The Last Stormlord (39 page)

Shale felt he was standing on shifting sand. He looked straight at Taquar. “I was born waterless,” he said.

There was a long silence. Then, “Yes. So you were. And I thank the Watergiver you were born, but it does not change my opinion. A succession of stormlords have been too weak to make the birth of waterless progeny a crime, as it should be. Instead they just deny the children water allotment. Where is the good in that? It takes the crime away from the parent and punishes those born through no fault of their own.”

“I didn’t know it was possible to—well, to stop the children coming. My mother never knew how. Most of them died, anyway.”

“Of course there are ways! But why are we talking of such matters? Monetary policies and the lack of birth laws are no concern of yours.”

No concern of yours.

As he remembered that conversation, Shale knew that Taquar did not ever think of him as being a cloudmaster one day, ruling as Granthon did. The rainlord was not teaching him the duties of a ruler. What Shale knew about those things he gained from his reading or the academy teachers.

He wasn’t sure exactly what Taquar did intend, but he suspected the highlord thought he, Shale, was going to be doing little more than move storms all his life.

Maybe I don’t understand all I read, or what I am taught,
he thought.
But I am not as stupid as Taquar thinks, either. I am sure I’m not.

As they were about to eat their midday meal, Shale felt the arrival of people outside. Not a few, but a large group. “Men and pedes,” he said urgently. “Coming up the slope.”

Swiftly Taquar was on his feet, his hand going to the loaded zigtube he had put down on the table. “Wait here,” he rasped and went out.

Shale, however, followed, pushing his water senses outwards. He felt most of the pedes and men stop at the bottom of the slope. Two men riding myriapedes continued up towards the grille.

He saw them arrive. Two dune tribesmen.
Reduners.

Shale began to unravel. Breathing became an effort. His hands felt clammy. His stomach churned.

They dismounted and the first man gave his reins to the second. “It is time,” he said to Taquar without greeting. “I want to meet him.”

The way Taquar held himself told Shale that the rainlord was angry, but nothing of the emotion came through in his voice. “As you wish,” he said smoothly. “Perhaps you will join me for a meal?”

As the highlord manipulated the grille, Shale saw the Reduner more clearly. Red-skinned, lean, hawk-nosed, his red-stained braids poking out under the cloth extensions of his woven cap, he was a striking man. His red-dyed tunic was lavishly embroidered in matching thread in a panel down the front. Even though he wasn’t large, he held himself tall; everything about him spoke of power and prestige.

Taquar turned to Shale. “Help the servant clean the pedes,” he said abruptly, indicating the animals. “Get them food and water.”

But Shale couldn’t move. He was pinned to the wall by a welter of emotion and memory.

“And who is this?” the first man asked, eyeing him with an intense gaze as he entered the cavern. Something told Shale the question was redundant; the man knew exactly who he was.

Taquar ushered the Reduner towards the living quarters. “Shale Flint,” he replied. “He does the chores around the place for me. We live simply here,” he added, “but I can offer you the finest of Scarpen pickles and preserves, and some bread I brought from Scarcleft.” He looked back over his shoulder as they entered the inner room, frowning his disapproval at Shale’s lack of response to his order. “Get to it, lad.”

Shale moved then. The Reduner servant wordlessly handed Shale the reins of his pede, making it clear that he did not intend to indulge in idle conversation now they were alone. Shale made himself busy, while the man tended to his master’s pede. It was a magnificent creature, larger than most, the deep red-black colour of the darkest of rubies. Shale stared at it with covetous eyes before turning to the servant’s pede. He worked without thinking, calming the turbulence of his thoughts in the steady cleaning and polishing. Antennae first, for without the sensitivity of clean feelers it was purblind. Then the head and mouthparts, next the thorax, brushing out the irritating grains of sand caught in between or under the segments. Next he fetched the herbal polish and began to work on the segments themselves, shining them till they gleamed. Alongside him, the man worked on similar tasks but said nothing, often deliberately turning his back. It didn’t take Shale long to realise he was being snubbed.

He was still wondering about that when he came to the fifth segment on the pede he was cleaning. Like all the others, it was carved with pictures. And as Shale ran the polishing cloth over the carvings, the pictures seemed familiar. A pede being pulled out of some kind of sinkhole.

He stared. Everything stopped: his heart, his breath, his throat.

He had last seen those pictures close up, with his cheek pressed down into the carvings as the pede—the very same pede—had flowed across the desert in the heat of the day with its burden, a boy still bathed in his sister’s blood.

Scarpen Quarter

Scarcleft City

Level 36

A few weeks before her eighteenth birthday, Terelle was buying water from Vato when a man raced past and almost knocked her water jars flying. Several armed men pounded after him, followed a moment or two later by riders on a myriapede. The driver and those seated behind him were zigtube-wearing enforcers.

“What is all that about, at this time of the morning?” Terelle asked Vato, grateful that she had saved the jars from being smashed.

“There’s a lot of raids lately. Be careful, lass. That fleeing man was Wilsent the beggar from Dung Street. He’s a water thief. Used to be a beggar on the uplevels, but they’ve got a lot stricter now. It’s hard to even go upwards any more, let alone beg there.” He frowned unhappily. “And water goes up in price again tomorrow.”

“Not
again
! Why?”

“Not enough water coming in from the Warthago Range, why else? Same old story: Highlord Taquar says the Cloudmaster isn’t making enough rain. That he’s old and dying.” He shrugged. “But he’s been dying for the past four years or more. People say Highlord Taquar has to do something because he’s the heir, you know. The Quartern heir. Did you know that? Granthon announced it ages back. What nobody cares about is that we waterless are always the first to suffer. After the cats, that is.” He spat, shedding his own water to show the depth of his contempt.

“Cats?”

“People don’t keep pets when times are bad.”

