The Last Stormlord

by Glenda Larke

  For a moment Shale didn’t understand. And then he caught sight of the revulsion on Mica’s face, and he did. He laid down his hammer. “Nah. Don’t want t’do that,” he said. “Not what Ore the stonebreaker makes his boys do. They say it hurts.”

  “Hurts? I’ll give you hurts if you cheek me, boy! You’ll do as you’re tole.” His pa stood up and came towards him.

  “The rush is comin’ down,” he blurted out. “You got t’do somethin’, Pa. Warn folk.”

  His Pa looked at him in astonishment. “You crazy as well as lazy, boy?”

  Mica gave him an agonised look, but Shale couldn’t keep quiet even though his hands had started to shake. “If the pedeman has his mount tied up in the street, he should get it inside someone’s garden. The water’ll be here ’fore the sun goes down.”

  Without warning his father back-handed him across the mouth, this time hard enough to send him flying. He hit the trunk of the nearest bab palm and slid to the ground, dazed.

  Mica sat still, biting his lip.

  “Your brother’s got the brains of a sand-tick. What the pickled pede is the matter with him?” Galen asked him, without even bothering to look at Shale.

  Mica shrugged and said nothing. His father walked away, grumbling. Mica waited until he’d disappeared through the palms, then went to kneel where Shale was trying to sit up.

  “You all right?”

  Shale touched his mouth gingerly. “S’pose so.”

  “What the withering spit did you have to tell him for?”

  But Shale couldn’t put into words the desire he felt—the stupid, childish need he had—to see approval in his father’s eyes. He knew it was stupid, but couldn’t help it. He mumbled, “ ’Cause it’s true. Mica, it’s almost here. I can feel it. We got to get to the top of the bank.” When Mica opened his mouth to scold, Shale added reproachfully, “You promised.”

  “Pedeshit. All right. Though you’re too messed up to go anywhere much.”

  Shale pushed the basket of crushed segment plates at him. “Take this.”

  “Someone’ll say we’re stealing if they see us makin’ off with it.”

  The feeling in Shale’s chest suffocated him, speeding up his breathing, quickening his sense of urgency. Roughly, he shoved the basket into Mica’s arms. “Then hang it up high in the bab palm so’s it won’t get washed away.”

  Mica gave an exaggerated sigh of irritation, but slung the bag over his shoulder, hauled himself up over the bulge of the lower trunk, then shimmied up the narrower part above until he could reach the fronds. He hung the bag on the broken end of a stem and slid down again. Shale, his whole face aching, headed for the bank on the opposite side from where they lived, and Mica followed.

  “Pa’s right,” he said as he pushed Shale up over the top lip of the wash a moment or two later, “You got no more brains than a wilting sand-tick.”

  “Folk should know,” Shale said, stubborn to the last. He felt dizzy and sick. Blood dripped from his nose and lip and already his face was beginning to swell. “Mica, think. They won’t have their garden cisterns open. Gravel won’t have opened the grove cistern, neither. An’ what if there’s folk in the streets? The pedeman’s pede, too. Even Pa might still be in the wash somewheres.”

  “But it’s not goin’ to happen,” Mica protested. “You’re as muddled as a legless pede!”

  “It’s comin’!”

  Mica stood up and looked down the wash. He could see over the settle to where the riverbed cut north through the plains. “There’s nothin’ there.” He glanced at his brother where he sat in misery, holding his head in his hands. “Shale, there really isn’t.” But even as he said the words, he gave an uneasy glance back up the wash.

  Beside him, Shale struggled to stand up. His fear vanished, swamped in the excitement of feeling the power of water on the move. The water in his blood stirred in joyous response; his heart raced. “Listen,” he said, and cocked his head to hear better. “I tole you so!”

  Mica listened, then squinted against the light to look up the wash. His eyes went wide with horror.

  “Weeping shit!” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gibber Quarter

  Wash Drybone

  The rush shot down the riverbed, filling it from side to side, riding up the banks on the curves and sloshing back down again. The front was a roaring brown monster topped with a ragged curl of foam. It consumed the gully, blasted it with sound that was at once familiar and exhilarating. The feral rage of water on the move. Life and death inextricably mixed.

