by Glenda Larke
The pinioned man began to struggle, striving to look back over his shoulder, crying out, "No, Lord Uthardim! Don't!"
Kaneth ignored the slave and answered Ravard. "As you wish." He undid the ties of his robe at the neck and, with a shrug of his shoulders, he bared his back and allowed the garment to slip to the ground. Underneath, he wore the white pantaloons of a Scarpen pede rider, now stained red by the sands of the dunes.
Ryka went cold. As yet neither of the two men had noticed her; their attention so concentrated on each other that everything peripheral had become irrelevant. Her gaze focused on Kaneth, hungry for information. He was thinner now, broad shoulders all rippling muscle and sinew with the excess flesh stripped away. The burn scars were there, mostly on his face where they puckered the skin and changed his appearance, but with patches extending down his neck to his shoulder and back. Oh, Sunlord, his back! Ravard couldn't have him cut, surely, not when the scar tissue was so fresh. She felt sick.
She didn't think. She couldn't. "No," she said, and it was Ravard she addressed, her gaze steady, her voice without quiver. "It would cost you too much, Kher."
Both men whipped around to stare at her. She was vaguely aware she had become the focus of them all-the watching Reduners and the slaves. Even the man tied to the rock twisted as best he could to see.
"The Kher is ever wise," she said, meekly dropping her gaze. She prayed he would understand what she meant: Kaneth was under Davim's protection. To scorn the sandmaster by harming a man he had favored, especially one considered a symbol of a heroic past by the tribes, was surely foolish.
When she risked lifting her head, Ravard's gaze locked on hers. She dared not glance at Kaneth. Even the sand crickets stopped their singing, as if hushed by the taut edginess of the atmosphere.
"Garnet," Ravard said at last, shattering the fragility of the silence with brittle politeness. "I trust you have recovered."
She slid from the pede and smiled, but it was an effort to speak. She had no breath. Her throat ached with fear. Each word was a separate agony as she let it slip. "I am well, Kher. Awaiting your pleasure."
They all heard it then: the deep-seated cry of the dune god, weeping beneath their feet. The pede stirred restlessly, its feelers swinging outward, scattering men as they tried to dodge the serrated edges. Ryka ducked, falling to her knees. The rock under the roped man shook, and ripples moved outward, shivering the sand as they passed. Men fell, unable to keep their footing on the shifting ground. Ravard went down on one knee. The cry changed to eerie music, twisting and keening under the ground, a sinuous serpentine thread passing beneath.
Kaneth stood, unmoved, unmoving. Around him, there was fear on men's faces.
Ravard struggled to his feet and rapped out a question to his shaman. "What says the dune god?"
The shaman rode the moving ground like a pedeman on his bounding mount, dancing his skinny shanks to shift his weight. "He says free them both; the punishment is his to make. And his is the justice to mete." There was no mistaking the hint of fear in his tone. As if in response to his words, the ground stilled.
No sooner had the last trickle of sand ceased than an ululation started on the dune crests around them. The sound was so unexpected, Ryka jumped in shock.
They all looked up, to see the sentries gesturing from their vantage points. Ryka had no idea what it portended, but the Reduners obviously did.
"To your posts!" The cry came from Ravard. The tableau around the flat space broke up into frenzied movement. Men ran toward their tents, and they had purpose. Even the slaves obeyed the call, racing to saddle pedes and ready them for their drivers.
"Get to my tent," Ravard snapped at Ryka. Then he turned to the bladesman still mounted on the pede beside her. "Get that baggage off," he ordered the man. "I'm taking your mount. You can sit behind."
"What's happening?" she asked Ravard as the bladesman scrambled to the back of the pede to untie their belongings.
"A large caravan coming," he said and hauled himself up into the driver's saddle. "Could be a raid. Could be my father. Take your things and get to my tent and stay there."
The bladesman tossed everything down at her feet. She bent to sort through the bundle as Ravard turned the pede and rode rapidly away without a second glance.
