The Last Stormlord Read online

  If only—

  “My lord?”

  If only he could control it.

  “Highlord?”

  If only he had been born a stormlord.

  He opened his eyes. With effort, he swallowed the bitterness, the sense that he had been the victim of an unjust fate. That was childish, and he was far from being a child.

  Beside him the reeve waited, face impassive, even as the questioning intonation of the echo whispered through the vaults: “Highlord?… ighlord?… lord?… ord?”—until it was lost in the background tinkle of trickling water. “Should we take samples, my lord?”

  Nealrith hauled his thoughts back to his responsibilities. “Yes, of course. All the cisterns, as usual.”

  The man moved to obey. The only other occupant of the hall stayed at Nealrith’s side, regarding him with a cynical half-twist to his mouth. “Mist-gathering, Rith?”

  Nealrith nodded, acknowledging his abstraction. “Sorry, Kaneth, I have much on my mind.” And that was an understatement. Even as he spoke, he was watching the reeve kneeling at the cistern to fill the vials they had brought. The black glass of the water’s surface shattered into half-moons of reflected lamplight and Nealrith felt the movement as a shiver across his skin.

  “I’ve noticed,” his friend said dryly. “You should talk more about what bothers you, you know. As my old granny used to say, ‘A trouble shared is a trouble pared.’ ”

  “From what I know of your old granny, I doubt she was ever given to uttering words of wisdom.”

  Unrepentant, Kaneth shrugged and grinned. “All right, so it was someone else’s granny. But the sentiment remains. What’s the matter, Rith?”

  “You know what’s the matter. And talking about it is not going to solve anything. Let’s see how much is in the overflow cisterns.”

  “You don’t need to see,” the other man said flatly.

  Nealrith looked at him. The lamplight accentuated the deep grooves of a desert-etched face; even Kaneth’s good looks were not immune. We appear lined and older than our years, Nealrith thought. And yet they weren’t old, either of them, not really. Other men of thirty-five considered themselves in their prime. But Nealrith and Kaneth were both rainlords, and in these times, that made the difference. Kaneth had the advantage, though; he had a fighter’s physique, broad shoulders and muscles that spoke of a more youthful strength and vitality. Nealrith was thinner and less toned. Too much sitting at a desk dealing with city administration, he thought, and envied his friend. Kaneth’s fair hair still glinted straw-gold in the light, while his own was already salted with grey.

  “No. I don’t need to see,” he agreed. The admission was surprisingly hard to make, and he heard his voice sag with the same grief that had aged him. “The two top cisterns are empty. The middle ones are half-full. The lower ones are fine.”

  “And at this time of the star cycle they should all be brimming.”

  “Yes.” He began to walk up the slight slope between the oblongs of water. “I want to look at the intake.”

  Kaneth fell in step beside him. “I saw the inspection team return this morning,” he remarked.

  “Ryka Feldspar and Iani Potch?”

  “Who else would I mean?”

  “Yes, they are back.”

  “Will you stop making me drag information out of you? Did they find anything wrong that would account for the drop in the amount of water arriving here?”

  Nealrith knew his hesitation betrayed him. Worry seethed beneath his outward calm. Worry that was close to panic.

  “Nothing. Ryka said they rode the whole course, checked the mother cistern, the intakes from the mother wells and every inspection shaft. There was nothing wrong. No signs of theft. Nothing except that the water flow is reduced from what is normal.”

  “Could she give a reason?”

  “The highest well shafts in the Warthago Range do not reach the underground water any more. Which means less water for the mother cistern.”

  “She has enough water-sense to know that?”

  “Granted, she’s not much of a rainlord. But Iani? He’s one of the best we have. Nothing wrong with his water-sense.”

  “He’s also sandcrazy. Last time I saw him, he told me he thought Lyneth was with a nomadic tribe of pedemen who wandered the land, invisible to the rest of us.”

  Nealrith shook his head sadly. Iani’s daughter Lyneth had disappeared in the desert and the rainlord had never been the same since.

