The Last Stormlord (18 page)

“Hush, Ethelva. Apart from our duty as hosts, we can ill afford to offend them now. I have been short-sending their storms for several years. They will have no reserves. All their waterholes will be operating at the bare minimum.”

“Was that… wise?”

“Wise?” He snorted. “Wise to cut the allotment of a volatile quadrant of nomads who live just to the north of us, all well armed with ziggers, scimitars and spears, warriors renowned for their ferocity, mounted on the best pedes in the Quartern?” Troubled, he ran a hand through his thinning hair. “So far they have enough, but the cuts will have worried them.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “It will be an awkward meeting at best. Fortunately for me it is the Scarmakers who have come and not that young hothead Davim from Dune Watergatherer. That lot would feed my eyeballs to their ziggers as an appetiser.” He levered himself to his feet.

Ethelva rose immediately as well. “I wish one of the rainlords was available to accompany you.”

He looked at her in affection. “I am hardly in danger from these men. And I am not defenceless, either. Not yet. I feel sure I can still take a man’s water.”

“I’ll see that your clothes are laid out.” She walked out without waiting for him, knowing he would bless her for it. He hated her to see just how slow he was nowadays. How
old
.

There was a strong smell in the nomad tent.

It wasn’t that the Reduners never washed—they did in fact, often, because they liked to swim and had no qualms about doing so in the same waterhole that supplied their drinking water. The smell was exuded not by people but by the ziggers in their cages.

Granthon had long since had them banned from Breccia City. If he’d had his way, they would have been banned throughout the Quartern, but the Reduners regarded them as part of their heritage and would never have countenanced limitations on what they called their ancestral right to own and travel with ziggers. They had a point. As a hunting people, they might have starved without the use of their traditional hunting weapon.

Some cities of the Scarpen Quarter allowed ziggers to be carried for protection or used for hunting for sport, even though the number of citizens who died as a consequence of zigger accidents was, to Granthon, astonishingly high. They also fell into the hands of criminals from time to time, and then there would be a spate of robberies where victims were threatened or killed by zigger-carrying bandits.

The smell of them in the tent was strong but not all that unpleasant, except that it reminded Granthon of his reluctance to impose his will on the Red Quarter.

He avoided looking at the cages and glanced around the tent. The man who came forward to greet him he knew: Tribemaster Bejanim, who carried the title Drover Son with the honorific Kher, because he was responsible for Dune Scarmaker’s pedes. He was also the younger brother of the Scarmaker sandmaster and he spoke the language of the Quartern fluently. Granthon was pleased to see him and acknowledged his gesture of salutation before turning his attention to the rest of the tent. The usual mats and cushions: basic colour, red. Refreshments laid out. Four other tribemasters (he knew them all). At least they were still smiling. As he returned their greetings and spoke the usual Reduner set phrases of hospitality, he reflected that Nealrith wasn’t the only one who was too weak to rule the Quartern; he himself had displayed weakness and a deeply rooted disinclination to do anything that would result in confrontation. He should have banned ziggers from the Scarpen Quarter at the very least.

With the formalities finally out of the way, including the ritual offering and acceptance of water, Granthon turned to the reason that the Reduners had crossed the Warthago Range and the Sweepings to come to Breccia. “Well, Kher Bejanim, old friend,” he said, “what is it that causes you to honour my city with your presence?” He stirred uneasily. His joints did not take kindly to sitting cross-legged on a carpet.
I’m too old for this
, he thought.

“Not a happy ride, m’lord. Our waterholes are little more than mud wallows. My brother, the Sandmaster, wishes to remind you of the ancient handclasp between the people of the Red Quarter and the stormlords of the Quartern. He says to inform you that the tribes of the Red Quarter have kept their clasp tight.”

