The Last Stormlord s-1 Read online

  "Oh dust, it's beautiful," Shale said. He pulled away from Mica, who looked at him as if he was daft, and ran to a spot further down the wash. "Down here, I think," he called back over his shoulder. "Come, we gotta try t'catch him and help him up the bank."

  "We can't haul somethin' that large," Mica protested, but already the pede had plunged through the water away from the last of the trees, struggling with all its pairs of legs, thrashing even with its feelers in an attempt to close the gap to the edge. "It'll never make it!"

  "Yes, he will."

  Shale started to scramble along the lip of the bank, looking for a way down. The flood bucked and plunged past in muddy skeins, and the closer he came to it, the more disoriented he was. He lost sight of himself, became at one with the water, unable to distinguish where he began and the river ended. He stumbled and sat down hard, clutching at his head, and felt himself begin to slide into the wash.

  Too much water, he thought. There's too much. And it won't stay still. If only it'd just stop so I can think.

  As the myriapede drew near, he slipped further down the slope and his feet plunged into the flood where it gouged at the bank. The flow tugged at him, plucking powerfully at his ankles and calves. His senses exploded. The hugeness of the expanse of water overwhelmed him; terror made incoherent nonsense of his thoughts. There was nothing that distinguished him from that expanse. He was part of it, not a boy any more. He was just water, unshaped, without boundaries.

  When something touched his face, sliding across his skin in jags, he focused on it. The pede; it was the pede's feeler reaching out to him. He grabbed it and fixed all his attention on the physical reality clutched in the solidness of his hand. The water receded from his mind, and the turbulence within him ebbed. The beast scrabbled against the bank, its feet churning up mud. Shale held tight. He slipped further into the water and struggled to dig his heels and his elbows into the mud of the bank. Terror returned as he realised he was about to be swept away. He lost his footing and swung out into the current. He tightened his hold on the feeler. As long as he had that, he could also hold on to what was real. He could keep the terror at bay.

  Water washed over his head and instinctively he held his breath and closed his eyes. The feeler, caught in the flow now that it was weighed down by his body, floated alongside the pede. Shale bumped hard against the body segments. Wincing, his head broke the surface and he opened his eyes. The black shiny side of the pede rose above him, slippery and wet and impossibly high. It blocked his view of the bank and of Mica, but even over the sound of rushing water, he heard his brother screaming his name.

  He shuddered with shock. The water wanted to enter his mind again, but this time he wouldn't let it. He grasped the feeler tight and scrutinised the pede. Mounting handles. It's got to have mounting handles somewhere. He could pull himself up.

  Towards the head, he thought, and began to haul himself along the feeler in that direction. The current tugged at him, but he ignored its clutch. The pede wasn't moving. It's hooked itself 'gainst the bank, he thought.

  When he saw the toehold slot carved into one of the segments, he knew he had the right place. He first hooked his fingers, then a foot, into the slot and levered himself up out of the water far enough to reach for a mounting handle. He hung there for a moment, then clambered up, slipping and sliding, until he was on the top of the beast where the saddle had been.

  His brother stared at him from the top of the bank. Mica was wet and covered in mud-and he held the pede reins in his hand. He was leaning back to keep them taut, braced against the weight of the pede in his effort to stop the animal drifting away. He swore at Shale, a nonstop string of obscenities.

  Shale grinned sheepishly back.

  The pede's feet found purchase on the floor of the wash as the water level dropped, and with Mica hauling on the reins it began to edge its way upwards. It dug the points of its feet into the earthen slope and finally humped its way over the top edge, Shale riding triumphantly on its back.

  I'm a caravanner, he thought. A pedeman ridin' me own beast 'cross the plains.

  For a precious never-to-be-forgotten moment of make-believe, he was free of the settle, independent of his father, unencumbered by poverty. He was Shale of the Gibber, leader of men, emerging victorious from an adventure.

  As he slid reluctantly to the ground, reality returning, Mica punched him on the shoulder none too softly. "I'll kill you if you do anything so pissing stupid ever again, you sandwitted wash-rat!" he cried. "You could have died in there!"

