The Last Stormlord (71 page)

On Level Eight, their small group made another stand and held their position with the aid of an ageing waterpriest rainlord who had not yet used up all his power. In the end, the man died, speared from behind, and the group splintered as they were charged by Reduner warriors. Kaneth led those who stuck with him to the Level Six Cistern Chambers. He knew it was time to abandon the streets to the Reduners.

When he scanned the men remaining with him, Elmar was no longer among them. He spared a moment to grieve.

They arrived at the Breccia Hall entrance almost a sandglass run later, and a water reeve opened the door for them. Kaneth continued up to the waterhall on Level One, leaving the guards behind at the hall.

He emerged straight into chaos. The defensive wall that had been erected across the tunnel leading from the mother cistern had been partially torn down. Everywhere he looked there were bodies of the dead or dying. At one end of the hall, half a dozen guards and a reeve were fighting still, close to being overwhelmed by eight or nine Reduners. At first glance, Kaneth couldn’t see Ryka, and his heart clenched with the unthinkable fear that she was dead. Then he saw her, lying against the wall, out of the way of the fighting.

Not dead, but wounded. Her thigh was roughly bandaged; blood showed through the cloth. She faced the skirmishing, propping herself up on an elbow. From the intensity of her stare, he guessed she was using her water-powers. He raced across the room, sword drawn, reaching for the dregs of his power as he ran. Halfway across, he sucked water from the nearest Reduner. The man collapsed, shrieking. Entering the fray, Kaneth trod on the man’s face. The next man he ran through with his blade. The impact almost wrenched his sword out of his hand.

Kaneth came up behind a warrior advancing on Ryka and tossed him face first into the nearest cistern. He pushed the man’s head under the water. A younger warrior leaped at Kaneth with a roar of rage and a swinging scimitar. Kaneth ducked, parried—and blinded his attacker without losing his hold on the drowning man. He released his grip only when the Reduner stilled under his hand.

Panting, Kaneth resorted to water-power again and blinded two more Reduners before they realised their danger. Another turned to flee towards the exit tunnel, only to have Ryka snatch up a sword and swing it into the back of his knees. He collapsed. She finished him off by extracting the water from his throat. He died opening and closing his mouth in silence, like a fish out of water.

Kaneth looked around for someone else to kill, but the remaining Reduners were already dead. He lowered his sword and turned to the Breccian guards. They were all wounded, but still upright. “Good work,” he said with a satisfied nod. “Check all the bodies to make sure they are dead. If not, kill them. And get that dead fellow out of our drinking water. Then start to block the entrance to the tunnel again before the next lot come.”

The men obeyed wordlessly. One of them plunged his head into the open cistern. When he lifted it out again, dripping, he drank deeply from his cupped hands. To Kaneth, it was an action that said more than anything else; in a single day, something that once would have been a crime had ceased to mean anything at all.

He looked at Ryka. She was on her feet, bloodied, dirty, weary, her sword slipping from her grasp. And he was certain, as never before, what was important—and how stupid he had been not to have seen it years earlier.
How ironic
, he thought, his heart aching.
It took a war
.

“How badly are you hurt?” he asked, striding to her side.

“Shallow cut. Bloody, but nothing serious.”

“Your father?”

“I heard he died up on the walls.”

The pain in her eyes unmanned him. He couldn’t speak. It was she who came to him, standing up and reaching out in answer to what she read in his eyes. “I thought you might be dead, too,” she whispered. “I thought I’d lost you.”

He enfolded her in his embrace, clutched her tight, buried his face in her hair. They stood like that, momentarily shut off from the world, while the men dealt out death around them. When he did speak, he said the first thing that came into his head.

“There haven’t been any hussies. Or snuggery jades. Not since the day we married. Not even once.”
Oh shit
, he thought.
Did I really have to mention that now?

Her arms tightened around him. “Not even since I left your bed?” she asked.

