The Last Stormlord (41 page)

As if you don’t know, you murderous bastard.
“Shale Flint of Wash Drybone Settle.” His voice was steady enough—a little hoarse, perhaps, but that was all. The next words he addressed to the sandmaster were silent ones:
Remember that name, Davim. It is the name of the man who will kill you.

“How old?”

He shrugged in reply. “Seventeen, eighteen perhaps. Thereabouts.”

“Shale serve master good?”

“I do not have a master,” he said quietly. “If you mean Highlord Taquar, he is my teacher.”

Taquar gave the faintest of smiles and spoke in Reduner. Shale struggled to comprehend. “The boy is sharp, Sandmaster. I would not play mind games with him, if I were you.” He looked at Shale and switched to the Quartern tongue. “The Sandmaster would like a demonstration of your water-power. Bring some water in from the mother cistern.”

Shale continued to put food on the table as he worked his water skills. He bundled up a ball the size of a man’s head, pulled it up out of the lake and brought it to hover low over Davim’s head. “What would you like me to do with it, my lord?”

Taquar sent a questioning look to the Reduner.

“Send it back,” the man snapped in Reduner. He must have known Shale could empty the water all over him any time he wanted. He stared hard at Shale as he spoke, and Shale was taken aback by the hatred he thought flashed there only to vanish a moment later under the fakery of a bland smile.

“The lad is too clever,” Davim growled.

“Shale has not had the best of experiences with Reduners, my friend,” Taquar said and switched languages once more. “Send the water back, Shale. And remember that not all men from the Red Quarter are coloured with the same dust. Please do not insult my guest by asking after those of your settle who were taken to the Red Quarter.”

“No, my lord.” Shale removed the water and cut some bread. His fury swelled in his throat.

Davim spoke again, and this time Taquar translated. “He asks if you can bring up a storm yet.”

Scrupulously polite to cover his rage, Shale said, “I do not know, Sandmaster. I have never tried.”

“I expect Shale to come into his full powers soon,” Taquar added.

“And how much longer will Granthon last?” Davim asked.

“It is nothing short of a miracle that he is still alive now.”

They were speaking in Reduner once more, ignoring Shale. He strove to grasp the gist of the conversation while appearing oblivious.

Davim sat back in the chair and regarded Shale through narrowed eyelids. “It will all depend then, won’t it, on which comes first? A stormshifter’s power or a stormlord’s death. We are prepared either way. We Reduners have no fear of a Time of Random Rain.”

Shale did not understand all that speech, but he did hear the threat lurking behind every word.

Taquar addressed him directly again. “That will be all, Shale. The grille is still open; why don’t you go for a walk outside? My friend here and I have much to speak about.” With that, he turned his attention to the food.

Shale moved to obey. It was only when he was outside that he started to shake.

Davim and his companion left about the run of a sandglass later.

Taquar called Shale in to tell him that he too was leaving, going back to Scarcleft.

“Who was that man?”

“A sandmaster. He was concerned about the growing extremism among some of the Reduners, so I told him about you. He came for reassurance that there will indeed soon be another stormlord.” The untruth was easily said, without inflection.

Shale stilled the tremor in his fingers. Blind rage turned his vision red, and he strove to subdue it.
The salted bastard!
Was there no end to his gall? The withering lies flowed from him like water from a calabash.

Taquar had been allied with the Reduners of Dune Watergatherer all along. Not Nealrith or Kaneth or one of the other rainlords.
Taquar
, rogue rainlord, and the sandmaster who had burned Wash Drybone Settle.

Part of Shale wanted to fall on the highlord and rend him to pieces with his bare hands. Rip his heart out and hold it in his hands. The image, detailed in his mind, shocked him, and the corrosiveness of the hate that had inspired it made him jerk back from the edge of the precipice that had opened up, black and forbidding, before him.

I’m not like that. I will not be consumed by hate or revenge.
And then the afterthought:
Though one day I will have justice.

Oblivious, Taquar said, “While I am away this time, I want you to concentrate on two exercises for me. The first is changing water to vapour. Remember what I have told you: the secret is to saturate the air with droplets within the cloud at a faster rate than water evaporates at the edge. The amount of droplets that the air will hold depends on temperature, so do not expect it to be constant.

“The other exercise is, of course, simply to continue trying to extract fresh water from a salt solution. Next time I come, I will take you down to the sea to begin to practise on the real thing: clouds.”

Absurdly, Shale’s heart surged. The sea. He couldn’t even
imagine
such a huge body of water.

He quelled the longing he felt. He wasn’t going anywhere with the highlord, ever.
Damn you, Taquar. You sent Davim and his men to get me, but my family was just an encumbrance. Blast you to a dry end and a waterless hell.

He watched the rainlord leave.

One day, Taquar
, he promised,
I will have justice for them.

That night, alone again, Shale did not sleep.

He lay awake shivering. Thinking. Trying to make sense of all that had happened. One thing he knew for certain: Davim was deceiving Taquar, and Taquar was too arrogant to see it. Shale was sure he had not mistaken the look in Davim’s eyes. He had seen it too often on his father’s face: a flash of loathing and contempt, warring with a murderous rage. Davim hated both him and Taquar.

Worse, though, was the ache Taquar’s betrayal had left behind. The emptiness that swamped him as a result. He felt a sense of loss, but wasn’t sure what it was that made him grieve. He had never
liked
Taquar, yet he felt bereft. Perhaps that was what betrayal was: the creation of a hole inside the betrayed. The loss of part of oneself.

You dryhead,
he thought.

He could have prevented the massacre of Wash Drybone had he not listened to Taquar in the first place. Why had he not gone to Highlord Nealrith and taken the sensitive’s test in front of all the rainlords? Citrine might still be alive and Mica safe if he had.

