Stormlord Rising Read online

  After the session with Taquar, he hesitated on the stairs for a moment, then made a decision. He went to visit Laisa. She had been entertaining some of her Level Three friends, but they were already on their way out when he arrived at the door to her apartment. Senya, fortunately, was nowhere to be seen. Laisa admitted him and—as gracious as she could be when she put her mind to it—she served him some wine from across the Giving Sea and asked a servant to prepare a meal for him. “You have been cloudshifting all day,” she said, “and you must remember to eat. I don’t think you take enough care of yourself, Jasper. You will do no one any good if you fall sick.”

  He nodded, knowing she was right. “I am hungry,” he admitted. He took a sip of the wine and added, “But that’s not why I came to see you. I wanted to talk to you about Senya.”

  She placed a bowl of nuts next to him. “What about her? She is rather annoyed with you, Jasper.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Your behavior of late has been less than discreet.”

  “She found out I’ve been visiting snuggeries?”

  “Yes. And you should not mention such things in polite company.”

  “Oh, I don’t.”

  She glared. “Don’t poke me, Jasper. I can bite.”

  “You can try, certainly. But you brought the subject up, not me. And speaking of Senya, she did not seem particularly put out by my behavior last night when she came to my room and climbed naked between my sheets while I slept.”

  Laisa was so startled it was a moment before she could speak. “May I assume you were not dreaming?”

  “No dream, Laisa. What happened was not at my instigation and I wish it had not happened. However, it did, and it led me to another surprise: I was not the first.”

  This time Laisa was more shocked than startled, and the ensuing silence was long. Finally she said, “Are you trying to drive a wedge between man and wife, Jasper? Because, if so, you are wasting your time.”

  “Ah. Interesting we should come to the same conclusion. Laisa, I have no illusions about your marriage to Taquar. And I don’t care anyway. What I do want to know is this: what is Taquar up to? I did—I think—make it clear I’ll marry Senya, if she is willing, as it’s in the interest of the Quartern and its people. I don’t love her. The state of her virginity is of no interest to me. I find it hard to imagine he’d think I’d be annoyed by her behavior, at least not until such time as we were married. Once wed, I’ll try to be the best husband possible under the circumstances, and I’ll expect her to do the same.”

  He paused, painfully aware that he sounded like a pompous sand-brain. Hurriedly he continued, “Nor can Taquar have done this to father children on her; I understand he has always been deficient in that area and he can hardly expect things to change now. So what is all this about?”

  “You can hardly think I encouraged my husband to sleep with my daughter, or that I knew of it beforehand,” she said icily.

  “No, but I am wondering why this occurred at all.”

  “Perhaps Taquar wants your wife to be loyal to him, not you, and engaging her affections before the marriage included bedding her.”

  It was barely possible, but her uneasiness told him she didn’t believe her own words.

  “You should court her,” she added finally. “Teach her what you’ve learned from your snuggery women. Tell her the kind of thing young girls like to hear. Wean her away from Taquar. You don’t want a disloyal wife in your household, do you?”

  He suspected her advice was good, but something told him she was deliberately trying to lead him away from Taquar’s real motives. He nodded noncommittally. “Perhaps you might have a word with her as well? I don’t want a repeat of last night.”

  “Oh, I shall. And I suggest you marry her soon.”

  The meal arrived at that moment and he stayed long enough to eat. They spoke of neutral matters. The latest news—that Portennabar and Portfillik were importing vast quantities of wine and water from across the Giving Sea, mixing them together and selling the result to supplement their water supplies—was much easier to talk about than Senya.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Scarpen to the Red Quarter

  Qanatend to Dune Pebblered

  They stayed five nights in Qanatend.

