The Last Stormlord

by Glenda Larke

  The memory of her last moments with him replayed over and over. The battle in the waterhall. His last conscious act had been to protect her with his body. Could she have done more? Done something differently? She had used the last of her power to stop his bleeding, to dry the horrible wound exposing the bone of his scalp as he floated face down, senseless in the cistern. She had kept pure the bubble of air around their faces so they could both breathe. But mostly she’d just had to float there, eyes almost closed, hoping the invaders would leave the waterhall and she could pull Kaneth out of the water and take him to safety.

  A futile hope, easily splintered. The Reduners had slung them both out of the cistern. They had dumped Kaneth, unconscious—or dead—on the floor; the sound of his body thudding onto the paving echoed in her head still. She’d landed on top of him a moment later. It had taken all her courage to allow herself to fall like a dead body. Not to stretch out a hand to break her landing. Not to open her eyes, not to touch him, not to look to see if his wound was bleeding again.

  More waiting then, more futile praying that the Reduners would leave the waterhall, more begging a boon of a Sunlord she didn’t believe in. A little joy, too, when she’d felt the baby stir within her.

  She’d tried speaking to Kaneth, whispered words of encouragement and love, but he had not replied. She thought she’d felt the movement of his breath faint against her cheek, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Several runs of the sandglass later, the guards had received fresh orders. She’d heard and understood: “Take the dead outside. Load them onto a pede and dump them outside the walls.”

  Her heart had leaped within her. A chance. A chance for both her and Kaneth—if he lived. Please, let it be so…

  More rough handling when she was thrown over a man’s shoulder, carried, her face bumping against his back, only to be dumped once more, onto this heap of the dead. She wasn’t outside the city walls; she knew that much. Cracking open an eyelid, she’d recognized one of the Breccia Hall courtyards. Hampered by her confounded short-sightedness blurring the details of anything farther than ten paces away, she saw enough to know that the last bastion against the invaders had fallen. They had lost the city to the Reduners.

  And so it was she now lay motionless, cushioned by lifeless bodies, her clothes drying out in the heat of an afternoon sun, as she listened and awaited her time to move.

  Sunlord, but she was tired! She needed to eat, and eat well. Without food, she had no energy; without energy, she had no water-power, no way of fighting back. Her sword was gone and she doubted she could have lifted it anyway.

  Some more desultory conversation, laughter, and then a voice answering an unheard question. “No. That’s the dead burning outside the city all you can smell.”

  The words sent fear stabbing into her bowels. They were burning bodies.

  “Are we eating them now?” someone asked, amused.

  “You sand-tick, Ankrim! The sandmaster ordered all the dead burned as soon as possible. Easier, I suppose, than burying them, when we have all those bab palms to fuel the pyres.”

  “Nah. More to teach a lesson to the living, I reckon. Here, let’s get this pede loaded.”

  She stopped listening. Burned! Sandblast the bastards—if Kaneth was unconscious, then… Being taken outside the wall began to sound like a rotten idea.

  The packpede was loaded, but no one approached the heap of dead she was on. The nearby voices were gone, leaving only far-off screams and shouting. She risked opening her eyes. No one. Cautiously, she raised her head and looked around. She was in front of the main entrance to the pede stables adjoining Breccia House, and as far as she could see, there was no one in sight. As she climbed down, bodies squelched under her sandaled feet and the odors of death intensified. Rot, shit, piss, blood. She gagged.

  Boys, some of them. Not all soldiers, either…

  In death, there was little to choose between those who had their skin stained red by desert dust, and the fair-skinned Scarpen folk like herself.

  Her feet reached the gravel surface of the courtyard and she stood up. She was sore all over, and stiff. She moved like an old woman. After another swift glance around to make sure she was unobserved, she poked through the piled corpses. The Reduners she ignored, and those wearing a guard uniform. Kaneth had never been one for uniforms. “If I am going to fight, I want to be comfortable,” he’d said, as he’d chosen his oldest tunic and trousers. She’d joked that he looked like a brass worker from Level Twenty, but she had followed his lead and worn clothes more suited to a laborer than a woman of her class.

  She couldn’t find him. Tall, broad shouldered, muscular, long limbed—he was hard to miss. And that sun-streaked fair hair he kept tied at the nape, it would stand out among the Reduners.

  She searched again, even more carefully. He wasn’t there. There had been a second pile of bodies, but it had disappeared. If he’d been among those…

  Panicking and weak and thirsty, she swallowed back a surge of dizzying nausea.

  “Looking for something?”

  The voice, and the accompanying sound of a weapon being drawn from its scabbard, dulled her fear for Kaneth, smothered it in more immediate terror. Her heart skipped, pounded. Slowing its beating by force of will, she turned to face the speaker. A Reduner man, for all he spoke the Quartern tongue with a strong Gibber accent. He’d just stepped out of the stables. Slim, athletic, armed, his red skin streaked with dust and blood. His dark red braids were untidy with beads missing or broken. His sword was blood drenched.

  The darkness of his eyes contained no hint of mercy, no hint of anything. She guessed he was at least ten cycles younger than she was, but he carried himself with assurance. His belted robe was elaborately embroidered, so she knew why: He came from a wealthy and important family.

  Probably learned his Quartern tongue from Gibber slaves, she thought, her bitterness deep. Reduners had been raiding the Gibber, almost with impunity, for more than four years. Kaneth and his men had done their best to curtail such raids, but their success had been limited.

  “My husband,” she said, keeping her voice level and respectful—but not meek; she would not grovel, even though she knew she was a finger’s breadth away from death. Or worse.

