The Last Stormlord

by Glenda Larke

  He pushed those thoughts away to concentrate on this night world of the desert. He had no need of any light; the star-shine and his water-sense were enough. Once, he startled a pebblemouse and smiled at its frantic fright as it somersaulted head over heels, diving for its burrow. A little later, he came across a flock of night-parrots as they chewed their way through grass tufts full of seeds. They watched him warily with their huge eyes but never halted their incessant and noisy feeding.

  I want to go home, he thought, and it was the Gibber he meant. And then he wondered at himself. What was there in the Gibber for him? What had he ever had there that was of value, except perhaps the love of his brother and sister—neither of whom was there any more? He didn’t have a home.

  One day, I will, I swear, he said to himself. A place where I belong, which is truly mine. I will build it myself, for me and those I love.

  He paused to look back. Far below, he could see the camp fires of the Reduners. In front of the flames, he could see men scurrying about. Some were saddling pedes, others lighting torches. The foot of the escarpment was alive with moving flickers of red, the burning brands of the searchers. They were spreading up the hill like sparks scattered by a gusting wind. He could feel the water of pedes as well, but none were close as yet. He smiled. They were as obvious to him as an eagle in the noonday sky. They would never find him.

  To his right, the city was mostly dark. He traced the outline of the waterhall at the top, then Breccia Hall, and thought of Nealrith and Kaneth and Ryka and Ethelva. He thought of Terelle the last time he had seen her, fleeing for her life through the streets of Scarcleft. He thought of Mica, enslaved. Or dead. He thought of Citrine, the piece of jasper clasped in her hand just before she died.

  “Davim,” he whispered. “You did this. You and Taquar. And one day you both will pay.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Scarpen Quarter

  Breccia City

  Ryka wondered, not for the first time, if she’d done the right thing. She’d denied Kaneth her body, moved out of his bed, avoided him as much as possible. She had concealed her thickening waist to punish the man she loved. It all seemed horribly childish now. She could hardly remember why she’d done it in the first place.

  Perhaps the baby in her womb, almost half grown now, would be a stormlord. Perhaps he might be the future of the land, and she ought to hide herself away to keep her baby safe. And what right had she to deny Kaneth the knowledge of his baby’s existence? She’d been thinking all along that she wouldn’t have to tell him, that he would realise. That he would sense the baby’s water. But he never had. That had hurt, had made her even angrier with him. How could he not feel his own son, there under his nose?

  Yet if she told Kaneth, he would never rest until he had sent her to safety. And she couldn’t live without him.

  I can’t.

  He was sleeping, sprawled out on the stone tiles of the waterhall floor. She sat opposite, back to the wall, and drank in the sight of him: long, lanky, lean. Tousled hair, worry lines on his face smoothed away by exhausted sleep, snatching rest while he still could.

  It wouldn’t be long now before the Reduners realised Jasper had escaped. The next attack, when it came, would be vicious; she knew enough about Reduners to be sure of that, enough to know that any attempt at negotiation would be ignored.

  She glanced over at the others in the waterhall. The remaining reeve and surviving guards had been reinforced by another eight guards, all that could be spared from the thinly stretched forces that remained to defend both the waterhall and Breccia Hall. She looked around at them. One of them, Pikeman Elmar Waggoner, was now replenishing the oil in the lamps in the wall niches and placing extra ones around the edge of the cisterns. His face resembled a battle-scarred tomcat, yet when his gaze lit on Kaneth, it softened to a gentleness at variance with his tough exterior. Earlier, both had thought the other dead, and their meeting in the waterhall had been a bright moment in an otherwise dark day.

  She thought of her father, who had died fighting on the city wall. She wondered if her mother and Beryll were safe inside the hall somewhere. That exasperating, teasing sister who drove her sandcrazy—now Ryka would have given everything she owned to have Beryll live through this siege safely.

  Something overhead started to thump, and dust sifted into the air from the hairline cracks that webbed their way along the daub ceiling. She frowned, watching. They were in the highest building in the city, the top of the escarpment. There was nothing above them.

