The Last Stormlord (67 page)

His anger at something that had happened so long ago was still enough to make his hands shake. Terelle stared, mesmerised by the way the patterns on his skin, lit by the lamplight, moved with each tremble as if they were living creatures crawling down his arms from under his wrap.

“Sienna’s father, the Pinnacle, furious. Pinnacle’s heir must be marrying someone of power, get children of power.” He shook his head, part in anger, part in puzzlement. “She and lover, they left mountains without permission. That be forbidden. They reached White Quarter, me at their heels. Wanted to bring her back. But some ’Basters gave them passage across the salt to the Gibber. I caught up with them there.”

“You killed him, didn’t you? You killed my father!” She was certain of it.

He shrugged. “Be him or me. And I be waterpainter.”

“But
why
?” she asked, outraged. “Why go after her like that anyway? You ended up being responsible for the deaths of them both!”

“She family. Her behaviour shamed me. Ye not understand—I be revered as great waterpainter of our time. But be getting old. Powers lessening. For family to have position, must be power in next generation, no? Sienna have that power. She was stormshifter. What you call stormlord, and she threw it all away.”

“Because she wanted to marry an ordinary man? So what?”

“Not just that. She not be wanting power. She refused to study. I chased her to bring her back. Find her in the Gibber. She told me she be having baby, a girl she be going to call Terelle.” He glared at her. “We be naming our children with colours. Match a child to their real colour, then they be the finest of waterpainters. But the name Terelle? Means exile. Nothing to do with colour. Her way of telling me she never be coming back.”

She shook her head, distraught, touched for a moment by the love of a mother she had never known. Unable to speak, she gestured with a hand that he was to continue.

He said, “The eel-catcher fight. He died. I be making sure of that with my painting. She fled into storm she made—”

“And you never found her.”

“No.”

“So why didn’t you go back to Khromatis?”

“What be point? My powers vanishing, Sienna gone, Pinnacle blaming me. So I keep looking, hoping she be still alive and one day I find her in a place where I painted her. I be travelling all over the Quartern looking. Gibber first, then Scarpen. And one day I be lucky: I followed your tears. You be having the look of her: proud and stubborn.”

Terelle’s outrage poured from her. “You killed my parents! You
can’t
think to take me back so that I can restore you to your position of power. That’s ridiculous.”

He didn’t answer.

“What do you think would happen, anyway? That they’d welcome you back after so many years? What, almost nineteen years—no, I suppose more like almost twenty, all told? And then what? They’ll make
me
the next Pinnacle? Do you think your people would allow a woman from the Gibber to lead them? I am nothing! I’m not really a Watergiver; I know nothing of your people or your customs or your language. And I don’t care to learn!”

“Ye be having great power; that be enough. Terelle, not be safe here for you. I painted ye at nineteen—after that, ye have no protection.”

“I’d be safe in Breccia.”

“Ye know, ye not be having much choice.” The smile he gave her was self-satisfied.

“Your paintings have no power any more,” she pointed out, but her heart was thumping, and she feared she was wrong. “You can no longer trap me in them. They weren’t enough to stop Taquar taking me prisoner. They weren’t enough to free me.”

The smile broadened, feral in its sly triumph. “Your fate be decided the moment I laid eyes on ye, foolish girl, and ye know it. Painted your future then, while I strong. Enough to make ye stay with me. Enough to point your feet in right direction—direction
I
want ye to take.”

“What if the paintings are already destroyed?” she asked. They were still in her bundle; she could burn them.

“They aren’t, or ye’d be dead,” he said. “I told ye that. They be your future, Terelle. Into them, I put last waterpainting magic I truly had.”

She didn’t reply. She suspected he told the truth, but she would never really know for sure.
Did Vato die because Shale planted his foot on my painting of him?

One thing she did know for sure: she had no choice. She already felt the tug of his paintings. She’d already experienced the penalty for resisting her future.

“Pick up your bundle,” he said. “We be leaving right now for White Quarter and Khromatis.”