  He held his scimitar up and took a step toward her, the blade pointed at her chest. She did not move.

  “Find him?” he inquired, his tone deceptively mild, if the sword was to be believed.

  “No.”

  “You’re supposed t’be in the big room.” He waved his free hand toward the hall. “In there. How did y’get out?”

  The point of the scimitar came within a whisker of her left nipple. She refused to look down and held his gaze instead. “A woman will risk much to serve her husband.”

  Something flared in his eyes then, but she wasn’t sure she could read it. “Not in my experience,” he said, his lip curling in cynicism. “These folk,” he added, indicating the heap of bodies, “came out of the waterhall. Your husband—guard, was he? Fighting up there?”

  “He was up there,” she said, “but he wasn’t a guard. He was a brass worker from downlevel. He went to help.” She did not have to feign grief; she knew it was written on her face and captured in her voice for anyone to see and hear. “He brought me up here for safety. He knew nothing about fighting.”

  “Then I think you can be certain he’s snuffed it. Everyone in the waterhall died.”

  No, they didn’t. I’m here.

  She didn’t move. Every piece of her being concentrated on not showing fear. Reduners valued courage and despised weakness, even in their women. Not, of course, that he would think twice about lopping off her head with his blade if it pleased him. “Doubtless you’re right,” she said, fighting her nausea, “but I would like to know one way or the other.”

  “What’s your name?”

  I shan’t make you a present of that, you bastard. If he realized she was a rainlord, she was dead—and someone among the Reduners mig
ht know the name Ryka Feldspar. “Who wants to know?”

  He stared at her, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “My name’s Ravard,” he said finally. “But what should count with you, woman, is the weapon I hold t’your body. What’s your name?” The blade tip brushed her nipple this time and then traced a pattern up to her throat.

  “Garnet,” she said, appropriating the name of the cook in Carnelian House and then adding another gemstone at random: “Garnet Prase.”

  “Dangerous for a woman t’be out on the streets after a battle,” he remarked with heavy mockery. “You never know what nasty thing might happen. There’s men wanting their rewards for a battle well fought, and they’ll take it anyhow they please.”

  “So your men are out of control already?” she asked, and then bit her tongue. Why could she never learn to keep silent when it counted!

  His eyes narrowed. “You play a dangerous game, woman, with your Scarpen arrogance. Perhaps you care nothing for yourself.” The sword point dropped to her abdomen. “But what about the brat you carry?”

  This time she couldn’t control her shock. “How—” she began, and then closed her mouth firmly, though her hand dropped to cover the roundness of her belly, as if she could protect her son from his weapon. If only I had my water-power—

  “I have eyes in me head,” he said. “Suggest you keep a still tongue in yours, Garnet, less you want t’lose your life and your man’s get, as well. I’ll take you t’other women in there. Tonight, you sleep with a man who’s not your husband, or you’ll lose more than your man. Think on it.”

  He turned her roughly and started her walking in front of him toward the hall’s main door. She hugged her arms about her to stop her trembling.

  A complete stranger works out I’m pregnant at a glance? It took Kaneth nearly half a cycle to wake up to it! This fellow was strange.

  She slipped in a patch of blood on the gravel and he grabbed her by the arm, wrenching her upright before she hit the ground. “Careful, sweet lips,” he said in her ear. “We want you undamaged, don’t we?”

  She gasped in pain. The sword cut on her upper leg—not deep, but raw and throbbing nonetheless—had opened up. He hadn’t noticed it before because the cut in her trousers had been almost covered by her tunic, but he saw the fresh blood now. He gave an exasperated grunt.

  “Why didn’t y’tell me you were hurt?” he asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  He pulled up the hem of the tunic and looked at the wound. There had been a makeshift bandage around her thigh once, but it had long since come loose and fallen off. “Humph. Maybe not, but needs covering nonetheless, t’stop that bleeding.”

  He left her where she was and went back to the heaped-up dead. With his scimitar, he slashed at a dead man’s tunic and brought back a piece of the cloth. She wanted to take it from him, but he ignored her gesture and knelt to wrap it around her thigh himself, over the top of her trousers. She braced herself for an intimate touch, a leer, or a sneering remark, but all he did was bandage her.

  As he tied off the ends, he said, “When you get a chance, wash the wound ’n’ put a clean cloth ’bout it. Even a small cut like that can kill you, if it gets dirty.”

  Perhaps that would be best anyway, she thought. To die.

  The thought must have been reflected on her face because he said harshly, “Listen t’me, you water-soft city groveller. Living’s what counts, understand? Your man’s dead. Probably your whole withering family’s been snuffed. Your city’s fallen. Your rainlords are rotting in the sun. Soon there’ll be no more water in your skyless city. Take your chance with us. We’ve not got rainlords, but our sandmasters and tribemasters can sense water on the wind. Our dune gods protect us.” He pointed to her abdomen. “That young’un of yours? It can grow up Reduner, a warrior or a woman of the tribe. Reduners don’t make no difference ’tween folk. Out there on the dunes, we’re all red soon enough. Being alive? That’s all that matters. That’s all.”

  She stood facing him. Wasn’t there more to life than that? Yes, of course, there was—but you had to be alive to achieve it. Sandblast it, she thought, despairing. How did we Breccians ever come to this?

  She nodded to the man. “Yes,” she said. “You are right.”

  “Now, get going, Garnet. I don’t have time t’waste on you.”

  Kaneth, I will be strong. I promise, for the sake of our son. You’re on your own, wherever you are. And so, dammit, am I.

  And then, just a whisper in her mind, to a man who was probably dead: I love you.