Stormlord’s Exile

by Glenda Larke

“You honour me, Kher.” The boy’s admiring glance went to Ravard’s eye patch.

  “There are other tasks that need courage, ones even harder to perform. It’s one of those I want to ask your advice about.”

  “I—well, of course. Anything.”

  “Here’s the problem. Your uncle Kher Medrim and I have a plan to bring down the rebel Reduners, but to make it work we need someone who doesn’t look like a threat to them. A woman, perhaps. Or a girl. Or at least, someone obviously not an experienced, battle-scarred warrior. Someone who understands the Quartern tongue as well as ours. And the person must be unknown to any of the warriors who are with this fake Uthardim and Vara Redmane.”

  He paused to let Islar think, then added, “This person would be going into the enemy camp to serve the enemy in whatever way they to use him or her. Cleaning the outhouses, maybe. Think about that. They’d be friendless and alone, cut off from all family and help and comfort. And once they learned information of use to us, they’d have to find a way to escape. They could die in the attempt. In fact, they could die in the attempt to enter the rebel forces. We do have a plan for getting in, but it’ll involve an injury.”

  “Isn’t it, er, dishonourable to spy?”

  “It’s dishonourable for a man to pretend to be a reincarnated Reduner hero and to divide the dunes against one another! It’s dishonourable to take water handouts from Scarpen street grubbers who sleep between walls and use water to keep themselves rich and powerful.”

  They had reached the camp’s waterhole, and he guided Islar to the rocky edge. At one end, bab palms thrived in patches of soil. Along the rocky sides, jute plants grew in every pocket of soil they could find. A creeper of desert runner cascaded in a shower of red blossom from the rim downwards, falling free until it touched the surface of the water.

  Ravard continued, “All that water, every drop of it, was sent to us by men who gifted it with generous smiles and sweet words, even as they stabbed us in the back. We can’t ride our land any longer, free to come and go where we want. They wall us in with rules and taxes and laws and their water gifts. We grew soft and forgot how to find our own water, forgot how to roam as the dune drovers we are: nomads, free and untrammelled. To cast off those shackles was your father’s dream. Now it’s mine. But the rainlords and the stormlord combine to prevent it ever happening. How can we find random rain if all random clouds are seized and used before they ever come our way? They’re the dishonourable ones, and if we must use a spy to purge ourselves of their dishonour, then we will.”

  Islar glanced at him, and his voice held a tinge of awe. “You can feel that way, even though you weren’t born on the dunes?”

  “It’s the dune gods who make Reduners, not where we were born. That’s the true glory of the dunes. Remember, the gods guided the original Uthardim here from the white-skinned south.” He smiled. “In the end we all share a red skin and red hair, a red land, black pedes and the language of the dunes. That is what makes you and me drovers.

  “And now we seek a new hero. Or heroine. Islar, we don’t even know where these men hide. They must use rain-lord sorcery to conceal their camp and supply themselves with water, otherwise we’d have found them before now. Your father hunted for Vara’s camp, and now we’re trying. We’ve decided the best way is to plant a spy. I have men who’d be delighted to try—but every one of them would run the risk of being recognised as a Dune Watergatherer armsman. The rebels would never trust a recruit from our dune.”

  “They don’t know me,” Islar said quietly.

  Ravard allowed the silence that followed to extend until Islar began to fidget. Then he gripped the lad’s shoulder. “Well, I must admit your name did come up when Medrim and I were discussing this. But we decided that it was too dangerous to risk a son of Davim’s.” He touched his eye patch in wordless illustration. “You will one day be my Master Son. These are dangerous times and I need an heir who’s near grown. Besides, over the years, people have seen the sons of Davim. You could be recognised.”

  “Look at me, Kher. And remember Islar as you knew him when you lived in my father’s encampment. I was not in the battles for the Scarpen because I was too young. I’m only recently braided, fully armed and mounted. A cycle back, I was a child. Since then, I’ve grown a hand span taller, broadened at the shoulder and built muscle. A cycle ago I looked like a boy. Now I am a youth—not old enough to be feared by a man, true, yet changed enough to be unrecognisable by those who once saw a child playing around a camp. And unlike my little brother, I don’t resemble my father.”

