Stormlord’s Exile

by Glenda Larke

  “Oh! But what would Taquar do with a baby?”

  “Nothing, as long as Jasper behaves himself. With Amberlyn in his hands, Taquar will get to stay in Scarcleft, with all his privileges returned to him. He might even be able to wrangle his way back to being the Cloudmaster. So, my dear, I hate to upset your pleasant life here, but as soon as Jasper leaves for Samphire I think you must make a visit to Scarcleft. When you get there, you tell Lord Iani in a panic that your sandcrazy mother found out where Taquar is hidden and has gone to release her beloved husband. That will send Iani racing up to the Warthago to stop me.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll leave that up to Taquar.”

  “Won’t Jasper just attack Taquar like he did before?”

  “Think, Senya. All Taquar has to do is threaten to cut off Amberlyn’s nose or something, and Jasper will do as he is told. In the end, Jasper will live in Scarcleft, doing the stormshifting we need—which won’t include the other quarters—while Taquar manipulates him through Amberlyn.”

  “And you?”

  Laisa paused. “I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “I’m rather coming to like being a highlord. Perhaps I’ll stay here and rule the city, especially if I don’t have Jasper looking over my shoulder all the time. I am not sure that Taquar is worth giving up a whole city…” She shrugged, wondering at herself. She was not usually so indecisive about what she wanted. “We’ll see.”

  “And me?”

  “You can decide when the time comes. Scarcleft or Breccia.”

  And I wonder how long it will take you to realise Taquar manipulated you into having a baby by Jasper, just so he had a hold on the stormlord. My poor dear daughter. You haven’t a moral thought in your head, and yet it never occurs to you that there are others just as amoral.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Khromatis

  Anderfoot and Variega Mountains

  Elmar had trouble sleeping. He and Dibble were lying on the ground in a copse of trees just over the Khromatian border, wrapped tight against the cold, huddled together. Around him the noises of the night—things snuffling through the fallen leaves, clicking in the trees, hooting in the sky—were as unfamiliar as the far-off murmur of flowing water. Still worse was the damp. Neither of them were used to that. But it was not the sounds, or the damp or the chill of the air that kept him awake. It was the task they had ahead of them.

  He may have thought of Terelle as a friend, but he could never forget that she was also Lord Terelle, one of the most important people in the Quartern. She had to be brought back so they had a chance. Just thinking of the responsibility made him tense up.

  At least, this time around, the Alabasters had helped as much as they could with information, clothing, money, food and advice, but now the two of them were on their own.

  I could do with Kaneth at my side. Withering hells, I miss him.

  Dibble grunted in his sleep and flung an arm across him. The armsman was a fine man to have around, but he was so… so damnably young. He still jiggled around like an ant caught in a sandpit when he was excited or tense; he still talked too much and asked too many questions. Although maybe that was not such a bad thing. Not shy about asking what things meant, or trying out what he’d learned, Dibble had turned his verbosity into an asset when it came to learning Khromatian. He could even crack a joke in the language when needed. Elmar knew he was going to be grateful for that skill, but oh—it would have been good to just follow along after Kaneth, instead of being looked up to by Dibble, as if he had the slightest idea of what he was doing.

  I want to have a quiet life for a change. He pondered that, then muttered, “Waterless damn,” he muttered. “I must be growing old to think like that.”

  They had arrived in Khromatis without being detected, thanks to the Bastion’s ingenious idea of filling the whole of the Borderlands up with people riding pedes in every direction. Two thousand men and every mount in Alabaster had criss-crossed the bog, aiming to confuse the Khromatian water sensitives while Elmar and Dibble headed for the other side. They’d hoped the border patrols would be spread thin, and that was exactly what they found. The Alabaster water sensitive with them had dropped them off in Khromatis far from the nearest sentries.

  Sandblast, why can’t I sleep?

  He tried to concentrate on the star river winding its way across the sky, just visible through the leaves, but his mind wandered. Were they going to get away with this? They both had the right clothes, had dyed their hair black and stained their skin brown. Fortunately their blue eyes were not so very different to the Khromatian green.

