fear in a woman’s eyes. He’d seen it in his mother’s gaze when she looked at Galen. He’d seen it in Terelle when she looked at Russet. But Ryka didn’t fear that Kaneth would hurt her, surely.

  So why those flickers of panic?

  He had no idea. Another complication he didn’t understand.

  The days bled into one another, one hardly different from the next. Yet each day made him a slightly different person. More competent, more knowledgeable, a better rainlord, a little closer to being a stormlord, a little further away from Terelle, from Mica, from the rawness of Citrine’s death. More Jasper and less Shale. Then, when he had been in Breccia for just over seventy days, Nealrith took him back to Granthon.

  “You are needed now,” the highlord told Jasper. “Even another day might be too late.”

  “But I still can’t extract pure water—or vapour—from water as salty as the sea!” It was the one area where he had made no progress.

  “My father will cloudmake,” Nealrith said. “You will cloudshift.” The tone he used brooked no protest.

  The Cloudmaster looked weaker than ever. Jasper concealed his despair at the man’s decline. He listened carefully as Granthon took him step by step through what he needed to know. Granthon would devote all his strength to the separation of fresh water from salt and its conversion to vapour. The moment the water vapour rose from the surface of the sea, Jasper was to take over. Nealrith would tell him where to send the clouds, and Granthon would help him break them.

  And so he started shifting clouds
, taking what the weakened stormlord made and teasing them across the sky at Nealrith’s direction. At first he found it especially hard to do once a cloud moved out of sight across the Sweepings, to the north of the city. But as the days passed, that became easier, too. He could use his senses to track and guide the unseen cloud to force it higher and higher above the Warthago Range, until it finally broke and released its life-giving water.

  After that, he and Granthon worked alone, raising at least two storms every day.

  Even though he still could not extract water from the sea, he was making a difference, and he was proud of that. Granthon would live longer because of him. The Quartern would survive longer.

  He knew who he was now. Jasper Bloodstone, rainlord. Useful, talented—but still an imperfect vessel, doing no more than postponing the Quartern’s day of reckoning.

  He knew that, ultimately, his failure to do more would condemn them all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Scarpen Quarter

  Breccia City

  Level 3 and Level 2

  Lord Basalt, High Waterpriest of Breccia and second in the hierarchy of the Quartern’s one true faith, stood on the suntower that rose above the Sun Temple and watched as Jasper, on his way home after his religion lesson, threaded his way through the crowd on the streets of Level Three. Several guards, dressed as ordinary citizens, unobtrusively followed.

  I hate him, Basalt thought, surprising himself by the degree of venom he felt. I hate the Quartern’s next stormlord. He’s a dirty Gibber sand louse with the soul of an unbelieving lowleveller. In front of me he pretends to worship the Sunlord, but I can see through him, even if Lord Gold does not.