Elmar detached himself from the bustle around the pede lines. Seeing him approach, Kaneth bent to roll up a trouser leg and retrieve a dagger strapped to his calf. He gave it to the pikeman, saying, "Cut Bartles down and get him to the slave tents. He should lie as low as possible for a few days and hope everyone forgets about this."
Elmar took the dagger, then glanced over at Ryka. "Welcome back," he said morosely and headed for the pinioned man. She suspected he was battling a desire to ask Kaneth if he'd been out of his tiny shriveled mind, trying to provoke Ravard like that.
She scowled at Kaneth. "You have no more sense than a senile sand-tick."
"Sense? Sense? And what about you? You scolded the Master Son in front of his whole tribe! You risked as much to keep me safe as I did to save Bartles. More, in fact. That was madness, Garnet!"
"Can't you call me by my name yet?"
His irritation fell away. He shook his head. "I-I remember a child I used to play with. She looked a lot like a younger version of you. I struggle to remember her name, but when I open my mouth to say it, the memory slips away like curds from the spoon."
"You were the bane of that girl's life."
"She was diabolical in her revenge. I remember the honey."
"Ah." She recalled a picnic and an incident that had involved trickling the remains of the picnic honey onto his clothes while he was dozing… and Scarpen ants loved honey.
She smiled at the memory; smiled, too, because he remembered.
The encampment seethed around them, but in the bustle no one paid them any attention. Elmar helped a limping Bartles toward the camp. Warriors were already riding out; pedes bristled with their weaponry.
"Think we are under attack from one of the Scarpen cities?" Kaneth asked.
Ryka shook her head. She could sense the water in the approaching caravan, and she could feel the panniers full of looted water. "Reduner. It would be a good time to escape now if we could find a pede somewhere."
He risked reaching out to touch her face. She shivered, feeling his concern. Not love. Not yet. Kaneth, remember me… I don't know how much of this I can bear.
"I can't," he said.
"Why not?"
"The slaves. I may not remember who I am, or who I was, but you were right in what you said about the slaves and slavery. It means something to me. I don't know where I belong, but I do know that they don't belong here and the way they are treated is wrong. They look up to me, Sunlord knows why. If I leave, so do they. Every blighted one of them. I will not leave them behind. I don't quite understand why I feel that way, but I know I do."
"You are a rainlord. We were taught that all the Quartern is our responsibility."
"I am a rainlord no longer. Whatever happened to me took it all away. But it left something in its place. I cannot speak to water, but I can speak to the dunes."
She fluttered a hand at the patch of disturbed sand. "It was you who did that, just then?"
"Yes. As I did that other time and harmed you. Then, I did not know what I could do."
"No, you're not talking to the dune, Kaneth. It's your rainlord connection to the dampness deep inside the dune. You call to the water and the sand shifts. You are a rainlord still."
He shook his head. "I do not feel the water even in my own water skin. But I feel something there, beneath our feet. A soul, something living. It speaks to me, and I can make it answer."
"Are you saying there really is a dune god?" Kaneth? Kaneth the disbeliever? So utterly uninterested in Temple he refused to go to Sun Day worship? She gaped at him.
"No. All I know is that inside every dune we crossed on our way here, I felt a-a presence. Something that I connect to. A god? I don't know tha
t I believe in gods."
"You are a shaman then, like that man who interpreted what he heard?" Ryka tried to keep the scorn out of her voice, but wasn't sure she had succeeded.
He gave a laugh, raw and sarcastic. "He's a faker, playing on the weakness of men. A clever one, though, and a frightened one now. He no longer understands the dune, so he fears there may really be a dune god. Little does he know it is only me, playing with the sand entity like a desert child chasing ant lions in the sand. I don't know what I'm doing. Or how I'm doing it. I just know I can." Something he saw in her face brought a gentler expression back to his. "Don't worry. I know I am neither the Uthardim of legend, nor a dune god nor a mythical hero returned. I'm just a man who sees something that has to be done. And someone who can feel the heart of a living dune."