Yet my mother resisted the paintings, I know she did.

That thought was followed by another, far more chilling. Rather than go back to Russet, her mother had become the mistress of a brutish Gibberman who would one day sell his own child into a brothel.

Then another thought, puzzling rather than frightening. If her mother had been a stormshifter, why had she stayed with a man like Yagon and lived in water penury? The explanation, when it came to her, was damning. It was Viviandra who had unwittingly given her the answer. “I think she was weak and ill most of the time,” she had said, speaking of Sienna.

Terelle’s mother, giving birth without a midwife, had died. Perhaps her resistance to the power of her grandfather’s paintings had left her too tired and ill and exhausted to live.

Terelle went cold with terror. If she chose to resist, she might die.

She picked up her bundle and followed Russet out.

In the doorway, she stopped to look back at the room. She and Shale had forged a friendship there. That link to him had been torn by her imprisonment, and the idea that it was about to be sundered entirely by her journey to an unknown land broke her heart.

A single tear gathered in the corner of her eye, but didn’t fall.
Oh Shale
, she thought.

Then, lifting her chin,
I shall come back. I’ll find a way. Somehow I’ll find a way, I swear it.

Scarpen Quarter

Breccia City

Kaneth wasn’t happy. Right then, though, he couldn’t have said which irritation in his life worried him the most.

It might have been the sand-ticks crawling up into his groin or the stones digging into his stomach as he lay at the top of a ridge in the foothills of the Warthago Range. It might have been the way the frost forming on the plants in front of his nose reminded him of the cold eating deep into his bones. Or perhaps the monotonous booming of that sandblighted night-parrot calling from its burrow entrance like a demented dune god. Or the fact that he believed Breccia’s attempts to train sufficient guards for its defence were too few and too late. Or the unsettled feeling he had that someone was out there in the dark in front of him, someone who had no right to be there.

Or annoyance at his own shortcomings as a rainlord. If Jasper had been with him, he would have identified the unknowns, counted how many pedes and how many people and how far off—and all Kaneth had was a nebulous feeling.

Or, then again, it might have been memories of saying goodbye to Ryka three days ago, soon after the Gratitudes festival. Her farewell had been formal, polite—and somehow sad.

Ryka. He didn’t know where to start when he thought of her. It was hard to admit, but he loved her in the idiotic manner of a youth twenty years younger. And she dodged him with the skill of a desert pebblemouse. When he walked into the room, she left. She hadn’t been in his bed for so long he had almost forgotten what she looked like naked. She had even taken to wearing unattractive baggy clothing, as if she was warning him off. Strangely enough, that didn’t help, either; it just made him yearn for her all the more.

Everything about her puzzled him lately. Several times he had felt she wanted to speak to him, tell him something that mattered, but every time she had backed off at the last moment. Once, she would have insisted on coming with him on a job like this, hunting for Reduners infiltrating the Sweepings to the south of the Warthago. Once, Ryka the scholar had also been Ryka the risk-taker, someone who liked adventure. This time, she had stayed behind to teach the water sensitives they had brought back from the Gibber, to try to turn them into skilled rainlords. Watergiver knew, they needed as many as they could train and as quickly as possible, but most of them were no longer in the city, anyway. They had been spread out over all the other Scarpen cities—except Scarcleft—because Nealrith had been loath to “put all our gems in one jewel box,” as he had put it.

Kaneth sighed and pushed his thoughts away from Ryka to Davim. His gut feeling told him the sandmaster wanted Jasper. Kaneth just wasn’t sure whether it was to make use of Jasper’s abilities in order to appease other dune tribes—or to kill him, to ensure the return of a Time of Random Rain. One thing Kaneth knew for sure: Davim was not going to stay in Qanatend forever. Granthon might believe the sandmaster would return to the Red Quarter; Kaneth was not so optimistic.