“Indeed they have. They are an honourable people.” A lie, that. The Reduners were renowned more for their breaking of promises than for the honouring of them. However, Granthon was well aware of the terms of this particular agreement—the scribes of Breccia Hall had written it down even if the Reduners had not—and it was true that the Red Quarter had followed most of its clauses. They’d promised not to raid the other quarters as they had done with terrifying ruthlessness for generations. They’d acknowledged the cloudmaster as the head of all the Quartern with certain rights to taxes and privileges. In return, they’d received regular rain at places specified by the Reduners themselves.

Granthon added smoothly, “We, too, have followed the agreement.”

Kher Bejanim’s red face flushed still deeper in colour. “Not so. Our water is too little.”

“We promised regular rain in sufficient quantities. We have done that. You do not thirst.”

“No, not yet,” Bejanim admitted. “But if the next storm around my dune’s main waterhole was but a week or two late, the result would be unthinkable.”

“Kher Bejanim, I’ll not lie to you. I cannot maintain previous levels of rainfall, not when I have to do it alone. The reduced levels will continue until such time as another stormlord is found. This is not negotiable. I do not have the strength for it to be any other way. My reduced storms are still more dependable than rain based on the vagaries of nature. Believe me, you do not want a return of the Time of Random Rain.”

The four men were silent and motionless.

“This is not good news,” Bejanim said finally. “It grieves us.”

Granthon found he had to suppress an involuntary shudder at the flint he heard in Bejanim’s tone. He said quickly, “Even as we speak, our rainlords scour the Gibber for new blood to restore our ranks. We have every confidence of success.”

“Cloudmaster, I hope you’re right.” More levels of meaning there, stacked one on the next. Bejanim gave a fleeting glance at the man next to him before continuing. “You’ve been honest with us; I’ll be honest with you. We older tribesmen, those of us from dunes that follow the traditions closely, are losing control of some of the younger pede hunters and drovers on other dunes. They are angered by the diminishing rain. They blame you city dwellers. They speak of returning to the old ways.”

“Old ways?”

“ ‘Free of the Scarpen harness’ are the words they use. Free to raid and plunder when they feel like it.”

“Free to steal water.”

“Yes.”

“They would be worse off.”

“
I
believe you. But the young, as ever, prefer action to waiting. I am not sure how long the wisdom of older heads will prevail. Take this as a warning, Cloudmaster, meant in friendship, not as a threat uttered by an enemy. Do not cut our water any further. Ever.”

Granthon’s heart sank as he bowed his head in acknowledgement. He knew the links between the dunes were even looser than those between Scarpen cities. There was an overall leader—traditionally the sandmaster of Dune Scarmaker—but he had little way of enforcing his rule unless there was consensus to begin with. “I will take an oath,” he said carefully, “that I will never cut the Reduners’ water one drop more than I cut that of Scarpermen. We will live or die together, Kher.”

Once again there was a long silence. Then one of the older tribesmen spoke, a shrivelled ancient called Firman, if Granthon remembered correctly. “There be old story among drovers,” he said, his desert accent thick, his words clipped short, “telling of nomad, name Ash Gridelin. Learned water-powers from Watergivers, became first stormlord.”

“We have the same story,” Granthon said, “although we believe there was but one Watergiver, Ash Gridelin himself, who now sits at the right hand of the Sunlord. Our waterpriests pray—”

“Pah!” Firman said dismissively. “What they know, men living inside dried mud, never feeling sand beneath feet? Watergivers not gods.”

Granthon gave Bejanim a questioning look.

Bejanim looked embarrassed. “It’s a legend of our people. In it, the Watergivers are many, not just a single god. It says they live in a place where there’s all the water you could ever want—”

“I understand there are many such places,” Granthon said, “across the Giving Sea. Unfortunately for us, people live there already.”

Bejanim ignored the interruption. “The story says that the Watergivers have power over water, but that they hide their land from the greed of the thirsty. That there are guardians who prevent us from ever finding them or their land. Some think the shimmering sand-dancers of the plains are in fact the guardians, dancing to lead a man away when he strays too close to the paths that lead to the Watergivers’ land. The tale says that the Watergivers took pity on Gridelin when he was lost and admired his courage so they gave him the power to be a stormbringer and cloudbreaker. They sent him on his way and hid their land again. Legend has it that someone will find the Watergivers once more, when the need is at its greatest. In the past, some of our young hotheads have searched. None ever returned. It’s said that one must find the key to the guardians first.”