  And if they found Kermes Manor but Terelle wasn’t there? What then? What if she hadn’t left a trail? He had no idea. No plans. Just a wild notion that they would find her somehow and launch a rescue, then escape, probably with every withering Khromatian Watergiver at their heels.

  Simple, right? Something he and Kaneth would have done for fun in their younger days… But no, not even half-asleep could he convince himself of the truth of that. He’d never done anything as sun-fried stupid as this, never embarked on anything that had so little chance of success. Especially not when the price of failure was unthinkable.

  Fear skimmed through his thoughts at regular intervals like birds crossing a waterhole to drink. At each touch, he pushed it away, but it always returned.

  And Dibble, the dryhead louse, looked up to him as a warrior hero.

  Little did he know.

  The next morning, having washed and eaten, they walked into the nearby town of Anderfoot, in search of an inn called Bogger’s Tavern. According to the Alabasters who’d helped them with information back in Samphire, the owner was a Khromatian dealer who could find anything, no questions asked, if the price was right.

  Elmar trailed behind Dibble, carrying the bigger pack, his clothing awry, his mouth hanging open. If anyone appeared to be taking too much interest in them, he tripped over his staff or dropped his pack, grinning inanely or grunting as he gathered things together again. It wasn’t long before Dibble was wearing an expression of long-suffering that was only partly play-acting.

  “Don’t overdo it,” he growled when Elmar flapped his arms like a demented sandgrouse in order to scare a cat sunning itself on a doorstep. He had to ask for directions five times before they finally found a poky little pothouse squeezed between a cooper and an apothecary. Neither of them could read the sign creaking monotonously over the door.

  “Bet they sell plenty of headache remedies,” Elmar muttered. Besides the noise of the squeaky sign, the cooper in his yard was pounding a hoop onto a barrel with a mallet, while inside the pothouse several drunken patrons were arguing. Or maybe singing. It was hard to tell.

  “Makes you feel at home, eh?” Dibble asked, his grin broad.

  He’d have clipped Dibs over the ear, except it would have been out of character.

  They entered and looked around. The drunken singers staggered past them on their way out. The place smelled of vomit, brewed alcohol and cat piss. A pot-bellied man sweeping the floor of the otherwise empty room looked up. “Wanting something?” he asked. Then he spotted Elmar, who let his mouth sag open and his tongue loll out. “The idiot with you?”

  “M’brother. This Bogger’s Tavern?” Dibble mumbled.

  “That it is.” The man left the broom propped against the wall, wiped dirty hands on an equally dirty apron and walked behind the bar counter. His stare swept over them, shrewd and assessing, from head to boots and back again.

  Elmar lounged against the wall near the door, all senses alert. He dribbled on his tunic, wiped his chin with the back of his hand and then settled for picking his nose. His instincts were already screaming at him not to trust the man and his staff was close at hand.

  “Want to talk to Master Basker,” Dibble said.

  “That’s me.”

  “Got a package waiting for us,” Dibble mumbled, hoping to cover any oddity of his accent. “Paid for in advance.” He placed a silver coin
on the counter top as he had been instructed to do. If the town’s Alabasters had done their part, he was about to be given the paint-powders Terelle needed. He added the exact words he had been told to say. “A little extra for your trouble.”

  “And the contents?”

  “Paint-powder.”

  The man picked up the coin. “Right. And I was told to ask your name.”

  “Denker.”

  “That’s the one.” He hefted a bundle from somewhere down at his feet. “Crushed sea urchins, cadmium, cinnabar, ochre, umber, sienna, chalk, indigo—someone has a well-lined money pouch. This stuff cost as much as a pair of boots made of seahorse leather!”

  Dibble shrugged. “I’m just the delivery boy.” He picked up the bundle, nodded in a friendly fashion and pushed Elmar out of the door in front of him. Once outside, Elmar opened the packet and quickly thumbed through the contents.

  “Not everything’s there,” Elmar said.

  “Huh?”

  “That stuff about the money pouch and expensive boots? That was a hint. He wants more money. Go back inside, but don’t say a word. I’ll stay here. You put another silver coin on the counter and wait. He’ll say something about how he has another buyer for what he didn’t put in the parcel, or some other excuse. Just stare at him and wait. Look as if you aren’t going to budge.”