  Ryka, impatient and crotchety, was locked in her rooms at Ravard’s orders. Nauseated with worry, she wanted to see Kaneth so badly her body ached, yet she didn’t want to risk her fragile peace with Ravard. If he trusted her, he might eventually give her enough freedom to bring him down, even to bring his whole tribe to its knees. That idea was as fragile as a sand-dancers’ mirage, so she obeyed his directives and kept her expression neutral when he gave her orders. She used his title when she spoke to him. In his bed, she was compliant and meek. It went against everything she was, and if she inwardly boiled with rage, she also shut that part of herself deep within, like a coiled snake in the darkness waiting for the moment to strike.

  She strove to remember all she had read about the legend of a hero called Uthardim. It wasn’t much. She had never thought it important. The actual history and the tribal myths of the Reduners were inextricably mixed, until no one knew which were an approximation of the truth and which just tales.

  In her twenties Ryka had made her interest in Reduner stories known to merchants in Breccia, and as a result, a steady trickle of shaman scrolls had come her way. In the Uthardim story she’d read, Uthardim had been miraculously born already an adult, sired by a dune god, birthed by the divine immortal, Fire. At his birth, however, a jealous mortal lover of Fire had appeared and distracted her at the crucial moment of Uthardim’s delivery. Instead of being caught in his mother’s arms, he had slipped into the flames of her conflagration. His face had been badly burned as a result, and thereafter he had been known as Uthardim Half-face.

  But ponder as she might, Ryka could not remember the rest of the story, except that he had become a warrior hero. Damn it, she thought crossly, I can’t even ask the guards, because that would mean speaking to them in Reduner. That ability was still better kept a secret. She toyed with the notion of asking Ravard, but shied away from that, too. She didn’t want him to think she was interested in Kaneth.

  And so, when they rode out of the gateway of Qanatend, she was none the wiser as to why the guards treated Uthardim with such respect.

  The caravan was larger now, and the pedes stolen from Breccia were loaded with more slaves from Qanatend. Her heart grieved as she scanned them—they were so young. Girls and boys of perhaps eight to twelve or thirteen, no more. Reduners preferred children; it gave them a chance to raise them to be wives and warriors who could forget their origins. Unlike older adults enslaved for their skills, a child was always given a choice after a year or two: slavery, or become a tribal member with all its privileges and responsibilities and loyalties. Most chose the easier route, and who could blame them? By then the sands would have stained their hair and their skin until they resembled their captors.

  Ryka glanced at the line of pedes making up the caravan. Every seat on a pede was taken up with people or water or baggage. Several packpedes were piled high with roped bundles of dried bab fruit stolen from the warehouses. This time she rode behind Ravard himself, and behind her were Reduner warriors. Ravard was almost light-hearted. She scowled at his back. Didn’t he care what his people had done to the city? Didn’t he realize what their plundering would do to the people left behind?

  As they rode through the groves and once again she saw the dying trees, the parched soil and the evidence of wanton vandalism, she allowed her bitterness to spill over. “You have stolen their food and destroyed their means of replacing it. Was it necessary to kill their trees and wreck the irrigation?”

  He shrugged and turned his head to reply. “You should never have built a city on this side of the range in the first place; this is ours. The Scarpen should start with the Warthago.”

  “Why?”

  “Once we lived all the way t’t
he coast! Once the whole Quartern was ours. You pushed us out! So now we take back all the land north of the Warthago.” He waved a hand back at the city walls. “Once we have taken all the water the city has, Qanatend will be leveled t’the ground. Obliterated. Let all you Scarpen folk go back t’where you belong—the southern side of the range.”

  “These people will die getting there!”

  “Perhaps. We don’t care, just so long as they never come back.”

  “Is this what you will do to Breccia?”

  “Breccia you can have. We have no interest in your cities. We certainly don’t want t’live in them. We went there t’kill your rainlords and stormlords, that’s all. ’Specially Cloudmaster Granthon. And we thought t’capture his replacement.”

  “You mean Jasper?”

  “Yes, him with the fancy name. Jasper Bloodstone. Is it true he’s a Gibber grubber?”

  “So I heard.”

  He snorted in amusement, but made no comment. “It’s time to return to a Time of Random Rain. With him in our hands it would have been easy.”