He felt Pikeman Elmar Waggoner coming up the slope from their camp behind him, so he slid down just below the lip of the ridge and rolled over onto his back. He could see their camp fire below and the occasional outline of one of the other ten guards as they passed in front of the flame.

“Something to eat, m’lord,” Elmar said, settling down beside him and handing over a packet of food. “You want to get some rest? I can get a couple of the men to relieve you.”

“No. This job is one for a rainlord. There’s something out there, I feel it. That valley running into the heart of the range is as black as a tunnel at midnight now. None of your men would see a thing.” He unwrapped the packet and peered at the contents. “I can’t even see what I am about to eat.” He took a tentative bite.

“So what is out there?” Elmar asked, scratching idly at the large scar that marred his face, reminder of a long-ago skirmish.

“Living water of some kind. Blighted eyes, what is this stuff?” He took another bite. It didn’t pay to be fussy out in the desert. “Something a dung beetle dragged in?”

Elmar did not even deign to acknowledge the complaint. “Want me to send someone with a message to the city?”

“No, not yet. It could just be a couple of Scarpen fossickers, after all, and not Reduner warriors riding to battle.”

“Reckon they can’t get packpedes anywhere over the Warthago except at the Pebblebag Pass, anyway. Those hills are as cut up with gorges and gullies as your granny’s cheeks are with wrinkles.”

“Elmar, how long has it been since Qanatend fell?”

“Must be sixty-five, seventy days, I reckon.”

“And we have the pass blocked up with our men and rainlords on our side, and so do they on their side. We can’t get down to Qanatend, and the Reduners can’t get through to us. So what do you reckon Davim’s been doing all that time?” He didn’t wait for an answer but gave his own. “He’s either riding around the end of the range, through Fourcross Tell—and that’s a long way to take an army without a source of water—or he’s looking for a way through that doesn’t involve Pebblebag Pass. By travelling the length of one of those wrinkles you mentioned, in fact. With access to a water supply right behind him, the Qanatend mother cistern.”

He ate the rest of the food, without ever identifying its origins. “There’s something alive out there.”

“A pair of randy horned cats fucking themselves silly?”

“Elmar, I love the way you regard your rainlord’s water-powers with
such
respectful awe.”

Elmar’s teeth gleamed white in his face.

Kaneth licked his fingers and edged up to the ridge top again. And gasped as the feel of water on the move hit him with the force of a rockslide.

“
Pedeshit!
”

“What is it?” Elmar edged up beside him, peering into the darkness. “I can’t see a bleeding thing.”

“Neither can I,” Kaneth said, but he slid back down the slope towards the camp in a hurry. “I don’t have to! Elmar, tell the men to get the camp struck and packed as fast as they know how.” He scrambled to his feet and began to run, calling over his shoulder as he went. “The Scarpen has just been invaded. There’s a couple of thousand men riding like a spindevil wind up that valley towards us.” His thought was an even more horrified:
And Reduners have pedes that make our hacks look like cripples on crutches.

When Jasper opened the door to leave Granthon’s study after cloudshifting, Senya was waiting outside. She tilted her head at him as he closed the door firmly. “Your grandfather is too tired to be disturbed,” he said.

“He’s dying,” she said with a careless shrug, “but it doesn’t matter so much now that you’re here.”

He stared, disliking her even while his body betrayed him and responded to her physical presence. Like her mother, she was so sunblasted beautiful. Blond curls and full lips, long lashes, nipples outlined by the thin cloth of her tunic, thighs that curved, just so—all saying things his mind didn’t want to hear even as his body did.

Blighted eyes, how can she do that to me?
he pondered.
I don’t want to marry her; I’d rather marry Terelle.
At least he didn’t flush around Terelle, like a settle boy caught thieving pomegranates, as he was doing right now.

Senya tilted her head and surveyed him rather as a pede seller might regard a prospective buyer for one of his mounts. Her next words made him wonder if she was reading his thoughts. “My parents want us to marry. They think we would have a good chance of raising stormlord children. I just wanted to tell you that I can’t imagine anything worse.”