Stormlord’s Exile Read online

  Outside, someone was shouting to wake the camp, doubtless in answer to Ravard’s previous screams. And at that moment, the tent roof in the next room burst into gouts of flame, sucking air from the bedroom. Jasper hauled Elmar into a sitting position and crouched so he could drape his unconscious body across his shoulders. He staggered upright and headed for the reception room. The shouts outside grew louder and more urgent. He dragged more water from the family jar and flung it behind and ahead of him, wetting the tent walls and roof in an attempt to slow the progress of the flames.

  Just before he stepped into the room at the rear, he looked back. Ravard was on his feet in the reception room, blood still streaming down his face, coughing in the smoke, stumbling blindly towards the front door. Golden snakes of fire slithered up the tent walls. Someone was slashing the ties on the door flap from the outside.

  Jasper ran, choking, leaving his brother behind. Gasping for air, staggering under his burden, he squeezed through the slit in the back wall. As he stepped outside into the cool of the night air, the whole tent exploded as a whoosh of flame burst through the roof.

  He drew in a shuddering breath of clean air and stumbled away into the dark. Elmar was still unconscious. Above, the water from the waterhole hovered. He left it there. Behind him, the tent was aflame. He headed for the nearest pede line, not trying to hide. Men and women were running in all directions, yelling for water or grabbing up blankets to smother any cinders as a night wind gusted sparks in unpredictable eddies. Others were striking their tents to diminish the chances of them catching fire. No one took any notice of Jasper. In the confusion, he was just another Reduner, helping an injured tribesman.

  There was no one at the pede lines. He bypassed the first two tethered animals to reach Mica’s mount, the beast the two of them had saved from the rush in the drywash so long ago, the same one that had in turn saved his life when Mica first tried to kill him during the battle. He had no trouble remembering its water. The beast clicked a greeting, and ran its antennae along his body in delighted recognition. He hauled on its tether to bring it down into a crouch. Half dragging, half pushing, he manoeuvred Elmar up onto its back, draping him stomach-down across one of the segments. The wounded man muttered and groaned. Fortunately, the sound was lost in the pandemonium around them. The whole camp was awake now. Jasper wondered if Ravard was coherent enough to have told his men a stormlord was in the camp. He thought it probable; what he didn’t know was what orders he would give.

  Ravard, not Mica. Remember it.

  Oh, spitless hells. His eyeball on the floor.

  Don’t think about it, you sandworm.

  Normally a driver would have untied the tether from the mouth ring; Jasper unhitched it from the picket line. There was no saddle and, worse, no reins. But he had a prod! He’d almost forgotten; Elmar had taken one as a weapon. It would be inadequate to guide the animal, but it was better than nothing. He unhooked it from Elmar’s belt. At the head of the pede, he yanked on the mouth ring to persuade it back onto its feet, then urged it forward. When the beast was moving, he grabbed a mounting handle and pulled himself up onto the first segment.

  “Elmar, can you hear me? Wake up! You’ve got to hold on.”

  Elmar swore richly, but his words were slurred.

  “Hold on.” He took Elmar’s hand and placed it on one of the side mounting handles. “Grip that. We’re heading out of here.”

  “What the… bleeding shit… happened? My head feels… hit by a hammer.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Withering mallet… banging my skull. And that bastard… set fire to me!”

  “Quieten down, will you? I need to get us out of here before someone thinks to release every damn zigger they’ve got.”

  “Told you… this was a bad idea… you withering louse of an upleveller.” As this was punctuated by a series of groans, Jasper didn’t take Elmar’s lack of respect to heart. He urged the pede up the slope of the valley that sheltered the encampment. Once they reached the crest, he began to move the water in the sky after them. If the Reduners did want to risk their ziggers, well, he’d drown the whole lot of the flying horrors.

  “We’re being followed.”

  Elmar, battling his pain and aching head, did not reply.

  Jasper had never felt so besieged. Just moments after leaving the camp and already people were on their tail. Problems, danger, distress, guilt, responsibility—he wanted to sink under it all. Just disappear. Pretend it had never happened. Send himself back to yesterday and start all over again.