  “That’s true. Your voice is breaking, too.” He paused again, as if to consider.

  “Really, if I was to join the rebels, no one’d know me. And Father insisted I learn the Quartern tongue from our caravanners.”

  For a moment Ravard was washed by an irrational wave of jealousy; he wanted to be like Islar, young and free and brave and in search of adventure… Instead, he was weighed down by decisions and troubles, water shortages and the desertions of dune warriors, the divisions between the tribes and their differing visions for the future. He released his grip on Islar’s shoulder and infused his tone with doubt. “I suppose it could be possible, if we thought of a good story.”

  Islar leaned forward and said passionately, “I want those people dead. That man who pretends to be Uthardim the hero. The whore with him, who revealed herself as a rainlord. And Vara, that withered old woman, pretending to be a dune warrior! She mocks us. If I cannot escape and get information back to you, then at least I can kill them, or even just one of them. Without their leaders, they’ll be no more than a meddle of traitors running in circles. Sandmaster, I ask your permission to do this.”

  “Talk it over with your uncle, then we’ll discuss it some more. We mustn’t make hasty decisions. The planning has to be thorough. Besides, there’s no hurry. Our men are still recovering from injuries, and we need to obtain more pedes and weapons and ziggers to replace those we lost. It’ll be more than half a cycle, perhaps a full cycle, before we meet Uthardim head on.”

  As they walked back to the encampment, he was careful to treat Islar as a fellow warrior, telling him all he knew about the rebels and Uthardim, and a few sketchy ideas that he and Medrim had discussed about how to introduce a spy into the rebel camp. They parted then, Islar to attend to his evening tasks at the pede meddle while Ravard sought Medrim.

  He found the older man seated under the veranda of his tent, surrounded by blades, various grades of whetstones, a pile of tartsip creeper leaves for cleaning, a small jar of bab oil and a polishing cloth.

  “Here,” Medrim said by way of welcome, “you can oil the blades I’ve already sharpened. What did the lad say?”

  Ravard sat, took up a wad of leaves and began to work on the scimitar Medrim indicated. “He jumped at the chance.”

  “Knew he would. Are you going to tell him his half-brother will be doing the same thing?”

  “No. If the two of them don’t know about each other, one cannot unintentionally betray the other.”

  “And I have your promise?”

  “About Islar? Yes. If he comes back safely, no matter the outcome, he’ll be my Master Son. And when I become sandmaster of all dunes, Islar will be the sandmaster of Watergatherer.”

  “I think we should think of a new title for you, when that happens. Dunemaster. Ruler of every dune.”

  Ravard smiled. It had a good sound to it.

  Yet, as he bent to clean the blades, and the long shadows of evening cooled the canvas, he felt only sadness. For a moment he couldn’t have said why. Then he knew.

  Ryka, oh Ryka. Why couldn’t you have stayed? You’d have made a fine wife for a dunemaster. We could’ve started such a line of Reduner warriors…

  And then hate overwhelmed his desire. The bitch had made a fool of him, and she would pay. Oh, she’d pay. He’d take her son, and make him his own, he swore it. And he’d laugh when she begged for his mercy.

  CHAPTER NINE

>   Scarpen Quarter

  Breccia City

  Level Thirty-four

  Breccia Hall, Level Two

  Dibble sat quietly in a corner of the Keg & Cask, a Breccian pothouse on Level Thirty-four. He was off duty but suspected if he drank any more he would have a headache in the morning severe enough to interfere with his ability to perform any duty at all, so he sat nursing his mug of amber and pondering just what Elmar Waggoner was up to.

  He watched as Elmar, on his way back from the piss-house, wended his way through the crowded room. The careful way the armsman walked, the slight stagger which he corrected with a hand on an arm or the back of a chair, told him Elmar was drunk again. It seemed so out of character for someone so canny to be drunk so often. Every night lately, lurching from pothouse to pothouse, dragging Dibble along in his wake…

  Not that he minded spending time with Elmar. He’d admired him from the moment they had met in Qanatend; the man was a legend, after all. Since then, the hero worship from afar had changed to something more informed and more personal. In fact, he’d become weeping fond of Elmar. Probably not a good thing. Some said the armsman was a man betrayed. Lord Kaneth Carnelian had thrown him out of his bed to take a wife and that was why he was plunging into the seedy side of the city, drinking and visiting the male snuggeries.

