Stormlord Rising

by Glenda Larke

  “By sensing their water?”

  He nodded. “Luckily Iani knows this track to Qanatend better than anyone. He agrees Davim means to make a stand at the cistern. He will have all the water he needs there, and although we will be attacking from above, which has got to be an advantage, he will have his back to the cliffs behind the cistern. No one can come in from behind, or the sides.”

  “Could he ambush you on the way to the cistern?”

  He grinned at her. “Not a chance.”

  “Oh. Rainlord power again. I keep forgetting. Where are our forces now?”

  “Down where Davim’s were. I just came back here to see if you had done a waterpainting for today’s stormbringing. And to tell you—and the rest of the camp here—to move down the wash after us.” He raised his eyes to meet hers. “I need you, Terelle.”

  She knew he wasn’t referring to her help with his stormbringing. He meant he needed her to fight.

  After the day’s cloudbreaking, Jasper sought out a group of the wounded who had earlier been brought up the wash to the flatter land at the top of Pebblebag Pass. I may not know what orders to give, he thought, but at least I can show I care.

  To his surprise, one of the wounded greeted him with effusive thanks. “You saved m’life!” he exclaimed. The Gibberman turned to others lying beside him. “Look!” he said, holding up his roughly bandaged arm. “There I was with a witherin’ useless arm, ’n’ m’scimitar dropped, with this hulkin’ Reduner fellow about t’spear me through, and all of a sudden he gets squirted in the mouth with a stream of water. He chokes, can’t see an inch in front of his arse-red nose, and is scared witless as well. So all of a sudden I had time t’get me bab blade outta my boot and slide it ’tween his ribs ’stead of him gutting me! M’lord, that was a sight I’ll remember the rest of me life!”

  Jasper smiled at him, and wondered if that was really what a battle was all about. Saving the life of the men around you, by doing the best you could. Throwing water about might not be the stuff of heroic stories to be told around a campfire, but it meant everything to that man.

  He had done something after all. He walked away, his shoulders straighter. Without thinking, he headed to where Terelle was painting, his renewed sense of hope prompting him to seek her out. Halfway there, he stopped. How could he give her hope—or himself hope—when there was none? Not for them. She had to leave to rejoin Russet. He had to marry the right person to produce a new generation of stormlords.

  I have no right to seek her out when I can offer her nothing.

  Struggling against his desires, he went to join Senya and Laisa for a meal. He sat there, hating himself for the hypocrisy of his polite conversation, for the false smiles he bestowed on Senya, for the empty lies of their every interaction. And when later he saw Terelle pass by, glance at them and then turn away, he grieved.

  When they rode further down the wash after the Reduners, they found the bodies of the men who had disobeyed the signal to retreat. They had been beheaded and disemboweled, left to bloat in the sun. The heads were missing. Insects crawled on the coagulated blood of their necks. Most of them wore the garb of Gibber folk.

  Jasper swallowed back his vomit and gave the order for two of the rainlord priests from Breakaway to stay behind and extract their water in homage. He wanted to stop his imagination, halt his memories, but instead he heard the echo of laughter, the bravado of young men before battle pretending they were immune from death. They had been giggling, by all that was waterholy. Perhaps these were the very same men. Perhaps not. Either way, his decisions had brought them to this moment.

  He rode on, staring straight ahead.

  They camped that night at the lower of the two Reduner camps and the next day most of them rode on to camp within sight of the Qanatend mother cistern. In the evening, they found out what had happened to the missing heads. They were being used as balls in an impromptu game of chala played in front of the cavern that held the water cisterns.

  Jasper, lying concealed with Iani, saw the beginning of the game. As soon as he realized what they were using for a ball, he rolled over onto his back and looked at the sky instead. Did Davim organize the game to remind him of Citrine? Probably.

  Sandblast the sick bastard.

  Faintly he heard the laughter of the players, wafted to their ears on an updraught. Warriors who can laugh at what they do. To teach me a lesson. Oh, pedeshit, what sort of men are they?