  “If the groundwater level has fallen…” Kaneth hesitated. “The information has implications.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” Immediately he’d spat out the words, he wished he had not said them. There was no point in alienating a friend, and Kaneth was that. It was just so hard to bridle his worry.

  Friend or not, Kaneth had never been one to accept rebuke mildly. He drawled, deliberately provocative, “On the contrary, I am quite sure you do. Your problem is not one of lack of understanding, but of will. The will to do something about it.”

  “And just what do you think I should do?” Nealrith’s tone was still dangerously taut. “Slaughter half the city so there are fewer people who need to drink?”

  They had reached the intake from the mother cistern tunnel. The splash of water through the heavy iron grille should have been comforting; instead it unsettled. Nealrith glanced through the bars. The rounded brick walls funnelled away into the darkness until they disappeared in a tiny pinpoint of light. That slim ray would have been sunlight entering at the first of the maintenance chimneys. There must be a crack in the cover. The tunnel did not end there, of course; it went all the way to the foothills of the Warthago Range, three days’ ride distant, to the mother cistern, which was fed in turn by pipes from the mother wells.

  “Kill some of our citizens… the lowlevellers perhaps. Now there’s an idea,” Kaneth replied, dryly sarcastic.

  Nealrith grimaced and softened his tone. It was pointless to turn his anxiety into bad temper. He went back to Kaneth’s original point. “Implications? Yes. The main one being that there wasn’t enough rain last year.”

  “But there were the right number of rainstorms.” Kaneth paused, and then asked, “Weren’t there?”

  “Oh yes.” Nealrith turned to face him. “I haven’t lied to you. My father hasn’t failed in that regard. Nor will he… yet.”

  “So there was insufficient rain in each storm cloud.”

  “Obviously.”

  Kaneth’s eyes narrowed.

  Nealrith made an exasperated sound and lowered his voice to make sure the reeve could not hear. “All right, I’ll say it, Kaneth. My father’s powers are failing. You want it even blunter than that? Granthon, Cloudmaster of the Quartern, is gravely ill. Possibly dying. He is not lifting enough water vapour from the sea. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “No, but I needed to hear you admit it, Nealrith. And I need to hear what you intend to do about it.”

  Nealrith ignored his words and waved a hand at the tunnel entrance. “Take a sample here.”

  Kaneth fumbled in his tunic pocket for one of the onyx vials he carried for the purpose. “Can you sense anything wrong?”

  “I would say the water is just about as pure as when it came from the skies. Its essence is not wrong, just the amount.” Nealrith thrust his hand under the water where it splashed through the grille. He kept it there for a moment before he added, “About half the flow of this time last year. And every star cycle before that. The city’s mother cistern is not filling to capacity. Ryka said it is eight handspans too low. They had to adjust the siphon.”

  “How long before that translates into shortages on the streets?”

  Nealrith shrugged. “Depends on when we start rationing.”

  “We can’t wait until these cisterns are empty and the decrease becomes noticeable in the level-supply cisterns down in the city. We have to start rationing now.”

  “That’s… drastic.”

  “Then what about d
eepening the mother well shafts?”

  “It’s not a solution, Kaneth. I’ve spoken to the engineers. The groundwater level needs to be maintained. And the only way to do that is to have sufficient rain.”

  “The engineers are fossilised old sand-grubbers, you know that.” Kaneth turned back to the intake flow and caught some of it in the vial, which he then stoppered. “The city engineer wouldn’t replace a single brick of the tunnel if it was left up to him, the sun-dried old fool. Rith, we can’t just go jogging along pretending nothing is wrong! Deepen the shafts. Build more shafts. Tap into the groundwater elsewhere and bring water through a new tunnel. Be stricter about the enforcement of birth control—there are still rich folk who have more than two children because they can afford to buy their dayjars. Anything is better than sitting back and waiting for people to die of thirst. Better still—” He paused.

