Stormlord Rising Read online

  But no, Cloudmaster Granthon would never have let him do that, surely.

  What if Sandmaster Davim and his Reduners took Breccia City? Had already taken it?

  No, don’t even think that.

  Sleep, whether wrapped tight in blankets on the ground or barricaded inside a mud-brick caravansary, offered relief from Terelle’s tangled thoughts of Taquar and Shale, but dreams brought nightmares which might even have been real. Her sister, Vivie, trapped under the ruins of Opal’s Snuggery. Garri the snuggery gatekeeper lying dead in the courtyard, hit by a falling balustrade. Madam Opal herself crushed under a fallen roof… She would wake, cold and shivering, wanting it all to be untrue. Wanting to wake up and find everything was all right.

  But it wasn’t. She and Russet had caused an earthquake and people had died because of it. Vivie could be dead in truth; she didn’t know and had no way of finding out. I will never shuffle up the future again, she thought. Never. Waterpainting power is wrong. To secure the future for your own benefit was wrong—because you never knew who would suffer to make that future real.

  Their journey continued, apparently interminable. Russet had a fall from the pede and was badly bruised, which necessitated staying days at one of the caravansaries while he recovered. Their supplies ran out and they were reduced to living solely on the bab fruits they found in the caravansaries’ groves. The pede liked nothing better, but Terelle found it a boring diet. Fortunately, now there were no travelers, the caravansaries had plenty of water in their cisterns.

  With a normal caravan, fifteen days would have found them entering Samphire, the main Alabaster city. It took them almost double that before they even reached the border between Scarpen and the White Quarter, a place called Fourcross Tell where all four quarters met.

  The caravansary there, on the heights of a crumbling plateau, was not deserted as the others had been. The keeper and his family were, however, readying for their departure to return home to the Gibber.

  The keeper’s wife, a spare woman with straggling gray hair and a harassed expression that could have been permanent, was only too glad to explain why. “We was attacked this morning, by a small band of them withering red marauders, the beaded bastards,” she said. “Took everythin’ they could find, they did. They’re ridin’ into the White Quarter, seizin’ water—anythin’. They spared us till now ’cause we served Reduner caravans well in the past, but we’ve decided we don’t want t’risk it no more. Got to think of them.” She indicated the two children clinging to her traveling breeches. Their worried faces, wearing expressions that were miniatures of their mother’s, peeked out through uncombed hair.

  Her husband looked Terelle up and down in pity. “You’ll be ripe for their pluckin’, girl. Watch how you go. You’re welcome t’whatever we’ve left behind. We won’t be comin’ back. Get the young ’uns up on the beasts,” he added to his wife. “We’ve lingered long enough.”

  “You think they’ll be back? The Reduners?” Terelle asked.

  He gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, yes. They made that clear. This part of the Quartern belongs t’them red savages now.”

  Terelle and Russet watched the family urge their mounts down the hill slope into the Gibber, the two pedes—prodded into fast mode—scudding up dust that hung in the air long after they’d gone.

  “Are we going to be safe?” Terelle asked as they shared a meal that evening while the sun slipped behind the Warthago Range. “Shale told me Davim and his tribe wanted to take over the White Quarter. We might be riding into the middle of a battle.”

  Russet thought for a moment. “Best we pass Samphire by, no?”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Cross Whiteout.”

  “The Whiteout? I’ve heard of that. It’s a salt plain.”

  “Flat. Easy ride. No Reduners be finding us on Whiteout. Cross straight to salt marshes. That be the border to Khromatis.”

  “I’ve heard stories about the pans. Trackless, they say. Just heat and salt and nothing else in all directions. I heard the white sends folk mad. How will we find our way?”

  “I crossed it once. Can be doing it again.” Russet stood abruptly and walked to the doorway. He pointed across the courtyard to the open gateway. “Look! See that white line bordering the sky? Those be the clouds over Variega mountains in land of Watergivers. That be where we be heading. Keep clouds in sight, can never lose selves.”