  Too late, the settle heard. Within the walls of their gardens, people scrambled to close gates, to open sluices that led to the cisterns, to scream for children, to make sure that all were safe within their yards and houses. In the street, a pede reared up on its multitude of legs, wailing. Shale could see its head above the walls as it attempted to climb over into one of the house gardens. He was glad they were too far away to see the terror in its myopic eyes.

  From where they stood, they could not see the bore hit the strengthened garden walls of the first houses, but they heard the impact, the slap of a wave travelling as fast as a pede could run, slamming into stone.

  “I’ll be waterless,” Mica muttered, awe-struck. “It’s never been like this before.”

  “Much more water,” Shale agreed, crossing his arms over his chest to hug himself, as if that would stop the turmoil gathering inside him from bursting out.

  The bucking torrent—now parted by the first of the houses—streamed down the parallel streets of the settle. The streets became rivers; garden walls were riverbanks. From their vantage point, Shale watched as villagers flung back the stone covers to allow the water, already gushing into their gardens through the water slits, to flow into their underground cisterns. He watched as several people escaped from the streets by diving through gates or climbing across walls. He saw the pede try to follow them, and fail. Its great body fell back and it was borne away on the water.

  He cried out, anguished, his elation diminishing.

  The water thrashed out of the settle and into the palm groves, far too much for the slots to handle. Spreading out to cover the cultivated land, it submerged crops, battered the trees, slammed up against the banks of the wash. The pede came with it, head emerging briefly, then disappearing, then visible again. Black pointed claws raked one of the palm trunks, scrabbling for purchase. The saddle came untied and was swept into the torrent. The water, relentless, dragged at the beast until it lost its grip. It snatched at the trunk of the next tree. This time it used its mouth parts as well as the sharp tips of its feet.

  Shale churned with conflicting emotions. He stood on land, but he felt he was caught up in the water, struggling for life. He was filled with power then buffeted by it, powerless. He couldn’t control his feelings. Everything was too volatile, too turbulent. He found himself shouting to the pede, as if it could hear above the sound of the water. For an absurd moment he thought that if only he could save the animal, everything would be all right. Everything could go back to the way it should be.

  The pede didn’t give up. It clawed deep into the second bab palm and rested. Its long feelers—the length of its body—lifted out of the torrent and began to grope around. One of them hooked on to another tree, closer to the bank where Shale and Mica stood. Quite deliberately, the pede loosed its foothold, allowing its body to swing out into the flow. Torn by the current, the creature groped through the air with its second feeler until it too hooked on to a palm, this one closer still to the bank.

  Shale surged with hope. “It’s goin’ t’work its way over to the edge,” he said, awed.

  Mica gaped. “I thought they were dumb.”

  Noise filled Shale’s ears. Water was roaring past, but the sound he heard was inside his head. Everything was muddled up, pressing in on him, making his brain ache. Later, he thought. I’ll sort it all out later. “Let’s meet it,” he said.

  “What?” Mica asked, not under
standing.

  “Let’s meet it. Once it gets to the bank I reckon it won’t be able t’climb up without help. It’s too muddy.”

  Already the beast had moved across another two rows. It clung to a tree, resting, gathering strength as water tugged at its body. Raising its first three segments out of the water, it clasped the trunk with all its front legs. The great head turned to look at them, blurry black eyes gazing out above mouthparts that fitted together like the pieces of a puzzle.

  “Oh dust, it’s beautiful,” Shale said. He pulled away from Mica, who looked at him as if he was daft, and ran to a spot further down the wash. “Down here, I think,” he called back over his shoulder. “Come, we gotta try t’catch him and help him up the bank.”

  “We can’t haul somethin’ that large,” Mica protested, but already the pede had plunged through the water away from the last of the trees, struggling with all its pairs of legs, thrashing even with its feelers in an attempt to close the gap to the edge. “It’ll never make it!”

