by Glenda Larke
“I… hmm. Yes, I think so. Well, the city anyway. But as long as we get Jasper and Senya out of here safely, there’s hope for… something. Jasper is special, Rith. If he stays free, the Quartern has a future.”
Nealrith looked at him in surprise. “So says Kaneth the cynic, who always takes the gloomy view?”
Kaneth smiled. “Oh, I think my view is sufficiently dark to please the worst pessimist. It’s not weeping likely either you or I will live to see many more sunrises. I just wish…”
“What?”
“That I could save Ryka.”
“Ah.” He didn’t know what to say. I’m lucky, he thought. Senya and Laisa might live through this. He said, “You really love her, then?”
“Sandblast it, Rith,” he burst out, “you should see her. Those bastards have been battering at the barrier into the waterhall. Every time they dislodge a brick, they send in more sodding ziggers, and she deals with them until her men get the hole covered. Ryka, who’s half blind! She can scarcely see the little stinkers, yet she deals with them, and I can’t even stay to help because it’s more important I’m out on the walls.” He was silent. Finally he threw up his hands. “Yes, I love her. How’s that for a sodding joke? Kaneth the tomcat of Level Three, tamed by the edge of the sharpest mind and the barbs of the sharpest tongue in the city, hankering after a woman most men would call plain.”
Nealrith was silent.
“You know what will really make you laugh?” Kaneth added, and his voice softened. “To me, she’s wise, not shrewish. To me, she’s the most beautiful woman in Breccia, not the plainest.” He gave a laugh, half amused, half bitter. “And she hasn’t let me near her in nearly half a year.”
Nealrith snatched a nap up on the wall, wrapped in a blanket. All too soon, one of the guards was shaking him awake.
“Highlord,” he said, “There’s some kind of activity out there.”
Nealrith scrambled to his feet and looked over the parapet. “Pedeshit,” he whispered, then roared, “Sound the alarm! Get some fireballs out there for light. Move it!”
Little could be seen in the darkness, but what he sensed heaped the terror in his soul. There was a solid line of pedes moving towards the wall. Each carried too many people for him to count. A fireball lobbed over the wall a moment later illuminated the scene. A running pede shied away from the burning ball of woven palm leaves doused in oil, but the others kept on coming, tens of animals, each packed with chalamen and bladesmen.
Nealrith bellowed for a continuous stream of fireballs. He shouted a message to his pede riders within the city to relay to the other rainlords elsewhere. Behind him, the warning drums started thrumming, the sound picked up by the drums of other levels, one after the other up through the city.
He took the water from the face of the nearest pede driver and wished he had enough power to drain the pede itself through its carapace. Useless to waste power blinding it; their eyesight was poor, anyway. They relied on their feelers, not their eyes.
Too hard to target human eyes at this distance. Faces, just grab water from their faces. That one. Another. A third. Then another. Other riders took over the reins from the affected, damn them. A fifth, sixth. That one there. He lost count.
No ziggers. Which meant they intended to scale the walls.
And then there was no more time.
The first of the packpedes leaped at the wall. Spears flew from both sides. Men scrambled. The pede dug the points of its feet into the sheer face of the wall and hauled itself upwards, a giant centipede climbing a rock. It was so huge its back segments were still on the ground when its mouthparts crunched into the top of the wall. The men it carried crawled up its body and over its head to the parapet. One part of Nealrith’s mind—the cool, unruffled part that refused to listen to his fear or hear his despair—noted that they had screwed more handles than usual into the pede segments to help them climb.
Pedes all along the wall now, scrabbling to raise their enormous bodies. Living, armoured ladders. The Reduners’ mode of entry into the city.
They learned a thing or two, the calm part thought, in Qanatend. Now I know how the city fell.
He used his power again and again, until he had none left. On either side of him, his men died. And were replaced. Fought. And died. Until the man next to him was a grinning Reduner and he had to use his sword to fight a red bladesman whose joy was battle. He knew before he started he was unlikely to win. But he had to try.
