The Last Stormlord

by Glenda Larke

  “There were clothes there to fit a child of nine or ten.”

  “She wasn’t yet six when she disappeared.”

  “I know.”

  Iani dragged in a deep breath and tried to still his shaking hands. “What—what do you think happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. He would not have hurt her or mistreated her physically, you know. He never mistreated me.” He thought of a six-year-old child locked up at the mother cistern and repressed a shudder. Iani did not need to hear the details. “Her death would have been a disaster for his plans. An—an illness perhaps. There were other clothes there, too. For at least one adult woman. I suspect he had someone to look after her. Lyneth would not have been alone the way I was.”

  Laisa, who had continued to eat her meal, said between mouthfuls, “Of course, this is all speculation. I find it hard to believe that Taquar is capable of villainy such as that.”

  “Do you, my dear?” Nealrith said. “I don’t find it hard at all.”

  Jasper looked up, startled. Too intent on their conversation, he had neither seen nor felt Nealrith enter.

  “I will kill the bastard,” Iani said. “Sunlord help me, I swear I will kill him!”

  “Only if you are the first to get the opportunity,” Nealrith said, sitting down next to him. “Before he is finished, there is going to be a long line of people wanting to effect his demise. I am sorry, my old friend. More sorry than I can say. We have all been blind.”

  “Perhaps you should have acted when Jasper first told us about all this,” Laisa told her husband.

  “And done what? Gone to war with another of our own cities? With a man supported by the Cloudmaster as Quartern heir, whose guards use ziggers when we have none?”

  “What did Granthon say about Iani’s news?” Laisa asked, pouring herself some more tea from the pot on the table. “Get me some more seeds, will you, Jasper?” He rose to do her bidding, bringing the cruet of resin seeds to the table from the sideboard. She sprinkled some on her drink, apparently oblivious to the emotional turmoil of those around her. Jasper, annoyed with himself, had to drag his eyes away from the sheer attractiveness of her languor. Senya watched him with a catlike stare.

  “He says we cannot send guards to Qanatend,” Nealrith said in answer.

  Iani’s head jerked up. “What?”

  “He says it would leave Breccia City vulnerable to attack. And we don’t have the numbers, anyway. He’s right about that, Iani. By your own account, there were some seven or eight thousand tribesmen besieging Qanatend. We have barely thirty packpedes and thirty-five myriapedes at our disposal at the best of times, although we could seize those belonging to traders and individuals, I suppose. We have only five hundred permanent guardsmen. Father ordered me to send most of them to guard our mother cistern and the tunnel.”

  “Every man in Qanatend—and half the women and children—will fight. They were fighting when I left. What Qanatend needs now is rainlords!”

  “I know, my friend. I know. But by the time we got there, the fighting would be over. You know that. Qanatend has probably already fallen.”

  Iani stood, knocking his chair over, and looked down on them all. “Do any of you know what it is like to abandon the groves outside your gates, which have been your city’s life for fifty generations? Do you know what it is like to hear the ziggers coming over the city walls and know that they will not rest until they have found a victim? Do you know what it is like to feel you cannot sleep, because you are one of too few rainlords to defend your city? Moiqa knows! Then she had to watch while I fled for my life, pursued by Reduner warriors and too many ziggers to count. She can have no idea if I even survived.”

  Jasper stood and righted Iani’s chair. The man sat down again, trembling, and added with a disturbing coldness, “I came across people caught outside the walls. People who had torn their own flesh trying to rip the ziggers out. People who had dropped in the midst of their tasks, dead. I saw a baby slaughtered in his mother’s arms, with a zigger hole through his cheek. They like babies, you know. Because of the softness of their skin.” He stopped and looked at the bracelet still clenched tight in his hand. “My poor, poor Lyneth. I couldn’t find a way back into the city to help. I couldn’t find my sweet Lyneth, either.”

  “And is Granthon at least going to stop all the storms to the Red Quarter now?” Laisa asked, sipping her tea.

  Nealrith shook his head. “No. It would unite the rest of the tribes in opposition.”