  Shale blinked. "Died?" He hadn't been afraid of dying. He'd been afraid of losing himself. Of not knowing what or who he was. Of becoming part of a larger whole, of being like a jug of amber spilled into a cistern until there was nothing of the original recognisable.

  "Yeah," said Mica. "Don't you know you can suffocate in water? Like chokin', 'cause there's no air."

  Shale furrowed his brow, thinking about that. He didn't remember choking. He didn't remember not being able to breathe. His fear had been that he was melting, disappearing as a person. He wanted to explain, but didn't think there were any words he could find that would make Mica understand.

  Beside him, the pede shivered with a clatter of segment plates, sending water streaming out of the joints. Then it reached out a feeler and touched the two boys one after the other, running the tip over their faces and bodies as if it needed to assess them, and remember.

  Tentatively, Shale reached out and touched the animal's head. For a moment it regarded him, then it slid its first segment down over its eyes, tucked its feelers back along its body and carefully rolled itself up into a tight ball, legs inside. The edges of the segments were embroidered with a lace fringe, tattered now, and several of the segments themselves were carved-a common custom among the Red Quarter people. They sculptured their personal myriapedes with pictures of all their journeys, so that the pede carried stories with it wherever it went, commemorating both its life and the life of its driver.

  "Reckon it's gone to sleep," Mica said, after it had stayed that way for a while.

  "I'm never goin' to eat pede again," Shale announced reverently.

  Mica gaped at him, baffled, as if unable to see what had prompted that statement. About to ask, he was diverted by the indescribable sound of earth on the move. On the other side of the wash, where the squatter shanties huddled, the bank had been undermined by water. Shocked, helpless, they watched several houses-including their own-slip down the wall of the wash and vanish into the water.

  "Ma," Mica whispered. "I'll be shrivelled, I hope Ma wasn't inside."

  Shale's heart clenched painfully. He scanned the figures rushing to and fro in front of the remaining houses. "Nah," he said, relief loosening the tightness in his chest. "Look, that's her there. No one else has a belly like that."

  Inwardly he thought, But Pa will kill me anyways.

  If Galen the sot was still alive. The Gibber Plains appeared to be flat all the way to the horizon. In truth, they were crazed through with cracks, each one a wash that started in the Border Humps to the north and then wandered southwards to the Edge. There, the plain stopped in a ragged tear as if a giant had ripped it away. A brave man could walk to the edge of the tear and peer over to see the Giving Sea several hundred paces below, the rolling surf pounding the cliff face in relentless lines.

  In the Time of Random Rain, before the rainlords commanded the clouds-or so the storytellers said-water would occasionally reach the Edge and fall over, to be wasted, evaporated into mist until the foot of the cliffs disappeared behind a skirting of white spindrift and the sea below was lost to sight.

  At dawn on the morning after the bore swept through the settle on Wash Drybone, water once again reached the Edge and plunged down towards the sea. There was no one to see it, no one to exclaim over the waste or be moved by the rainbow beauty of colour playing across the spindrift. Yet somewhere deep in their souls, several people felt that water fall and felt the loss of its purity wh
en it hit the sea. Far away in Breccia City, Cloudmaster Granthon cried out in his sleep and woke, the sadness lingering from his dream subsumed in a larger grief he could not name. In Wash Drybone, Shale Flint felt a wave of pain pass through him, and foundered in the residue of sorrow it left behind. Beside him, Mica stirred uneasily. Highlord Taquar of Scarcleft, already awake, left his bed and opened the shutters, wondering what he'd just felt. In other parts of the Quartern, some of the rainlords stirred, distressed by an event they sensed but lacked sufficient power to interpret. Shale and Mica had spent the night out under the stars. At sunset the water had still been running too high to cross the wash; later, when the water level fell, it was too dark to see. Once the sun had gone, the cold came, as always. Poorly clad and as wet as they were, they might have died in the open if it had not been for the myriapede. It curled its great body around them and although it lost heat as the night wore on, it trapped the boys' warmth within its encircling wall. Shale and Mica weren't comfortable, and Mica complained that all the water was making his head ache, but they were sheltered.