  But he couldn’t. Elmar depended on him. Terelle would be waiting for him on Dune Scarmaker. He was the Cloudmaster and the whole Quartern looked to him for life-giving water. He wanted to scream: I never asked for this! Instead, he was left with a playful pede under him and a mob of infuriated tribesmen rampaging in pursuit, armed to the teeth and bent on revenge for the affront to their pride and the injury to their sandmaster.

  Sunblast the pede. It was so happy to see him, it kept stroking him with its feelers. All he wanted was for the blighted animal to run fast in the right direction, but without a pair of reins, how was he going to achieve that? All his stupid fault too, just because he wanted to make a point to his older brother. Wanted to say: I am the one that rescued this pede from the rush down Drybone Wash. It should have been mine from the beginning. Stupid, stupid grubber that he was. He ought to have chosen an elderly staid hack that would have got them back to their own pede with a minimum of fuss.

  “Elmar, don’t pass out on me again. You have to hang on.” He’d heard somewhere that you shouldn’t let someone with a head injury and unfocused vision go to sleep, because he might never wake up. In Elmar’s case, he’d be bound to fall off the pede.

  He jabbed the pede again, and finally it rose into fast mode and raced across the dunes, its mouthparts angled into a prow at the front to push the low bushes aside, its feelers tucked along its sides to lessen the wind resistance. Jasper breathed a sigh of relief and began to calm.

  More in control now, he used his senses to note that the chaotic confusion behind them was being straightened out. It had become an organised search on pedeback. He felt the mounted men heading out in all directions, most of them to the south—but not all. Five pedes were heading east lengthways along the dune, towards him.

  He had to head back to where he’d left their own pede and all their gear. They couldn’t leave those things behind; already Elmar was shaking with cold, a reaction to his injuries. Guiding the pede with his makeshift rein was difficult; he was constantly having to correct its path. Their pursuers were gaining.

  Blighted eyes, we’re in trouble. How the withering spit do I guide the beast with one flimsy line attached to a single mouth ring?

  The answer was, he couldn’t. There had to be another way. There had to be, because otherwise they were going to be caught.

  Think. A scattering of useless ideas flittered through his head. Use fear to keep the beast from straying? What would it be scared of? A spindevil wind. Fire. Pain. Noise. Nothing useful suggested itself. He lacked the ability to conjure up a spindevil and he could hardly start a fire on the back of a pede. He could shape water, though. Something the animal wouldn’t understand and would therefore fear. A ghost pede…

  He pulled the water in the sky closer to make it more easily manageable. Splitting it in two, he moulded the halves into two huge pedes made of water and placed one on either side of his mount, each matching their speed a few paces away. Feet he didn’t bother with, but he did fashion two feelers, solid-looking things that whipped this way and that. In the dark, the water-pedes partially obscured the scenery beyond and the ground under them. Their sides rippled in the wind of their movement so that they took on eerie life. Interested, the stolen pede swung its head one way and then the other to take a look. To Jasper’s dismay, it wasn’t perturbed, but reached out with a feeler in curiosity and stroked one of the ghost beasts.

  Damn, Jasper thought. A
pede depended more on smell and feel than on its poor eyesight, and all this one sensed was harmless water.

  “What the spitless damn… are you doing?” Elmar asked. His voice was thin and weak, but at least he was coherent. And, by the sound of it, battling the pain of his burns and what must have been a colossal headache. “Did you really want to make withering playmates for the blighted animal?”

  Playmate. Of course. Jasper increased the speed of the two ghosts so they started to draw ahead. The real pede gave an excited clatter of its mouthparts and doubled its pace to catch up. Elmar groaned as the speed doubled the roughness of their ride.

  Jasper breathed again and thought of Mica. One-eyed Mica.

  When he’d plucked out his eye, his brother had not made a sound. That was all Ravard.

  His brother was really and truly dead.

  They rode at a breakneck speed into the hollow where they had left their pede. Jasper hauled on his single rein, yanking the beast’s head around so that it was forced to a halt. He jumped to the ground while they were still moving and roused their own sleepy animal.