  The thump continued. Her hand crept to her womb, to rest protectively over the child within. Her mouth went dry.

  When her gaze returned to Kaneth, she found he was staring at her, at where she had placed her hand. “They are coming through the roof,” she said. “The Level One wall must be breached.” So soon.

  “Ryka,” he whispered, “do you have something to tell me?” Around them the guards were waking, looking upwards to where the thump continued to pound. Men reached for their weapons and stood. No one spoke. Faces tilted towards the ceiling. The air thrummed with tension, with sound, with fear.

  Ryka had eyes only for Kaneth, and his did not waver from hers. She nodded.

  He paled. “Oh, Watergiver’s heart! Ryka, why didn’t you tell me earlier? You should not be here.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet. He moved towards the concealed trapdoor, the one that led to the hidden room, tugging her after him. Someone had covered the entrance with a stone slab.

  She pulled against him. “No. No time. If they were to break through now and see it open—What if Jasper and Laisa and Senya haven’t left yet?”

  He halted, in agony. Torn. “A child is our hope for the future, Ryka. Everyone’s future. How could you endanger him? Or is it a her? How could you not tell me?”

  “A boy, I think, but I could yet be wrong. And he would die of thirst long before he learned to cloudshift. Leave it, Kaneth.”

  Still he hesitated, his anguish a tangible thing between them.

  “It’s too late,” she whispered, knowing she had made a horrendous mistake, but the words were drowned in shattering sound as the roof at one end of the waterhall collapsed. Several of the guards died on the spot, hit by falling debris. The rest were swamped in a cloud of dust. Kaneth grabbed Ryka with one hand and drew his sword with the other.

  And out of the dust the Reduners came, ululating their war cry to their dune god.

  There were too many of them, Ryka saw that at a glance, and they kept on coming, leaping down through the hole in the roof. Kaneth dropped her hand, and they placed their backs to the wall, side by side, and groped in their tired bodies for the water-power to make men blind.

  I wonder if Kaneth was right about Taquar? Ryka reflected. Would things have been different if he had ruled here? Because the rest of us made such a mess of it.

  But there was no time to consider what might have been. To her despair, she realised the Reduners were using new tactics. They held chala spears, not scimitars.

  She and Kaneth blinded the first few men who tried to throw them, but there were just too many chalamen. The guards began to fall under the onslaught. More and more blinded men groped their way through the battling warriors, until Ryka had no more power to call on. She clutched her sword, preparing for the first of the Reduners to reach her, but Kaneth grabbed her hand and yanked her away from the wall. He raced along the walkway between the open cisterns, towards the waterhall door, pulling her with him. Elmar, ever ready to follow his lord, pounded down a parallel walkway, heading in the same direction.

  Kaneth yelled to the guards, ordering them out, too, although Ryka doubted many of them would make it—or even hear.

  She didn’t see the spear that hit him, but she saw his head jerk back, felt him stagger. Another spear tore at her tunic, pulling her off balance as it ripped the fabric and sliced a thin line across her skin. She flailed and fell backwards into the cistern. And Kaneth dropped face down on top of her, blood pou
ring from his head. He clutched her as they fell, his grip hard and tight.

  She closed her eyes as his weight bore them both to the bottom. The water was cold. She felt stonework under her back and panicked. Instinct told her to surface. Rational thought told her all that waited there was death.

  And then she was breathing air. She opened her eyes, to look directly into Kaneth’s only a finger’s length from her own. And there was nothing but air between them, a small pocket he had cleared for them to breathe. He winked and mouthed, “Don’t move.” They drifted upwards through the water, and at the surface he let her go. His arms floated on either side of her head, keeping her sunken beneath the protection of his body.

  Waterless hell, she thought, he knows there’s a good chance someone is going to plunge a spear into his back to make sure he’s dead. How can he be so brave?