  “You have no heart!”

  “You Scarpen folk taught us well.” The bitterness belonged to him now. She heard the acid in his voice and the grief in his tone, saw rage in the way his hands tightened on the reins. “You came t’our land and killed and plundered and destroyed. You made most of the Quartern yours. The ’Basters came and made the White Quarter theirs—well, now it’s our turn again. You’ll be the nomads, lookin’ for water. We will be the hunters and drovers who know how t’live in this land, as you never did. All you ever had was magic”

  “Are we—the people living now—guilty for what our ancestors did a thousand or more years ago?”

  He twisted in the saddle to look at her. “No. You’re guilty for what you did yesterday. I grew up in poverty so bleeding grim I counted meself lucky if I had water t’drink and a rough piece of bab sacking as a blanket against the cold. You—the people of the Scarpen and your rulers—you allowed people t’live like that, while you had enough water for your bleeding fancy bath houses! You could have granted us more water. Then we could have grown more bab, raised more animals.”

  “We didn’t have sufficient stormlords. Cloudmaster Granthon did his best.”

  “You looked after yourselves just fine.” He glanced ahead to make sure the pede was on track. “Anyhow, now we’ll return to a time when we are dependent on no one—no one but ourselves—for water.”

  “A Time of Random Rain.”

  “We call it Saren Jan Kai. You people translated it as ‘Time of Random Rain,’ but that’s not really correct.” He frowned, searching for the right words. “ ‘Time of God-granted Rain’ is closer t’the true meaning. We believe if we give the dune gods due respect, if we respect our dune, then they will see to it we get rain.”

  She waved a hand at one of the water-loaded pedes. “God-given random rain? You steal!”

  “A temporary measure in place of having Jasper Bloodstone. ’Sides, maybe we don’t have random rain ’cause Bloodstone takes whatever clouds start to form natural-like.”

  He was probably right at that. She fell silent and they rode on, into country she had never seen before: the dry flatlands known as the Spindlings. By midday, they had reached the border of the Red Quarter. Beyond a rough gully marking the boundary, the land was red and sandy. In the distance the first of the dunes was a long red barrier across the plains, extending east and west as far as Ryka could make out with her inadequate eyesight.

  She felt the dryness of the air like a physical assault, sucking moisture from all it touched. The Scarpen was an arid, thirsty land, but the Gibber was worse, and so was this. There were no trees; just low plants, grotesque in shape and vivid in color, clinging to the red sand, creeping hither and thither in a desperate anxiety to find water. Many had leaves designed to collect dew or suck the juices out of desert insects and small creatures. A savage, killing land, baking under a devouring heat.

  By evening they were camped at the foot of the first dune.

  “Dune Pebblered,” Ravard said, and helped Ryka down. He left her standing there and started to give orders to his men.

  “Here, help me down, dear,” Junial begged from her perch on another pede. “I don’t have a handsome warrior waiting on me. My joints are on fire with all this sitting still and I hate being this high up. I cling onto that handle as if my life depended on it. Which it probably does, think on it.”

  Ryka gave a weary smile and obliged. The woman snorted as she looked about her. “So this is one of their precious dunes, eh? Just looks like a heap of red sand to me. Is this where he lives? Ouch, but my backside hurts. All the muscles is scrunched up.” She rubbed her buttocks, wincing. “They’ll be after me to cook in a moment, too.”

  Ryka envied Junial one thing: she was not molested by the Reduners, possibly because she was old enough to be unattractive to them, or perhaps because no one wanted to upset a good cook.

  “There are settlements on many of the dunes, including this one,” Ryka told her. “But we are going to the one Sandmaster Davim rules, Dune Watergatherer. We have to cross a number of dunes to get there, I believe.”

  “Thought he ruled the lot of them?”

  “Sort of—except wherever the rebels are. Vara Redmane and her followers. Dune Watergatherer is where Davim started, and it’s where he lives now, as far as I know. Each dune has its own sandmaster, although nowadays they all bow to Davim.”