  At first light they heard voices, and as they struggled to unwind themselves from a tangle of pede legs, a Reduner peered down on them. "Who the salted wells are you?" the owner of the face asked, in tones that were far from friendly. "What you doing with my pede?"

  Shale felt his guts twist. The pedeman. He sat up saying, "We didn't hurt him!"

  Beside him, the pede woke and, still sluggish with the cold, clicked its segments apart in an unhurried stretch.

  The boys scrambled to their feet.

  "Why, it's Galen's two lads!" another voice exclaimed. Rishan the palmier. "Your da thinks you two snuffed it." He turned to the Reduner in explanation. "They're just settle lads. They won't have harmed your pede."

  The Reduner glared but didn't say anything. He was running his hand over his beast, checking for broken legs, frowning over a nick he found in the edge of a segment and fingering a torn embroidered fringe.

  "He broke the tip of one of his feelers," Shale said.

  The Reduner took a deep breath and Rishan hurriedly intervened. "Why don't you two lads run off. Your ma and pa'll be worrying."

  Nodding, Mica grabbed hold of Shale and pulled him away. "Let's go," he muttered in his brother's ear. As they scrambled down the earthen bank to the sodden floor of the wash, he added, "You don't want t'come between a Reduner pedeman and his mount. They say that a caravanner w'druther lose his son than his pede. He probably thinks we wanted to steal it or somethin'."

  "But we helped save it," Shale protested.

  "Yeah, but he's not goin' t'believe that. Hey, look at all the water!" Mica looked around in amazement. A shallow stream trickled down the centre of the wash. The slots were all overflowing. Wherever there was a dip in the riverbed, water had pooled clean and clear, with the mud and sand sunk to the bottom. The crops were all gone, but most of the bab palms stood, battered but still anchored by their tortuous root systems.

  Shale's eyes widened. "I never seen so much water lying round after a rush! And it's all goin' t'waste-just flowin' away."

  "Tell you what, I'm going t'have the best drink I've ever had in all m'life."

  "Me, too," Shale agreed reverently. He knelt at the edge of the flowing water, cupped his hands and drank deeply. When he finally looked up, chin dripping, he asked, "Do you think Pa saved enough water for the house?"

  "In what? Our hut fell into the wash, remember? We must've lost all our jars. I wish Pa'd fallen in, too, and got washed all the way to the Edge." Mica smiled gleefully at the thought.

  "You reckon Ma was worryin' herself 'bout us?"

  "Her? Don't be daft. The bitch would be glad to get rid of us. 'Specially as she's having another brat soon." He wiped his face with a wet hand. "You know what I'm going t'do? Get in and wet myself all over."

  Shale thought of the way the water had tried to swallow him up and frowned, doubtful. "Reckon we should?"

  "Why not? Isn't no settle lower down the wash t'drink it." Mica waded out into the deepest pool he could find and sat down in water up to his neck.

  Shale followed, but stopped when he was knee deep. This time it felt different. Not so overwhelming. Without the furious speed of the flood, the water was gentle, welcoming. The feeling of oneness was still there, but this time it didn't threaten; it was huge and immeasurable and it felt right. He waded in further and watched water swirl around his thighs.

  " 'S good, right?" Mica asked.

  "Cold, but wunnerful! Like… like… I don't know what it's like. Like being happy and full of water an' food an' everything good all at once." He stripped off what was left of his smock and threw it aside. Then he flung himself face down in the pool.

  The shock of being surrounded by water, of having it come up over his head, of absorbing its oneness with him: it was too much. The pleasure of its touch-the sensuality of it-threw him. He sank into the depths of the pool and his body responded to the joy. Warmth spread through his loins, swelling his stick, but in a way he'd never felt before. He gasped at the wonder of that and choked. He spluttered, pushing the water away from his face in irritation without even being aware of the impossibility of what he did. He wanted to concentrate on feeling so… so good. On the rising pleasure, the spreading heat, the rushing of his blood, the unbearable, unbearable moment of exquisite pressure when everything stood still. Then the warmth burst inside him. He shuddered, and shuddered again.

