by Glenda Larke
“You have tears on your lashes,” he said.
“That happens to me sometimes,” she mumbled. “So silly. Shale, be careful, won’t you? Not because you’re a stormlord and we need you, but because—because I don’t want anything to happen to you. Please.”
She’d forgotten to call him Jasper, but he didn’t seem to mind because he grinned, that rare grin of his, which lit up his face from the inside. “I don’t want anything to happen to me, either.” He bent his head, and she knew he was about to kiss her. She wanted it so badly, she hardly knew herself. And then he withdrew. “Damn,” he said softly. “We have company.”
Feroze and Iani rode up with a group of their bladesmen, wanting to discuss more details of their plans for the next day, and it wasn’t long before Jasper was suggesting she ride back to their camp in the pass without him. “Do you want me to send someone with you?” he asked.
Still reeling from her exhaustion, she was tempted to say yes. Instead, she shook her head. “No, I’ll be fine. Really. You—you take care.”
He nodded and changed before her eyes from Shale to Jasper, Stormlord. He seemed suddenly regal, greeting the men, giving orders, overriding her assurance she could ride back herself, and sending her on her way seated behind Iani’s driver. As she looked back one last time to see the group listening to his every word, she knew they would never again sit on the floor side by side to play a game of Lords and Shells. They would never again feel young.
Tomorrow he would be a man who led his people to war.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Red Quarter and Scarpen Quarter
Dunes and Warthago Range
Ryka had never been so weary. Long days on the saddle under a hot sun had merged into one another, each spent dodging dune encampments and driving the two young pedes out of the way to avoid groups of riders. The quarter was alive with warriors on the move, riding between dunes and along dunes and across dunes to assemble at their agreed meeting point. She was always tense: straining her inadequate eyesight to glimpse riders, straining her unreliable water-sense to track approaching pedes and men so she could evade them, straining her own cumbersome body with too many hours on the saddle.
Finally—how many days was it? She couldn’t remember—she crossed the southernmost dune undetected. Ahead was the Scarpen; ahead somewhere was safety. And Kaneth. But her backtracking and detours had delayed her far too much. And so she rode on toward the Warthago Range, knowing that for her, the sand was running too fast through the glass. She bypassed Qanatend at night, stealing water from a pede livery outside the walls as she rode by. She hoped somewhere within were Ravard and Davim and their men, but she knew it was more likely they were still ahead of her, already pushing their way deep into the Scarpen.
The track upward was hard on the young pedes. They had never encountered such a steady climb and they fussed and clicked their anxiety. Whichever one she was riding would swing its feelers behind to flick her in irritation, sometimes grazing her skin on their spines. She found herself bribing them with treats more and more often, just so they would keep going. The second day past Qanatend was even worse than the first because she wasn’t feeling well. She’d lost her appetite. Her back ached. No matter how she wriggled or squirmed, she couldn’t find a comfortable way of sitting on the saddle.
And then the reason struck her. Oh, no. Not now. Then, aloud and even more anguished, “Nooooo.” Her baby was on its way. And she was still short of the mother cistern. Blackwing, sensing her inattention, ambled to a halt and turned to look at her. She raised her head, pulled a face at him and gave him a prod between the segments. When he’d started up again, she turned her senses upward. Water, a lot of it. The cistern was only a couple of hours further on. Her powers were not sufficient to tell her what she would find there, not from this distance and not against a background of so much water. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t sense people or pedes until she was dangerously close to them.
You have no choice, Ryka. Push on—and hope there are no Reduners there. Hope they are all still back in Qanatend. And perhaps you had better consider turning religious as well because a prayer or two might be in order…
A little voice that had been bothering her thoughts ever since she’d left the Watergatherer whispered, Do you really think the Reduners in Qanatend would leave their water supply unguarded?
You’re a rainlord. You can do this, Ryka, she told herself, you know you can.
She shouldn’t listen to the little voices in her head; they never said cheery things, blast them.