  “So how do they build cities on a heap of sand?”

  “They don’t. They live in tents, and move the encampments from time to time. There are several tribes on each dune, all owing allegiance to the same dune sandmaster. So Kher Ravard heads his own tribe, but he lives on the same dune as Sandmaster Davim.”

  The older woman sighed. “Don’t tell me, more lying on the ground instead of a proper bed. No tables, no chairs neither, I’ll wager. I’m too old for this. And all because I cook a good loaf of bab bread. How’s that for fate playing its sandblasted tricks on a widow woman?” She gazed up at the slope of the dune. The sand was patterned with lines of creeping plant life, runnels flowing forth in random designs. “Pretty enough, I suppose. But where are the tunnels bringing water? We’ve seen none of them shafts since we left Qanatend.”

  “No tunnels were ever built here. I was told once the Reduners regard each dune as sacred to a dune god, and not to be defiled by deep digging—or by any permanent building for that matter. Besides, the dune moves. Difficult to build anything permanent.”

  “Then however do they get their water?”

  “A stormlord can make it rain on the slopes of each dune near the waterholes. The most difficult of all the cloudbreaks, I believe, and only possible because each camp is only a few hundred people, so they don’t need much water.”

  Junial looked at her curiously. “How do you know all this stuff? There’s more to you than meets the eye, seems to me!”

  Ryka hedged. “I was a scholar once.” She paused, then added quietly, “I suppose that has gone, along with the rest of my life.”

  Junial grimaced in sympathy. “I’m sorry. At least I’m not young enough for the men to want to climb under my shift. But y’know, you did get the best of the bunch, m’dear. Whose is the bread rising in the basket? His?”

  “The bread—? Oh. My baby. Blighted eyes, he’s not the Kher’s! He’s my husband’s.” She touched her abdomen. “It really is obvious now, isn’t it?”

  “It is that. How far along are you? More than halfway, by the looks.”

  They were interrupted by a guard yelling at Junial. “Time cook!” he told her. “Work!”

  Junial shrugged and trudged off to where the guards and slaves were starting the cooking fires.

  Ryka lingered a moment to watch the changing shadows as the sun slid below the horizon. Dark blood-red shadows accentuated the dips and hollows. The dying light blazed on the ridges until they glowed as if lit from within. It’s not pretty, she thought. P
retty is for sweet frilly stuff. This is stark, harsh, dangerous.

  But she couldn’t help adding, and magnificent.

  Even as she watched, the dune groaned, a deep moaning sound reverberating deep in the sand like a note plucked from the bass string of a giant lute.

  “The dune god speaks,” one of the Reduners said in his own tongue, and thumped his fist to his chest in reverent acknowledgment.

  As they were eating, six men mounted on individual myriapede hacks appeared on the horizon. Ryka felt them before she saw them. In the gloaming, they were no more than silhouettes against a deep purple sky, hard to see, but having sensed their water she knew where to look. Quickly she glanced away, not wanting Ravard, seated next to her on the matting and cushions by the fire, to realize her water sensitivity.

  A few moments later he must have felt them himself because he stood hurriedly and called to his senior bladesmen, who sprang to their feet in instant obedience. They strode away from the camp, fully armed with scimitars, zigger cages and zigtubes. Ryka scrambled to her feet to see better; so did Kaneth, who had been sitting with the rest of the slaves.

  Ravard doesn’t trust the Pebblered folk, she thought. They bow to Davim and his heir, but once they were subject to no one. I wonder if they hate the tribes of Dune Watergatherer as much as we do.

  Kaneth threaded his way through the slaves to stand at her shoulder as she watched. “Ravard sent word to the closest Pebblered tribe that we were here,” he murmured in her ear. “You cannot cross an inhabited dune without the permission of one of the tribes living on it. Of course they are far too frightened to stop Kher Ravard and his men, but apparently he observes the courtesies and pauses to ask.”