Stormlord rising s-2

by Glenda Larke

  "Indeed I shall. This land depends on my continued good health."

  "You will have my prayers."

  Jasper smiled. "I have an idea that yours will be more sincerely meant than the new Lord Gold's. My thanks, Lord Taminy."

  As he walked back to Scarcleft Hall, flanked by both guards and enforcers, he dismissed Lord Gold from his mind. The man was a small-minded bigot, and there was no way he could bring trouble to the only stormlord the Quartern had.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  White Quarter The Whiteout As Terelle and Russet continued to descend from the highlands around Fourcross Tell, they made slow progress. They had left the caravan route to Samphire City, and there was no track the way they were heading. The pede picked its way, plodding along with a stoic refusal to be hurried.

  The scenery around them was strange, alien. The creeping vegetation was something Terelle had never seen before: a plant of plump stems but no leaves, or nothing she thought of as leaves. It was purple and green, a sea of it drowning all other growth.

  "Samphire," Russet said. "Grows at lake edge."

  "Lake?" She looked up, but all she could see beyond the samphire was a plain of white. A breeze gusting in swirls on the dazzling flats also teased against her face, leaving its residue. She touched her cheek and looked down at her fingers. "That's salt."

  "A lake sometimes, every ten years or so, in Time of Random Rain. Be so again, if that obstinate Gibber boy not bring back planned storms. Use your head. How ye think it like that, if not water once?" He waved a hand. "Great inland sea… saltier than Giving Sea. Birds be coming from everywhere to nest and eat pink shrimps."

  "Shrimps? Aren't they like fish?" People raised fish in the grove cisterns, but never shrimp. She had heard, though, that the very rich imported salted shrimp from the coast. She stared in disbelief at the salt. "Out there?"

  "So they say."

  Terelle found it hard to believe, but conceded the Whiteout's beauty. "It is almost splendid," she said, considering the hard sparkle of it, the bobbled edge of purple and green a contrast to the purity of the glittering white. She'd expected it to be dirty-colored, like the salt blocks arriving in Scarcleft always were, but this stretched as far as she could see, so bright it hurt the eyes, white without end. Only the edges were grubby, dragging in the dust of the bordering earth.

  "It's so hot out there. The pede will need a lot of water. What if-"

  "Worry, worry, worry! Why ye worry so much? We get safely other side! Otherwise, how my painting ever come true?"

  She felt sick. His faith in his painting agitated her with its implications.

  "Anyway, Whiteout salt mines have tunnels bringing water, just like Scarpen cities. The pede can be finding it for us."

  Her stomach lurched in doubt. "Can you be sure of that?"

  His injury had made no difference to his arrogance. He didn't bother to reply. "Harness pede. Eat bab fruit as we go."

  A few minutes later, as he struggled back onto the pede, she saw the calf of his leg. Red and inflamed, the skin stretched tight over the swelling was shiny. She wanted to protest, to say something, but the look he gave her stopped the words.

  "We go on, girl," he said. The salt penetrated everything. It coated everything. Sometimes the air was so still even the intake of breath was an effort. At other times the winds came: hot, salt-laden winds playing across the surface of the dried-up lake, stirring the salt crystals into white eddies, bombarding them both with tiny splinters of salt. No matter how well Terelle wrapped herself against the onslaught, the salt grains infiltrated every crevice. Her eyes were soon red and sore, her toes inflamed, her lips cracked. If she used pede fat on her skin to protect against the worst of the sun and the drying wind, then the salt stuck to her like a dusting of the powder Opal's handmaidens used.

  She brushed the pede even more carefully than usual each time they stopped, but the beast was in misery. In between the segment plates, the salt irritated its skin until it bled. Pain made it trumpet its distress, turning its head this way and that, as if it sought to find its attacker. Terelle rubbed the worst places with fat, and wondered what they would do when the tub of ointment was empty.

  Lit by the blue light of stars at night and sheened with a luminous glow, the saltscape had a raw beauty. It begged to be painted. Yet Terelle could think only that Russet's stubbornness was going to kill them both. True, they had not seen any Reduners, probably because no Reduner was sun-fried crazy enough to cross this vast salt pan.