  And then, just when he felt there was nothing worse that could be done to him, he felt it. The familiarity of water he recognized.

  Mica. Mica was one of the players.

  And his world fell apart yet again.

  “Men are dying, Terelle. Ziggers. We have to do something, and soon.” Which was why Jasper had brought her here to look, of course.

  It was her first glimpse of the cistern. She was lying on a slope, just below the ridge. She’d cautiously raised her head over the rise to peek down at the scene below. From where she lay, the ground sloped steeply downward in a tumble of gray scree. The thousands of loose stones were inert enough now, but the whole slope looked unstable enough to slide down to the flatter land in front of the cistern if a single pebble was disturbed by as much as the scampering of a mouse, although Jasper assured her it wasn’t as precarious as it looked.

  She and Jasper were on the right arm of the crescent-shaped slope. The left arm was a steep cliff cradling the mother cistern of Qanatend. Terelle could see the entrance, far below. The grille had been smashed, and pedes and people—small enough to be unrecognizable—came and went through the cavernous gap, carrying dayjars and water skins for refilling.

  The large flat clearing in front of the cavern filled the valley from one side to the other. Split by the gully of the wash, which also cut back into the slope, the flat area was cupped inside the base of the crescent. Right then it was cluttered with scarlet awnings, pedes, cooking fires, a few tents—and armed tribesmen. The men wore their deep red robes, the hems to mid-calf, over trousers of red. She knew these same men had played a game of chala with the heads of the men they had killed, just two days earlier. Jasper hadn’t told her that, but she had heard it nonetheless.

  She turned her attention to the drywash. Water still lurked in rocky crannies of the gully, where the curves of the valley sides offered partial shade. The rest of the flood had long vanished down the slope toward Qanatend. Downwash, the valley sides were not so steep, and many warriors were camped on the slopes as well. A glance was enough to see that it would be hard for warriors to climb up the wash unseen; Jasper’s men could ambush them from both sides.

  The Reduners went about their daily business as if they did not know they were being watched, but their spears were never far away, their scimitars swung at their sides, their daggers remained thrust through their belts. A few guards stood around, apparently with nothing to do, but they spent their time looking upward. Terelle didn’t need to be told that they were waiting for the first sign of a Scarpen charge.

  “Could a rainlord kill the Reduners from here, by taking their water?” she asked, as if it were an everyday thing to speak so casually about how to take the lives of men.

  Jasper shook his head. “Too far. And even then—it is the hardest of all water abilities. People don’t want to die. They hang onto their water simply by the act of living. I’m told it’s very exhausting to kill that way.” After a moment, he added, “It might possibly be less tiring to do it my way, I suppose.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “To hold water over their nose and mouth until they die. Or stuff it down their noses. I can shape water and I can push water. I can push it into a man’s open mouth with such force he cannot close his mouth to stop it. Or I can push it against his eyes or into his ears. I’ve learned a thing or two in the past couple of days when we met some advance scouts. The trouble is, it takes concentration. I can only kill one man at a time, focusing everything I have on a single man, not wavering as I watch him die.�
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  She felt the color rush from her face.

  “There’s nothing nice about what’s going to happen here. There’s nothing nice about what they’ll do to us if they win.”

  “No,” she whispered, “I know.” She reached out and took his hand in hers. For a moment they lay in silence, neither of them looking at the other. “What about taking all the water in the cistern?” she asked. “You can do that, can’t you? Leave them to thirst or surrender or retreat.”

  “Wouldn’t work. The cisterns just keep filling up from the mother wells, through pipes deep in the hillside.”

  “And you’re saying we’re within their zigger range.”

  “Yes. They release a few every now and then. No pattern to it. Hard to detect them. People are dying.”

  Something in her chest tightened at the thought.