  Iani cried out, his misshapen mouth distorting the words. “They are already united!”

  “It doesn’t matter which of you is right,” Laisa said. “What is important is that having no water would kill the tribesmen, a favourable result for us, surely.” Beside her, Senya’s gaze flicked from speaker to speaker in fascinated interest.

  “Not fast enough to save Qanatend. Or us,” Nealrith said quietly. “They have supplies for months and would become more determined than ever to steal water from our cities. Thirst also kills the innocent. Granthon thinks to court the moderates and to use water supply as leverage. He wants to support the resistance under the leadership of Vara Redmane—”

  For the first time, Laisa lost her calm. “Granthon is not fit to rule. He won’t fight to save us, nor will he stop supplying water to our enemies! What shall we do: sit here and wait for them to come riding across the Sweepings to our walls?” She made a gesture of disgust. “Are there no men in your line, Nealrith?”

  “Granthon has decided it is time to send a team of negotiators to Davim, to tell him we have Shale Flint. We will threaten to stop the storms to the Red Quarter unless they withdraw. When Davim discovers his unholy plot with Taquar is missing the most important element, he will be forced to obey. As long as we have Jasper, we are safe.”

  “Rubbish,” Laisa spat at him. “What if Davim doesn’t mind going back to random rain, as Jasper says? What if he comes in search of Jasper? We should at least send a couple of rainlords to assassinate this blighted sandmaster. Without its head, this unity of tribes may fall apart.”

  Nealrith didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “All rainlords are going to be ordered to Breccia City.”

  Iani scrambled to his feet again. “You are ordering rainlords here? Not to Qanatend to help Moiqa?”

  “Forgive us, Iani. Those are Granthon’s orders. And he is right: his safety, and Jasper’s, is of more importance than—”

  But Iani didn’t let him finish. Enraged, he hooked his hands under the edge of the table and heaved it upwards. Laisa leaped to her feet out of the way as dishes and mugs and food slid to the floor. Senya squealed. The table crashed on its side.

  “More important than Qanatend?” Iani shouted at Nealrith. “Maybe you’re right. But it’s not just about Qanatend or my Moiqa! It’s about all the other cities, too. And my Lyneth. It’s about justice. And compassion. And children dying. It’s about our honour!” He stood for a moment, gasping, then added, “I never thought I would live to see this day.” And he walked unsteadily to the door and left the room.

  Jasper, feeling foolish sitting where he was when his meal was on the floor, stood up. Senya, surveying the mess, put a hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.

  Laisa looked on dispassionately. “I’m surprised,” she said. “I would not have thought he could do that with a crippled hand.” She glanced to where Nealrith still sat. “You are a dreamer, Rith. Your awakening will be a rude one. To protect the whole tunnel system is impossible, you know that. We may be able to protect the mother cistern for a while with rainlords, but the many miles of tunnel? It is not possible.”

  “We may not have warriors like the Reduners, but we do have rainlords who can kill both men and ziggers. And who can sense men and pedes in the desert from afar. Davim will discover that rainlords are not to be trifled with if he comes here.”

  “If the rainlords are here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned on him in a swirl of flowing sleeves
and skirt. “Do you really think that the cities of the Scarpen will give up their rainlords so easily in order to protect us?”

  “Of course they will! Without a stormlord, they can’t survive. They must protect us; they must save Granthon and Jasper—or they won’t have water in the future.”

  “Tell people to think about the future when the present is threatening them, Rith, and see what happens.”

  “People are not so foolish,” he muttered, as she walked away.

  Jasper, righting a chair, was not so sure. He remembered the irrationality of the attack on Feroze, the Alabaster salt trader. Did it make any sense to condemn him to certain death and to kill his mounts simply because he was an Alabaster? Sooner or later everyone needed salt. He sighed. People can be so unbelievably stupid.

  Nealrith clapped a hand to his back, adding, “Don’t worry, Jasper. There’s no way Taquar would countenance an attack on Breccia by Davim. He wants to rule here, rule a city, not a heap of smoking ruins. He will stop Davim. Or kill him if necessary. Anyway, I have a number of things to do right now. Orders to give. We are going to give priority to protecting the mother cistern and the tunnel and to keeping a watch. Your classes with Kaneth and Ryka will have to be put on hold. I need the rainlords. You can still take the religion classes, though, and I will get another swordsman to teach you, as well.”