  At times, her thoughts drifted to Shale. To his promise of protection. She would smile softly at the memory, choosing to recall not the irony of his inability to uphold the pledge, but the nobility of his intention. When she thought of the Reduners riding south into the Scarpen, a tear trickled down her cheek, washing a track through the dusting of white.

  Loneliness set her dreaming of what might have been-futile, silly visions of a world that never could be, at least not to a Gibber girl sold to traders for water tokens. She knew her thoughts were foolish, but let them wander anyway. What she wanted, she would never have: Shale's hand in hers; Shale seated behind her right now, his hands holding her by the waist, whispering promises in her ear.

  She turned her face to the sky and silently sent her thoughts questing, not even sure what power it was she queried. Was it too much to want? she asked. Just to have one friend? When Terelle woke early the next morning, she lay for a moment staring at the sky. In the east, the stars were fading, then vanishing as the dawn light crept higher.

  Another day. There was no way it would be a good one.

  And you, my girl, have to stop whining and whingeing and feeling sorry for yourself. It's no use looking back. That life is behind you. Now you have to make the best of what's ahead.

  And the first thing was to stay alive in order to have a life. When they set off once more, she gave the pede its head.

  Russet roused himself enough to complain after they had been traveling an hour or two. "We've swung too far south," he protested.

  "I'm letting the pede choose the route."

  "Why? Don't need water yet!"

  "The pede needs more than we can give it. Besides, you need help. Getting me to Khromatis will gain you nothing if you are dead."

  "I be not dying!"

  "You will be if you don't get help. I want to find the tunnel. We'll follow it to the nearest mining settlement."

  "Don't be stupid, girl. You know we get through this. I painted you there, in mountains!"

  "You didn't paint yourself, old man." His painting had portrayed her next to running water on a green hillside. His clothing had been in the painting-but not him. A painter could not paint himself to ensure his own future. He tried to argue with her, but she didn't listen and he was too weak to offer any physical resistance. The pede plodded on.

  They stopped during the heat of the day, but when Terelle went to groom the animal she was shocked at how hot the black carapace was under her touch. Even the underlying skin connecting the segments felt much too warm. Alarmed, she looked across at Russet where he sat lifting a water skin to his lips. "The pede is feverish," she said.

  "Pedes don't get fever. Desert creatures," he said in scorn, but she wondered if he would really know something like that.

  She said slowly, "The people of the White Quarter own white pedes. White reflects heat. Number Twelve is far too hot. It's burning up, and there doesn't seem to be nearly as much water in its tissues as there should be."

  "Don't bother me," he muttered. "Stop worrying. I be painting you there…" He lay down in the shade she had erected and closed his eyes.

  Troubled, she patted the pede's head, but it didn't seem to have enough energy to raise its eye mantle to look at her. Its feelers lay flat to the ground, unmoving. She wondered if she should give it more water, and was torn. If the pede died, they were doomed. To continue on foot would be ridiculous; she had glimpsed the peaks of the mountains as an unevenness along the horizon, but they were still
far away. She had no idea in what direction Samphire City lay, and no idea of where the salt pan's water tunnels were. They couldn't even retrace their route because the wind had teased away the footprints. Besides, Russet was hardly able to stand, let alone walk. They had to have the pede, not just to ride, but to find the water of the tunnel.

  Wryly resolute, she took up one of the water skins and offered the spout to the animal, letting it sense the water through its mouth. It did not stir. She even poured a little of the precious liquid into its gullet, but it gave no sign of caring. It wasn't dead yet, though; she knew that. It still made odd snuffling noises, and occasionally clattered its segments in a shrug.

  Not knowing what else she could do, she lay down to rest. Whatever happened, they couldn't move until the heat was gone from the sun. When she woke, late in the afternoon, it seemed no cooler-and the pede was dead. For a moment she couldn't absorb the enormity of that. It was impossible, surely. For that huge a beast to die so quickly, without her even being aware of it, without a struggle, without a sound. She reached out and forced up the mantle that covered its eyes, wondering if she could be mistaken. Begging that she was.

