The Last Stormlord (75 page)

“It would be different if I was already a cloudmaster with power enough to bring the storms,” Jasper said bitterly. If the rainlords believed there was a stormlord who could supply water to the Quartern, then they would believe in a future. And they might therefore decide that it was their duty to live to serve their people. As it was, they had no faith in Jasper’s ability, and no hope. And so they would die fighting.

Jasper sighed and thought of Terelle and how she had always wanted life to be fair. “I’ll make you all a promise, Kaneth. Rainlords will rule here again one day.
I
will rule here one day. Not Taquar. Not Davim. Me. And everyone who fought here will be remembered.”

Kaneth gave a laugh, but there was no amusement there. “Just make sure it’s for my death, Jasper, not the way I lived. That was nothing spectacular, as I am sure you have realised. The only wise thing I ever did was marry Ryka, and I almost ruined my chances with her by behaving like a withering waste of water.” He glanced at Laisa, who was watching them both with folded arms and a bemused expression. “Beware of Laisa. She is indubitably a beautiful woman and a highly intelligent one. She is also quite amoral.”

“Thank you, Kaneth, for that,” she said, inclining her head in mock deference. “I don’t believe you will be any great loss to the world, either.”

Kaneth ignored her. “Cloudmaster Jasper Bloodstone, may the waters always be sweet to your taste.”

He picked up his lamp, and Jasper went to open the door and clear the water for him.

Afterwards, Laisa remarked, “Who would have thought? Kaneth, of all people. A hero.”

“Don’t mock him,” Jasper snapped. “None of them. Not ever.”

Jasper crawled out of the grove cistern onto its flat covered roof and tried to sense what lay beyond without raising his head to see.

People. Far too many people. And animals. Pedes. Carefully he tried to build a picture from the water he could feel out there. Reduner pedemen everywhere. Mostly sitting in groups. And the pedes were in lines, which probably meant they were tied up. He rolled over onto his side as Laisa and Senya arrived beside him. Senya’s skirt was wet again. Impatient with the way it hampered her movements, he sent the water back to where it belonged. When Laisa went to close the cistern lid, he stopped her.

“I will need the water,” he said.

She nodded, understanding.

“There are people everywhere,” he continued. “There’s a camp, a huge Reduner camp all the way along the grove. We’ve got to be quiet.”

Laisa raised her head to look. “A diversion?” she suggested a moment later.

“Yes. Which direction do we have to go in?”

She pointed. “That way. Up the scarp, but at an angle, cutting across, towards the west. Not too close to the city wall. Our pedes are in a hidden gully near the top of the escarpment, about two hours’ walk. Maybe more in the dark.”

“There’s no danger that they will have been found? No chance we will walk into a trap?”

She didn’t bother to answer. It had been a stupid question, of course. She couldn’t possibly know the answer to the first part, but they could sense a trap before it was sprung. They were water sensitives, after all.

He crawled to the edge of the roof and peered over. “We can jump down, no problem.” He eyed Senya’s skirt in distaste. “You should have worn travelling clothes; however can you run in a skirt?”

“I don’t
like
trousers,” she said. “I’m not a man.”

“Get ready to jump and run,” he said, smothering a sigh. “Don’t wait for me. Laisa, can you take my pack and water?”

“They have to see you leave,” Laisa said, pointing out the obvious as she took his things.

“They will. The sun’s setting, but it won’t be fully dark for a while.”

And let’s hope they don’t kill the hostages anyway.
They might, Jasper knew that. But he had no choice. He had to stay alive, in the hope that he would eventually find a way to bring water to the Quartern.

He reached out with his water-power and sucked some water out of the cistern. Carefully raising his head to peep, he sent the water in a thin line through the gloaming to one of the palms near a camp fire at the far end of the camp. Once it was there, he dumped it on the old palm fronds sagging from the bab palm’s underskirt. One by one, under the sudden weight of water, the fronds snapped at the base and fell to the ground. Several Reduners sitting beneath the tree were hit, and the fronds were heavy. Someone yelled, and men shouted warnings as more sodden branches came crashing down. All heads swung in that direction. “Now,” he said to Laisa and Senya. “Jump!”