“Not even then. I didn’t want them any more, not after you.” He eased his hold so that he could see her face, meet her eyes. When he spoke, there was pain behind every word he uttered, and he neither tried nor wanted to hide it. “Ryka, the truth is you have to come through this alive. Because without you, I won’t have a reason to live. It’s taken me half a lifetime to see that you are all that matters, all I want, all I need. I’m so sorry you were forced into a marriage you didn’t want. So very, very sorry.”

She sighed as if he had said something excessively stupid. “You are the only man I ever wanted to marry since I was fourteen years old, you dryhead.”

He tried to make sense of that, but it was too difficult. Emotion uncurled inside him, but he couldn’t untangle the strands: love, hope and shining joy entwined with dark knots of despair and grief.

“There’s no need to say it,” she said gently and laid a finger to his lips. “I’ve already heard the only thing I needed to hear. I love you, Kaneth Carnelian, and I always have. Always.”

The day passed unbearably slowly down in the hidden room on the thirtieth level. They measured time by the run of a sandglass and the faint light that entered through the ventilator from the outside. The day had, in fact, begun for them before dawn, when they had heard the distant drumbeats that signalled an attack on the walls. The level’s reeve had spoken to them then, using the other ventilator shaft, his voice echoing strangely. He had told them he would go out into the streets to find out what was happening and they were not to move until he came back.

He had not returned yet.

Senya slept most of the time; Laisa paced; Jasper tried to read by lantern light. He’d opened the pack he had been given, to find that it contained the tables and maps he had studied with Cloudmaster Granthon. They detailed all the areas throughout the Quartern where rain was supposed to fall, and when, and how to get it there. Some of this Jasper had already learned in a practical sense from Granthon. Granthon and Nealrith had done their best to pour as much knowledge into him in the time they’d had, but it had not been enough. Here, in written form, was all he needed to know, if he ever had the chance to study it. If ever he grew enough in power to apply it. The size of the task was monumental.

Those papers weren’t the only things in the pack: there were food supplies, a blanket, a palmubra hat and water skins, as yet empty. All things he would need on a journey.

He looked up, watching Laisa’s shadow on the wall as she paced with unending restlessness.
What drives her?
he wondered. Not love, he was sure of that. He looked away from the shadow to her face, to the reality. Her brows were drawn together into a deep furrow, and the lines around her lips were tight with irritation.

We are all about to lose the lives we have led,
he thought. And then, brightening slightly,
Never mind. Maybe I can search for Terelle at last. Maybe I can find Mica.

But though he tried to find hope in that, he was thinking of a land without rain. Of a Quartern that was about to die because he couldn’t bring it water, because he was the last stormlord and couldn’t make a storm cloud.

Terelle
. Maybe she could help with her painting. That was another reason to find her.

As if I needed another one! I must find her. We have to find a way.

We must.

The reeve did not return to speak to them again.

Some time after midnight, Kaneth came, but a different Kaneth to the well-groomed man Jasper knew. He was dirty, tired, unshaven. There was blood on his clothing, and he reeked of sweat and crushed ziggers and death. He was so exhausted, Jasper had to hold back the water while he entered or they would all have been inundated.

Senya wrinkled her nose and said, “You stink, Lord Kaneth!”

They all ignored her. Laisa asked, her voice unusually rough, “What’s the news?”

Jasper poured him a drink of amber as the rainlord replied: “The worst. They’re in the city. In fact, I expected to find you gone. I thought I had better check, just to be sure you’d got out.”

“The reeve never told us anything. We haven’t heard from him since before dawn, just after the drums started,” Laisa said.

“Ah. He was one of the casualties, I expect. And if there was a backup plan in case something went wrong, that also failed you. You should have gone just before dawn. That’s when they entered the city.”

“They’ve taken Breccia?” Jasper asked.

