Stormlord’s Exile Read online

  The roll of water was racing now, almost out of his control. Every now and then it skipped along the earth, collecting dust and grit, but it had its own momentum. All he had to do was keep it together.

  Some of the Reduners faltered, slowing their mounts. One of their number yelled something, but he was too far away for Jasper to hear the actual words. He hoped it was encouragement. He hoped they’d think there was no reason they couldn’t take a deep breath and splash their way through it on their pedes. After all, it was only water… People often underestimated the power of water, especially if they weren’t Gibber grubbers who’d watched the rampage of a rush down a drywash.

  In his head he pictured what he could feel unfolding. Reduner pedes churning full speed at the water. Then, at the last possible moment, every pede balking. They screeched their fear; he could hear them as they plunged and reared, careening sideways into one another as the water smashed into their faces, travelling fast. The force made it hard for the riders to stay in the saddle. Men fell and were trampled. Panicked animals scattered.

  Further away, though, more were coming. He could feel them. Damn you, Ravard. Why couldn’t you just let it be?

  Oh, Mica. Mica.

  He turned his attention to the ziggers, detaching pieces from the water over their heads to hurl at them. He chased them with water, damaged their wings, drowned them. Until every one was dead. He let the water fall, soaking himself and Elmar, unable in his exhaustion to return it to the waterhole.

  Slowly he got to his feet, his sudden frailty sending him to the panniers for something to eat. “The ziggers are all dead,” he told Elmar. “And we’ve got to get going before the next wave of men hits us.”

  Elmar stood unsteadily, then dragged himself back onto the pede, his soggy cloak around his shoulders. “I wish I could be of more help,” he said. “It’s this damned dizziness. The headaches I can put up with.” He held up his cloak, heavy with water. “Why the bleeding hells did you drop the water on top of us?”

  Jasper went to untie the reins. “I doubt you’ll be much good until you can rest instead of riding long hours in the sun. You’ve managed well, Elmar. And no, I’m not drying your cloak for you.” He glanced around for the second pede, only to find it already plodding its way up the dune after its stablemate. He patted Ravard’s pede. “This fellow did well, too. Does it have a name, do you know?”

  “Ravard called it Chert.”

  Chert. Blighted eyes.

  To remember his friend? Or to show the world he didn’t care?

  He had no idea. He did not know this man, this Ravard. But then he wasn’t sure he knew himself any longer, either. He’d taken the pede on the cusp of his anger as a petty revenge, a boy’s silliness when he thought about it, yet he couldn’t regret it. It was so withering satisfying to own that pede, to have shown Ravard he was not to be underestimated.

  “Chert it is,” he said.

  He turned the beast towards the slope of the dune, eating as they went so he’d have enough strength to deal with what was to come.

  When they were halfway up the wall of sand, he stopped a moment to look back. None of the first group of pursuers was following. They didn’t have much choice; most of their pedes were scattered and riderless, heading north in their panic. The second group had arrived on the patch of wet land. Some were helping the injured; others were taking extra men on their pedes—and were turning towards the dune. Jasper sighed. They were going to follow. As he prodded his pede upwards once more, he wearily pulled more water out of the waterhole. The twist of it trailed them up the slope, droplets dripping on the sand to betray his fatigue.

  Terelle and Dibble were waiting for them on the crest, their mount grazing in the dip behind them, joined now by its stablemate. Terelle’s gaze sought Jasper’s, her eyes anxious, as if she could sense the depth of his anguish.

  “What happened to you?” Dibble asked Elmar, horrified when he saw the state the armsman was in. “What happened to your eyebrows? The front of your hair’s all frizzled!”

  “Charred by a flame. It’ll grow back.”

  “You were burned?”

  “Just… singed. It’s sore, but no more than that. I also got clobbered on the head.”

  “He’s been groggy and ill ever since,” Jasper added as he slid off the pede. “You drive this animal, Dibble, so you can look after him. Terelle, you go with them. I’ll catch up with you shortly. I have to deal with this other lot behind us.” He smiled at her as he handed the reins to Dibble.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Tired, that’s all.”

  “Is Mica among them?”

  He shook his head. “No. And you were right, Terelle. He’s not Mica, not any more.”

  “I’ll take Elmar,” she said. “Dibble will stay with you.”

  Without a word, Dibble gave her the reins.

  “Don’t either of you listen to a word I say?” Jasper asked him, exasperated. “I am supposed to be your Cloudmaster.”

  “Then act like it,” Terelle snapped. “You’re more important than any single person in the Quartern. Dibble will stay in case you need help.”

  “I am quite capable of—”

  “Perhaps. And perhaps you’ll need help,” she added, mounting in front of Elmar. The look she gave him was calm and steady—and utterly determined. “I’ll ride on slowly.”

  He watched her go, wondering if the way he felt about her was as obvious as he thought it must be. “Remind me never to argue with her once she’s made up her mind,” he said to Dibble when they were out of earshot.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I am going to kill men,” he said.

  Them or us. He needed to sleep; the pedes needed time to eat and rest—and they still had a long way to go. The thought made him sick, but it didn’t alter his intention by as much as one drop of water.