They both obeyed. Jasper repeated his trick with another tree. This time, the fronds dropped into a camp fire, and there was a billow of smoke. Then he himself jumped and ran. Behind him, there was pandemonium as more wet branches fell and put a camp fire out. The line of tethered myriapedes baulked and twisted and reared, screaming their panic in ululating wails. The sound made the hairs stand up on Jasper’s neck, but he didn’t look back.

Even as he ran, he· pulled water out of the cistern, twisting it through the trees after him like a tail, just as he had done when he’d freed the Alabaster Feroze. There were more yells and answering replies; he’d been seen. He ran on, pursued by water, pursued by men. A spear whistled through the air, but it fell short. He dodged behind a tree and paused there while he assessed the pursuit. Just men on foot, he decided. No one was mounted. He turned the line of water and pounded a stream hard into the faces of the closest pursuers, the force of it knocking them off their feet. He drove the water into their noses and mouths and eyes and ears. Then he sent a twist of water, the length of several pedes, slapping into the faces of the rest of the men following him. They tried to duck and weave, but the water pursued them, whipping around and reforming after every stinging blow. The pursuit faltered as those behind ran into the men on the ground, their faces bruised, most of them barely alive.

Jasper called out to them from the gathering dusk, “Tell Davim that Cloudmaster Jasper Bloodstone is leaving Breccia now. Tell him that I still command the water of the Quartern.” And he spun the water into a funnel, sending it gyrating into the midst of the Reduners, a wet spindevil that tore at their clothes and their weapons, that knocked them off their feet and flung them down like dust in a wind.

After that, there was no effective pursuit.

Jasper had lost sight of Laisa and Senya. He left the groves, put his back to the camp fires, kept the city walls far to his right and headed up the escarpment after the two women, following traces of their water. He hurried, but made no attempt to catch up with them. He was glad to be alone in the drylands again. No one demanding his time. No one asking him to do something. For a while, he could pretend to be just Shale the Gibber-born, out collecting resin, not the Quartern’s last stormlord whose failure would mean the death of a land. Not a young man commanded to marry a girl-woman for whom he had little but contempt. Not a man who had killed one of the few people who had ever cared about him or a cloudmaster who had failed to be the saviour of the land.

He pushed those thoughts away to concentrate on this night world of the desert. He had no need of any light; the star-shine and his water-sense were enough. Once, he startled a pebblemouse and smiled at its frantic fright as it somersaulted head over heels, diving for its burrow. A little later, he came across a flock of night-parrots as they chewed their way through grass tufts full of seeds. They watched him warily with their huge eyes but never halted their incessant and noisy feeding.

I want to go home,
he thought, and it was the Gibber he meant. And then he wondered at himself. What was there in the Gibber for him? What had he ever had there that was of value, except perhaps the love of his brother and sister—neither of whom was there any more? He didn’t
have
a home.

One day, I will, I swear
, he said to himself.
A place where I belong, which is truly mine. I will build it myself, for me and those I love.

He paused to look back. Far below, he could see the camp fires of the Reduners. In front of the flames, he could see men scurrying about. Some were saddling pedes, others lighting torches. The foot of the escarpment was alive with moving flickers of red, the burning brands of the searchers. They were spreading up the hill like sparks scattered by a gusting wind. He could feel the water of pedes as well, but none were close as yet. He smiled. They were as obvious to him as an eagle in the noonday sky. They would never find him.

To his right, the city was mostly dark. He traced the outline of the waterhall at the top, then Breccia Hall, and thought of Nealrith and Kaneth and Ryka and Ethelva. He thought of Terelle the last time he had seen her, fleeing for her life through the streets of Scarcleft. He thought of Mica, enslaved. Or dead. He thought of Citrine, the piece of jasper clasped in her hand just before she died.

“Davim,” he whispered. “You did this. You and Taquar. And one day you both will pay.”