  “I’d rather forget the classes with the High Waterpr—” Jasper began, but he was speaking to himself. Nealrith had already gone.

  Senya smirked at him as she rose to go. “Don’t you like religious studies, Jasper? I suppose that’s because you Gibber folk are all heathens.”

  He watched her leave, not even bothering to reply, his thoughts elsewhere. Everyone was making decisions based on guesses. Who really knew what motivated Davim the drover? Or what he would do next? To even consider that the Reduner might take any notice of an instruction from Taquar was ludicrous. One thing Jasper did know: Davim took orders from no one. Nor was he a man to be scared by threats from the Cloudmaster.

  He wondered if killing the sandmaster would solve the problem. Would the tribes go back to arguing with one another if they did not have his leadership? It was worth a try, although maybe Davim was grooming an heir. A son perhaps.

  He sat down again in the chair he had put to rights. How could he know more than men like Nealrith and Granthon? It wasn’t how things were supposed to be.

  But I do, he thought, exasperated. They are wrong, and I am right, and no one will listen to me.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Scarpen Quarter

  Scarcleft City

  Scarcleft Hall, Level 2

  Terelle paced her room like a desert cat in a cage.

  She could hardly believe that this had happened to her, and she had not the faintest idea of how much longer she would be able to stand it. Sixteen paces one way, fourteen the other. A bed, a chair, a rug on the stone-tiled floor. A closet-privy built into the corner. A dayjar, filled for her at dawn every day. And nothing to do. Nothing. It was worse than being a handmaiden in a snuggery and spending the day primping and preening, and she had always thought that was the most boring thing she could imagine.

  She had been locked in the one room for not quite half a year—she wasn’t sure of the exact number of days, but she knew it was close to one hundred and fifty—and she thought she was going sandcrazy. The fact that it happened to be the loveliest room she had ever slept in was irrelevant; it was still a prison. Her view of the world was what she could glimpse through the openwork carving of the locked shutters that separated her from the outside. If she placed her face to the carved holes, she could see the sky; if she pressed hard enough to indent the patterns onto her skin, she could just see the lower-level courtyard of the building, one floor below, with armed guards on patrol every hour of the day and night.

  She knew where she was. Scarcleft Hall, villa of the Highlord of Scarcleft, Taquar Sardonyx. Just thinking his name was enough to conjure up an image of horror, the casual wiping of blood from a sword, the touch of his blade under her chin, the dagger driven so deep under Amethyst’s breast.

  She had done her best to fill her time, making up dances and performing them as she hummed the music; painting on the walls with paint made from bread and water and oil, coloured with fruit and vegetable juice—all from her food trays; unpicking the cover of her bed and then weaving it again with a different pattern.

  The only distractions in otherwise eventless days were the delivery of water and the arrival of meals, but the servants responsible were disinclined to talk and were always accompanied by a guard. All Terelle’s attempts to be friendly or to seek information were met with stony silence.

  At first, her hope centred on Russet. He had already made paintings of her future, and they didn’t include her being imprisoned in Scarcleft Hall, so surely that meant she was going to be freed. If he could just make a waterpainting of her free and somewhere else, then she could count on being released sooner rather than later. Or having an opportunity to escape. Or something. But as the days passed and nothing happened, she began to wonder if Russet was still alive. Perhaps he had returned to his room only to be arrested and killed. Perhaps once a waterpainter was dead, the magic of their paintings dissipated. Hadn’t he once said something like that? That when he was dead, she would be free to do what she liked?

  And free to be killed.

  The thought that he might be dead was… what? Certainly not devastating in the way Amethyst’s death had been. She hated him for the way he had tethered her with his painted magic, for the secretiveness that deliberately obscured her origins. She disliked the sly pleasure he took in other people’s troubles. His death would not sadden her, but she grieved that it might sever the only connection she had to a distant family she had never known. Her thoughts of Russet’s fate were not the worst that plagued her, though.