  “They are testing our courage, to see how long we can remain here without flinching.” He sighed. “At least they won’t send them our way at night anymore. They learned their lesson there. But we are at an impasse now: they can’t use the drywash trail to Scarcleft and we can’t take the fight to them unless we are prepared to lose a lot of bladesmen—there’s no cover on the slope. The moment we come down over this rim, they’ll throw every zigger they own at us. I could gamble they don’t have many left, I suppose. If we come down through the wash, the moment we emerge at the base, they will be waiting for us. We’d walk into a wall of spears—” He stopped and swallowed. “I find it hard to ask men to die, Terelle.”

  “And yet you ask me to kill them.”

  “Yes.” He stared at her, expressionless. “You, and everyone here. This is an army. This is a war.”

  She met his stare, but in the end it was her gaze that fell. His message was clear. No exceptions.

  He slid back down from the crest and dusted off his clothes. “Let’s go back to the camp.”

  “Why not just stay here, blocking the way?” she asked as they walked back to the tents. She had to lengthen her stride to keep up, realizing once again how tall he had become. “Sooner or later he’ll give up. Let him go, Jasper. All the way back to the Red Quarter. After all, wasn’t that what he was going to do as part of his bargain with Taquar?”

  “The game has changed now. He knows who challenges him. He knows I can’t let him go back to the Red Quarter. He would be a spear in our side, just waiting for his next chance. He would conquer the White Quarter and raid the Gibber Quarter. Besides, he needs to kill me. I can control the water of the whole of the Red Quarter… how can he let me live? I can stop him getting random rain, and he knows it. He knows Taquar has lost control of me. If I don’t go down that slope after him, he’ll just wait until he has the opportunity to attack us; if not here and now, then later.”

  “What about waiting to see if Vara Redmane turns up?”

  “She is more likely to attack those warriors he left at home. It always was a long shot, and I’m guessing she won’t care about us. I reckon she’ll try and take back her own dune, the Scarmaker, while his men are here.”

  “Will his men be short of food?”

  “They are hunters, Terelle. And these ranges are full of mountain goats and deer. Truth is, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Sneak down the slope at night?”

  “You can’t sneak on scree. And if we went down the wash, it would have to be in a narrow column. We’d be killed too easily emerging at the foot. We don’t have anywhere near the training or experience his men have. We may have killed a few hundred the other night with our trickery and rainlord power, but they still outnumber us by far. Waterless hell, Terelle, I’d beg you to draw Davim dead, if you knew what he looked like.”

  “Archers?” She was desperate.

  “We do have a couple of hunters who can pierce a windhover at a couple of hundred paces—but they have less than fifty arrows between them.”

  She wasn’t surprised. Bows and arrows were rare throughout the Quartern because there were no suitable trees to make them, and the taboo against cutting down a tree was formidable anyway.

  They reached the camp and Jasper flung himself down on the mat under the shade of one of the awnings. A bladesman came to offer him a drink, but he waved the man away irritably and said, “Davim has a weapon that could bring me to my knees like nothing else could.”

  She waited for him to explain, but he said nothing. The bleak look in his eyes told her what he meant. She’d seen that look before. “Oh, blighted eyes. Mica. You think Mica might be down there?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so, I know it.”

  She stared at him, her stomach churning in shock. “How?” she asked in a whisper.

  “I can sense his water, of course. Oh, he’s changed, and I can’t sense him as well as I can sense you, but I am aware of his presence. Of his water. That’s really the only way I can describe it.”

  “But they are tribesmen in that camp, not slaves,” she protested. “They wouldn’t bring slaves, surely, to fight a war—they couldn’t trust them.”

  “He’s not a slave. He’s one of their warriors.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “He was playing a game of chala, down there, in front of the cistern, with other Reduner warriors.”

  Her eyes went wide with shock. “You mean with the heads? He—? Oh, Shale.”

  “I don’t suppose Davim could be sure I was watching, but it was a message for me anyway. He was hoping I’d recognize Mica. I didn’t, of course, not his face; he was too far away and he’s a man now, anyway. I couldn’t even work out which of them he was, but he was there. I—I recognized his water, moving back and forth.” He picked aimlessly at the mat under his feet. “Funny, when I was a boy in the Gibber, I didn’t realize I was beginning even then to know people by their water, but I was. And his—the feel of it, rather than the shape—it came back to me.”