  She squinted. The caravansary was high on the range dividing the southern quarters of the Gibber and the Scarpen from the northern two—the White and the Red—and the view to the east and northeast was extensive. The plain far below stretched without interruption to the distant line of pinkish white, illuminated by the last long rays of the setting sun. “Why can’t we see the mountains themselves?” she asked, doubtful.

  “Far, far away. Later ye see the white tops.”

  “White? Are they made of salt then?”

  “Be topped with snow,” he said, and she heard his familiar mockery of her ignorance.

  “Snow? What’s that?”

  “A form of water. Like—like shavings of white ice.”

  She tried to imagine a world where there was so much water it coated the hilltops with ice shavings, and failed.

  “That family leaving much food behind. Pack it all,” he said. “And all water pede can carry. Make sure it drinks well too, before we be leaving.” He already sounded invigorated, as if the hint of his homeland had infused him with energy.

  Terelle did as he suggested, stripping the bab palms of their ripe fruit the next morning in the washed-out light of predawn and cutting them into strips so they would dry easily. She filled every water skin they had to the brim, sealing them with candle grease after stoppering them tightly. Russet found some extra dayjars, and she placed those in the side panniers of the pede as well. When they’d finished, Terelle regarded the loaded pede dubiously.

  “That’s a heavy load for a myriapede,” she said.

  “Downhill,” Russet said. “Then flat, mile after mile. Each day weight less as we drink and eat, no?”

  “The pede will need to drink a lot, and often, out there. How many days will it take to cross the Whiteout?”

  “Less time than be taking to finish the water,” he replied.

  Unsettled, she wondered if he really knew. In the snuggery, she had heard tales of the White Quarter, of travelers dying on the salt, their bodies found years later, mummified and dried solid. Pickled. What kind of people were they, these Alabasters, who apparently did not have red blood in their veins? Who could live in a land where the very ground beneath one’s feet was made of salt?

  In the first few miles after Fourcross Tell, the land was not all that different from the areas they had already crossed: stunted trees dug into the soil with grotesquely twisted roots, gullies scarred the land in memory of long-ago streams. Even the dust felt the same. Later in the day, though, as they descended to the plains, the vegetation changed and she felt as if she was leaving everything sure and familiar behind. The trees disappeared, replaced by low bushes and creepers snaking over the ochre-colored earth. When they stopped to rest, Terelle fingered the leaves of one plant and found it dusted with salt.

  It was hot by then, stifling. The air hung so still it felt heavy on her shoulders, and thick to breathe. When she licked her lips, she tasted salt. When she touched her hair, it was stickily coated.

  “We stay here while sun high,” Russet said. They dismounted and he sat in the shadow cast by the pede. Wearily, he pulled his embroidered head-wrap loose and drank from his water skin. His earlier vigor seemed to have been vanquished by the heat. “We go on later; be cooler.”

  Terelle nodded and strung up bab matting for shade by tying it to the pede on one side and a single saltbush on the other. She sat down next to Russet, using the pede as a backrest. Even under the cover, the heat was intense enough to shrivel the skin. Carefully she smoothed some of the pede ointment onto her face; Vivie would have approved. The pede
flicked one of its feelers backward and touched her cheek in a tentative gesture.

  “What is it, girl?” she asked. “You can’t be thirsty already.” Gently, she prodded the belly between the segments; the moisture-saturated tissues were soft. She gazed into its myopic compound eyes, and wondered whether it had a name or not. The liveryman had called it Number Twelve—indeed, it had the number etched into its rear segment. It wasn’t a handsome creature, all carved and polished and sewn with embroidery, like a lord’s animal. It was just a plain, working hack. Still, she tried to do what was best for it. Russet had said pedemen kept the crevices between carapace and skin cleaned of grains of sand and such, so every evening she groomed the pede carefully and checked every segment groove for sand-ticks, every one of its eighteen pairs of feet for injury. When she found abraded spots on its skin, she smeared on the lanolin supplied by the livery.