It never occurred to her that Kaneth had not stuck to their original plan. It did not cross her mind that, once he realized his group of escaping slaves was without a rainlord to tell them when they were in danger, he would decide it was safer to trek north to join forces with a woman fast becoming a legend: Vara Redmane.
It was just after sunset, but there was still light in the sky as Jasper, Laisa and Lord Ouina of Breakaway silently led a group of Gibbermen down the slope, from where they’d left their pedes to the lanterns. Overhead, Jasper amassed waiting clouds to cloak the sky until the night had an eerie sombreness. The lack of star-shine reduced the normal exuberance of the Gibbermen to wide-eyed silence.
“A black sky,” one of them had muttered earlier, eyes wide with fear. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”
“It’s unnatural,” his companion whispered. “It’s like walkin’ down an adit after your lamp blew out.”
Even after Jasper had explained, they weren’t any happier. Spooked by a darkness they had never known, they were like pebblemice caught out in the open, startled at every little sound, jumping at the sight of a scraggy bush looming up out of the shadows.
To Jasper’s surprise, nothing went wrong even though the men were jittery. They dispersed to light the lanterns and camp fires. When they returned, he sent them back to the Scarpen camp, leaving the three rainlords behind.
“Now I know what it is like to be a decoy mouse, set in the windhover trap,” Laisa said in Jasper’s ear as they waited for the Reduners to react. “You had better be right about this, Gibber boy, because there is no way two of us can dry up thousands of ziggers.”
“You won’t have to,” he said, trying to express a confidence that suddenly seemed absurd.
She asked, “Are you going to explain just what that little snuggery girl of yours had to do with all this?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not. There’s nothing to tell. The Reduners will see the lamps and fires; they’ll think it’s our camp. They will loose their ziggers, we will stand here on the far side of the lamps. The ziggers will home in on our smell, but be distracted by the light. They’ll fry themselves. Once they start coming, we move away.”
“Sounds ridiculous to me,” Ouina said with a scornful snort.
“To me, too,” Laisa agreed.
Both women then proceeded to raise all the same questions that Terelle had, plus a few of their own, to ridicule the idea that the Reduners would release their ziggers.
Jasper listened patiently, and wondered what they would say if he said he knew it would happen because Terelle had painted it that way… It did sound ridiculous when you put it like that.
In the end Laisa did in fact ask, “And what the hells was that girl of yours painting dead ziggers for?”
“She’s superstitious, that’s all. She believes painting dead ziggers means all the ziggers will die.”
“That’s absurd!”
“Yes, isn’t it?” he agreed, smiling blandly. Underneath his cheerful exterior, he wondered how long it would be before Laisa put two and two together and came up with an approximation of the truth. He had a horrible idea that if and when she did, it would mean trouble for Terelle.
“What’s happening?”
“The dark is eating the sky!”
Fear surrounded them on all sides. It was there in the whispers, in the eyes raised upward, in the harsh curses and the soft-spoken prayers, in the way men c
rowded together as if there was safety in proximity. Ravard was exasperated. These were the same men who displayed no fear when facing the reality of death in battle?
He and Davim and Medrim, the Warrior Son, moved among them, trying to dispel the fear and calm the mounting panic. “The stars are still there. Nothing is eating them, it’s just a cloud blocking your view of the sky.” “You afraid of a cloud now? What, you reckon it will come and eat you, too?”
Embarrassed, the men began to disperse as the word spread. Ravard, still carrying his burning pitch torch, returned to where their tents were erected, to find Davim had already arrived back and was now in conversation with Medrim and a Reduner whom Ravard didn’t know. “This chalaman was on sentry duty up the gully to the south,” Medrim was telling Davim. “There are lights and fires on the hillside above us, apparently a large camp. He reckons the Scarpen army must have come down just after dark and settled in for the night.”
“Damned quiet about it they were, too, but they aren’t trying to hide the lights, so they can’t know we are so close,” the chalaman added.
Ravard grinned, touched by an unexpected excitement. War. Battle: the promise of it was there in the shine of the sentry’s eyes, in the anticipation of his tone.