His stupidity had killed or enslaved his whole settle.

His fault. Because he had feared the wrong people and trusted where he should have feared.
Never again
, he thought.
Never again.

In the morning, he rose, tired and dulled, and prepared to leave the mother cistern.

He packed a cloth bag with food and his best clothing, a bottle of lamp oil and a lamp, some candles, his flint and striker and tinderbox, a couple of empty water skins and—after a moment’s further thought—six books. He scoured the storeroom for anything of value he could convert to tokens, but the only thing he found was the gold bracelet with the carved name. He had forgotten all about it and now he packed it without a qualm, together with his piece of jasper. The last thing he added to his makeshift pack was a length of hempen twine.

He raised the grille, closed it behind him and set off for the maintenance shaft. He walked quickly, scarcely aware of his surroundings, anger driving him forward.

Once there, he climbed up to the top of the shaft and removed the wooden cover. He made no attempt to break the lock; instead, he emptied his belongings out of the cloth bag and threaded the twine through the shoulder strap. The other end of the twine he tied to the grating. Then he pushed the bag through the bars. He had chosen to bring only items that would fit through the grating and could therefore be reinserted into the bag now that it was on the inside of the inspection shaft. Once the bag was full again, he lowered it down and left it hanging there, within easy reach of someone walking along the tunnel below. He went to close the wooden cover, but changed his mind. He left it half open to let in a shaft of light. Then he retraced his steps to the mother cistern.

Perhaps the long walk helped calm him, for he managed to sleep a little that night. The next morning, carrying a lighted candle, a bucket of water and an old cloth, he walked to the overflow outlet. Designed to drain water into the tunnel if the lake ever rose too high, it was covered with a metal mesh filter, easily removed. He peered into the pipe, as he had done several times before on his previous explorations of the lake, but could see nothing. It disappeared into a darkness as deep as a starless patch of night sky.

He set fire to the cloth and dropped it into the outlet. It slid down and dropped out of sight as he watched its progress. For a few moments longer he could see the glow of the flames somewhere below the end of the pipe. Then he poured the bucket of water into the pipe and followed the water with his senses. He had done that before, too, but he wanted to double-check exactly how long the pipe was, that it did not get any narrower, that the water gushed out of the other end without any impediment to its flow. He wanted to confirm that it then plunged only a body length before it hit ground again. His main worry was that his shoulders were nearly as broad as the pipe itself.

He stripped off all his clothing, took a deep breath and entered the pipe feet first. The lower part of his body slipped in easily, but when he tried to wriggle in still further, his upper torso became wedged. He curled his shoulders inwards, crossing his arms in front.

For one terrifying moment he was trapped, then he was plunging down, burning his bare skin against the sides of the pipe. He had a brief sensation of flying unimpeded through total darkness before his feet hit the brickwork at the base of the tunnel. He was free of the pipe, crouching in the blackness, his feet stinging from the impact. There was water underfoot because the inlet from the siphon was somewhere behind him.

He took a deep breath, trying not to think too much. There was no way out now, until he reached Scarcleft, five or six days’ walk away. The only light was a pinprick in the far distance. He remained still for a moment, sensing the water: ankle deep, flowing gently in a straight line for as far as his senses would allow him to perceive.

Blighted eyes
, he thought,
how many people are there in this city of Scarcleft that they need more than this amount of water all day, every day, flowing into their cisterns?

He allowed another moment to try to detect any other forms of life anywhere ahead, but there were none. Not even the smallest of sand-leeches, as far as he could tell. He started to walk towards that far-off star of light.

It enlarged as he approached, going from a pinpoint to a shaft falling as a half-moon on the brick floor of the tunnel. His bag hung at the end of the twine, waiting for him. He was glad to dress. Naked and stripped of any material possessions, he had felt not only chilled but vulnerable.

His cold fingers had trouble striking the flint to the tinder, but he finally lit the lamp and placed it on the walkway. Then he hauled himself up the ladder to the top of the shaft. It was a moment’s work to reach through the grating and manoeuvre the wooden cover back into place. He was far too much the son of the Gibber to have been comfortable leaving water exposed to the sun and wind-blown sand, or to any small desert creature seeking the dark and a drink.

Down in the tunnel again, he began his long walk to Scarcleft.

Now he could see what he was doing, he used the walkway built along the side. When he was tired or hungry, he stopped. He slept fitfully at intervals, stretched out on the walkway in the smothering dark with the lamp extinguished. When he awoke it was always into panic at the utter blackness, and the panic remained until his fumbling with flint, striker and tinder produced enough of a flame to light the lamp or a candle.

He passed other maintenance shafts, where light filtered in through cracks or knot holes in the wooden covers: tiny slivers of light visible from far, far away if he turned out the lamp and walked in the darkness. He had little idea of the passing of time. Disconnected from the rest of the world, he felt as if he was the only person left alive, destined to walk this straight line in the dark forever.

He’d hoped the tunnel would turn into a slot and he would simply emerge at the end of the journey into the light and the open air. A silly idea, on reflection: all this water was precious and had to be protected, of course. And so, at the end of the tunnel, he was left staring at another grille, trying to see into the darkness beyond.

The light cast by the meagre stub of his sole remaining candle did not show him much. His water senses told him that there were a number of cisterns in the room and that water ran from one to another. A waterhall, he guessed. Those same senses told him that the room was empty of people. The grille had a door, but it was locked. He had come so far only to be stopped by more iron bars; he would have been better off trying to walk to Scarcleft in the desert heat above ground, stealing water from the maintenance shafts as he went.