  Encouraged by Terelle’s words, the beast curved its front end around, poked its head into the shade cast by the cloth, then rested the base of its head on the ground at her feet. If a pede could look soulful, then that was what it did. Terelle chuckled. “Oh, I see—you’re just hot too, eh? Fine, Number Twelve, you stay right where you are. We can share the shade.” The creature settled its first segment mantle down over its eyes—the only way it had of closing them—and dozed. Next to her, Russet was already sleeping.

  Terelle glanced around. Nothing moved in the midday heat, so she, too, closed her eyes.

  She was awoken by a scream.

  She leaped up, whirling around to find the danger. The pede raised its head and flicked its feelers. Russet was clutching his leg and moaning.

  “What is it?” Terelle asked, trying to slow the thumping of her heart.

  “Something be stinging me.” Hurriedly, he pulled the cloth of his wrap back from his calf. A single spot of blood oozed just above the ankle.

  “Snake?” She cast around where he had been lying, but nothing moved.

  “Only one hole.”

  “Sand-leech?”

  “More painful. Scorpion.”

  “That—that’s not—not so very serious, is it?”

  “Not if ye be treating it,” he replied between gritted teeth. “Reduners use herbal concoction.”

  “We can go back to the caravansary—”

  “Don’t be stupid. We be going on. Get the water skin. Must be washing leg.” He took the water and waved her away, indicating with further gesturing that she should dismantle the shade cloth and reload the pede. She did as he asked; she knew better than to argue.

  They set off once more, in silence, and she concentrated on persuading the pede to whatever speed it was capable of—which never seemed to be as much as she had seen other pedes do. Whenever she looked behind at Russet, he was staring straight ahead, expressionless.

  When she slowed their mount some hours later, thinking to stop for the night because the sun had almost set, he spoke again. “No,” he said, “go on.”

  “I won’t know what direction. I can’t even see the ground properly.” And I’m tired. And you are sick.

  “See well enough once star river shines. Go on.”

  She did as he asked. A little later he brusquely pointed out a particularly bright star in the sky and said, “Be keeping that on your left.”

  He was silent for a long time as they continued. Every now and then she turned her head to check if he was still there, to find him hunched up and motionless behind her. In the silver-blue light she could not tell if the bite was bothering him. She felt a pang of guilt at her lack of compassion, but he was forcing her on this journey, sunblast it! He had no right to expect anything of her except rage.

  It was pleasant traveling in the cool of the night; at least at first. Later the slight breeze they generated with their passing chilled her skin like slivers of ice. She drifted off, dozing on the saddle, but roused with a start when he spoke.

  “We camp now.”

  His voice sounded small and thin in the silence of the night, as friable as ancient sun-bleached rock. She reined in, dismounted and went back to help him. Even so, he fell out of the saddle rather than climbed down, and then collapsed, unable to stand.

  “Give me my pack and be fixing a meal,” he said, and there was still enough authority in his tone to have her obey without protest. If he did not ask for help, she knew it would only anger him to offer it. She stifled a sigh.

  By the time he was wrapped in his blanket, she had a fire alight, using dry twigs and leaves for fuel. The salt coating the soil and plants spat in the flames with green and blue sparks, the sound animating the quiet of a salt-encrusted world. She made some soup out of the shredded dried meat and bab root she had obtained at the caravansary. She had to wake him when it was ready, but he ate gladly enough, then slept again. After she’d had some of the soup herself, she went to groom the pede. It was eating the low plants with enthusiasm and took no notice as she followed it around brushing out its segment joints. When she’d finished, she hobbled the animal by linking its antennae together. No pede moved far or fast when it didn’t have the free use of its feelers.

  Just before she turned in herself, she felt the pull of her journey as sharp as a knife beneath her ribs. The pull of the future Russet had painted for her.

  My mother could resist, she thought. Why can’t I? And she remembered once again the offhand words Vivie had uttered about Sienna: she was always ill.