“Show us,” Davim ordered. “How many men do you estimate?”
“Several thousand, maybe? There must be a couple of hundred lamps at least, and a number of cooking fires. It’s too sandblasted dark to see much, though, with the stars gone, and no way a scout can get close, not without making a racket.”
Ravard knew Medrim’s estimate was probably accurate. He was an experienced warrior. He was also Davim’s uncle and he’d held the same position under the previous sandmaster. He would keep it, Ravard guessed, until one of Davim’s sons was old enough to fill the role. I just wish he was a wiser man. We could do with some wisdom now. Experience is not everything…
Uneasily, he looked up. Half the night sky was still blotted out. Why? he wondered. So we don’t have starlight to see when they attack? But then, how can they attack if they can’t see, either? They’d be stumbling all over the place and we’d hear them coming. It didn’t make sense, and Ravard didn’t like things that didn’t make sense.
Some time later, when they rounded a turn in the gully where the last row of sentries was posted, they had a view up the wash to Pebblebag Pass. On the hill slope there were scattered lights and flickering camp fires.
“You’re right, Medrim. That’s not a scouting party,” Davim remarked, keeping his voice low even though they were too far away to be heard. “Too large by far. This is an attack force.”
“Not Taquar’s, surely?” Medrim asked.
“Hardly. This is the stormlord’s trap for us.”
Ravard struggled with that. “The message was from him, not Taquar?” The bastard! Davim knew all along. But he was worried the other tribes might give us trouble if they knew we were riding into a trap.
“Did you doubt it? Seems they are bringing the fight to us.” He smiled. “I’ve been expecting something like this ever since I found out there have also been sky messages for that old bag of bones, Vara Redmane. As if the sandcrazy old bitch could read them! I hadn’t expected they would set the trap so far down the gully, but I am glad they have. We will teach them the folly of their leadership.”
“We attack?” Ravard asked, trying to sound nonchalant. His heart beat faster in his eagerness. And yet another niggling thought refused to be cast out entirely: what if Garnet wasn’t lying? What if Jasper Bloodstone and Shale Flint were one and the same person—and Shale was up there somewhere? Shale, always being beaten down by Pa, and yet so bleeding stubborn he never gave in.
“Ever the warrior; aren’t you, Ravard! I know you’d rather wield a sword than a zigger, but there are better ways of winning a battle than poking your nose into a scorpion’s hole and getting it stung.” Ravard couldn’t see the sandmaster’s smile, but he heard it in his tone as the man clapped Medrim on the back. “Let loose some ziggers up there—they’ll do a better job than we ever could.”
“How many?” Medrim asked.
“Make a thorough job of it. Send five thousand. We wouldn’t want any of the Scarpermen to miss out, would we?” His tone told Ravard he was wearing that feral grin of his, that glint in his eye only ever fuelled by blood lust. Davim loved ziggers in a way Ravard never had.
“Five thousand?” Ravard was taken aback. A zigger that had gorged on human flesh was sated and useless for three days. A third of their ziggers would be out of action. And only Dune Watergatherer had that many.
Medrim warned, “We’ll lose quite a few. They’ll fly into the flames or sizzle themselves on the lantern glass.”
“Some, yes.” Davim didn’t sound worried. “But once those men start screaming and running, they’ll be better targets than a lantern, believe me.”
Ravard rubbed irritably at the back of his neck as they returned to the camp, leaving the sentry at his post. So many things seemed to be bothering him lately. He hadn’t liked the idea of returning to the southern Scarpen in the first place. While he approved of the idea of being free of the power of stormlords and returning to a Time of Random Rain, Davim’s quest for power and his hatred of all Scarpen folk smelled dangerously passionate to Ravard. Passion was fine in a warrior, but in a leader? A man wanted to feel he was being led by someone who used his head, not his temper, to make decisions.
When he arrived in Qanatend, Ravard had tried to counsel caution, but Davim had not been in the mood to listen, especially not when the usually bold Master Son preached prudence. Davim then asked him, with considerable asperity, if Ravard had lost his guts. Medrim, the sunblasted old bastard, had laughed.