"Kaneth, if there was anything alive under the sand bigger than a dune lizard, rainlords would have felt its water long ago. There's nothing there."
He shrugged. "I know what I feel. It's not an animal. It's the dune."
She abandoned the argument. "I'm worried about you," she said. "You are antagonizing Ravard. You have no fear in you, and therefore I am afraid for you. Kaneth, a man who does not fear dies because he does not know when to turn from danger."
"Is dying so bad a thing? I have nothing to live for because I have no memories, no idea of who I am or why I should live. So I weave a worthwhile aim based on a future, not a past: freedom for these slaves. A purpose for this nameless man, this possessor of a past hidden in mists. When the mists tease apart to give me a glimpse of that past, it tantalizes, but it's never enough. Sunblast it, Garnet, I'm like a flower that's been picked. I look as though I am alive, but in truth I am already dead."
His words were spikes into her heart, into her being. She wanted so much to take him in her arms, to murmur words of love. But to him, she was almost a stranger. She could do nothing.
"It is different for you," he said. "You have a reason to fear death. You have a reason to live growing within your body."
Her calm shattered, gone in an instant as his words splintered her control. "So do you!" The cry ached with her pain. "It is yours! Yours, you idiot! Your son."
The lump in her throat stopped her breath.
She turned from him to go, to run. Anywhere. Just to escape from the hurt. To be able to breathe again.
And came face to face with Ravard.
He stood close enough to have heard everything she had cried out in her final burst of unbearable emotion.
His stare, the darkness of his eyes depthless, swallowed her alive. His voice when he spoke was as toneless as mud brick, but his eyes said his tone lied. "I asked you to go my tent," he said.
She stood still, hearing his words, yet unable to say what they signified, not caring what they meant. It was the look in his eyes that stopped the breath in her throat.
Watergiver have mercy, she thought, one of us is as good as dead.
She just wasn't sure if it was Kaneth or herself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Scarpen Quarter Scarcleft City Scarcleft Hall, Level 2 and Breccia City When the disaster came, Taquar didn't recognize it as such. How could he? Of all the things he had thought Shale-no, Jasper, but still a bastard plains-grubber for all that-might do, fleeing Scarcleft was not on the list. After all, he had been given the freedom to come and go. Yet that was exactly what he had done. Fled the city.
At first Taquar assumed he'd gone for a ride in The Sweepings or The Skirtings with his guards, as he did often enough on days they didn't shift storms. Certainly he had been accompanied by his guards. But this time none of them had come back by nightfall, nor the next morning. Laisa had searched Jasper's room and noted his warm night cloak and several outfits were missing. Taquar, the growing rage within him suffused with the cold panic of a deep-seated fear, had gone immediately to the stormquest room with its view over the city toward the distant ocean. Laisa followed him in, looking around with bright-eyed interest. He had to repress a desire to wring her neck.
Even the briefest of glances around told him many of the maps and notes Granthon had given Jasper were missing.
He took a deep breath and calmed himself. "The boy has no way of creating a storm without me yet. None. And if there is one thing I know about him, it's this: he would never let any part of the Quartern thirst. Every blighted argument we've had lately has been on that very issue."
"Firstly," Laisa said acidly, "when are you going to acknowledge he is no longer a boy? He's a man, Taquar, and the life he's led has caused him to be a surprisingly resourceful one. Besides, he must be nineteen or twenty. Why are you always so blind to that? Secondly, I find it perfectly possible he has been deceiving you about the extent of his storm-raising ability."
He shot a withering look her way.
She said, "You must have considered that he is pretending to lack skills he actually has, just to keep you physically weakened."
He hesitated before replying. "Yes," he admitted. "He also knows that if life is too unpleasant, I will leave. Money will get me a passage on a ship, no matter what Iani orders to the contrary."
"So the truth is, you don't know what he is up to." She tilted her head in question. "What do you intend doing?"