And not long afterwards, he was falling, falling. Off the wall. Down, his bloodied sword still in his hand and Senya calling out to him, in that cool part of his head, Don’t die, Papa! Don’t die!
He woke into a darkness so profound he thought it was death. Pain soon told him a different truth. He hurt so much there was no way he could be dead. Something jabbed him in the genitals, sending waves of agony to drown the rest of the pain. He groaned then, and light filtered through the dark of his vision.
He was lying on his back in the street, where he had fallen. He was surrounded by men. Red faces, red clothes, red braided hair. Zigger stink. One of them was holding a spear far too close to his privates. He couldn’t move. Everything ached too much and his shaken body would not respond. Waves of pain made nonsense of his thoughts.
From a long way off, he heard a voice speaking in an accent so thick he wasn’t sure he understood.
“I, Sandmaster Davim the drover. You, rainlord, son of stormlord. Nealrith, your men say. My men say you no power more. Your men dead now.”
His mind struggled with that—and then found an explanation he didn’t like. Davim had tortured his men into identifying him and then killed them. The monstrous ache inside him prevented a reply.
“Where stormlord?”
Nealrith looked up at Davim through a haze. “Dead,” he said finally. “Died even before the battle started. You’ll find his body, what’s left of it, in the House of the Dead. You can pay your respects there, to the man who brought you the water you drank every day of your life.”
Father. I wanted to say goodbye. Oh, Mother, don’t be there when the Reduners arrive! I cannot save you. Maybe Father was the lucky one.
He tried to focus on the sandmaster. Not a large man; he’d expected someone taller. But he reeked of power for all that.
Senya. She will have gone by now. Laisa, too. That was the arrangement: for them to flee the moment the walls were breached.
He tried to reach the man with his power. Tried to take his water. But he had nothing left, nothing. And maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d still had power. Davim was water sensitive, surely, and must have known enough to keep his own water safe.
The withered bastard was smiling, amused.
He knows I tried. Did it tickle him, perhaps? He feels safe now, the rotting piece of shit.
“And the youth? Shale Flint?” Davim asked. His eyes glittered in the flame of a burning torch.
It was night still, then. His own eyes were behaving oddly. He couldn’t focus. And his head ached. But then, so did everything else.
“Shale Flint?” The spear poked at him again.
Pedeshit, that hurt! “Jasper left the city. I sent him away.”
“Where? When?”
“Sorry. Can’t remember. My head hurts. I think I fell off the wall.”
An upwards quirk of the lips, a flash of ire in those black eyes: they promised horrors.
Davim turned to the man with the spear and spoke in his own tongue. Then he turned back to Nealrith. “This man cut Nealrith’s eye. Give to his zigger. Then number two eye. You no see. Then number one ball, then number two. You no have more children. Then he cut your pleasure stick, feed to cat. You no more pleasure women. You still no say where Shale Flint, he cut tongue. Then you no more tell anyone anything. Understand?”
“I think so. Sounds plain enough.”
“Where Shale? You say, I kill you now. All finish quickly then. No hurt more.”
Nealrith drifted away from
the pain, then deliberately brought himself back. He battled for coherence. It seemed important, although he was no longer sure why. “I have seen all I ever wanted to see. I have the child I desired.” Senya, oh, Senya. “There can be no more pleasure when my city is in your hands.” Laisa, I wish you could have loved me.
He fought to stay lucid. “To help you find Jasper Bloodstone would be a greater agony. Do your damnedest, Davim the drover, and may your heart shrivel in the waterless land you’ll leave behind you.”
Davim unsheathed a knife and rapped out a command. Men grabbed Nealrith’s arms and legs and held him hard to the ground. He didn’t struggle.
No point, he thought. No point to anything now.
Davim leaned over and held the eyelid of Nealrith’s left eye open with the fingers of one hand.
I must really have riled him, he thought with grim humour. He’s going to do it himself.
Then Davim stuck his knife into the eyeball and cut it out. Agony lanced deep into Nealrith’s brain like a stream of molten fire. He struggled then, and screamed. He hadn’t known what pain was till then. Blood poured down his face and into his mouth.