  “Better still what?” Nealrith was willing to listen to anything, for how could you ration something that was already apportioned at its acceptable limit? There was no wastage of water in Breccia. Each man, woman and child received exactly what he or she needed for life. Every fruit tree, every palm grove, every jute and flax plant, every vegetable patch received exactly enough for growth and harvest. Ration water and food production would drop. Eventually people would die. They’d starve, if they hadn’t already died of thirst.

  But Kaneth backtracked. “Are you saying that the Cloudmaster cannot make good the lack?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you it is unlikely. You’ve seen him. My father is old beyond his years, and ill. I am going to the Sun Temple after this, to ask Lord Gold to make a heavier sacrifice to the Sunlord. Perhaps that will help.”

  Kaneth snorted. “Withering waste of water.”

  They looked at each other, two men who had been friends since the day they had first met as children, almost thirty years earlier. Nealrith’s heart lurched. They were like sand grains at the top of a slope too steep for stability, waiting for the landslip, the irrevocable damage, the words that couldn’t be taken back. He smothered a desire to change the subject rather than hear something he knew instinctively he would not be able to countenance.

  “Spit it out, Kaneth,” he said finally. “What is your solution? None of what you have suggested so far is practical. You can’t tap into water that simply isn’t there. More wells somewhere else would be accessing the same underground water as the present ones do; you know that. And I am assuming that you are not going to recommend wholesale slaughter of a number of our citizens so that the rest of us have enough to drink.”

  “As much as it might sometimes be tempting,” Kaneth said with a flippancy that grated on Nealrith, “one has to draw the line somewhere.”

  “So?”

  “We must let the other three quarters fend for themselves. Your father has more than enough strength to supply us here in the Scarpen Quarter; let the other three find their own water.”

  Nealrith drew in a sharp breath. “Sunlord help me—you are advocating wholesale slaughter! You can’t be serious.”

  “I am perfectly serious.” And indeed for once he appeared to be. The cynical half-smile, the insouciance, were gone. He was utterly sober. “Save ourselves. It’s all we can do.”

  “It is unthinkable.”

  “Oh no, it’s not, for I am thinking it. And I am not the only rainlord to do so.”

  “Taquar Sardonyx of Scarcleft, too, I suppose,” Nealrith said bitterly. “But the idea is ridiculous. Quite apart from the sheer inhumanity, we would have the Reduners battering at our walls with an army of zealot tribesmen mounted on pedes and tapping out ziggers. Have you thought of that? A war on our hands at this time? You should, because you may be one of those who fall with a zigger burrowing up your nose. Although I suppose a war would indeed reduce the number of our citizens in need of water.”

  Kaneth shrugged dismissively. “All right, keep the Reduners supplied with water, although I suspect they may actually care the least. Many of them think they should return to a time of random rain anyway. But we should stop sending rain to the White’s ’Basters and the Gibber grubbers. After all, what have they ever done for us? We don’t need them, Rith. They are weeds, sucking up water and producing nothing we cannot do without in the short term.”

  He caught hold of Nealrith’s sleeve. “Think of it. Your father need only supply half the amount of rain. He can do that much. It will buy us time to find other stormlords to help him, to find another to replace him as Cloudmaster when the time comes. He will live longer if he has fewer stresses on him.”

  “He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he had to do that! The shame and the guilt would kill him. What of those who would die in the White and Gibber quarters? You are advocating the brutal eradication of two peoples, as if they were rats in the waterhall!”

  He had raised his voice and the echoes faded out around them: “waterhall… hall… all.” The reeve looked up from his work, curious. Nealrith lowered his voice to a furious whisper and shook off his friend’s hand. “Kaneth, I didn’t think even you would be so utterly without conscience.”