  They were going to die, and she was flooded with regret. They should have run. They should have tried to save their child. Death was forever. I was wrong, she thought.

  “Live,” she said to Kaneth, just the tiniest whisper into the air between them so no one else would hear. “Live, for the three of us.”

  The water around their heads reddened with his blood. She could see it running from his wound, a crease through his scalp, a deep furrow that must have reached the bone. The edges of the air pocket weakened as the last of his power drained. She used her senses to feel its dimensions: just enough to cover their faces, with a narrow pipe running from the edge to emerge on the surface, hidden in the floating tangle of her hair. She shored up the sides by pushing water away. Sandblast, she was so weak. Only the faintest dregs of her power remained. How long could she keep the water at bay?

  He must have felt her power take over from his, because his eyes closed, and she felt him slip away somewhere she could not follow. His last conscious action had been to protect her and their child.

  She wanted to hold him. She wanted to tell him she loved him. And most of all, she wanted to reach out and pinch his wound closed with her fingers to stop the bleeding that leached his life away. Live, she told him silently. Live.

  Yet she could do nothing. A single movement, a single sound would betray them both and bring certain death. She had to play dead. A slim chance, but the only one they had. So much blood…

  Think, woman! she shouted in her mind, berating herself. You are a rainlord. You can stop the bleeding if you can find enough within you… As she floated there in a sea of his blood, her heart breaking, she searched for a fragment of power to dry his wound, to seal it with dry scabbing. Just a fragment, that’s all she needed.

  Oh, Kaneth, love, please don’t die on me, not now.

  Motionless and silent, she searched for power—and wondered, if he died, whether she would sense the moment his life left him.

  “Mother?” Senya asked, breathless after the climb. “What do we do next? I mean, if we go to Portennabar, Davim will just go there, too, and exactly the same thing will happen. We can’t fight, because we don’t have ziggers or enough rainlords or enough pedes.”

  “I’m glad to see you are finally thinking, child. Ah, here’s the gully. I can sense the pedes, right where they should be.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  Laisa smiled in the darkness. “Don’t worry, Senya. We are not going to Portennabar.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Have you ever known your mother not to have a spare water jar in the cupboard? We have the Quartern’s only stormlord. So we will go where there are fighters and ziggers and pedes and a man with guts enough to lead us to power and victory.”

  Senya’s eyes widened. Then she began to smile.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My heartfelt thanks to all the wonderful people around the world who helped to make this a better book. I know how much I owe you. To name just some of you:

  my beta readers Alena, Mark, Marcus, Mitenae, Phill, Donna, Karen, Russell, Jason;

  my agent Dorothy Lumley;

  my editors and copy editor at HarperCollins Voyager Australia and Orbit Books UK.

  extras

  meet the author

  Glenda is an Australian who now lives in Malaysia, where she works on the two great loves of her life: writing fantasy and the conservation of rainforest avifauna. She has also lived in Tunisia and Austria, and has at different times in her life worked as a housemaid, library assistant, school teacher, university tutor, medical correspondence course editor, field ornithologist and designer of nature interpretive centers. Along the way she has taught English to students as diverse as Korean kindergarten kids and Japanese teenagers living in Malaysia, Viennese adults in Austria, and engineering students in Tunis. If she has any spare time (which is not often), she goes birdwatching; if she has any spare cash (not nearly often enough), she visits her daughters in the United States and her family in Western Australia. Find out more about the author at www.glendalarke.com.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed THE LAST STORMLORD,

  look out for

  STORMLORD RISING

  Stormlord: Book Two

  by Glenda Larke

  Scarpen Quarter

  Breccia City, Breccia Hall, Level Two

  The man lying next to Lord Ryka Feldspar was dead.

  His eyes stared upward past her shoulder, sightless, sad, the vividness of their blue already fading. For a while, his blood had seeped from his wounded chest onto her tunic, but that had slowed, then stopped. She did not know his name, although she had known him by sight. He’d been a guard at Breccia Hall. Younger than she was. Eighteen, twenty?