  Lying flat on the sand, he peeped over the edge of the slope. The first pedes were already zigzagging their way upwards, sand sliding under their feet.

  He waited patiently until they were three-quarters of the way up. Then he made another tube of water and rolled it downwards. They saw it coming, hauled their mounts to a standstill and tried to hold them steady and calm. Each driver instructed his pede to mantle its eyes, and obediently, they did.

  More prepared this time, they might have succeeded in halting the panic if the only weapon coming their way was water, but it wasn’t. As the roll descended, Jasper—in his fatigue—allowed it to roll over the sand. It collected more and more grains on the outside. He began to find it difficult to hold together, and water leaked from it in streams. The flow destabilised the slope, which started to slip.

  For a moment Jasper watched. The sand-slide started as a small patch eating back into the slope. It widened, grains tumbling into the slide until a thundering wave of sand followed the water. The dune screamed. Water, then sand, hit the men and pedes. Jasper was no longer watching. He was running to join Dibble, vaulting onto his pede and shouting for them to go.

  But he couldn’t run from what he felt inside his head.

  The water that was men and animals jumbled together, bodies contorted, breaking, somersaulting, plunging, suffocating—and dying. The water alive one moment and struggling to go on living… and then life winking out, leaving only something that was still water, but insensate.

  One by one they died, and Jasper lived every death.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Red Quarter

  Northern dunes, God’s Pellets

  Dune Koumwards was twice the height of most dunes. It was on the last stages of its journey towards the Burning Sand-Sea to the north, and it clung to its position within sight of God’s Pellets with a tenacity few dunes had ever mastered. Twice its more southerly travelling companions had piled into it, raising its height and increasing its bulk. Each time, it had grown another crusting of plant life for stability.

  Its future was far from sure. Perhaps, one day, a gale
too strong to resist would come to breach that floral coat. The sand would shuck its skin and ease its way onwards. For now, though, Koumwards brooded over the north, wrinkled with ridges and rucks, frowning with creases and dips, a giant barrier containing a thousand hiding places for an army—but no water. Each plant on Koumwards eked out its existence on the moisture of dew and the skeletons of its predecessors. The dune had no waterhole, and a rainlord had to dig deep with his power to gain even a hint of the dampness at its heart.

  “We’re too far north for stormlords,” Kaneth said. “It never rains up on Koumwards or the Pellets, which is why Ravard has given only a cursory search for us here.”

  “And yet Vara found the place.” Ryka was struggling up the steep slope of the dune’s northernmost ridge on foot, her sandals entangling in the creepers, the thorny seed cases clutching at her pantaloons and digging into her calves. She cursed under her breath.

  Far below her, Vara and their warriors were preparing the camp for the night and lighting fires to cook the evening meal. There were more of them than there’d been when they’d left Qanatend. They had not ridden straight for God’s Pellets, but had visited numerous tribes on many of the dunes, recruiting more armsmen, with some success.

  Nothing like a victory to persuade folk to join your side, the cynic in Ryka thought.

  “She is wise, that old woman,” Kaneth said, still speaking of Vara. “She remembered all the old legends of the Pellets and the Source she’d been told by her grandmother, and she set off to find it based on the descriptions in the stories. The marvel is that she found a band of young warriors to follow her on her quest. Of course, wind-whispers travel fast on the dunes. She is known as the woman who outwitted Davim and his warriors after they threw her husband’s head at her feet. She has a reputation.”

  “I’m not surprised.” He is fond of her, even though they argue like horned cats in heat.

  He reached the crest and held out a hand to haul her the last pace or two. “That’s it,” he said with an expansive sweep of his free arm. “God’s Pellets.”

  She gasped. But she was looking directly down, not at the horizon. The flat plain was staggeringly far below, and it was the first time she had seen a dune with its front slope covered in vegetation.

  He grinned at her. “Hey, you’re supposed to be looking over there.” He jabbed a finger towards the north where a distant grouping of rounded uneven knolls rose from the flatness of the land between Koumwards and the next dune, Burning View.

  She squinted at the towering red rock humps that caught the light of the setting sun. “Well, you know I can’t see very well. But they do look huge.”

  “Wait until you look up at them from below. Or until you climb to the top of one of those knobs.”

  “Climb them?” she asked, wondering if it was even possible. The north is a place built on a grand scale. We are as negligible out here as sand-fleas on a pede, not even worthy of scratching.

  “It takes our sentries about half a sandrun. We have a lookout camp on eight of them. It would be hard for Ravard to creep up on us, even if he thought to look.”

  “What are your plans for the immediate future?” she asked, a wave of guilt taking her by surprise. Caught up in caring for a baby a mere quarter-cycle old, and sleeping whenever she could, she realised she had not lately played much of a role in Kaneth’s life or in forming his vision of the future. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have asked that question before this.”

  He placed a finger on her lips. “Don’t ever apologise for taking care of our son. Not ever.” He enfolded her in his embrace while he pondered her question, a faraway look in his eyes. “The answer? Patrol the dunes to contain Ravard’s marauders, recruit as many new warriors as we can, catch and train more wild pedes for our recruits. Those are the short-term goals. Vara refuses to allow an all-out war, and possibly she is right. What’s the use of a victory, if it leaves behind a world where there is nothing to salvage?” He paused again, then added, “Long term—once we have a new leader for the dunes and Ravard is dead and his warriors scattered—it will be time to go home, to be a father and a husband, to drink too much amber and grow fat and wise in my old age.”