  “Even I?” Kaneth stood looking at Nealrith with a sharply raised eyebrow. “Well, even I don’t want to see my fellow Scarpermen die of thirst. It is you—and your father—who would see us all die a lingering death as our gardens and groves wither and the cisterns empty. Tell me, Nealrith, Highlord of Breccia City, which is a better ending: to have all four quarters die slowly, or have two of them prosper and only two succumb to a waterless death? Yes, I’ll admit it, I think of myself. Is there shame in that? I want to live! I am looking to settle down at last—to marry into the Feldspar family, actually. But that’s neither here nor there. Rith, I want you to propose this solution to Granthon. He will listen to you.”

  “Never!”

  “Then I will. Someone has to have a practical solution for a very real problem, and the Cloudmaster has got to listen. You’re a dreamer, Rith, and your scruples will suffocate us all in sand.” When Nealrith did not reply, he added, “I warn you, there will be those who will fight for this to the bitter end, and you may not like our methods. We will salvage something from this mess, with you—or in spite of you.”

  “You can’t force my father to do something that goes against all he has ever worked for: the unity of the four quarters and the prosperity of their peoples.”

  “That’s just words, Rith. There has never been unity. Or prosperity, either, if you were to ask a Gibberman. It may have been Granthon’s dream in his younger days, but he never achieved anything like it. And now we have a problem. And even you have to admit that there are only two possible solutions, at least in the long term. We either find several more stormlords—and we’ve had a singular lack of success there, you must admit—or we reduce the number of water drinkers. It is as simple as that.”

  Nealrith said nothing, knowing that it wasn’t simple at all.

  It was a choice between the apparently impossible and the totally unconscionable. He turned away so that Kaneth wouldn’t see his revulsion, or his grief at the widening breach in a long-time friendship.

  Breccia, like all Scarpen cities, was a single entity. Even though the narrow streets radiating downwards from Breccia Hall sliced through it, even though the winding lanes circling each level were cracks in its cohesion, every part of the city was linked. Houses and villas grew into one another, sharing walls, connected by their flat roofs, interlocked beneath the ground by arteries of brick tunnels supplying water.

  The first and highest level contained only the water hall. On the next was Breccia Hall, and the remaining thirty-eight levels spilled down the escarpment slope in the shape of a fan. The lowest level at the base, inhabited by day labourers and the waterless, was a tattered flounce to the city. Although hemmed with a wall, parts of this dirty petticoat to Breccia seeped out through the gates in the form of foundries and liveries, kilns and furnaces, knackers’ and slaughter yards. Another trimming to the city was more
salubrious: the bab groves, the rows of trees interspersed with slots and cisterns and vegetable plots. Beyond them were only the drylands, the Sweepings to the north and the Skirtings to the south.

  Level Three, where Nealrith headed after leaving the waterhall, was home to the city’s richest inhabitants and the main house of worship, the Sun Temple, with its attached House of the Dead. After speaking with Lord Gold, the Quartern Sunpriest, Nealrith backtracked to Breccia Hall on Level Two. The hall was the traditional residence of the ruler of the Quartern, and was therefore now home to Granthon Almandine and the rest of the Almandine family. Granthon’s father, Garouth, had preceded him in the post. When the old man had died ten years earlier, Granthon had succeeded to his father’s position by virtue of his talent, not his birth. Unfortunately, Granthon was now not just the Cloudmaster of the Quartern, but the Quartern’s only stormlord.

  Nealrith Almandine knew his father’s life had been far from easy. If the histories were correct, in some eras there had been several hundred stormlords scattered through the Quartern. Even during Nealrith’s own childhood there had been ten or eleven, but one by one they had died, leaving only Granthon. For five years, the Cloudmaster had shouldered his responsibility without the help of another stormlord, a burden too great for any one man no matter how talented. Worse still, he’d been forced to acknowledge to the world that Nealrith, his only child, was not a stormlord and never would be. It had been a bitter blow to both father and son.

  Granthon was kind enough never to mention his disappointment and wise enough never to reproach Nealrith for a lack beyond any man’s power to remedy, but he could do nothing about the bleakness in his gaze. Nealrith saw it every time his father looked at him, and suffered that same blow again and again.