“We still hold the waterhall and Breccia Hall. Level One and Level Two. Mix some water with that, Jasper—I don’t want to lose my edge. And get me some food. I need to build up my power.” He sat down with a sigh. “There are so many Breccian dead. The guard is shattered. Lord Gold is dead. Other rainlords died. Merqual and the waterpriest Foqat for sure. I haven’t seen Lord Selbat or Lord Meridan or Lord Porfrey or Lord Tourmaline, and nor has anyone else, so they are missing, too.”

He took the mug and looked at Laisa. She read the look and said calmly, “He’s dead?”

“Not—not yet. That I know of. But they do have him. He did a brilliant job, you know,” Kaneth said.

“Who are you talking about?” Senya asked petulantly. “Who’s captured?”

“They paraded him under the walls of Breccia Hall,” Kaneth said. “He was, um, still alive. I’m sorry.”

For the first time, Jasper saw Laisa lose her composure. Her face whitened. He understood then the double meaning in Kaneth’s words and had to turn away to hide the dry heave that rose through him.

“You mean Papa?” Senya asked. “But he’s a rainlord! They couldn’t take him prisoner. He’d just suck the water out of them!”

No one said anything. Senya looked from one to another, then started to cry. For once, Laisa showed some compassion for her daughter. She reached out and gently pulled the girl to her, burying Senya’s face in her shoulder.

“How many people do we have safe in Breccia Hall and the waterhall?” she asked after a pause. To Jasper’s ears, she sounded inhumanly calm.

“About five or six thousand adults. It’s packed up there. Too many are not fighters. There are so many children. It was hard to turn anyone away. We can hold out for a while. With a smaller area to defend, the rainlords still alive have a better chance.”

“What’s happening in the rest of the city?” Jasper asked, bringing a selection of food to Kaneth.

“The Reduners are telling people to stay indoors. If they don’t, they are killed. They are slaughtering all reeves as soon as they identify them. And any Breccian guards, of course.” He helped himself to some flat cakes stuffed with bab fruit.

Laisa tapped her fingernails impatiently on Senya’s back. “There’s something else you are not saying, Kaneth,” she said.

“I’m getting to that. We had a message from Davim. He says that he will spare the city, leave entirely, even give us back Nealrith… if we give him Jasper.”

“Oh!” Senya exclaimed, tears forgotten. “Then we can do that! What does it matter? Jasper can go with the Reduners. They need a stormlord, so they won’t hurt him. And he can still bring us rain.”

Jasper shot her a look, then turned away. Neither Laisa nor Kaneth spoke. Kaneth doggedly continued eating. The silence dragged on.

Finally Jasper asked, “And if I don’t go to him?”

“Nealrith dies, and Davim starts bringing out the city folk, ten at a time, to feed the ziggers. Ten people every hour.”

“Did he give a deadline for the decision?”

“Sunset tomorrow. I’ve no idea why he gave us so long.”

“He’s probably smart enough to realise that it’s something that would require some debate,” Laisa said. “And by then he will have shown you in other ways that you can’t win.”

“He’ll have his answer tomorrow,” Jasper added tightly.

“No!” Senya cried. “It’s not your decision, Jasper! It’s ours! We can give you up if we like.”

Jasper whipped around to face her. He said coldly, “With the death of your grandfather, I am now Cloudmaster, and you will not treat me with disrespect. Do I make myself clear?” His voice sounded confident and calm to his ears, but inside, both his resolution and his courage trembled. The blood burned in his cheeks.

Who am I trying to fool?

She stared at him, defiant. “You may be
a
stormlord, but Grandfather didn’t appoint you as his heir. You’re not the Cloudmaster, Shale Flint! Taquar was to be the high ruler, not you. You’re just a dirty Gibber rat!”

“Taquar’s claim to the position was revoked at the Gratitudes festival,” he said.

“But Grandfather died without naming anyone else,” she pointed out triumphantly. “And Mama said that means it could revert to the last named heir—Taquar.”

Her words gored him. Whatever had given him his moment of strength, of resolution, was ripped apart by her words. He turned to Laisa and Kaneth, unwilling to believe. “Is that true?”