  She laughed.

  They stood hand in hand and watched the sun set and the shadows lengthen. A wind sprang up, twisting its way along the crest, rippling the leaves around their feet but failing to stir the few patches of exposed sand.

  He said, “I’m sorry to bring you back to the dunes after what you went through, but I can’t see any way we can stabilise the Red Quarter without this Uthardim fellow playing his part. We both know he’s about as substantial as sand twirling in a spindevil, but men have been flocking to join us because of it. I never wanted this, but if I can assemble a real army, large enough to show Ravard he hasn’t a chance, and if Jasper brings water to the dunes to show his good faith, well, we might have peace enough for the Reduners to find themselves a worthy sandmaster to rule all the dunes.”

  “A dunemaster.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your greatest danger?” she asked, thinking of Khedrim’s safety.

  Again he waved a hand at God’s Pellets. “It’s a fortress, but fortresses can also be prisons. We bring in new warriors all the time. They are not allowed to go home again until they have proven themselves, and Vara or I grow to trust them, but even so our greatest danger is a traitor within.” He paused to consider his own words. “Perhaps traitor is a harsh word to use. Spy, maybe. A hero for the wrong side.”

  She thought of another question she’d never asked. “Do you think your rainlord abilities will ever return?”

  “No.”

  “Do you miss them?”

  “All the time. We’d be a lot safer here if we had a few rainlords.”

  “Your, er, other ability?”

  “It’s unreliable. And weird.” He ran a hand over the scar on his head. “That wallop on the skull just accentuated the oddness of what was there anyway. You remember how good I was at finding small amounts of hidden water when we were students?”

  She nodded.

  “I think that ability has edged out all the others. I can sense a tiny film of water, but not a dayjar. Sometimes it tells me about how a person feels. I can sense a frown, or tension in their muscles, or a heart beating faster than normal. I am assuming what I sense is a change in the water within. It is random and not dependable. It’s how I found Vara Redmane—I somehow became attuned to the wrinkles in her skin. That’s all I felt, but I knew there had to be an old woman up here somewhere.”

  “And the moving of sand?”

  He tensed, and she knew he was remembering what his manipulation of the dune had done to her. She laid her hand on his arm in reassurance.

  “When I didn’t know who I was, I wasn’t even sure I was the one who was doing it. It was just—instinctive. Reaction rather than premeditated action. Now I’ve had time to think about it? Deep in the dunes the sand is damp. Perhaps that’s the—the presence I feel and which I can move.”

  Sorcery, magic, or the Sunlord’s blessing? Unnatural and blasphemous, or supernatural and blessed? Ryka was shrivelled if she could see the difference between water-sense and whatever it was that Kaneth had.

  I’m scared of it, though, she thought. It almost killed me and I don’t believe he has the slightest idea of what he can unleash.

  But who knew? Maybe it would save them all in the end. Still, she shivered. She was a scholar, and scholars liked to understand things. She said, “If any other Reduners can feel the dunes the way you can, no wonder they speak of dune gods. This might be what shamans feel. After all, they are water sensitives. Maybe their ritual to find a new shaman is not so silly.”

  “How do they do it?”

  “The men of the dune run down one of the steep slopes. If the dune sings under the feet of one of them, he’s the new shaman. Maybe he actually starts the singing by touching the dampness within the dune.”

  He w
inced. “I’d rather be just an ordinary rainlord. Ry, I don’t want to be Uthardim. I want this all to be over, so that we can be at peace again. I have you and Kedri. The idea that I might die in some pointless battle—” He gave a half-laugh. “Once it was adventure, and dying didn’t seem to matter much. Now even the thought of it hurts because I have so much to live for.”

  “All the more reason why I don’t want you to go after Ravard just because you want revenge for what he did to me. It no longer matters, not to either of us.”

  He didn’t speak, but drew her back into his arms and buried his face in her hair. “Don’t ask me to forgive someone for hurting you, someone who tried to usurp my place as a father to Kedri. That’s too much to expect.”

  And perhaps it was.

  She changed the subject. “Do you mind that I named him after a Reduner boy?”

  “Khedrim? That helpful youngster from Ravard’s camp? Likeable, obliging lad, but a shade simple. I did wonder what made you choose the name.”

  “He’s dead. I accidentally killed him when I escaped.”

  “Ah.”

  She waited for him to say something else.

  “Ry, do you need the reminder of something so—so obviously tragic?”

  “It’s the least I can do for him. Khedrim the Reduner was a nice child. Bland words, but true. He would have made a fine, if simple man. He never will, because his path crossed mine.”

  “Ah. All right then. I call him Kedri anyway.” The look in his eyes softened. “He looks like a Kedri.”

  She laughed again. He always could make her laugh.

  They watched until the light dimmed, then walked back to the camp. She shivered in the evening chill and he draped an arm around her shoulders. “Cold?”