by Glenda Larke
She slipped away in the dark to the pede yard, where she finalized the packing. Once everything was done, she rode Blackwing down to the waterhole. Keeping an anxious watch behind her, she used her power to fill the water jars, then headed south, her shadow springing into existence as the first ray of the sun tipped over the horizon onto the plain.
Blackwing flicked his antennae this way and that, sometimes reaching back to touch her in protest. It was the first time he’d been ridden any distance, the first time he’d carried a load, the first time he’d been separated from his litter mates.
“Ah, Blackwing,” she murmured, “I’m not sure you are really big enough for what I am asking of you, you poor little thing.”
The animal stopped then, and turned a questioning head, as if to say, “Do I have to go on still further?” Ryka gave a rueful laugh. She jabbed him with her prod, aware they mustn’t drop too far behind because she had to bypass the Reduner forces while they were in Qanatend. If she was too slow, they would reach the pass through the Warthago first.
The journey was not going to be a dew-coated stroll, not on a young pede with no idea of what it was supposed to do, and with a baby who could decide to be born any time at all. She was probably being foolish. She told herself she was taking the risk because Jasper needed to be warned an army was on its way. Just in case he hadn’t been responsible for the messages. But in the end, she couldn’t fool herself.
Be honest, Ryka. This journey of yours has nothing to do with warning the Scarpen and everything to do with wanting to see Kaneth. You want him to be there when his baby is born. You don’t care if he is Uthardim still, you don’t care if he left you behind, you want him there.
* * *
Mid-afternoon on that first day she felt a body of moving water behind her. Painfully aware of her inadequacies as a rainlord, she’d made a deliberate effort to be alert to her surroundings. Usually her concentration ended up telling her useless things like the presence of an eagle in the sky above. This time, though, it wasn’t a bird. She’d just passed over the first dune south of the Watergatherer and the next was no more than a red line crimping the skyline ahead. She stopped Blackwing and turned to look back, but could see nothing. Her short-sightedness annoyingly blurred the line of the last dune into an amorphous mass of shades of red.
About the length of a sandglass run later, Blackwing became restless, slowing down and balking if she prodded him. When he battered at her with his antennae, expressing his annoyance, she was forced to stop. He turned his head behind, his feelers swirling in the air. She guessed he scented another pede, and was rebelling at any notion she had of keeping ahead of whoever was following.
Looking back herself, she could now see a puff of dust rising up into the air. She was being followed. Her water-sense told her it was a single pede, but she had no idea how many people were on it.
She gave Blackwing a piece of dried bab fruit, hoping to put him into a good mood so he would move on, but he was stubborn. Spitless damn, she thought, you idiot lump of chitin! I might end up having to kill someone because of you. She dismounted and tried leading him, but he just dug his legs into the red soil and clicked his mouthparts at her in annoyance. Worried he might take it into his head to pull the reins out of her hands and flee, she clambered up again, cursing the sheer bulk of her pregnancy. He still wouldn’t move.
He was willing enough to wait, so they sat there in the sun and gradually the puff of dust grew larger and changed into a single figure on pedeback. Her eyesight was such that the rider was almost on top of her before she recognized him or his mount: Khedrim on Redwing. Sunblast the boy.
He drew up alongside and stared at her.
With a sinking feeling in her stomach she saw he was clutching a zigger cage full of the murderous beetles keening their hunger. Her heart flipped over.
“Khedrim, what do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“You’re escaping,” he accused, apparently not noticing her Reduner had suddenly improved to almost faultless diction. “And you stole a pede. I went to help you and you weren’t there.”
“So? Just go home, lad.”
“Grandfather told me to come after you. He’s in charge now the tribemaster and the others have gone. Redwing showed me the way—she wanted to follow Blackwing. It was easy.”
“And they sent a single boy after me? Do they expect me to calmly return with you?”
“What can you do?” he asked scornfully. “You’re just a woman, and a slave. And you’re having a baby. There’s nothing you can do. Besides, I have ziggers.” He waved the cage at her. The beetles screamed in anger. “And a scimitar.”