  The worst moments of each day came when her thoughts returned—again and again—to Shale. Her last glimpse of him had been of his face, pale and grim, surrounded by a swirl of fighting men, a spray of blood dappling his skin and clothes. Apart from that, her most vivid memories of those moments were of the noise: the clash of blades, the heart-wrenching keening of wounded men, the confused shouting and grunting, the cold voice saying “Kill her.”

  She still did not know how the fight had ended. Taquar had never told her what the outcome was. When Taquar’s men had not returned that day to Amethyst’s house as quickly as he had expected, he had locked Terelle in the water-room and left the house. She had tried furiously to escape, clawing and battering at the door with the only implement she had—the wooden water scoop—without success. Several hours later, some enforcers had come for her and escorted her to Scarcleft Hall. She had been locked in the room she now occupied and had not seen Taquar again. No one told her if Shale had escaped with Kaneth, or indeed if Nealrith and Kaneth had succeeded in leaving the city. No one told her anything, and every question she asked was ignored.

  The idea that Shale might be dead gnawed at her, hour after hour, but she had to accept that it was possible. Anything was possible, and it was the not knowing that was the worst. She and Shale: they had squabbled, he with reasoned coolness and she more with hotheaded passion, but part of her had revelled in the joy of the relationship, in the wonder of her first good friend. Nor had she been blind to the way he looked at her sometimes, with the hint of something more than friendship if only she would give the word. Haunted by memories of the lust of men who came to the snuggery, she had hesitated. And now it was too late.

  Part of her had been deeply touched by his last promise, no matter that it had been rendered ineffective just moments later. He had said he would look after her, that she would never want for water.

  And now? Now the days dragged by in boredom and in fear of a future she could not foretell.

  It was a relief when Taquar finally came to see her.

  Yet she had never met anyone who frightened her as much as the rainlo
rd did. The cold flatness of his eyes, the calculation in his gaze. He was handsome, true, and sensual, but in a way that disturbed rather than attracted, and there was no heart there, none.

  Waterless souls, how could Shale have lived with only this man for company for so long?

  She faced him from the far side of the room, at first unable, in her terror, to speak. Behind him, two other men entered carrying a small desk, a chair and some writing implements. They placed these at Taquar’s side and left the room. “I want you to write a letter for me,” he said without preamble.

  She ran her tongue over her dry lips. “Who—who to?” She put her hands behind her back to hide the way they shook, and wondered if he carried a knife like the one he had used on Amethyst.

  “To your friend Shale Flint.”

  Her relief was so intense she nearly dropped where she stood. Shale was alive. And Taquar did not have him.

  When she did not move or speak, he beckoned her to the chair. “Sit down. You can write, I believe?”

  She had started to move forward, but stopped dead then. “How—how can you know that?” Her fear was so tangible she was wearing it like an extra skin.

  “There is little I don’t know about you, child. I have even spoken to your sister. Viviandra, is it?”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “No? She seems to think she is.”

  “Her parents took me in. No more than that.” Have you hurt her? She did not dare ask the question aloud. For Vivie’s sake, she did not dare show an interest.

  “Hmm. No matter.” He indicated the chair. “Sit. This is not a hard letter to write, because every bit will be the truth. You can put it in your own words. I don’t care how you say it.”

  She sat and pulled the parchment towards her. “And if I refuse?” She had to put her hands flat on the desktop to stop their trembling. Her palms left damp marks on the bab wood. Once I write it, will you kill me?

  “It matters little. I could write it myself, saying the same things. I just thought that if you put pen to parchment, it might have a little more immediacy. I want you to tell Shale that you are my prisoner. Tell him how that came about. Tell him that I have told you that I will kill you slowly and unpleasantly unless he finds some way to escape Breccia City and come to me. Make it sound a little dramatic, if you would. Then tell him that a man called Bankor, an apothecary on the tenth level of Breccia, will help him escape if he needs help. I think that’s all.” He gave her a faint smile that was bone-chilling in its indifference. “Simple.”