"We should soon know if he raises his own storms. We'll be able to feel them. If he can do that, then he has enough power of his own to look after the Quartern's water and he's probably gone to join Iani's army. If he has, well, we have enough water to last to the end of this cycle, even without further rationing or rain. I have the pedes and the men and the ziggers to steal more if need be. We must build up our pedes and our groves to their former numbers. We will need food and transport to wage a war."
"Rather than leave?"
"That's a last resort. I don't like people to get the best of me."
She gave a thin smile. "Some would say your present difficulties are a just punishment for murdering your peers."
"You think that's so amusing, don't you?" He made no attempt to hide the loathing in his voice. Its intensity made her take a step backward. "How was I to know there were to be no more stormlords born? Or that your Senya or Merqual Feldspar's two daughters were not going to be stormlords? My aim was merely to dispose of those around my own age-not to wipe stormlords off the face of the Quartern! I certainly never, ever intended Lyneth to die."
Just then, when he thought things could not get any worse, Senya appeared in the doorway, her mutinous expression and down-turned mouth enough to sour his stomach.
"My maid said Jasper has disappeared! Is that true?"
"It seems so," Laisa answered calmly.
"He can't do that! He has to marry me. You said so. You both said so!"
"I shall leave you to deal with this," Taquar muttered, and left the room.
***
Turning to her daughter, Laisa ignored his departure. "I spoke to Jasper only two days ago, Senya. He made it clear-yet again-that he will indeed marry you, and soon. And I must say I am glad you have come to regard the marriage as desirable."
"Well, you married the only man I wanted to marry."
Laisa suppressed a desire to snap. Senya could occupy a powerful position one day, and it would be foolish to alienate her. "Senya," she said gently, "you have no idea how easy it is to burn yourself on a man like Taquar. I hope you have been keeping out of his bed, and out of his way, because he is not renowned for his patience. Quite frankly, I cannot see what he is up to in all this, and I don't like it when I don't understand what he is doing. You would do well to wonder just why he has been pushing you from his own bed into Jasper's before a wedding."
Senya pouted. "You're just jealous."
"And you don't know just how laughable that notion is. Did Taquar ever tell you why he wanted you to seduce Jasper?"
"To make him want to marry me all the sooner, of course. Then we shall have children and they will be stormlords and Taquar won't have to make clouds all the time."
Laisa regarde
d her daughter with pity. "My dear, you have the critical thinking abilities of a sand-dancer in a mirage. You must learn to think things through, for your own benefit. It will be eighteen or so years before any child of yours is a trained stormlord and in a position to be of help. So I hardly think it matters to Taquar if you have a baby next week or next year. There has to be another reason."
Senya pouted and flounced out of the room, leaving her mother pondering how to benefit best from the situation. After that, matters went from bad to worse for Taquar. A few more days passed, and there was no word from or about Jasper. They did hear that Sandmaster Davim's troops had completed their evacuation of both Breccia City and its mother cistern and had withdrawn beyond the Warthago Range. Davim informed Taquar by messenger that, although the Reduners were leaving a force in the northern city of Qanatend while there was still water left there to plunder, everything south of the Warthago was Taquar's.
"Just don't trespass over the range. And remember, if we don't have regular rain, then we must have random rain, or I shall be knocking at the walls of your city," the message concluded.
The words galled him with their cheek, but also left him elated. Breccia City was within his grasp and he reveled in the thought. It should have been mine years ago. He almost forgot himself enough to rub his hands together, as gleeful as a carpet merchant about to make a sale. Two cities; Scarcleft and Breccia. It was a beginning.
The next day he left for Breccia, accompanied by a force of pede-mounted water enforcers armed with ziggers.
When he gazed at the destruction the Reduners had left behind, though, he was appalled. The devastation and looting were more extensive than he had anticipated. Fierce fighting had left the interior of many buildings burned. Much of the bab grove would have to be replanted. There were no pedes in the city, not one. The metal works and the forges outside the walls were all in ruins. There was no food or oil or fuel briquettes or weapons to be had. Other, odder items were also missing. Carpets. Metal items. Pottery. Gemstones had been pried out of the gates.