  “Yes, he will.”

  Shale started to scramble along the lip of the bank, looking for a way down. The flood bucked and plunged past in muddy skeins, and the closer he came to it, the more disoriented he was. He lost sight of himself, became at one with the water, unable to distinguish where he began and the river ended. He stumbled and sat down hard, clutching at his head, and felt himself begin to slide into the wash.

  Too much water, he thought. There’s too much. And it won’t stay still. If only it’d just stop so I can think.

  As the myriapede drew near, he slipped further down the slope and his feet plunged into the flood where it gouged at the bank. The flow tugged at him, plucking powerfully at his ankles and calves. His senses exploded. The hugeness of the expanse of water overwhelmed him; terror made incoherent nonsense of his thoughts. There was nothing that distinguished him from that expanse. He was part of it, not a boy any more. He was just water, unshaped, without boundaries.

  When something touched his face, sliding across his skin in jags, he focused on it. The pede; it was the pede’s feeler reaching out to him. He grabbed it and fixed all his attention on the physical reality clutched in the solidness of his hand. The water receded from his mind, and the turbulence within him ebbed. The beast scrabbled against the bank, its feet churning up mud. Shale held tight. He slipped further into the water and struggled to dig his heels and his elbows into the mud of the bank. Terror returned as he realised he was about to be swept away. He lost his footing and swung out into the current. He tightened his hold on the feeler. As long as he had that, he could also hold on to what was real. He could keep the terror at bay.

  Water washed over his head and instinctively he held his breath and closed his eyes. The feeler, caught in the flow now that it was weighed down by his body, floated alongside the pede. Shale bumped hard against the body segments. Wincing, his head broke the surface and he opened his eyes. The black shiny side of the pede rose above him, slippery and wet and impossibly high. It blocked his view of the bank and of Mica, but even over the sound of rushing water, he heard his brother screaming his name.

  He shuddered with shock. The water wanted to enter his mind again, but this time he wouldn’t let it. He grasped the feeler tight and scrutinised the pede. Mounting handles. It’s got to have mounting handles somewhere. He could pull himself up.

  Towards the head, he thought, and began to haul himself along the feeler in that direction. The current tugged at him, but he ignored its clutch. The pede wasn’t moving. It’s hooked itself ’gainst the bank, he thought.

  When he saw the toehold slot carved into one of the segments, he knew he had the right place. He first hooked his fingers, then a foot, into the slot and levered himself up out of the water far enough to reach for a mounting handle. He hung there for a moment, then clambered up, slipping and sliding, until he was on the top of the beast where the saddle had been.

  His brother stared at him from the top of the bank. Mica was wet and covered in mud—and he held the pede reins in his hand. He was leaning back to keep them taut, braced against the weight of the pede in his effort to stop the animal drifting away. He swore at Shale, a nonstop string of obscenities.

  Shale grinned sheepishly back.

  The pede’s feet found purchase on the floor of the wash as the water level dropped, and with Mica hauling on the reins it began to edge its way upwards. It dug the points of its feet into the earthen slope and finally humped its way over the top edge, Shale riding triumphantly on its back.

  I’m a caravanner, he thought. A pedeman ridin’ me own beast ’cross the plains.

  For a precious never-to-be-forgotten moment of make-believe, he was free of the settle, independent of his father, unencumbered by poverty. He was Shale of the Gibber, leader of men, emerging victorious from an adventure.

  As he slid reluctantly to the ground, reality returning, Mica punched him on the shoulder none too softly. “I’ll kill you if you do anything so pissing stupid ever again, you sandwitted wash-rat!” he cried. “You could have died in there!”

  Shale blinked. “Died?” He hadn’t been afraid of dying. He’d been afraid of losing himself. Of not knowing what or who he was. Of becoming part of a larger whole, of being like a jug of amber spilled into a cistern until there was nothing of the original recognisable.

  “Yeah,” said Mica. “Don’t you know you can suffocate in water? Like chokin’, ’cause there’s no air.”