Davim straightened up and pushed the eye through the bars of the zigger cage he wore at his belt.
Nealrith didn’t see, and no longer cared.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Scarpen Quarter
Breccia City
Past noon, and the reeve at the Cistern Chambers on Level Six was still alive and still on duty. He unlocked the door to the main water tunnel for Lord Kaneth and fifteen exhausted, wounded men.
“They are killing reeves,” Kaneth said as the man lit a candle lantern for them to use in the tunnel. “Level by level. Come with us to Breccia Hall. If you stay here at the waterhall, you’ll die.”
“It’s hard to walk away from your duty,” the reeve replied, shaking his head. “My father was the reeve here before me. And his father before him. I grew up here.” He sighed. “I shall probably die here. What else is there for me?”
Kaneth looked away. Honour, he thought, comes at a terrible price. He had seen too many good men die this day. Aloud he resorted to ritual words. “May the Sunlord send you solace.”
“Take care, my lord.”
Kaneth urged his small group of guards uplevel. Tired as they were, bleeding and bruised and limping, they found it a tough dimb. Worse, there were grilles blocking the tunnel on every level, each with a water lock to be opened and closed, which meant Kaneth had to find power somewhere inside himself to manipulate them. He had never been so close to dropping with exhaustion. Blighted eyes, but he was tired!
He had used up most of his power on the walls hours before, just after dawn. The drums had told him to expect the worst, and the worst had come with the forced opening of the gates—by Reduners already on the inside. Since then, Kaneth had been fighting in the streets. No more ziggers, though, thank the Sunlord. Or maybe thank the Reduner reluctance to risk dying in the frenzy from their own bastard weapons. Still, men died, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of chalamen and bladesmen. They’d had to flee and regroup.
He’d known they were doomed. Known he was a dead man refusing to give up. It made no difference to his decisions. He had rallied as many guards as he could find, and they’d held off the invaders for a time on Level Ten. He and Elmar had fought side by side, two men sealing a long camaraderie with a deeper bond of two warriors who believed they were about to die. As the day wore on, more and more men dropped. Elmar saved Kaneth several times; Kaneth returned the favour, flashing a smile at the pikeman. For a while, they seemed charmed, a duo that could hold death at bay.
On Level Eight, their small group made another stand and held their position with the aid of an ageing waterpriest rainlord who had not yet used up all his power. In the end, the man died, speared from behind, and the group splintered as they were charged by Reduner warriors. Kaneth led those who stuck with him to the Level Six Cistern Chambers. He knew it was time to abandon the streets to the Reduners.
When he scanned the men remaining with him, Elmar was no longer among them. He spared a moment to grieve.
They arrived at the Breccia Hall entrance almost a sandglass run later, and a water reeve opened the door for them. Kaneth continued up to the waterhall on Level One, leaving the guards behind at the hall.
He emerged straight into chaos. The defensive wall that had been erected across the tunnel leading from the mother cistern had been partially torn down. Everywhere he looked there were bodies of the dead or dying. At one end of the hall, half a dozen guards and a reeve were fighting still, close to being overwhelmed by eight or nine Reduners. At first glance, Kaneth couldn’t see Ryka, and his heart clenched with the unthinkable fear that she was dead. Then he saw her, lying against the wall, out of the way of the fighting.
Not dead, but wounded. Her thigh was roughly bandaged; blood showed through the cloth. She faced the skirmishing, propping herself up on an elbow. From the intensity of her stare, he guessed she was using her water-powers. He raced across the room, sword drawn, reaching for the dregs of his power as he ran. Halfway across, he sucked water from the nearest Reduner. The man collapsed, shrieking. Entering the fray, Kaneth trod on the man’s face. The next man he ran through with his blade. The impact almost wrenched his sword out of his hand.
Kaneth came up behind a warrior advancing on Ryka and tossed him face first into the nearest cistern. He pushed the man’s head under the water. A younger warrior leaped at Kaneth with a roar of rage and a swinging scimitar. Kaneth ducked, parried—and blinded his attacker without losing his hold on the drowning man. He released his grip only when the Reduner stilled under his hand.