“Your grandfather told you to kill me?”
“No. That’s just to threaten you with.”
“And if I still say no?”
An astonished look spread over his face. “But you wouldn’t want to die!”
“No, I wouldn’t. However, I am refusing to go back with you. The question remains, then, are you willing to kill by releasing a zigger? Or several ziggers?”
Astonishment turned to confusion. It had obviously never occurred to him this could be the outcome. “You’re scoffing me,” he said at last.
“No, I’m not. I’m not going back with you. I am riding on.”
His reply was a wail. “You can’t! I’d have to let a zigger out!” He looked as if he was about to weep.
“Khedrim,” she said as kindly as she could, “I am wearing the correct perfume.”
“You’re lying. No one gives the perfume to slaves.”
“Maybe not, but I stole some of Kher Ravard’s. Look, why don’t you go home and say you couldn’t find me.”
“That’s not true. Besides, I have to stop you. Otherwise you might warn the Scarpen folk our warriors are coming.”
“Ah. Then we are at an…” She tried to think of a Reduner word meaning impasse, couldn’t, and changed what she had been going to say. “I don’t think we can find a solution then, at least not one that will suit you.”
She glanced at the ziggers in the cage and sucked the water out of them, one by one, taking care not to hurt Khedrim in the process. “Sorry about this, but I think it’s the best solution.”
He didn’t understand at first. Then he realized the ziggers were silent and looked down. Water dripped out of the cage. The dried-up husks looked no more harmful than the curl of a dead leaf.
He gaped, his jaw sagging, as he struggled to comprehend what had happened.
She didn’t wait for his realization, but jabbed her prod into the gap between Blackwing’s head and thorax. Startled, the pede leaped forward.
Unfortunately, Redwing, now she had caught up, wasn’t about to let her litter mate disappear again. She sprang after him without waiting for any signal from her driver. Khedrim jerked in shock and the zigger cage went flying out of his hands. He grabbed for the reins.
Ryka cursed. The lad was not trying to rein the animal in; he was urging it on. “Witless boy,” she muttered. “Surely he knows now what I am and what I can do to him.”
Redwing was the stronger animal and she was soon streaming along level with Blackwing. Khedrim yelled for her to stop. Redwing, apparently convinced this was a fascinating game, paced herself to match Blackwing’s speed perfectly. Her nearside feeler entwined with Blackwing’s in a playful caress.
“Go home! Go home before I kill you,” Ryka roared at Khedrim. “I’m a rainlord, you stupid sand-tick! I can dry you up like those ziggers…” She wondered briefly if she could blind the pede to stop the lad. Oh, blast it, if I disable the beast, how will Khedrim get back to camp? He could die out here…
Khedrim glanced away, bending down, struggling with something strapped to Redwing’s other side. Almost too late, Ryka realized what he was doing. The silly boy had brought a chala spear with him. And he intended to use it. On her. Even as she absorbed that, he had leaped to his feet, perfectly balanced on the saddle, feet hooked under the segment handle and his arm draw
ing back, preparing to throw.
The waterless little shit, she thought, with more exasperation than rancor. So typical of a boy’s game, endlessly practiced, now turning deadly with such ease. She dragged back on the reins. Indignant, Blackwing threw up his head, but his feeler was still locked with Redwing’s and the two young animals slowed together.
In the split second left to make a decision, Ryka dismissed the idea of throwing herself to the ground as too dangerous, declined to blind the lad as too cruel and rejected the obvious alternative, of drying the flesh on the hand that held the spear, as too crippling. Instead, she drew out the water from one of the bare toes poking out of his sandal.
He screamed in agony, lost his balance and fell from the still moving pede.
The two animals parted. Redwing, freed of the weight of her rider, came slowly to a puzzled halt. Ryka pulled Blackwing around in a wide circle to return to where Khedrim lay, unmoving, on the ground. Quickly, she hobbled Blackwing’s feelers together with the reins to prevent the pede from wandering, and slid off to run to the boy.