  At Jasper’s direction, Elmar dismounted and climbed unsteadily onto the rear saddle of their own pede. “I’m going to drive you,” Jasper told him. “I’m relying on you to hold on.” He attached the lead from Ravard’s pede to the rear saddle handle of their own, then handed Elmar his cloak. “Try to keep warm. If you fall off it’s going to cost us time we don’t have, so it’s important you tell me if you’re having trouble staying upright. That’s an order, El. You understand?”

  “Understood.”

  He mounted and turned to hand Elmar his water skin. “I’m sorry about this.”

  “I was right… wasn’t I?”

  “You were.”

  “Spitless sand-tick.”

  “Indeed.” And that’s the unhappy truth. Well, I’ve learned my lesson, and you’re paying for it. He gripped Elmar briefly by the shoulder, then settled into the driver’s saddle and picked up the reins. They had a long way to go before they could feel anywhere near safe. But first he had one more thing to do.

  He took the water he had used for the ghost pedes, merged the two, then pushed it through the air, faster and faster, just at the height of a man mounted on a pede. It was the work of moments to clear the saddles of the unsuspecting riders looking for them and to spook the five mounts into a panicked scattering.

  That would slow them down.

  Unfortunately there was a whole tribe out there, scouring the desert to the south, and he was far too tired to carry another drop of water with him unless it was stoppered tight inside a drink skin.

  For Terelle and Dibble, travelling at night by starlight was not hard, even without a water sensitive with them. They had two occupied dunes to cross, Slow Eater and Ravenbreak, so they travelled only at night, hunkering down in dune valleys during the daylight hours. They arrived on the Scarmaker at dawn on the third night and rested until the sun was up and they could see Jasper’s cloud. By mid-morning they had found the waterhole. The water, the colour of emeralds, was easily accessible, and fruiting bab palms provided shade and fresh food.

  No one was there. Terelle knew the story: Sandmaster Davim had slaughtered the men of the tribe who lived nearby and enslaved the women. The only one who had escaped that fate had been Vara Redmane.

  The place was fine; it was the waiting that was tough, the waiting and wondering if Jasper and Elmar were dead or injured or taken prisoner. Then, just two sandruns after they’d arrived, they saw dust out on the plains to the north, but even half the run of a sandglass later all they could discern were two myriapedes in the lead, while a mile or two behind, five or six pedes followed at speed.

  “Something’s gone wrong,” Terelle said. “That can’t be them in front. They don’t have two pedes.”

  Dibble didn’t waste time speculating. At the first sign of the dust, he’d started saddling their mount, and he had it all packed and ready to leave long before they could recognise the drivers. “I think we’d better go, Terelle,” he told her.

  She stared at him, heart fluttering in panic. “What if it is them?”

  “What if it’s not? There’s nowhere to hide around the waterhole. What if it is them and those others are Watergatherer warriors bent on killing them—and us?”

  She nodded in reluctant agreement and mounted behind him. He turned the pede towards the foot of the steep north face of Dune Scarmaker, which began about half a mile away. It rose in a precipitous slope without vegetation or tracks, a red wave rearing above the plain like a drywash bore wave about to thunder down on them. From that angle it looked an impossible ride. She feared they’d have to dismount and walk.

  Dibble looked back at the waterhole and his eyes widened. She turned and saw water being sucked up, spinning out of the waterhole into a twisting pillar.

  “Shale,” she said.

  “Lord Jasper,” Dibble said at the same moment.

  “I don’t think we should wait anyway,” she said, suddenly even more anxious. “They are in a tremendous hurry.”

  He prodded the pede hard in answer, and it moved off at a smooth run. “We’ll wait at the top. His instructions were for me to look after you and that’s just what I’m going to do. Don’t worry,” he added with irritating cheerfulness. “There’s a heap of water there in the waterhole still, and what a stormlord can do with water is withering marvellous.”

  He tried to guide the pede straight up the dune. The animal balked and for a moment they battled, driver and mount. When they slid backwards as much as they advanced, Dibble gave up and let the pede decide how to tackle the slope. It began to zigzag at an angle.

