The Last Stormlord (33 page)

“Shale,” Taquar continued, more gently this time, “we who are rainlords or stormlords, we have to make sacrifices. For without us, thousands of people would die of thirst and hunger. We have to put them before our selfish needs. What I ask of you—what the Quartern asks of you—will never be easy. If I appear hard or unfeeling, that is the reason. You are one of us and must grow up to be a man of honour.”

Shale wasn’t quite sure that he understood the meaning of the word “honour,” but he nodded anyway.

He was glad when Taquar changed the subject and returned to his lessons on moving water.

He tried. He worked at it all day, trying to send the water from one bowl to another. For the first two hours, nothing happened, except that he became frustrated and helpless. He didn’t know how he was supposed to do it, and the water never budged.

Halfway through the morning, Taquar came to sit at the table. “Close your eyes, Shale, for a moment,” he said.

Shale did as he was asked.

“What am I doing with the water?”

“You’re pourin’ it into that plate thing.”

“Not into the other bowl?”

“Nah.”

“
No
, not nah. And yes, you are right. How do you know?”

He thought about that. “I can feel the shape of the water.”

“Good. You can open your eyes.” Taquar poured the water back into the bowl. “From now on I want you to think of the water as a shape, not as something in a container. I want you to change the shape, with your mind. Change it so that it will come out of this bowl and drop into the other.”

Shale sighed and tried again.

He still had not raised as much as a ripple on the surface of the water by lunchtime.

When Taquar once again approached him, he cringed.

“It will come,” Taquar said. “You can’t expect to have it happen all at once. It takes years to learn how to be a rainlord, years more to be stormlord. One step at a time.”

Shale looked at him in wonderment.

Taquar must have understood something of his surprise because he added, “You won’t get beaten by me, lad. Not when you do your best to please. Anyway, take a rest. Here, eat this.” He handed him food in a bowl.

Shale stirred the mixture and tasted it carefully. “That’s real good. Highlord, what’s—what’s Scarcleft like?”

“Large. Larger than anything you’ve ever seen.”

Shale reduced the idea of large to something he could understand. “Twice as large as Wash Drybone Settle?”

Taquar threw up his hands. “Waterless heavens, lad, but you are ignorant.” He rose and went into the storeroom and came back with a book. He undid the ties that kept the parchment pages in place between the end-boards, and turned the first pages over to find what he was looking for. “Here, this is Scarcleft.” He pushed the page over to Shale. It had a woodcut picture and some writing underneath.

Shale studied it but had trouble understanding the drawing. Finally he realised he was looking at a settle of enormous proportions, tipped down a hill slope that was many times higher than the banks of the wash back home. He had seen slopes like that only on his journey to the waterhall. “Whassit say unnerneath?”

“What does it say underneath?” Taquar corrected.

Carefully Shale repeated the words.

“It says that this is Scarcleft, a city of the Scarpen Quarter.”

Shale wanted to ask more, but he sensed that there was a limit to the amount he could pester Taquar at any one time and have him remain pleasant. The rainlord was already beginning to sound bored. He abandoned the idea of another question and said instead, “I wanna—”

“I want to—”

“I… want… to learn how t’read.”

Taquar stared for a moment, considering. “That’s an excellent idea. It will give you something else to keep you occupied while I am gone. It’s easy enough.” He indicated some of the writing on the open page. “Each one of these marks is the sign for a sound. We call them letters. There are forty-eight of them. Learn them all, and you can read. Look.” He dipped a finger in one of Shale’s bowls of water and drew a letter in water on the table. “This is the letter we call ‘shi.’ It says the first sound in your name. And this symbol is the second sound, and this the third. Sh… ay… el. Shale.”

Shale’s mind blossomed with the concept. So that’s what reading was! Suddenly something that had always seemed so arcane was within his reach. He pointed to the words under the picture. “Which one says Scarcleft?”

“That one,” Taquar said, pointing. “There are quite a few books in the storeroom. You may look at them while I am gone. Make sure your hands are always clean, and always tie the end-boards back on when you finish.” Quickly he sketched four more letters on the table and explained the sounds they represented. “I’ll teach you some more tomorrow before I leave,
if
you can remember these,” he said. “Now, finish your meal.”

The next morning, when Taquar left, Shale watched him ride away with a growing sense of disbelief. The rainlord really was leaving, taking his ziggers with him. And he, Shale, was going to have to spend his time alone, unprotected.

It felt strange.

It wasn’t that he had never been alone. He had, often—whenever he went into the Gibber to collect resin. The open space of the Gibber he had regarded as friendly; even its trackless and waterless nature had not scared him. He could always sense where the settle and the wash were. He could sense the water in the cisterns, in the ground. The familiar had never been far away. Sometimes he had worried about the people he might meet out there, but he’d never feared the place itself or the loneliness of it.

But now he felt trapped.

The grille was closed and he had no idea how to open it. What if Taquar never came back? The food would not last forever, and he had nothing he could use to force open the grille.

And what if his enemies came? What if
Davim
came?

He stood at the grille and watched as the speck that was Taquar and his pede grew smaller and finally vanished into the stony soil and dry gullies of the Scarpen.

I have got to find the way out of here
, he thought. He considered the pipes into the—what was it called? Tunnel?—and shivered. If he tried that and got stuck halfway…
No, I have to find out how to lift that grille.

But as hard and as long as he studied it, he couldn’t see how it was done. All he knew was that it had something to do with moving water. Controlling water, that was the key. He had to learn, and learn quickly.

He went back to the table and the two bowls, one full, one empty.

Taquar had actually not given him good advice: he had told him to concentrate, but in concentrating, he lost his affinity with water. It was not until he realised that the secret was focus and relaxation, not concentration and stress, that he could ripple the water at will. The next day, he slopped some of it from one bowl into the other, and he smiled for the first time since Citrine had died.