  Dibble didn’t know if he believed it. All he’d ever heard about Lord Kaneth indicated that he’d always been a nipple-chaser, not one for men at all. True, Elmar did go quiet whenever Lord Kaneth’s name was mentioned. And he’d once caught Elmar looking at a portrait of the rainlord that Terelle had painted, but somehow it was hard to imagine a man as tough as Elmar ever succumbing to a broken heart.

  He sighed. Sometimes he felt as if he was drowning in quicksand, not knowing how to keep his nose up. He and Elmar weren’t sharing a pallet, not yet anyway, so just why in all the Sweepings was an experienced armsman like Elmar dragging a fellow like Dibble Hornblend around every pothouse and male snuggery and bath house from Level Ten downwards?

  Dibble knew he was still as green as a bab-palm sucker, naïve as a cleanskin pede, plunging into trouble with embarrassing regularity because he tended to believe everything he was told. Maybe that was it. Maybe Lord Jasper wanted his personal bodyguard to be sharper. More perceptive. So he’d asked Elmar to give him an education?

  It seemed unlikely.

  Still, the post of bodyguard had grown into something of huge importance. Sometimes Dibble would wake in the middle of the night, sit bolt upright and think, I am responsible for the safety of the Cloudmaster. What if someone is attacking him right now?

  Although Lord Jasper had not repeated anything as silly as his sand-brained ride to talk to the sandmaster of Dune Watergatherer, Dibble worried that he would, and the thought made him ill. He still wondered exactly what had happened that night. Jasper could have told them, but hadn’t. Elmar Waggoner had been unconscious for the last part of the fight and even his memory of what had happened immediately before his injury was patchy. The armsman was only now, almost half a cycle later, finally free of his headaches and dizzy spells, but Dibble wondered if the enforced rest was doing him any good.

  Face it, he thought. As far as understanding what’s going on around you, you’re as good as buried in sand up to your sunblasted eyebrows.

  A burst of laughter on the other side of the room made him idly seek the cause. Nothing much; just two men at a table sharing a joke. Or so he thought until one of them looked up. He was missing half his nose, as if it had been cleanly sliced away by a sword cut and then healed leaving his nasal passage exposed.

  The hairs on the back of Dibble’s neck stood up. Sunlord be frizzled—he knew that man. One of Seneschal Harkel Tallyman’s enforcers from Scarcleft. The guards had called him Snotnose. He switched his attention to the second man, fear still pricking at him. Yes, him too, another enforcer.

  Shocked, he darted glances their way every now and then, trying to seem uninterested. Laughter over, the two men bent their heads together as if they did not mean to be overheard. One of them dipped a finger into his amber and wrote something on the tabletop with a wet fingertip. The other nodded and wiped it out. They were both armed and neatly dressed. There was nothing about them to suggest poverty or troubled circumstances. Worried, Dibble wondered how they had escaped punishment in Scarcleft. Highlord Iani would never have let enforcers loose, surely? He tried to attract Elmar’s attention, but the armsman had his arms around the shoulders of two people at the bar, a man and a woman, and wasn’t looking his way.

  Another man joined the two enforcers, someone Dibble didn’t know. It had the look of a planned meeting, a discussion, not an idle drinking session.

  This is not good. Enforcers are Lord Taquar Sardonyx’s men… Their prosperity had been linked to the Highlord of Scarcleft.

  He was about to leave the table to tell Elmar when he saw the armsman was on his way back, carrying the man and woman along with him by the force of his personality and, perhaps, by the promise of a free drink. Nothing new in that; Dibble was used to the way Elmar flashed his tokens around and then sat back with a fatuous smile on his face and listened to the drunken conversation that ensued.

  “These are my new friends,” Elmar said tipsily as he pushed the newcomers onto the bench at their table. “Cuprite and Trundle. Reeve Cuprite,” he added, pointing to the man, who couldn’t have been more than thirty-five but had an elderly man’s paunch and sagging jowls. By contrast, the woman was tall and slim.