  Resistance came with a price.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Scarpen Quarter

  Breccia City

  Breccia Hall, Level 2

  Beryll.

  She was dead. One moment Ryka had been so relieved to find her little sister alive and unhurt—and then she was gone. Those blue eyes had lost their light like a candle suddenly snuffed.

  Ryka’s stomach heaved in rebellion. No. She clamped a hand across her mouth. Not Beryll. She was so young.

  She swallowed the bile in her throat. Sweet Sunlord, why? Beryll, you could have recovered from rape, but there’s no coming back from death… Why, oh why couldn’t you see that?

  She mustn’t think about it. Mustn’t dwell on it, or she’d lose her edge. Beryll was dead; accept it. But Kaneth? She had to believe he was still alive. His son moved within her body, and him she must keep safe, no matter what it took. She inhaled, a deep calming breath to push away the paralyzing grief. Think, woman. Start planning. You are Ryka, rainlord.

  She glanced about Ravard’s quarters. Watergiver damn, I recognize this. It’s Nealrith’s private reception room. Her next astonished thought was tinged with fear. Who the sunblast is this Ravard fellow that he warrants the Breccian highlord’s quarters?

  Davim, obviously, would be quartered in the Cloudmaster’s rooms, if he wanted them. She’d already known Ravard must be important from the way he dressed and the way he had bantered with Davim, even defying his orders to kill her. But to be assigned the highlord’s apartment?

  Davim’s son? No, not possible, surely. Ravard must have been twenty or so, and Davim didn’t look much older than Ryka herself. His sons, if he had any, would still be children.

  She shivered and wrapped her arms around her upper body. Night had fallen and the rooms were cold. The shutters had been left open, and no one had brought fuel for the night braziers. Limping because the wound in her leg pained her, she stepped out onto the balcony and looked over the balustrade for a way to escape. Her distance vision was blurred, but the burning torches helped her recognize where she was. Below was the open forecourt in front of the main doors of the hall. Now there were guards camped there and fires burned on the paving. The smell of cooked meat wafted upward. She wasn’t surprised. She knew many Reduners hated the idea of sleeping within solid buildings.

  Oh, the smell of that food… Sunlord, but she was hungry!

  Quelling all thought of eating to concentrate on her escape, she raised her eyes to the defensive wall surrounding the first and second levels. It was patrolled by Davim’s men; she
could see their shapes against the sky. If she tried to escape via the balcony, she would just be climbing down into an ants’ nest of Reduner warriors—and still be on the wrong side of the wall. There was no freedom for her that way. For a moment despair overwhelmed her.

  Her father, her mother, Beryll. All gone. Her friends, her city, her whole way of life; too much, too soon. It numbed her, and she couldn’t afford to be numb. Watergiver’s heart, she had to fight. For Kaneth. For their son. For their land.

  Closing the shutters behind her to keep out the cold of night, she stepped back inside and examined the apartment with more care by the light of the single tiny oil lamp they had left for her. If the mess was any indication, the place had been searched and looted. No, more than that: it had been the scene of a fight. The head of a Scarpen-made spear was buried in a cupboard door, the shaft missing. The tip of a sword blade lay on the floor. The rest of the weapon was nowhere to be seen. A chair was smashed, the pieces lying where they had fallen.

  She tried the door she had entered by, only to find it firmly barred from the outside. When she crossed to one of the other two doors, she found it led to Nealrith’s private study. The floor and desk there were strewn with parchment and scrolls. A dark splash of blood had sprayed across the wall and then dribbled downward in parallel lines.

  The second door opened into Nealrith’s bedroom. The bed was unmade, and a Reduner cloak had been flung carelessly over the end. The wardrobe and a trunk made of bab wood had been emptied, although some of the contents seemed to have been discarded on the floor. The entrance to a small water-room was hidden behind a carved screen. There was another door as well, bolted top and bottom. She opened the bolts, only to find it was somehow locked or barred on the other side as well. She guessed Laisa’s bedroom lay beyond.