  “How the withering winds do you know all that?”

  “Dibs, he may be a Khromatian, but I’ve met his double back in the Scarpen twenty times over. He knows there’s something that doesn’t smell right about this deal and he intends to make some money. If you’re too long, I’ll come in and strong-arm him. Otherwise, when you come out of the door afterwards, run and join me. I’ll be behind the cooper’s gate.”

  As soon as Dibble disappeared inside, Elmar scampered clumsily to the left, past some amused women walking by with their market baskets full of greens. Outside the cooper’s he waited for a moment until no one appeared to be looking, then stepped behind the gate to the yard, which opened outwards, so that he was hidden in the triangle between gate and plank fence. It wasn’t much of a hiding place, but it had the advantage of not being visible from the tavern door or the cooper’s yard.

  Dibble emerged a while later and jogged to the left. When he drew level, Elmar pulled him behind the gate.

  “You were right,” Dibble acknowledged, holding up three small packets. “What now?”

  “Check what’s in them and wait. Unless I’m much mistaken, someone’s going to take a look out of the tavern door in a moment, to see which way we went.” He peered though the hinge crack. “Spot on!” he whispered. “Basker himself with a boy he wants to send after us.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Basker walked into the middle of the street, looking first one way, then the other. Finally he shrugged and said something to the boy and they both disappeared back inside.

  “Good. He was probably thinking he’d alert the local guard, but now he doesn’t know which way we went, it’s hardly worth the trouble. I hope. Is everything there?”

  “As far as I can tell.” Dibble stuffed the packets into his pack.

  “Then let’s get out of here as fast as we can.” He pointed up the street towards the mountains. “That way,” he said as he shouldered the bundle. Now that they had a weapon for Terelle, all they had to do was find her. “We have to reach the road heading north-east. Once we’re on it, keep an eye out for those mirror pieces.”

  A sandglass run later, they were walking briskly away from the town on the main road. They were already north of Marchford, and if Terelle was on the way to Kermes’ Manor, this was the route she would have taken. The Alabasters, who had been exchanging information to and fro across the border, said two of Bice’s sons had been seen heading north after the fire, but no one knew if she was one of the party.

  Elmar felt sick, thinking about all the possibilities. We know so damned little about where to look. We’re probably many days behind. And there was still no glint of a mirror to be seen.

  All they had to go on was the knowledge that Russet’s magic would work to bring her to where he’d done the painting, near his family home of Kermes Manor. Thank the Sunlord I overheard that conversation.

  Shortly before midday, they caught up with a farmer on his dray going the same way. Having sold his farm produce at the market, he was on his way home and offered them a ride for a couple of coppers. Dibble was scornful; they could walk faster than the alpiner was pulling the dray, but Elmar frowned at him and indicated they should take it.

  Underway once more, with them sitting on the empty sacks, he said quietly, “We’ve a long way to go and a pack gets heavy. We’ll take rides whenever we’re offered them. Ask this fellow how far to the Kermes Manor.”

  “Kermes?” came the answer when Dibble asked. “The Watergiver family? They don’t live in the Southern Marches. Don’t you know that, lad?”

  “Never had nothing to do with lords,” Dibble muttered.

  “Ah. Suppose not. We’re the tiddlers, scraping for a living, we are. Soft-handed fellows don’t have aught to do with the likes of us. They live up the heights.”

  Sounds like a Scarpen city, Elmar thought, and wondered just how high “the heights” were.

  Shortly afterwards, the farmer dropped them at a divide in the road, and it was there that Elmar spotted the first of Terelle’s mirror pieces, catching the sun where it lay. He pounced on it, grinning, as the cart disappeared down the branch track.

  “How can we be sure the mirror was one of hers?” Dibble asked.

  “We can’t. But only Alabasters use these bevelled pieces and they’re unlikely to be dropping them along a road.”

  “There are some Alabasters working in the fields,” Dibble said, pointing to where white-skinned men were harvesting the crops growing on either side of the road. “Are those plants flax?”