Scarpen Quarter

Breccia City

Ryka wondered, not for the first time, if she’d done the right thing. She’d denied Kaneth her body, moved out of his bed, avoided him as much as possible. She had concealed her thickening waist to punish the man she loved. It all seemed horribly childish now. She could hardly remember why she’d done it in the first place.

Perhaps the baby in her womb, almost half grown now, would be a stormlord. Perhaps he might be the future of the land, and she ought to hide herself away to keep her baby safe. And what right had she to deny Kaneth the knowledge of his baby’s existence? She’d been thinking all along that she wouldn’t have to tell him, that he would realise. That he would sense the baby’s water. But he never had. That had hurt, had made her even angrier with him. How could he not feel his own son, there under his nose?

Yet if she told Kaneth, he would never rest until he had sent her to safety. And she couldn’t live without him.

I can’t.

He was sleeping, sprawled out on the stone tiles of the waterhall floor. She sat opposite, back to the wall, and drank in the sight of him: long, lanky, lean. Tousled hair, worry lines on his face smoothed away by exhausted sleep, snatching rest while he still could.

It wouldn’t be long now before the Reduners realised Jasper had escaped. The next attack, when it came, would be vicious; she knew enough about Reduners to be sure of that, enough to know that any attempt at negotiation would be ignored.

She glanced over at the others in the waterhall. The remaining reeve and surviving guards had been reinforced by another eight guards, all that could be spared from the thinly stretched forces that remained to defend both the waterhall and Breccia Hall. She looked around at them. One of them, Pikeman Elmar Waggoner, was now replenishing the oil in the lamps in the wall niches and placing extra ones around the edge of the cisterns. His face resembled a battle-scarred tomcat, yet when his gaze lit on Kaneth, it softened to a gentleness at variance with his tough exterior. Earlier, both had thought the other dead, and their meeting in the waterhall had been a bright moment in an otherwise dark day.

She thought of her father, who had died fighting on the city wall. She wondered if her mother and Beryll were safe inside the hall somewhere. That exasperating, teasing sister who drove her sandcrazy—now Ryka would have given everything she owned to have Beryll live through this siege safely.

Something overhead started to thump, and dust sifted into the air from the hairline cracks that webbed their way along the daub ceiling. She frowned, watching. They were in the highest building in the city, the top of the escarpment. There was nothing above them.

The thump continued. Her hand crept to her womb, to rest protectively over the child within. Her mouth went dry.

When her gaze returned to Kaneth, she found he was staring at her, at where she had placed her hand. “They are coming through the roof,” she said. “The Level One wall must be breached.”
So soon.

“Ryka,” he whispered, “do you have something to tell me?” Around them the guards were waking, looking upwards to where the thump continued to pound. Men reached for their weapons and stood. No one spoke. Faces tilted towards the ceiling. The air thrummed with tension, with sound, with fear.

Ryka had eyes only for Kaneth, and his did not waver from hers. She nodded.

He paled. “Oh, Watergiver’s heart! Ryka, why didn’t you tell me earlier? You should not be here.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet. He moved towards the concealed trapdoor, the one that led to the hidden room, tugging her after him. Someone had covered the entrance with a stone slab.

She pulled against him. “No. No time. If they were to break through now and see it open—What if Jasper and Laisa and Senya haven’t left yet?”

He halted, in agony. Torn. “A child is our hope for the future, Ryka. Everyone’s future. How could you endanger him? Or is it a her? How could you not tell me?”

“A boy, I think, but I could yet be wrong. And he would die of thirst long before he learned to cloudshift. Leave it, Kaneth.”

Still he hesitated, his anguish a tangible thing between them.

“It’s too late,” she whispered, knowing she had made a horrendous mistake, but the words were drowned in shattering sound as the roof at one end of the waterhall collapsed. Several of the guards died on the spot, hit by falling debris. The rest were swamped in a cloud of dust. Kaneth grabbed Ryka with one hand and drew his sword with the other.