Even before she reached him, she knew he was dead. His neck was broken, his eyes open, unblinking and lifeless. She fell to her knees, keening.
Khedrim. Oh, Khedrim.
The day before he had been happy and obliging. Today, blood seeped sluggishly from his nose and ear, spreading a dark red stain on bright red soil.
So needlessly dead.
She rocked to and fro beside him, cursing, trying to make it not true. She cursed Davim and Taquar and Ravard and their senseless dreams of vanquishing the rainlords. She cursed their cruel vision of returning to a Time of Random Rain.
And tried, in vain, not to curse herself for making a mistake. A boy dead. Was it worth it, Ry?
Then, because she was Ryka—pragmatic, unromantic Ryka Feldspar the historian—she took Khedrim’s water. When she left him, he was no more than a dry husk, bones and teeth wrapped in sinew and parchment skin all draped with red cloth, his skull adorned with red-stained hair and shiny agate beads tumbling around his face.
She rode on, stony faced, with her load evenly spread over two young pedes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Scarpen Quarter
Warthago Range
“They are here.” Shale’s—no, Jasper’s—pede prod jabbed at the map spread out on the ground. Terelle had to remember he was Jasper now, among these people. He was Jasper to himself, too. She had to let go of the person he had been and the name he had used. Jasper the stormlord, that was how she had to think of him.
She glanced around at the people gathered under the canopy strung up outside Iani’s tent. Eleven of them—seven rainlords representing all the Scarpen cities, two Alabasters, two Gibbermen. Light and shadow danced crazily when Messenjer joggled the lantern hooked on the roof pole over his head.
“That’s the cavern of the mother cistern of Qanatend,” Iani muttered, identifying the map symbol under the point of Jasper’s prod. “Those red bastards are camped at the city’s water source.” He shook his head. “Poor Moiqa. How will she cope if she knows that?”
As everyone else believed Moiqa was dead, no one knew quite what to say.
Terelle, at the back of the group, frowned and came in closer to see. “And where are we?” she asked.
It was Iani who answered her question, kneeling to place his finger on a point still further south from Qanatend and its mother cistern. “Here. We’re at the northern end of Pebblebag Pass. We’re way above the cistern. From here it’s more or less downhill all the way, until you get to Qanatend. Beyond that, flat lands, then the Red Quarter. And Davim. One day I will kill him.”
“The trail?” asked Feroze, who now knew Iani well enough to ignore this last.
“It follows the dried-out floor of the wash. Narrow, enclosed by steep valley sides. In front of the cavern of the mother cistern, it opens into a huge flattish area divided by the stream bed. Reckon that back in the days of random rain the gully got blocked and it filled up with soil until it was as flat as a griddle. Not much vegetation anywhere—nothing that would offer any cover to either side. After that, the trail narrows again all the way to the bottom. To Qanatend. Moiqa’s city, you know.”
“The cavern?” Jasper asked. Like Feroze, he ignored Iani’s deviation from the matter at hand. “What’s it like?”
“The holding cisterns and inlet and outlet pipes are all inside. The cavern itself is set in a cliff. Rather like the Scarcleft mother cistern. There is a narrow gully coming down from the catchment area higher in the mountains. It ends directly above the cavern, hanging there. Once, when an extra large rush came down after a cloudbreak, the water fell over the cliff like a lace curtain in front of the cavern.” He gave a snort. “Real waste, that was. Usually the water is piped directly into the cistern from a pool above, through some cavities and a couple of small caves inside the cliff.”
Feroze scratched his face thoughtfully. Mirrors twinkled in the lamplight as if he was covered with fireflies. “Can we attack them through that hanging valley?”
“It’s inaccessible except by climbing the cliff near the cavern opening.”
“Didn’t I hear that when the Reduners attacked Breccia City they found another way through the Warthago besides Pebblebag Pass?” That was Ouina.
“So Kaneth told us,” Jasper agreed. “Iani?”
