The Last Stormlord (34 page)

The water exercises tended to become boring after a while, and he didn’t proceed nearly as fast as he would have liked. The gains he made were small ones: a little more control, a little more precision, one tiny step at a time. Fortunately, life in Galen’s erratic household had taught him patience, and the son of a drunkard learned never to expect miracles, never, in fact, to expect.

Still, the loneliness continued. He started to feed a pouched mouse that came each evening at dusk, looking for insects in the hallway, but it remained shy. Sometimes he talked to Mica, telling him everything that happened, as if he could hear. He found himself longing for Taquar to return.

*   *   *

When the rainlord did return, it was a disappointment. After a few hours, Shale was remembering the man’s remote coolness. He brought food and more books and more clothing, although Shale thought that last an unnecessary extravagance. He appeared content with Shale’s progress with regard to water sensitivity. He complained that the floor hadn’t been kept clean enough and scolded him for not washing his clothes.

“I’ve learned a lot of readin’,” Shale told him. “I can read whole pages—”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” Taquar said. “Now go and brush my pede.” Shale subsided, hurt by the rainlord’s indifference, and went to perform the task.

That evening, after the sun had set, Shale noticed a light out in the desert. He stared, so startled by the idea of someone being out there that it was a moment before he could even think straight.
A fire,
he thought. It was the flickering of flames from a distant camp fire. He blocked out the idea of the water behind him in the waterhall—which he had once found impossible to do—so that he could concentrate on whatever was beyond the grille. Finally he isolated one person, only one, and a pede.

He went back into the main room. “There’s someone out there,” he said. He was shaking, but flattened his tone so Taquar would not hear the fear he felt.

The rainlord’s head swung up and he paused, focusing. “Ah. I have been expecting a visitor. Doubtless this is he.” He laid down the book he had been reading by lamplight and stood. “That was well-sensed, Shale. I am pleased with your progress. I will ride out to meet him alone. There is no point in him knowing you are here.”

“Whossit?” Shale asked.

For a moment he thought Taquar would refuse to answer. Then he said, “Who is it? I rule a city, Shale. There are matters that concern me that are better dealt with away from Scarcleft. Sometimes with men from other Scarpen cities, even Reduners. The man is a messenger, merely.”

When Shale glared, he said, “Not all Red drovers are evil men, you know. There are moderate men among them who need to be cultivated. But who this is and why he is here is none of your concern.”

Shale concentrated when the rainlord lifted the grille, trying to sense what happened. He thought Taquar moved water from one place inside the rock wall to another, through a pipe of some kind, and as a result the barrier opened. However, the rock blocked his feeling for the water within, so he found it difficult to understand precisely how it worked.
I will in time
, he thought.
I must.

Taquar closed the grille behind him, and Shale watched him walk away. He had a loaded zigtube swinging at his side, and the insects screamed with rage at their close confinement. In their agitation, the odour they exuded was sharply tangy, the smell of toxins that kill with unimaginable agony.

He still didn’t like them.

“But how d’you
know
I am a stormlord?” Shale asked the next morning over breakfast. “And not just a rainlord?”

“Because you sense water with such ease. I knew right from the beginning, when we were in Wash Drybone Settle.” He leaned back in his chair, rolling his mug between his hands. “One day you will bring all the water we need, from the sea, just as Granthon used to do.”

“Is he still alive? Y’said he was almost snuff—er, you said he was dyin’.”

“He is. And taking a long time about it, too. Fortunately for us.”

“How long ’fore I can help him?”

“That depends on how hard you work. Several years at least. I don’t know. I’ve never trained a stormlord before.”

“Why don’t y’take me to Granthon then? He’d know the best way t’train me. He went through it hisself.”

The rainlord’s face became curiously blank. “Because he is Nealrith’s father. How long do you think you would be safe? Use your head.”

Shale swallowed unhappily. Arguing with Taquar always made him feel vaguely threatened.
He’s not Pa
, he told himself.
He’s not going to lam you.
He said, “If he’s snuffed it, he can’t teach me nothin’ and we’re all in a heap of pedeshit.”

The highlord’s expression changed from blankness through exasperation to something else Shale could not quite read, but the stare was unsettling. “You will stay here,” Taquar said finally, “until you learn enough to look after yourself. Then I will take you to Scarcleft. Now go and feed the ziggers.”

Shale obeyed.

As he lay in bed that night, his discontent grew. He wanted to rebel, but wasn’t sure what he wanted to rebel against. His imprisonment in the mother cistern? Not being taken to meet the Cloudmaster? Not being able to search for Mica? His fate generally? Something was not right.

I got t’know things
, he thought.
Them books aren’t enough, specially if I can’t read proper.
He wanted more. Much more.

The next day, he begged still more books from Taquar and continued to pester him with questions. Finally, the rainlord said, more in exasperation than in a spirit of helpfulness, “I’ll ask a few of the Scarcleft Academy teachers to select books for you. In fact, I’ll ask them to set you some written work to do and then I’ll take it back for them to mark. That should keep you happy. You can ask them questions in writing instead of asking me in person. I’m no teacher.”

“But I can’t write! Can’t read proper, neither.”

“I can’t read properly,” Taquar corrected.

“Can’t read proper
ly
, neither.”

Taquar sighed. “Then you will have to learn, won’t you? I’ll teach you more letters and words today and you can practise writing them. However, if you have written contact with teachers, I will need your promise that you will not tell them who you are or where you are.”

“Course not,” Shale said.

Inside, his mind was already bubbling with ideas and questions to ask, answers he wanted. Something told him that the key to his future lay in how much he could understand of things he had never seen.