  Terelle took little notice. Her heart was pounding in fear, not for herself, but for Jasper. She kept staring back at the scene as it unfolded below. The racing pedes looked as small as millipedes; the dust was a mere scuff on the landscape. They were too far away to make out who it was in the lead. To her dismay, she could now see that the first group of pursuing Reduners were not the only ones; further back was an even larger number, a mixed group of myriapedes and packpedes with multiple riders.

  Oh, Shale, she thought in dismay. How your brother must hate you.

  The waterhole ahead had blazed in Jasper’s senses all the way from Dune Ravenbreak, like the distant flaming of a caravansary beacon. He knew its shape, its depth, its amount even before he reached ahead and hauled out what he needed. No subtlety, he just yanked. And it came.

  He turned in the saddle to look at Elmar, still seated immediately behind him. Elmar’s face was ashen; even in this dry heat, his skin glistened with sweat. “I’m fine,” he said.

  A lie, my friend.

  Such rotten luck. They had evaded their pursuers soon after leaving Ravard’s encampment. They’d hidden out on Dune Sloweater during the day, and then crossed undetected to the other side of Ravenbreak in one intense overnight ride. Unfortunately, with the dawn, things had gone wrong. They’d been spotted by a local hunting tribal party, who—noting they were unbeaded—had proved unfriendly. Not wanting to lead the Reduners to Terelle, they’d taken a circuitous route south and finally shaken them off. They’d then risked riding across the plains to Scarmaker during the day, only to be spied by Ravard’s men while they were out in the open, just a sandrun short of the waterhole.

  Grimly, Jasper rolled the water he’d collected into a long cylinder, hollow in the centre, about as wide in diameter as a pede was high, and long enough to block those following him if he placed it across their path. After pulling it into place behind him, he hovered it ten or twenty paces across his trail, above the ground.

  He gave a quick glance to the dune, still half a mile away. He could see a pede nearing the crest and felt Terelle’s water there.

  “Ziggers!” Elmar warned.

  Jasper heard them too. A flock of them, by the intensity of their screaming, still distant and already audible. Fear ran shivers of cold sweat down his spine.

  A man’s eye o
n a knife blade. An eye socket ripped and bleeding. And for what?

  Vile, horrible things.

  They reached the edge of the waterhole at full speed. Elmar loosed the second pede to take care of itself and Jasper brought the mount they were riding at the time—the one he had stolen from Ravard—to a clattering halt. He leapt down, guided it into a circle and yelled, “Get down and into the centre!” He linked the reins from the mouth rings to the rear mounting handle, pulling them tight so that the pede’s head rested against its rear in its normal sleeping position, with himself and Elmar inside the circle of its body. The beast shuttered its eyes, and hunkered down on its softer belly, adopting the posture that was its defence against ziggers.

  “Blighted eyes,” Elmar muttered, “I really wish you could kill the rainlord way.” He flung his cloak over himself and huddled low, face buried in his lap, hand over his ears.

  “So do I.” Jasper knelt, but remained uncovered; his senses were with the water he had dragged from the hole, with the riders, with the ziggers, those speeding horrors, now well ahead of those who had released them. He dropped the roll of water until it almost touched the earth, then trundled it forward towards riders and ziggers, faster and faster, a giant spool rolling across the plains.

  A few of the ziggers flew into it, and drowned as their wings were ripped away. Most simply flew higher over the top. He felt them coming. How many? Forty? Fifty? Hurriedly, he pulled more water out of the waterhole and formed it into a round slab big enough to place across the curled body of the pede, like a lid for a pot.

  The next few moments were a chaotic hell within his head. The sense of water on the move bombarded him from all directions. The roll of water. Men on pedes. Some close, some still so distant. Fifty tiny bodies flying this way and that, visible in the air above them although distorted through the water, disappointed to find the soft, tasty human prey out of reach. Some crept into the crevices between the pede segments and pierced the thick skin with their pointed mouthparts to drink the blood. The pede clattered its segments in mild irritation. Other ziggers, frustrated by skin that was too thick for them to eat their way through, continued to seek a passage to their preferred human victims. Keeping track of them all, just in case, was like trying to keep an eye on individual ants after kicking over their nest. At least none headed up the dune towards Terelle and Dibble.