Panting, Kaneth resorted to water-power again and blinded two more Reduners before they realised their danger. Another turned to flee towards the exit tunnel, only to have Ryka snatch up a sword and swing it into the back of his knees. He collapsed. She finished him off by extracting the water from his throat. He died opening and closing his mouth in silence, like a fish out of water.
Kaneth looked around for someone else to kill, but the remaining Reduners were already dead. He lowered his sword and turned to the Breccian guards. They were all wounded, but still upright. “Good work,” he said with a satisfied nod. “Check all the bodies to make sure they are dead. If not, kill them. And get that dead fellow out of our drinking water. Then start to block the entrance to the tunnel again before the next lot come.”
The men obeyed wordlessly. One of them plunged his head into the open cistern. When he lifted it out again, dripping, he drank deeply from his cupped hands. To Kaneth, it was an action that said more than anything else; in a single day, something that once would have been a crime had ceased to mean anything at all.
He looked at Ryka. She was on her feet, bloodied, dirty, weary, her sword slipping from her grasp. And he was certain, as never before, what was important—and how stupid he had been not to have seen it years earlier. How ironic, he thought, his heart aching. It took a war.
“How badly are you hurt?” he asked, striding to her side.
“Shallow cut. Bloody, but nothing serious.”
“Your father?”
“I heard he died up on the walls.”
The pain in her eyes unmanned him. He couldn’t speak. It was she who came to him, standing up and reaching out in answer to what she read in his eyes. “I thought you might be dead, too,” she whispered. “I thought I’d lost you.”
He enfolded her in his embrace, clutched her tight, buried his face in her hair. They stood like that, momentarily shut off from the world, while the men dealt out death around them. When he did speak, he said the first thing that came into his head.
“There haven’t been any hussies. Or snuggery jades. Not since the day we married. Not even once.” Oh shit, he thought. Did I really have to mention that now?
Her arms tightened around him. “Not even since I left your bed?” she asked.
“Not even then. I didn’t wan
t them any more, not after you.” He eased his hold so that he could see her face, meet her eyes. When he spoke, there was pain behind every word he uttered, and he neither tried nor wanted to hide it. “Ryka, the truth is you have to come through this alive. Because without you, I won’t have a reason to live. It’s taken me half a lifetime to see that you are all that matters, all I want, all I need. I’m so sorry you were forced into a marriage you didn’t want. So very, very sorry.”
She sighed as if he had said something excessively stupid. “You are the only man I ever wanted to marry since I was fourteen years old, you dryhead.”
He tried to make sense of that, but it was too difficult. Emotion uncurled inside him, but he couldn’t untangle the strands: love, hope and shining joy entwined with dark knots of despair and grief.
“There’s no need to say it,” she said gently and laid a finger to his lips. “I’ve already heard the only thing I needed to hear. I love you, Kaneth Carnelian, and I always have. Always.”
The day passed unbearably slowly down in the hidden room on the thirtieth level. They measured time by the run of a sandglass and the faint light that entered through the ventilator from the outside. The day had, in fact, begun for them before dawn, when they had heard the distant drumbeats that signalled an attack on the walls. The level’s reeve had spoken to them then, using the other ventilator shaft, his voice echoing strangely. He had told them he would go out into the streets to find out what was happening and they were not to move until he came back.
He had not returned yet.
Senya slept most of the time; Laisa paced; Jasper tried to read by lantern light. He’d opened the pack he had been given, to find that it contained the tables and maps he had studied with Cloudmaster Granthon. They detailed all the areas throughout the Quartern where rain was supposed to fall, and when, and how to get it there. Some of this Jasper had already learned in a practical sense from Granthon. Granthon and Nealrith had done their best to pour as much knowledge into him in the time they’d had, but it had not been enough. Here, in written form, was all he needed to know, if he ever had the chance to study it. If ever he grew enough in power to apply it. The size of the task was monumental.