She thought about that. It had been a long time since she had seen a cat. The idea that people killed their cats rather than feed them, or worse, that they killed them for the cupful of water they could obtain if they took the body to one of the houses of the dead for water extraction, appalled her more than anything else he’d said. She felt ill, sick in the stomach and heartsick in spirit.

“And if the Cloudmaster does die?” she asked at last.

“Who knows? We are taught that we owe everything to stormlords. That without them, there would be no water. If that’s true, and we’ve only got one stormlord now—which is definitely true—I think we could all be in trouble before much longer. But, Terelle, it may all be a lie. After all, what better way to stay in power than to tell everyone that they get their water because of you? Seems a mighty clever way to rule to me.”

She stared at him in horror. “Surely no one can think the Cloudmaster lies!”

He shrugged. “The waterpriests say the rainlords are the living proof that the Sunlord exists and aids us. People who believe them bow low to the rainlords. But me? I reckon Highlord Taquar has a nasty smell to his water. There’s not much holy about that wilted bastard. And if you tell anyone I said that, I’m dead, lass.”

He hawked and spat yet again. “Withering lords. Grind us down into the dust of the Scarpen, while they live in their fancy uplevel houses and drink all the water they want. If I had my way, I’d slit all their throats. Then we’d find out, wouldn’t we?”

Terelle tried to suppress her unease.

“Don’t look so worried!” He grinned at her. “You’re coated with dew, you are! Because of that old man you’ve hooked up with. Never short of tokens to buy water, you are!”

She reddened at the insinuation behind his words, but resisted the temptation to deny what he had not openly said. “Russet says that in troubled times people are less likely to buy artwork, and it’s true, I think. Especially ones that use water. Lately we’ve been getting less work.”

“Eh, I heard tell he did one for the Cloudmaster himself!”

“Yes, but that was ages ago.”

He turned away to serve Ba-ba and she plodded her way upstairs lugging the water jars and wondering about her life. She hated the unfairness of the idea that she could one day be struggling with water problems again.

This was her fourth year with Russet, and the old man had finally done what he had promised: he had taught her how to paint. In addition, she had learned nearly all there was to know about making the paints. She knew where to procure the ingredients, how to grind them and mix them and add the resins and additives that made waterpainting possible. She knew all the tricks of what Russet called artistry: perspective, depth, foreshortening, texture, shadow. The sort of things anyone could learn. But she was aware, too, that she had something that he could never have taught her. She could do more than reproduce the reality of a scene in paint; she could suggest the feel and movement, the smell and mood of it as well. Just as Russet could. Painting was a joyous thing, a whole experience, not just the layering of colour on water. It was better than dancing had ever been. She could no longer imagine a life without it.

But one thing Russet had never shown her: how to make a suggestion of a painted figure change the way he had done that first day.

More to the point, was he ever going to tell her? After all, he’d never explained how he had known her name. She’d asked—no, begged—him to tell her who she was, but his reply was always the same: “When I be ready.”

At first she had been both defiant and persistent, threatening to leave him, but her arguments with the old man always had the same result: she ended up in the outhouse, throwing up her last meal, doubled over with cramp. For days afterwards she would feel listless.

The sharp-eyed Lilva had cornered her about it one day. She had been fifteen at the time. “You got a young’un in your baby jar that’s making you sick, have you, love?” she asked.

Terelle, blushing, denied it.

“Ah, then maybe you have one of them delicate stomachs that don’t like arguments,” she said with a derisive snort. “Specially arguments you’ll never win. That old man? He’s pure poison, child. The more you defy him, the more his eyes glint with the joy of battle. But you? You just get sick to the stomach.”

Terelle had dismissed the idea as fanciful at the time, but now, when she thought about it, she wondered if Lilva was right. Defying Russet did seem to upset her stomach, which was infuriating and such a stupid weakness to have when he so often annoyed her.

She bit her lip as another nagging thought niggled at her. That first waterpainting she had seen Russet do… the confused expression on the face of the woman, as if she’d stepped out of the house without knowing why. As if she had been
compelled…

Compelled. Could Russet force someone to do something simply by painting them doing it?

No, of course not. The idea was preposterous. And he couldn’t make her sick simply by arguing with her, either. Besides, she was sometimes sick like that when she hadn’t been arguing with him. Why, she’d been sick just the other day, when she had been doing nothing more than daydreaming about going to Breccia City or Denmasad or somewhere to be a waterpainter there, all on her own…

That memory trailed away and was replaced by another: the time she had seen Russet painting in the middle of the night. She frowned uneasily as she stowed the day-jars, not liking the way her mind seemed to be drifting.

“I be going uplevel now,” Russet said. He wound his coloured cloth around his bald head and tucked in the ends. “To collect a debt owed for a painting. Ye can make stew for dinner.”

She nodded and started to gather the ingredients as he left the room and set off along the hallway. Even though her mind wasn’t on the task, it didn’t take long before she had the pot hanging on the hook over a low-burning fire. She continued to think about the painting she had seen him do in secret, when he’d thought she was asleep.

Once the stew was gently simmering, she studied the room. There weren’t many places to hide anything, let alone something as large as a painting severed from its water. She knew it wasn’t under his pallet because she always moved it to sweep. The only other place it would fit was under the box where the seaweed briquettes were kept.

Carefully, she took out all the briquettes and lifted the woven box from its corner. Ten or so paintings lay flat underneath. Her hands trembled as she carried them to the table.

They were all pictures of her. Several portrayed the girl she had been when she’d first come to live on the thirty-sixth level, showing her right here in this room or out in the hallway. In one of them she was doing a waterpainting, in another she was eating at the table, in a third she was pounding something up to make paint-powder. Because they looked so much like moments she had known, she assumed he must have done them from memory.