  Too young to die.

  The man on top of her was dead, too. He was a Reduner. His head lay on her chest and the beads threaded onto his red braids pressed uncomfortably into her breast, but she didn’t dare move. Not yet. Around her she heard Reduner voices still; men, heaving bodies onto packpedes, talking among themselves. Making crude jokes about the dead. Coping, perhaps, with the idea that it could so easily have been them. To die or to survive: Even for the victors, the outcome was often as unpredictable as the gusting of a desert wind.

  Reduners. Red men from a land of red sand dunes, flesh-devouring zigger beetles, and meddles of black pedes. Drovers and nomads and warriors who hankered after a past they thought was noble: a time when rain had been random and they ruled most of the Quartern with their tribal savagery. A people who had recently returned to a time of slave raids, living under laws decided by the strength of a man’s arm and dispensed with a scimitar or a zigtube.

  She had been a scholar once, and she spoke their tongue well. She could understand them now as they chatted. “Those withering bastard rainlords,” one was saying, his tone bitter and angry. “They took the water from Genillid’s eyes while he was fighting next to me. Left his eyeballs like dried berries in their sockets! Blind as a sandworm.”

  “What did you do?” another asked, a youngster by the sound of him.

  “For Genillid? Killed him. That was Sandmaster Davim’s orders. Reckon he was right, too. What’s left for a dunesman if he can’t see?”

  “I heard he went among the men afterward and killed everyone who was like to lose a hand or leg as well. ‘No place for a cripple on the dunes,’ he said.”

  Ryka felt no pity. They had taken her city. Killed her people. Cloudmaster Granthon Almandine, the Quartern’s ruler and its bringer of water and its only true stormlord, was dead; she knew that. His son Highlord Nealrith, the city’s ruler, had been taken and tortured. He’d died in a cage swung over one of the city gates. She knew that, too. She’d heard Jasper Bloodstone had killed him to save him the agony of a slow death.

  Poor Jasper. She’d seen the respect and affection in his eyes when he’d spoken to the Highlord.

  Gentle, kindly Nealrith. She had grown up with him, gone to Breccia Academy with him, attended his wedding to that bitch, Lord Laisa. Oh Sunlord receive you into his sunfire, Rith. You did not deserve your end.

  “Did we ge
t all them bastards?” the same youth asked.

  “The rainlords? Reckon so. I hear exhaustion finally sapped their powers, leaving them defenseless. My brother killed one of them rainlord priests. Still, not even a sandmaster can tell one from an ordinary city grubber. They don’t look no different.”

  “I heard some of them are women.”

  The first man gave a bark of laughter. “One thing for sure, we can slaughter any force that has to use women to fight a battle!”

  Ryka wanted to grit her teeth, but she couldn’t risk even that slight movement. Blast Davim’s sun-blighted eyes. The tribes of the Red Quarter had been leaving their violent past behind until he’d come along to twist their view of the history.

  Sandmaster Davim, with his vicious hatreds and his brutal desire for power, had taken away that scholarly life of hers. He’d shattered the Quartern’s peace, mocked the cultures not his own, destroyed the learning, all in a couple of star cycles. His men had killed her father. Watergiver only knew what had happened to her sister and her mother. And Kaneth?

  No, you mustn’t think he is dead. You mustn’t lose hope. Strange even to think of the life she’d had because it was all gone now, spun away on the invader’s swords and the shimmering wings of their ziggers, like sand whirled into the desert on a spindevil wind. A wisp of her hair tickled her cheek. She ignored it. She mustn’t move. Not even a twitch. She had to live through this, for the baby. For Kaneth.

  Sunlord, I know I don’t really believe in you, but let him be alive, that wonderful, gentle bladesman-warrior of mine. Father of my child. She longed to raise her head and look for him. Perhaps he lay somewhere beneath her, still alive. Or dead. Her hand longed to move to cover her abdomen where their son stirred. She knew his water and thus his maleness. Oh Kaneth, we had so little time…