  “So I’m buying him a drink,” Elmar continued. “Got to support our new reeves, right? And this here is Maddy Trundle, who reckons she knows the reason Breccia’s in such a mess. Maddy used to be a dyemaker.”

  “A mess? The city’s in better shape than it was,” Dibble replied, indignant. “Elmar, tell them!” But Elmar had wandered off in the direction of the keg to buy some more amber. Dibble didn’t know where to begin. Jasper had achieved so much since he had returned from Qanatend, and he’d worked day and night to achieve it. “There’s water in the cisterns, and the groves are being watered. The trees are being replanted—”

  “We’re all wilting beggared!” Maddy cried. She had the deep voice of a man. He blinked. Salted damn, but she was pretty. She continued, “How long do we withering have to wait for them trees to fruit? Takes five cycles, that’s what. What we going to do in the meantime?”

  “The stormlord is doing his best—” he began, and then corrected himself. “I mean the Cloudmaster.” The Council of Rainlords had confirmed the title, but he forgot to use it sometimes.

  “Sunblighted upleveller, what does he know about hungry littl’uns?” Maddy cried. “And no work to be had for the likes of me. Who wants anything dyed these days? No one! They’re all too busy trying to find food to put in their stomachs. And in the meantime the streets run wild with armed thieves attacking us honest folk in our homes, taking what little we got. And what’s the Cloudmaster doing while we suffer? Bet he don’t go hungry.”

  If he did, you wouldn’t get any water, he thought angrily, but before he could express the thought, Cuprite weighed in with his own complaints.

  “The Cloudmaster’s only answer is to get us deep in debt to the other cities, buying food,” Cuprite said sourly. “Even if we get out of this mess we’re in, our young’uns’ll be paying back the debt till they drop dead of old age. He ought to up the price of their water, but he won’t.” He leaned forward and waggled his forefinger at Dibble. “The fall of Breccia was the fault of you Breccians. Over in Breakaway, where I’m from, there weren’t no Reduners, and you know why? ’Cause we’re a pious folk. We sacrifice to the Sunlord, never stinting. Our highlord most of all. Never misses a Sun Day service, or a holy day thirst, she doesn’t. And the Sunlord protected us. You was warned. It’s all in the holy book. Wish I was back there, but the Sunpriest said he needed help here, so here I am. Doesn’t mean I like the place.”

  Trundle nodded sagely as Elmar came back with the amber
. “’Strue,” she agreed. “Remember them uplevellers before Breccia fell? Sodden water-soft lot, decked out in silks they bought from outlander traders ’stead of honest workers like me, the men spending their time in snuggeries and such, while we down here on the lower levels worked our hands to the bone for them. And now we got a cloudmaster what won’t set foot in the Sun Temple.”

  “He’s too busy calling up storms so you’ll have your water to drink, that’s why!”

  The reeve took a swig of his amber and addressed Elmar, who was edging his backside on to the bench as much as Cuprite’s ample backside would allow. “Yon lad’s a hatchling, as innocent as sunshine.” He switched his attention back to Dibble, saying, “Look, you salt-head, the Cloudmaster might be bringing us water, but he’s not bringing us good times like we had before. The Sunlord’s not pleased. His rays burn, where they used to give life. We shrivel under the heat of his disgust. And you know why?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Dibble said, trying to rein in his rage. Several people had grouped around the table to listen, and there was a murmur of agreement.

  “Cuprite has the right of it,” said an elderly man, his face flushed red with drink. “We’ve run foul of the Sunlord, for sure. So who’s to blame for that?”

  Reeve Cuprite warmed to his subject. “It’s all the fault of that outlander who lives up in the hall with the Gibber grubber. The waterpriests say she’s a blasphemer from the land of the profane across our borders. Polluters all—look what they did to the ’Basters! Perverted them until they deny the Sunlord, though the Lord shines bright in all his glory for all to see. She should be sent back where she came from, the lying, snuggery harlot.”

  “Ought to be thrown out into the Sweepings,” someone said. There was a murmur of agreement.

  Dibble went cold. “She’s Gibber born,” he protested. “She’s not like that at all. And how can you be so insulting to Gibber folk? I fought alongside Gibbermen who came to defend the Scarpen and you dare—” He gasped as Elmar drove the heel of his sandal into his instep, hard.