  Just as he was beginning to revel in the mind-boggling wonder of that, he found himself grabbed and hauled upwards, to break the surface. Mica, white-faced, still dressed and dripping wet, was holding his arm, yanking him into the shallows. "You dryhead-didn't I tell yer you can suffocate in water?"

  He blinked, clearing his vision, and wondered what Mica meant. Suffocate? He hadn't been suffocating, or choking. He'd been breathing, just as usual. He'd pushed the water away from his face. He flushed, remembering the rest, enjoying the memory, the glow left behind, the way it made him feel. So that was what it was like. Embarrassed, he avoided meeting Mica's gaze.

  Rivulets of water trickled down his body, and idly he rubbed at his forearm. Dirt dissolved, leaving his skin lighter.

  Mica remarked uneasily, "Folk say washin' a lot makes you sick."

  "I don't feel sick." He felt wonderful. He rubbed some more of the dirt away. "Makes me look more like ord'nary folk. Didn't know I got that colour underneath."

  Mica grabbed a handful of wet sand and scrubbed his own arm. His skin lightened as well and he started to laugh. "Let's get back in and wash all the dirt away," he said.

  "Nah. Better get back and see if Ma and Pa's all right."

  "Y'know what? I don't care. Neither of them cares as much as-as a grain of sand for us. And Pa will be in a real rotten temper. Come on, Shale. We'll prob'ly never see water like this, never again."

  He waded back into the pool. Shale wavered and then followed. They played, washing away the accumulated dirt of a lifetime, laughing and giggling at the strangeness of their appearance, at the feel of it.

  Only later, when his skin was soft and shiny and golden brown, did Shale suddenly sober up. "But we're not like ord'nary folk, are we? Not you 'n' me. Ord'nary folk live in real houses and have water allotments and don't get beat up by their pa." He looked up at his brother. "An' ord'nary folk don't know when the rush's comin' down. I felt it, Mica. A feeling inside my guts. Pa's goin' kill me."

  Mica didn't reply.

  "You reckon he'll make me go with a Reduner if one of them wants it?"

  His brother wrung the water out of his clothing and wouldn't look at him. "He's never made me do it."

  But Shale knew that didn't mean a thing. He pulled on the remains of his smock. "I won't do it," he said as they headed across the groves to where their house had once stood on the opposite bank. "Least of all for 'im."

  "The bastard'll clobber you proper."

  "Not this time. Not no more. 'Cause I'll clobber him right back. I'm done w
ith his wallopings."

  Mica stared at him, eyes wide.

  Not all the shanty houses had been demolished by the force of the water. Further away from the bank, several huts belonging to other waterless families still stood, and they found Galen leaning against one of them, talking to Ore the stonebreaker and Parman the legless. He scowled at them as they approached.

  "Where the waterless hell have you whelps been?" he yelled at them. "You know your mother's birthin' that new brat of hers and you two off enjoyin' yourselves somewheres, without a thought to what trouble we're in. We got no house, and no jars neither, just when there's water out there for the having!" He jerked a finger at Mica. "You, get back down into the wash. Pick up anything you can find that's of any use. There's wood there, Mica, washed down from the hills, I wouldn't wonder. You know how valuable wood is? Get back down there!"

  Mica gave a despairing look at Shale but didn't dare say anything. He slunk away towards the wash.

  Shale stood his ground, waiting for his father to speak to him. It weren't m'fault, he thought. None of this was my fault. The bastard's got no right t'be angry. I was the one what warned him.

  Ore laid a hand on Galen's arm. "Go easy on the lads. They could've been dead y'know."

  "Mind your own damn business, Ore. Them's my get, and I'll deal with them my way." He grabbed Shale by the arm and pulled him around to the back of the shanty house where they couldn't be seen. He shoved Shale up against the stones of the wall, bruising his back with his roughness.

  "Now you listen to me, Shale, and you listen good." He lowered his voice and hissed in the boy's ear. "That talk of knowin' 'bout the water comin' down aforehand? I don't want t'hear it. Not a word. That's shaman stuff, and nobody wants no shaman stuff. You talk 'bout that, and I'll beat you as you've never been beat before, till your tongue comes out your arse. You understand me?" He fitted his hand across Shale's cheeks, and pinched them inwards towards his nose. It hurt.