“My scouts found that route. It starts not far from here, right inside the Pebblebag. They used it because the Breccian forces were watching the southern entrance to the pass. It was no more than a way of bypassing the watchers. I’ve made sure they won’t be going that way again, but it’s of no use to us.” He stabbed at the map. “If Davim’s forces are moving up, and we assume they are, tomorrow night they will camp here. And the night after that, they should be just below where we are now—about here.” His finger jabbed again.
“How do we know where they’ll camp?” This time it was Messenjer who asked. “And why so slow?”
“Because that’s what they did last time. Tent poles and pede lines and fires leave marks. Besides, those two places have the only flattish land between the cistern and here. And you don’t move a large force up a narrow, steep track as if you were running a race.” Iani looked around the group, wiping away the dribble from his chin with the back of his hand, before he scrambled clumsily to his feet. “They are a much larger force than us, but they’ll lose the advantage because they will be squeezed into the narrow drywash.”
“How can ye be so certain where they are now?” The question came from Feroze.
“They’re a large enough force for me to feel them,” Jasper said. “I can’t estimate numbers, though I suspect Davim has at least two thousand more men than we do. Because of the narrowness of the valley, that will not necessarily be an advantage. Fortunately for us, too, they will have no reason to think themselves threatened. We hope they expect to fight Taquar at Scarcleft.” He looked around the group. “Iani knows this country, and he’s fought the Reduners. He’s our overman. However, we need someone with more experience with pedes and knowledge of fighting from pedeback. Envoy Feroze will be that man, answerable only to Iani. In the battle, I will be responsible only for the deployment of my own stormlord powers.”
Clever, Terelle thought, to divide the command like that. It wasn’t easy to please everyone.
Feroze straightened up, a smile deepening the rifts on his salt-white face. “It would be an honor to my people. We shall spend some time in prayer for our endeavor before we sleep tonight.”
“There is one question I have,” Jasper added, addressing Feroze. “You use spears in battle. So do Reduners.”
“That’s right. Each warrior is expected to be riding with two spears, the first for throwing and the second for stabbing and lancing. The balance is different.”
“Who makes them?”
For a moment the salt merchant froze. “What do ye mean?” he asked, after a pause far too long for such a simple question.
&nbs
p; “Those spears of yours, and the Reduner ones, too—they’re made of wood. Straight poles of wood. We have bab wood, certainly unsuitable for such shafts. Our other trees are gnarled, their wood twisted. The Red and the White Quarters have no wood at all. The Scarpen and the Gibber buy good wood, if they want it, from over the Giving Sea. Where does yours come from?”
“Ye have a reason for asking besides mere curiosity?”
“Indeed I do,” Jasper snapped, beginning to lose his patience. “Reduner marauders have been fighting you and the Gibbermen for several years now. They mounted an attack on Qanatend and Breccia. I can only assume many of their spears have been broken in all that fighting. The spearheads they may have been able to salvage and sharpen—but the hafts? They will need replacing. So, where will they get their wood?”
“Ah. I see. Stormlord, this is not something for public discussion—”
“We are allies, Feroze! It’s not a time for secrets!”
The Samphire gate, Terelle thought, suddenly remembering. The gateway to the Alabasters’ city had been hung with two huge wooden doors. The thick planks must have come from trees that were too large for her to even imagine. We don’t have anything remotely like them in the Scarpen or the Gibber.
Feroze swallowed uneasily. “They used to be buying their spears from us. A few years back, Dune Watergatherer bought a great many. They told us wood beetles had burrowed into their armory tent and ruined those they had. And they needed many more tent poles for the same reason.”
“You supplied just the wood?”
“Er, no. The spearheads as well. I understand the Red Quarter does not have fuel for much ironworking.”
“And I assume tent poles could be whittled down to make a replacement haft for a chala spear?”
“I suppose so.”
Jasper held the Alabaster’s gaze with a hard look. Terelle expected him to ask where the Alabasters obtained their iron and wood and fuel, but he said merely, “What’s your assessment of the Reduner preparedness with regard to weaponry?”