After that he relaxed still more. No one came to threaten him; there was no pressure from anyone to perform. Taquar was not there to watch his every move; he could advance at his own pace, to suit himself.

He
was
lonely. Without Mica he was bereft, and the pain of loss was welded onto him, part of his being. He knew what Taquar had said was true: the horror at Wash Drybone Settle had not been his fault. Yet it was still a tragedy that was undeniably linked to his gift, and
that
motivated him. If he could become a stormlord, then he could undo some of the damage. He could free Mica.

He spent hours moving water drop by drop from one bowl to the other. He slopped it, dribbled it, splashed, wasted it—but gradually he moved it. The day he moved the entire contents from the first bowl to the second in a steady stream he celebrated by going for a swim.

Within a day of Taquar’s departure, he had found being cooped up in the rooms a physical irritation. He wanted more space, and so he gravitated towards the waterhall every evening. The rock walls of the cavern rose sheer from the water’s surface in several places, which meant he couldn’t walk around the lake. He could sense its depths—cold, bleak and dark—and one part of him was wary. He remembered the power of the rush down Wash Drybone, the way he had lost himself. Mostly, though, this still water held no fears for him. It fascinated. Its power, its weight, its immensity—his bodily
need
of it. He understood it, recognised it so easily, felt kinship with it. He knew, without consciously dwelling on it, that he himself was mostly water.

For the first few days he just looked. The lake, so large and still, seemed a sacred thing, not to be taken lightly. Now, though, he was a
mover
of water, a rainlord, and he saw it differently. He remembered how good it had been to submerge himself in water that day with Mica, and now it felt right to do it again. And so, to celebrate his success, he walked into Scarcleft’s drinking supply.

The cold water moved over his naked body like a living thing, connecting with him and yet not blending with him. Toughened by a lifetime of desert nights covered only by burlap sacking, he was not bothered by the temperature. He waded in waist-deep, crouched down and let the water lift him, hold him, cradle him in the gentle, arousing embrace of a lover. This time, though, he controlled his urge. This time, it seemed right to accord respect to something that allowed him to have power over its very movement, to respect something that could have killed him with its own power. He remembered every moment of being hurled this way and that in the surge of the rush.

This time he didn’t sink in the water like a token dropped into a dayjar, either. He splashed around on the surface, discovering that if he thrashed his arms and kicked his legs, he could move as he willed. He ducked his head under and tried to move water away from his nose and mouth, the way he had in the wash pool, but found he couldn’t duplicate the effect now that there was no urgency.

Never mind
, he thought.
I can practise
.

When the cold finally did drive him out, he felt cleansed. Uplifted. Jubilant. He was surely a water-mover. A rainlord.

I was born for this
, he thought.

Then:
Mica, one day I will use my power to save you.

That same evening, he thoroughly explored the storeroom. As he uncovered one treasure after another, he found himself the possessor of an abundance of riches—more, surely, than any one person could ever want. There were extra blankets to keep out the cold of desert nights. There were supplies of oil and salt and amber. There was dried bab mash for pedes. There was the food that Taquar had left behind for him: strips of dried pede meat—which Shale refused to touch—nuts and nut paste, bab fruit, pickled kumquats, dried figs and apricots, salted eggs, raisins, honey and yam biscuits. There were odd items of clothing, both for adults and for children of different ages, and there was even a child’s gold bracelet.

Reduner caravan women occasionally wore gold bangles, but Shale had never seen one with metalwork as finely executed as this. The centrepiece was a flat gold disc intricately carved with a word—which he could not read—surrounded by fruit-tree blossoms. It was obviously valuable, and Shale could not imagine why it was so carelessly tossed in amongst a pile of clothing. He laid it aside and turned his attention to other items. Extra pede harnesses, water skins, saddle cloths and cushions, pede packs, zigger-feeders… and books.

He opened every one of the books that night, looking at them by lamplight. He took exaggerated care not to knock over the lamp and spill the oil, or worse, set fire to the parchment sheets. Most of the writing was just strings of words he couldn’t read. Fortunately there were eight or nine books with pictures, including one that had page after page of drawings, each carefully labelled, of living things—beetles, moths, sand crawlers, pebble speeders and pebblemice, ant sippers, night-parrots and the like—most of which Shale recognised. He grinned, delighted.

Before he had left, Taquar had taught him a total of twenty letters, twenty out of forty-eight, and Shale was desperate to learn the remainder. Once he knew each letter and the sound it made, he believed, he would be able to read, and that excited him. He had
seen
the city of Scarcleft, simply because there was a picture in the book; how much more could he learn if he knew what people
wrote
about the city? And now here was a chance to learn all the letters without waiting for Taquar to come back.

He knew what an ant sipper looked like, and the drawing he had in front of him definitely portrayed that little desert-living creature: long tail, furry nose, strong feet for digging, long tongue for eating ants. He traced out the letters underneath, two words, as should be expected. Ant sipper. And the letters he already knew were exactly where they should have been. His grin broadened: he
could
teach himself to read.

That night he fell asleep smiling.

After a while he developed a routine. He kept the rooms, and himself, as clean as possible, just as Taquar had insisted he do. He couldn’t see the point of sweeping up the dust (it was going to blow right back in again) or folding his blankets every morning (he would just have to unfold them again at night) or cleaning his teeth (he was going to eat with them again, after all)—but Taquar had wanted him to do these things, so he did. He came to like the feel of all this cleanliness. No grit beneath his bare feet, no greasiness on his skin, no coating on his teeth. It was pleasant, and there had never been much that was pleasant in his life before.