Granthon hid his irritation. “The story might be of more value if it told us where to look.”

“Be wisdom to listen old stories,” Firman said. The words were bland, but the tone was layered with contempt.

“I do,” Granthon replied. “But I can’t see how this one helps us.”

Firman grunted, barely concealing his disdain for the Cloudmaster.

“More water?” Bejanim asked, proffering the jug.

When he emerged from the tent some time later and straightened his tired body in the full heat of the afternoon sun, Granthon felt the grip of panic around his heart. How long could he hold on? He could feel power slipping away from him like water disappearing into desert sand.

Sunlord
, he thought,
is that how you will end our era, having us slain by ziggers wielded by renegade nomads?
The thought was more a prayer for mercy than an accusation.

Oh, Ethelva, I have loved you so. And now I cannot even protect you from what is to come.

Gibber Quarter

Wash Drybone

The distance shimmered in dance. From afar, the figure plodding across the Gibber Plain stretched and split and rejoined, now an elongated giant, now several thin-limbed sand-dancers. But there was no one to see it, no one to note that the illusion was larger than the reality: a boy of thirteen or fourteen, on foot, lugging a sack of resin on his back. Far beyond him, the sand-dancers swayed and cavorted…

Shale had spent three days collecting out on the plains; now he had run out of water and was desperately thirsty. He shifted the weighty sack from left shoulder to right. The harvest had been good and the resiner would pay him well. It riled Shale that he couldn’t sell direct to the caravanners; he would get more tokens that way. But then, maybe not. Caravanners would try to cheat him. Besides, the resiner would make life unbearable, maybe even go to his father. No, it was better this way, at least for the time being. The last thing he wanted to do was rile Galen.

After the unexpected rush down the drywash, a full year ago, his father had hated him with renewed vigour, even though he rarely raised a hand to him any more. Shale was as grateful as he was puzzled. Surely his father could not fear him as some sort of shaman simply because he had sensed the coming of the rush.

He stopped for a moment, long enough to taste the air with his senses. He had been feeling water from an unexpected direction for some time now. Wash Drybone Settle was ahead of him, in the south-east. The Giving Sea was to the south, a long way off, but large enough for him to feel its water as a vague mistiness. What he felt now, though, was to the north and it was coming closer. It wasn’t a cloud this time, he was sure of that.

Uneasy, he turned to study the horizon behind. It was never wise to travel alone on the plains; some who travelled the desert regarded a lone fossicker as prey. And Shale had a sack of resin, laboriously collected from gummy plants, drop by precious drop. He strode on, quickening the pace a little in spite of his fatigue and thirst. He would be glad to reach the safety of the wash. In a wash, one could hide.

By the time he dropped down into the dry riverbed about two sandglass runs later, he was staggering with the light-headedness of water deprivation. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and it took physical effort to detach it. In spite of his disorientation, he took care to hide the sack in amongst the rocks. The water on the move was much closer now. From this distance, he could not differentiate water in jars, water in people or water in animals, so the presence he felt could have been a wild herd of pedes—rare outside of the Red Quarter but not unheard of—a caravan on the move or even people on foot. The latter he doubted. Whatever it was, it was moving fast and there was a lot of water present.

He ignored its approach and attended to his more immediate needs. He crouched for a moment and cast about for water close by. Concentrated.

A feeling, an awareness. Not something he could explain. It was just there: knowledge that there was water to be found a short walk up the wash. When he arrived at the place, the knowledge was even more pressing and he could narrow down the position. About five hand spans deep, there was a pocket of water caught in a basin of rock. He would have to dig down for it, but he had expected that. He set to work.