  “I don’t know. But by all that’s holy, don’t go asking any Khromatian that. It would be a dead giveaway that we don’t belong here.”

  “No one we’ve seen so far seems suspicious of us. Except the tavern keeper. The town was full of folk, but no one gave us a second glance.”

  “They’ve never seen folk from the Quartern who aren’t Alabasters. I reckon it just never occurred to them that’s what we are.”

  He was glad to see the panic at the back of Dibble’s eyes ease a little. Not that we’ll be very happy in a while, he thought, glancing up at the sky. When clouds get that dark, it rains.

  It was weird having to consider the weather. Back home it was either hot or cold, depending on whether it was day or night. Here, there were so many variations. Dry, wet, cold, windy, hot, warm, cool, damp, and blithering freezing enough for him to worry his balls would drop off.

  He sighed. He so much wanted to go home.

  Elmar glanced over at Dibble. He was wet. They both were, but Dibble’s body shivered with cold. Every so often he hunched over to sneeze and wiped his nose on his sleeve. At least their hair dye and skin stain seemed water-fast.

  Four bleeding days of rain, on and off. Water running away into the soil as if it was useless stuff. And no one on the road to give them a lift either. Strange how odd the rain made him feel, as if he was complicit in the wicked waste of water. Pity it also made them so thoroughly miserable.

  “I don’t think we should sleep out in the fields tonight,” he muttered. “We’ll pay for a room in a roadside inn if we find one.”

  Dibble blinked in surprise. “That’ll take a lot of coin.”

  “Thanks to the Bastion, we have a lot. If we get sick because we’re wet and cold, we won’t be of any use to Terelle. Later on there’ll be those bivacs things the Alabasters told us about, but here near towns there’s only inns, so we’ll get a room, pay for a fire and eat some meat hotpot. Do you remember all that the Alabasters told us about what to ask for and how much you should pay?”

  Dibble nodded. “I also remember they told us it’d be more normal for
travellers like us to rent floor space in front of the taproom fireplace after the drinkers go home.”

  “Yes, I remember. But tonight we’re going to spoil ourselves.”

  Some time later, with full stomachs, a warm fire and beds that did not appear to have any bugs, Elmar was rewarded by the sight of a relaxed and cheerful Dibble. His own spirits lifted in turn. Blighted eyes, he thought, once I left it up to Kaneth to make all these sort of decisions. Maybe I’ve finally grown up myself.

  He grinned at Dibble. “Let’s turn in,” he said, and blew out the candle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Scarpen Quarter

  Begg’s Caravansary

  Warthago Mountains

  Taquar, bare-chested, was exercising when he felt the water that told him he was about to have visitors. He was startled. Usually it was just one man—Iani—and one myriapede. This time it felt like a small army.

  He washed and dressed, then sat down to wait. As the party on its way up the ravine grew closer, he counted two packpedes, two myriapedes and over twenty people. He was no stormlord, so their identities remained a mystery until they were in sight.

  Laisa. He hadn’t expected her so soon, not from what she’d said previously. I’ll be wilted—where did she get all those men from?

  It wasn’t until they were closer still that he recognised some of them: they were his own water enforcers from Scarcleft. Or had been, until Iani had taken over.

  When they halted in front of the cave, Laisa came forward while the most senior among the enforcers, a nasty piece of work who went by the nickname of Savage, organised the men into unpacking the panniers.

  “You’re a welcome sight,” Taquar said, inclining his head to Laisa with a smile as charming as he knew how to make it. “Where the withering hells did you get this crowd of reprobates from? Don’t tell me you managed to free Harkel, too!”

  She smiled back. “No, sorry. Although I did hear recently that he was still alive. Apparently Iani thought dying was too easy a punishment. Harkel and the rest of your enforcers are working in the quarries just to the west of Scarcleft. When you’re home again, you can release them. As for this lot? Jasper and Iani were stupid enough to allow me to sleep in Scarcleft Hall before we rode out to fight Davim. I made the most of my time. In the confusion, I helped myself to your stash of jewels and tokens, let these miscreants out, paid them off and told them there would be more if they wanted to contact me later. When I turned up in Breccia, most of them did. They have proved themselves invaluable.”