  The eyes were sunken, unseeing, speaking of nothing but an absence of life. In shock, she struggled to maintain her resolution. The disaster was too huge, too fraught with dire outcomes, all of them now probably unavoidable.

  After several deep breaths, she went to wake Russet, only to find him delirious. He called her Sienna, her mother's name, and shouted at her angrily, asking why she had hankered after an eel-catcher, why she had run away. "Ye could have been Pinnacle!" he cried out in anger. "Don't ye be knowing how much I wanted to be Pinnacle? But no-I be not good enough for them. I not be having Pinnacle blood in my veins…" And then the words disintegrated into meaningless syllables.

  Terelle sat back on her heels, thinking. Russet could not possibly walk; yet if he didn't, they had no chance.

  Unless his waterpainting had been powerful enough. If so, then it ensured she at least would reach the land of the Watergivers one day. All she had to do was wait where she was and she'd be rescued, possibly Russet along with her. But could she rely on that? She didn't know enough about waterpainting magic to be sure. Maybe if he died, and the magic of the paintings with him, then she could die as well, without ever reaching the water of Khromatis. Even if he didn't die, perhaps as he grew weaker, so would the effects of his waterpainting. She tried to assess whether her drive to go toward the mountains had lessened, but couldn't be sure.

  "Blighted eyes," she growled. "I hate magic."

  Nonetheless, she rummaged in her pack and took out her waterpaints to have a look at them. She had everything she needed: paints, tray, the last of their water. Russet had once said you couldn't paint the impossible and expect it to happen. But she could paint something sensible showing Russet being saved. A party of Alabasters riding up to their camp? But if she did, could she be sure she did not hurt someone else? What if one of the people who came to save them died because they came? She knew in her heart there was no way she could ever be certain. When you messed with the future, you had to be prepared to change other people's lives as well, not necessarily for the better. It was wrong.

  She looked down at the old man and shook her head in exasperation. Here she was, wondering how to save Russet, when she should have been taking the opportunity to rid herself of him. Here she was, in danger of dying a slow and torturous death of thirst because of him, and yet she couldn't just walk away.

  Life definitely wasn't fair, but at least she no longer expected it to be. She gave a snort of sardonic amusement and said, "I think I'm going to die because of you, old man, and I don't even like you."

  One thing she did know for certain: she was never going to give up. For the rest of that day and for the entirety of the next, she worked. She used Russet's knife to strip off some of the carapace from the dead pede. It was a horrible job, difficult and messy and smelly. Fortunately, the worst of the smell dissipated after a few hours as the flesh dried out, but it was hard not to feel guilty. They had asked too much of the animal, and it had suffered a cruel death.

  Trying not to think of that, she separated two segment pieces from the carcass and cleaned out all the flesh, which she cut up and laid out to dry in the sun. The legs and the thick skin of the underbelly she discarded. She set fire to the remains of the pede, using the oil from its own glands to fuel the blaze. It made a pillar of black, greasy smoke rising straight up into the air, a signal to anyone within several days' journey. She had no confidence anyone would actually respond. Why should they? If they were Alabasters, they would probably think it a Reduner trap. If they were Reduners, they wouldn't be interested in someone else's troubles.

  While it burned, contaminating the air with an unpleasant acridity, she placed the two cleaned segments inner side upward, lengthways one behind the other on the salt. They were vaguely boat-shaped, flattish in the middle but then curved upward into a broad prow at either end. They dried out quickly in the heat. Using the point of the knife, she punched holes in the ends of each and linked them with twine. The result looked vaguely like a two-part insect, overturned and legless. She lined one of the segments with the two blankets they had, then made a harness out of some of their clothes so she could pull the segments along behind her, like a sled.

  When she'd finished, she straightened up to look around. In the far distance white figures cavorted, coalescing and parting, shivering and stretching.