That first visit of Taquar’s set the temper of all his visits. He came bringing books, food and other necessities; he tested the progress of Shale’s water sensitivity, made sure that the state of the rooms was to his liking and criticised if it wasn’t. He started to bring lessons from Scarcleft Academy teachers and take back the completed exercises. He’d glance at them, but their content did not seem to interest him much. He was more concerned that Shale learn to speak properly; sloppy speech he corrected without fail. Shale soon learned to mimic Taquar’s accent and grammar, until his speech was no longer an issue between them.

At first, Taquar came every ten days; then the time between visits began to lengthen, until it was usually thirty days. He never stayed more than four days, usually less. And on some visits, he walked out towards the light of a distant fire in the desert. He never mentioned the reason for it again, and Shale did not ask. He always loaded his zigtube before he went, but whether he ever had cause to use it, Shale never knew.

The water exercises became more complex and difficult. He had to move plain water through coloured water without mixing the two. He had to move water through a maze without letting it touch the sides or base. He had to identify which out of a number of different-shaped containers held more water—and sometimes the difference could only be measured in drops.

Gradually his knowledge of the Quartern increased as his reading improved and he learned to write sufficiently well to communicate with his teachers. A map he found in the storeroom was invaluable. The only other maps he had ever seen were temporary things drawn in the dirt by caravanners; this one was an entry point into another world that he had not known existed. He’d had no idea that the Quartern was so
large
. That Wash Drybone Settle was so small. That distances were so vast.

Or that he could be important in such a huge world.

Shale was aware of the passage of time: he could see much of the sky through the bars of the grille, and he watched the constellations move. The way his arms stuck out of the bottom of his tunic sleeves told him he was growing fast. His clothes were becoming too tight.

He rummaged through the clothes in the storeroom, only to find there was nothing there that fitted. The garments were for women or children, and he was no longer a child. He held one of the tunics he found and fingered the intricate embroidery along the hem—finer embroidery than his mother had ever done—and thought of Citrine. Sadly, he reflected that he had already begun to forget what his little sister looked like.

And Taquar seemed to have forgotten all about her, and Mica, too. How could he ever rescue Mica if he never got to leave the mother cistern?

By the time the stars told him he had been there for about half a cycle, his frustration was a boiling cauldron of emotion in his chest, and he knew he had to do something, or go mad. He waited until Taquar came and went once more, and then started to work on opening the grille to the outside world.

He thought he knew now, at least in principle, how it was done. He had sensed Taquar do it often enough. He already knew about pulleys and weights from watching the building and repair of houses in Wash Drybone Settle, and observing some of the mine diggings maintained by a few settle fossickers. He now had enough water sense to understand that the grille was opened by transferring water at each end from full tanks to empty ones through pipes in the hollows of the cavern wall. As the empty ones filled up, they dropped down. The falling weight worked pulleys to open the grille. To close it, it was just a matter of moving the water back again. What scared him was the possibility of moving the grille up but not being able to bring it back down again before Taquar returned.

He wondered why he was so afraid. He wasn’t even sure whether the rainlord would regard the opening of the grille as something worthy of anger. Maybe Taquar expected him to try. Maybe he wanted him to try. Maybe it was a test.

Shale sighed. Why did he understand so little of what was in Taquar’s head? And why, when he thought of the rainlord, was it with a mixture of niggling fear of his ire and desire for his approval—of wanting to have the man look at him with pride the way Rishan looked at his son, Chert.

He took a deep breath and focused on the wall of the entrance hall, feeling the water inside. He was slow, much slower than Taquar. He was sweating by the time the containers started on their way down and the grille began its slow rumble upwards. He was weak at the knees by the time it disappeared into the wall above the entrance.

But he was free.

His initial steps outside were hesitant, as if he half-expected Taquar to come bellowing in a fury over the nearest hill. A ridiculous thought, and he grinned at the image. Then in a moment of wild exuberance he flew down the slope in loping strides, going faster and faster until his feet barely seemed to touch the ground. He was a desert elan escaping a hunter, a hawk liberated from a cage winging into the sky. He was
free
.

At the bottom of the slope, he tripped and rolled into a somersault. He sat up, brushing the dust from his knees, and laughed.

The liberation, the release, was so profound it brought a flash of brilliance and clarity to his thoughts.
I’ve been a prisoner, a sandgrouse in a cage
. All the stuff Taquar had been talking about? Safety, protection, responsibility, duty, the need to learn—it was all just words. He had been a prisoner, and it was Taquar who had latched the cage.

His shift in perception was so fundamental that it had a physical dimension, as if his shoulders were suddenly broader, his spine strengthened, his height taller. He stood up and took a deep breath.

His heart pounded in his chest.
Outside. Under the sky. Free, the way I was once, wandering the Gibber.
He began to climb the hill above the cavern entrance so that he could look out over the Scarpen.

Half a year earlier, still confused and torn with grief, still wearing clothes fouled with Citrine’s blood, he had not absorbed much of his journey or the surroundings of the cavern in the hill slope.

Now he saw it all with wondering eyes. The brightness of full sunlight and the brilliance of the late morning sky assailed him, leaving him blinking like a night-parrot dragged out of its hole into the light. Heat baked the skin of his arms and seared through the cloth of his tunic to warm his back. The soles of his feet had lost their tough armoured skin, so the stones were sharp and rough beneath his sandals. The muscles of his calves, unused now to anything but a flat floor, shrieked their pain. Every time he looked up at the vault of the sky directly above he felt vulnerable, as if he was naked. When he disturbed a lizard and it exploded out from under his feet, he jumped and had to halt until his heart steadied. Part of him even wanted to turn back, to return to the sanctuary of the cavern, like a pebblemouse scurrying back to the protection of its hole.