The Last Stormlord (40 page)

Other paintings showed her older, year by year, doing similar things, still living in this same building. Then there were three sheets portraying her at an age she had not yet reached. She looked in bewilderment at these versions of herself. In one, she was mounted on a pede, and the land the animal was crossing was pure white. The White Quarter, perhaps? She’d heard there was a place called the Whiteout, where the soil was as white as salt. Strapped behind her was a bundle of what looked to be Russet’s clothes.

In another painting, she was in a camp, and Russet’s belongings were strewn around her feet on that white soil.

In the third, she was standing on some kind of green plants, and there was water—water exposed to full sunlight—sliding in profligate abandon across the green. She gasped to see even a painted depiction of so much waste. In the background, the land tilted, ending in jagged shapes of blue and purple. The picture was the imaginings of a fever dream, surely, not reality.

Yet when she touched the paint, an overwhelming desire to be there, in that place, uncurled inside her, until she was gasping from a need she could not understand. The desire wasn’t hers; she was sure it wasn’t.
I don’t want it.
And if it wasn’t hers, it had to be his.

That was the moment, with cold clarity, that she began to make sense of it all. Terror ripped through her then, tearing all her peace of mind apart. She skimmed through the paintings again, staring, shaking, not believing, grasping a thought only to lose it again when it seemed too unbelievable to be true.

And always, always that memory she had: the woman stepping out into the street as if she had been compelled to do so. Compelled, because he had painted her there. Another memory: she had been uncertain after she had first met him whether she should take up his offer—until a day or two had passed, when she had become certain.

She knew then what had been done to her, and it was unspeakable. Those early portraits had not been painted from memory at all. He had done them before she had agreed to become his apprentice, not afterwards.
He made my future by painting it.

She let the paintings fall from nerveless fingers and could not bring herself to touch them again. She sank down onto the chair and sat huddled there, not moving.

That was the way Russet found her several runs of the sandglass later.

He glanced at her, then at the paintings lying where she had dropped them. “So now ye know,” he said.

She struggled to sit straight, to contain the rawness of her emotions, her rage. “What have you done?” she asked. But she knew. In her heart, she knew.

“Trapped ye,” he said. His complacency was both chilling and streaked through with a gloating malice. “For y’own good. Y’future be painted, and ye never be changing it. If ye be wise, ye’ll not struggle against it, because will get ye nowhere. Ye cannot leave me.”

“And what is my future?” she asked in a whisper. “What life have you decided I must live?”

He smiled. “That is for you to find out by living it.”

Oh, Sunlord help me
, she thought. She had believed she’d escaped an unwanted future when she’d left the snuggery. Now the menace of it was back, lying in wait, inevitable in its arrival, unchangeable, its outcome unknowable—at least to her.

“No!” She jumped up, snatched the heap of paintings and leaped for the fireplace. He moved faster than she thought possible. As she went to fling all the paintings into the fire, he struck downwards across her forearms, sending the sheets scattering across the floor instead.

“Ye’ll die!” he cried, panting. “That be y’future, ye silly frip. Burn them, and ye’ll be burning with them!”

Terelle stood, her hands dropping to her sides, her passion draining away.

“And ye already know, I think: fighting a painted future means ye’ll be ill.”

She began to weep, the tears born not of defeat but of fury.

Scarpen Quarter

From Scarcleft mother cistern to Scarcleft City

“Are you
sandcrazy
?” Taquar hissed, his temper only just under control.

He had closed the door to the outside cavern, where Shale and the Reduner pedeman were busy with the pedes, but he used the Reduner tongue just in case Shale could hear.

Davim looked around, frowned at the table and chairs, and settled for a bed instead, where he sat crossslegged. “You have played with me long enough, Taquar,” he replied in the same tongue. “I came to see the lad myself. I want to see his power. I want to be sure you really have a stormlord as you claim, because I have seen none of your promised rain.”

“If he recognises you, he will never cooperate with me again. You’re sun-fried to come here like this—your visit taints me in his eyes! Have you any idea how much he hates Reduners? You wiped his settle off the face of the Gibber!”

Davim shrugged. “He won’t recognise me. He saw me only in the cold light of dawn with the sun behind me and my face swaddled. He won’t recognise my chalaman out there, either—the boy was drugged out of his senses. Anyway, it was almost four years ago. Besides, as planned, we have the means to persuade him should he prove reluctant to help our cause. I have his brother still.”

“We would have his sister as well, if you hadn’t been so damned set on teaching him a lesson. She shared his blood and might even have been a stormlord. You jeopardised everything I’ve been working towards.”

“She was too young to be bothered with, and he needed to know my nature in case we ever need to threaten him.
You
are the one who jeopardised our agreement. You were to supply me with water until such time as all the tribes were behind me. Instead of their willing cooperation, I have had to fight some of them because I had nothing to offer them!”

Taquar’s eyes gleamed at the opportunity to ridicule the sandmaster. “I’ve heard rumours there’s active rebellion against your leadership. I hear Makdim’s
wife
leads it from one of the northern dunes. An old woman!”

“Vara Redmane is a shrivelled bag of bones, no more danger than a sand-leech,” he snapped. “Do you think we drovers fear a wrinkled old hag with no more children in her womb?”

“If she’s so harmless, why haven’t you killed her and her followers?”

“That is dune business, none of yours!”

Taquar did not bother to hide his smile.

“The lad. Tell me about the lad! When does he begin to cloudshift?”

“Shortly. He must be eighteen soon, and that’s when most stormlords begin to shift.” He forbore to say that previous stormlords had always been able to extract vapour from salted water at a much younger age.