  Look, Terelle, sand-dancers… No. Salt-dancers, that's what they are…

  She laughed, finding her own thought hugely funny.

  Then she sobered. During the day and a half of preparations, she had restricted her water intake as much as she could bear. Now that she had finished the sled, she was light-headed and finding it hard to think straight.

  Russet was in a worse state. He lay unheeding, drifting in and out of delirium. His leg was still red and swollen, although it didn't seem to be worsening. He drank when she gave him water, he muttered and moaned when she touched him-but no more than that. When everything was ready, she laid him inside the padded segment. The curvature meant it could not have been comfortable, but he wasn't conscious enough to complain. Surprised to find how light he was, she had the fanciful feeling he was just a husk, that the real man had long since gone.

  Blown away on the wind, maybe. No, not the wind, the salt-dancers. Maybe they took him…

  She shook her head and frowned. Sunlord, her brains were frizzled. Russet wasn't dead. Concentrating, she packed into the second segment the items they needed: the remaining water, food, the shade cloth and its support poles, cloaks. She picked up her waterpaints, then put them down again. Wrong. It's wrong. That little boy who died in the earthquake… Reality faded into dream. Her resolution remained true, but the reason for it was blurring. Thirst. Sunlord help me, I am so thirsty.

  She would not risk any innocent lives for either Russet or herself. That was the truth. Hold onto it. You can do this without magic.

  When she set off pulling the makeshift sled, it glided along on the salt as easily as a snake slithering across the plains.

  Behind her, the pile of unnecessary items was a dwindling dark patch on a white background. Behind her, the wind blew and silted salt into the paint trays, while the pede still burned.

  She walked all night into the dawn of the next day, taking only the occasional short break. At night, there were the stars to help, but after the first day, the mountain peaks dropped out of sight beneath the horizon and she couldn't tell which way she was heading when the sun was high in the sky. Once that happened, she rested, dozing fitfully, only to wake and start again toward sunset.

  Every step was a struggle against the drag of the sled. Every step was a struggle against the urge she still had to head toward Khromatis.

  Another day. Thirst, and more thirst. And heat. The temperature-even under the shade of a makeshift cover she constructed with the bab matting and the pe
de segments-quickly became unbearable. Her throat scorched, her skin shriveled. Her exposed skin was red and sore, although she had done her best to protect herself. The water they carried became more than a temptation; it was a torture. She knew she had to make it last, but she also knew she needed it now. Worse as the day wore on. Burning. Skin on fire, loose over her bones like borrowed clothes that didn't fit. And Russet, so hot. Delirious.

  As she lay there under the meager shade, her mind drifted, focused and drifted yet again. She shook her water skin and assessed what was left. Enough for the next day if she was careful; after that… well, neither of them would last more than a day without water. Not in this heat.

  Look, the salt-dancers are back. Undulating. Like Arta Amethyst. Once I was a dancer, too.

  Terelle dozed in uncomfortable snatches, sleep born of exhaustion, not normal need. In the evening, when it was cool enough to go on, she set off again, the segments dragging behind her.

  Another night of walking. Salt coated her, rubbed her skin raw, gummed up her eyelashes. Her shoulders ached. The shiny surface of the pede segments wore away, and the sled no longer slid across the salt with such slickness. Her slow plod became the dragging steps of an old woman; her hopes faltered further as she began to stumble.

  Thirst, waterless soul, the thirst…

  She thought of Shale. He wouldn't really give himself up to Taquar because of her silly letter, would he? And Taquar. The way he had touched her hair. She must never meet him again. Not ever, because he would never let her go. She knew that look he had given her. She'd seen it before, on the faces of some of the men who came to the snuggery: looks that coveted, on men who were consumed with greed. Like Huckman, the pedeman who'd wanted to buy her first-night.

  The earthquake-had she killed Vivie in the earthquake? And Amethyst, who had helped her escape the snuggery-what of her? No, she was dead. How could she have forgotten that? The knife in her chest. Taquar had knifed her… Was that my fault, too? She couldn't remember. Oh, sand hells, my mind is wandering.