  She continued to stare in horror. He said it with an unemotional flatness, as if it didn’t matter. But oh, it did. She knew the last time he had seen his brother they had stood side by side and watched as Sandmaster Davim played chala with their baby sister.

  “You think—you think he did it deliberately? Mica? To hurt you?”

  “I hope not. I would not have thought he would become so—so cruel. But Davim? He knew there was a good chance I was watching. He sent me this, through a messenger under a wrapped sword of truce, the same day.” He fumbled in his belt pouch and extracted a piece of parchment which he handed to her.

  She unfolded it and read the words. They were written in a rounded childish hand, in ungrammatical Quartern tongue. To Stormlord Shale Flint. Come down. Mica Flint go up. Same time. Pass each by. Then no war. Reduner go dunes. You stay Scarpen. So swear Sandmaster Davim, Dune Watergatherer.

  You not come, Mica die.

  Terelle shook her head as she read it. “That’s, that’s vicious!” She raised her eyes to look at him. “You can’t do that. And he knows you won’t. You go to him, he’d kill you and then we’d all die of thirst.”

  “And the Reduners would emerge as the survivors. Yes, I know.”

  “He’s just trying to hurt you by tormenting you.”

  “He’s succeeding.”

  “You said Mica wasn’t a slave. Davim’s not going to kill one of his men just to spite you.”

  “Of course he would, if he wanted. He killed my sister to teach me a lesson. The people of Wash Drybone are just so many Gibber sand-leeches to Davim, to be slaughtered or enslaved. He’s never thought of any of them as people.”

  She was silent, unable to think of anything to say to help him. She felt cold all over. If Jasper led an attack down the slope, he could end up killing his brother.

  He stood up and began striding about under the shelter, crumpling his palmubra, fiddling with a pede prod, refusing to look at her.

  Terelle felt something rip inside her; what had once been a certainty tore from its shelter to become doubt. This is what we are fighting… a sandmaster who
deals in humans as if they were salt blocks, to be bought and sold and used—or discarded or destroyed at a whim. A whole land is at stake. We have to do something, anything at all to stop this…

  Aloud she said, “How could Mica go from slavery to being a Reduner warrior?”

  He shrugged. “He proved his loyalty. Somehow. I don’t want to think how.” He paused before continuing.

  “When I was younger, I had a daydream. The same dream, all those years I was Taquar’s prisoner, and all the time I was in Breccia, too. I was going to rescue Mica. I believed Mica would never become one of the Reduners, he was too kind, too gentle. I knew he must be a slave, and one day I could save him, and we’d be together again. But now I know he’s down there, I remember other things. How he didn’t always stand up for me against our father. That he often took the easiest way out. That he kept silent. And I’ve thought maybe the easiest thing for a slave to do is to join his master.”

  His voice garnered roughness with every word. “If that happened, how can I condemn him for it? He was only fourteen or fifteen when he was taken. It doesn’t make me love him any less. It just makes it so much harder for me to… fight them.”

  Tears came into her eyes. Sandblast it, she thought. She wanted to ease his hurt, but had no idea how. Inside her, doubt corroded the validity of her past decisions, making them seem childlike.

  He sat down next to her again, arms resting on his bent knees, hands fiddling with his palmubra. “Terelle, I don’t know how I can win this one alone. I know you don’t like using your waterpainting power, but I don’t see we have any choice. And I’m not talking just about killing ziggers.”

  She shied away from consideration of the ruins of her moral certitude, and spoke instead of practicalities, of what was—in theory—possible, or otherwise. “I don’t know what to suggest. If I’ve learned anything, it is that I have to be very careful. I have to provide the means to make the painting real—otherwise the water-power may use a method I don’t like. For example, if I painted all those Reduners lying on the ground down there dead, without also making it clear what killed them, the reality might be some catastrophe horrible enough to kill us all.” Like an earthquake.