  Shale furrowed his brow, thinking about that. He didn’t remember choking. He didn’t remember not being able to breathe. His fear had been that he was melting, disappearing as a person. He wanted to explain, but didn’t think there were any words he could find that would make Mica understand.

  Beside him, the pede shivered with a clatter of segment plates, sending water streaming out of the joints. Then it reached out a feeler and touched the two boys one after the other, running the tip over their faces and bodies as if it needed to assess them, and remember.

  Tentatively, Shale reached out and touched the animal’s head. For a moment it regarded him, then it slid its first segment down over its eyes, tucked its feelers back along its body and carefully rolled itself up into a tight ball, legs inside. The edges of the segments were embroidered with a lace fringe, tattered now, and several of the segments themselves were carved—a common custom among the Red Quarter people. They sculptured their personal myriapedes with pictures of all their journeys, so that the pede carried stories with it wherever it went, commemorating both its life and the life of its driver.

  “Reckon it’s gone to sleep,” Mica said, after it had stayed that way for a while.

  “I’m never goin’ to eat pede again,” Shale announced reverently.

  Mica gaped at him, baffled, as if unable to see what had prompted that statement. About to ask, he was diverted by the indescribable sound of earth on the move. On the other side of the wash, where the squatter shanties huddled, the bank had been undermined by water. Shocked, helpless, they watched several houses—including their own—slip down the wall of the wash and vanish into the water.

  “Ma,” Mica whispered. “I’ll be shrivelled, I hope Ma wasn’t inside.”

  Shale’s heart clenched painfully. He scanned the figures rushing to and fro in front of the remaining houses. “Nah,” he said, relief loosening the tightness in his chest. “Look, that’s her there. No one else has a belly like that.”

  Inwardly he thought, But Pa will kill me anyways.

  If Galen the sot was still alive.

  The Gibber Plains appeared to be flat all the way to the horizon. In truth, they were crazed through with cracks, each one a wash that started in the Border Humps to the north and then wandered southwards to the Edge. There, the plain stopped in a ragged tear as if a giant had ripped it away. A brave man could walk to the edge of the tear and peer over to see the Giving Sea several hundred paces below, the rolling surf pounding the cliff face in relentless lines.

  In the Time o
f Random Rain, before the rainlords commanded the clouds—or so the storytellers said—water would occasionally reach the Edge and fall over, to be wasted, evaporated into mist until the foot of the cliffs disappeared behind a skirting of white spindrift and the sea below was lost to sight.

  At dawn on the morning after the bore swept through the settle on Wash Drybone, water once again reached the Edge and plunged down towards the sea. There was no one to see it, no one to exclaim over the waste or be moved by the rainbow beauty of colour playing across the spindrift. Yet somewhere deep in their souls, several people felt that water fall and felt the loss of its purity when it hit the sea. Far away in Breccia City, Cloudmaster Granthon cried out in his sleep and woke, the sadness lingering from his dream subsumed in a larger grief he could not name. In Wash Drybone, Shale Flint felt a wave of pain pass through him, and foundered in the residue of sorrow it left behind. Beside him, Mica stirred uneasily. Highlord Taquar of Scarcleft, already awake, left his bed and opened the shutters, wondering what he’d just felt. In other parts of the Quartern, some of the rainlords stirred, distressed by an event they sensed but lacked sufficient power to interpret.

  Shale and Mica had spent the night out under the stars. At sunset the water had still been running too high to cross the wash; later, when the water level fell, it was too dark to see. Once the sun had gone, the cold came, as always. Poorly clad and as wet as they were, they might have died in the open if it had not been for the myriapede. It curled its great body around them and although it lost heat as the night wore on, it trapped the boys’ warmth within its encircling wall. Shale and Mica weren’t comfortable, and Mica complained that all the water was making his head ache, but they were sheltered.

  At first light they heard voices, and as they struggled to unwind themselves from a tangle of pede legs, a Reduner peered down on them. “Who the salted wells are you?” the owner of the face asked, in tones that were far from friendly. “What you doing with my pede?”