“If I don’t see evidence of it within another year, then I will use other methods to bring water to the dunes. We don’t get enough random rain yet because Granthon is still stealing many of the natural-born clouds. I must placate those tribes who resist my rule, and I will do it one way or another. I do not carry all my wealth on the back of one pede, my friend. Remember that, if you choose to betray our agreement.”

“You threaten me? I could take your water right now and leave you a dry husk on the floor.”

“You’d never get out of here alive. Even you can’t kill
all
the ziggers out there in the hands of my men.” He smiled pleasantly. “Now show me what the lad can do.”

Shale stood, dragging air into his chest, staring at the carvings on the segment plates of the servant’s myriapede. Memory renewed, raw and anguished: a bag roughly pulled over his head, the pain of the ride, the searing agony of Citrine’s death, despair at being parted from Mica.

The Reduner servant did not notice his abstraction. The man was still working on his sandmaster’s pede, sharpening the roughened points at the end of the feet with a file.

Shale inhaled once more, forced himself to think. Forced his thudding heart to slow. With awful clarity, he knew exactly how much depended on the rest of this day. If he made one wrong move, he risked his chance of freedom, perhaps even his life.

He cleared his mind of emotion and thought back. Was this man, supposedly a servant, one of those who had initially carried him away from Wash Drybone Settle? He could not be sure, even though he was sure about the pede. He’d been too drugged, too sick, and during the day both men had kept their faces covered. Certainly the man Taquar was now talking to had not been either of them—but he could have been the leader who’d suggested a game of chala.

Davim. Dressed in red, all but his eyes obscured by the red cloth he wrapped around his head, mount rearing up… a reddish pede. A sandmaster. Catching Citrine—thrown to him as if she was a ball in a game—on his chala spear and laughing as the blade pierced her dress but not her body… not then. They kept her alive as long as they could, those chala players.

Shale cleared his throat and risked everything.
He had to know.
Quietly, and hoping the man understood, he asked in the language of the Quartern, “That’s a magnificent pede you’re working on. Does it have a name? Do Reduners name their pedes?”

“Has, yes,” came the answer, thickly accented, but understandable. “Burnish.”

Davim
. The man in the inner room, it was
him
. The man who had killed Citrine… sitting there in the other room talking to Taquar, like an old friend.

Davim and Taquar. Together. Planned all this.

Davim uniting the Reduner tribes, raiding the Gibber. Slaughtering Citrine. Enslaving Mica.

Taquar the betrayer, who had killed Citrine as surely as if he had been the one who had held the chala spear. Who had tricked Shale into gratitude by “rescuing” him from his captors. No wonder something about the rescue had bothered Shale: Taquar had not killed the two kidnappers. He could have done so easily.
Should
have done so, to ensure they weren’t followed. It was hardly the kind of thing that would have bothered his conscience.

Automatically, Shale’s shaking hands went on polishing the plates of the pede. He didn’t notice that he was working on the same spot, over and over. His mind darted after facts, skimming all that had been said and not said. And in between it all, he heard Citrine’s last scream of terror.

Power. All for power. Split the Quartern. A man who couldn’t be stormlord, but who wanted the power of the Scarpen ruler.

Pede piss, but you are a fool, Shale. All Taquar ever wanted was the skills he thinks you have. He wants a stormlord. A man could do anything if he owned the only stormlord in the Quartern.

The thought choked him, lumped somewhere in the throat. The teaching, the patience, even the small kindnesses—all a sham. And he, Shale, had tried to please him. He, Shale, had ached to be liked, ached to see respect in Taquar’s eyes. To make the rainlord proud of the lad he had rescued.
Rescued!

His stomach heaved, and he had to choke back the vomit. He grabbed up the file and began to work on the feet of the pede, savagely filing away the rough edges and sharpening the points. How could he have been so dumb? So credulous? Had he learned
nothing
from all that had happened at Wash Drybone Settle? Sun-fried, sandcrazy
dryhead
!

He looked up briefly when Davim’s servant switched over to the near side of the pede, and was glad to note that the man kept his face averted.

Making sure I don’t recognise him
, Shale thought savagely.
But I wouldn’t have. It’s been too long, and I was too crazed to think then anyway. He’s probably not a servant, of course. He’s a warrior. A chalaman.

As he worked, his eyes lit on the zigger cage against the wall. Ziggers. If he could load a zigtube, one of Taquar’s, he could kill Davim and this man. But not Taquar. For that he’d need Davim’s zigger. Too difficult. Besides, Shale wasn’t wearing the correct perfume, so he could be the victim. No, he couldn’t use ziggers.

But these men deserved death. Deserved it over and over again.

Citrine, Mica, all of Wash Drybone Settle—either dead or enslaved.

What kind of men are they?

The pede stirred restlessly, unused to quite so much passion applied to its foot maintenance.

The door of the inner room opened. “Shale, haven’t you finished out there yet?” Taquar called out to him.

He straightened, laying down the file.

Don’t let your thoughts show.
“Coming, Highlord.” He washed his hands in the pede trough and went through into the other room.

“Bring us some amber, there’s a good lad,” Taquar said. He and Davim were just about to seat themselves at the table. “And something to eat.”

“Yes, Highlord.” He didn’t know how he could keep his voice calm, expressionless—and yet he could, and did. He walked into the storeroom, collected the amber and mugs, came back, poured the drinks. His hands shook slightly, but his nerves showed no more than that. This red man in his embroidered red tunic and breeches, his braided and beaded hair swinging around his face, had been the one who had played a deadly game with Citrine. Deliberately. To punish Shale for lying. To show him who had the power.

For no good reason at all.

As he handed the Reduner a food platter a little later, he deliberately looked him straight in the eye.

Davim smiled. “What you name?” he asked, demonstrating a clumsy, heavily accented command of the Quartern tongue.