“So what if it is a trap?” Davim had asked. “We will prevail. The rainlords of the Scarpen are doomed. Jasper Bloodstone will either die or be in our hands. Either way, we win.”
Ravard’s unease was with him still as he and Medrim ordered the zigger assault. It wasn’t a simple matter; each dune used ziggers attuned to a different perfume. With their appetites satisfied, they were happy to return to their cages and ignore anyone else around, but until that moment it was essential only warriors doused with the correct perfume were anywhere in the release area.
They thought of giving everyone the Watergatherer scent, but a look at the stores convinced him there wasn’t enough of it. Instead, Medrim pulled back everyone except the men of Dune Watergatherer, and sent them down the gully. Only Watergatherer ziggers were released, and he insisted that only cages with inbuilt zigtubes were to be used. This made the beetles crawl down a tube pointed in the right direction, one after another. They then tended to keep flying in a straight line. Haphazard release through an open cage door often meant more aimless flight as they hunted for a victim that smelled right. The last thing anyone wanted was fatalities among Reduners from other tribes.
Once he and Medrim had everything moving smoothly, and the first batch of the ziggers were on their way, Ravard didn’t wait to hear the screams. He returned to the camp to report to Davim.
He ducked his head inside the flap of the sandmaster’s tent. Davim was there, and so was a Qanatend slave woman, crying softly in the corner of the tent.
“You want me to get rid of her?” Ravard asked neutrally.
“No need. She doesn’t speak a word of our tongue, and I shall have more need of her before the night is over. You can avail yourself of her reluctant services if you like. We will doubtless be fighting tomorrow, and this could be your last night on earth. What better way to spend it? The bitch bit me, though, so be careful.”
There had been a time when he would have taken up the offer without a second thought, but now, since Garnet—
God, what had that woman done to him?
He thought of her wistfully. And wondered, not for the first time, why he hankered so after a woman who must be ten or fifteen cycles older than he was, and who was probably still in love with another man.
She looks me in the eye, he thought, as if she is my equal. A strange reason to like a woman, when he came to think of it. Maybe she is my equal. He didn’t pursue that thought. It made him uncomfortable.
“All done?” Davim asked.
“The ziggers are on their way. Do you want to follow with an attack by the chalamen?”
“No. Not until we see in the morning what happened. Come in, come in. Have some amber with me. Best brew I could find in Qanatend.” He held out a drink skin.
Ravard withdrew his head from the tent and glanced around. Down in the dry stream bed, rows of warriors were trying to get some sleep wrapped in their bedrolls against the cold; small fires of pede droppings glowed between the prone bodies, helping to take the cold cutting edge from the air. On the higher flat ground, the tents—belonging mostly to the sandmasters of other dunes and all the tribemasters—had their flaps laced shut. Ravard knew without being told that many of them contained other slave women, or men, brought upwash to use, just as Davim had used the girl now shivering in the corner.
Where men were still up, they were quiet, chatting around a fire perhaps, or eating a late meal. Everything was as it should be. It would be at least half a sandglass run before the first ziggers returned. There was nothing to do but wait, so he entered the tent, accepting the skin as he sat. He tossed a blanket to the girl before lifting the skin to his lips.
Davim gave a mocking smile. “You are too soft, tribemaster,” he said.
Ravard shrugged. “Not where it counts.”
“Don’t disappoint me tomorrow.”
“Do you expect me to?” He handed the skin back to Davim. He wasn’t interested in drinking and had taken little more than a sip. If he died in the fighting to come, he didn’t want it to be because he was slurped. He didn’t like drunkenness; it reminded him too much of his father, Galen the sot. Dune god save me, I hate the bastard even now.
“No, I don’t think you will. I made a man of you. You were nothing when you came to the dunes. Nothing but a sniveling Gibber grubber scared of his own shadow.” Davim took a long drink. “I beat that out of you. In fact, I beat the fear out of you. You’re not afraid of anything now, are you?”
