by Glenda Larke
"Sounds ridiculous to me," Ouina said with a scornful snort.
"To me, too," Laisa agreed.
Both women then proceeded to raise all the same questions that Terelle had, plus a few of their own, to ridicule the idea that the Reduners would release their ziggers.
Jasper listened patiently, and wondered what they would say if he said he knew it would happen because Terelle had painted it that way… It did sound ridiculous when you put it like that.
In the end Laisa did in fact ask, "And what the hells was that girl of yours painting dead ziggers for?"
"She's superstitious, that's all. She believes painting dead ziggers means all the ziggers will die."
"That's absurd!"
"Yes, isn't it?" he agreed, smiling blandly. Underneath his cheerful exterior, he wondered how long it would be before Laisa put two and two together and came up with an approximation of the truth. He had a horrible idea that if and when she did, it would mean trouble for Terelle. "What's happening?"
"The dark is eating the sky!"
Fear surrounded them on all sides. It was there in the whispers, in the eyes raised upward, in the harsh curses and the soft-spoken prayers, in the way men crowded together as if there was safety in proximity. Ravard was exasperated. These were the same men who displayed no fear when facing the reality of death in battle?
He and Davim and Medrim, the Warrior Son, moved among them, trying to dispel the fear and calm the mounting panic. "The stars are still there. Nothing is eating them, it's just a cloud blocking your view of the sky." "You afraid of a cloud now? What, you reckon it will come and eat you, too?"
Embarrassed, the men began to disperse as the word spread. Ravard, still carrying his burning pitch torch, returned to where their tents were erected, to find Davim had already arrived back and was now in conversation with Medrim and a Reduner whom Ravard didn't know. "This chalaman was on sentry duty up the gully to the south," Medrim was telling Davim. "There are lights and fires on the hillside above us, apparently a large camp. He reckons the Scarpen army must have come down just after dark and settled in for the night."
"Damned quiet about it they were, too, but they aren't trying to hide the lights, so they can't know we are so close," the chalaman added.
Ravard grinned, touched by an unexpected excitement. War. Battle: the promise of it was there in the shine of the sentry's eyes, in the anticipation of his tone.
"Show us," Davim ordered. "How many men do you estimate?"
"Several thousand, maybe? There must be a couple of hundred lamps at least, and a number of cooking fires. It's too sandblasted dark to see much, though, with the stars gone, and no way a scout can get close, not without making a racket."
Ravard knew Medrim's estimate was probably accurate. He was an experienced warrior. He was also Davim's uncle and he'd held the same position under the previous sandmaster. He would keep it, Ravard guessed, until one of Davim's sons was old enough to fill the role. I just wish he was a wiser man. We could do with some wisdom now. Experience is not everything…
Uneasily, he looked up. Half the night sky was still blotted out. Why? he wondered. So we don't have starlight to see when they attack? But then, how can they attack if they can't see, either? They'd be stumbling all over the place and we'd hear them coming. It didn't make sense, and Ravard didn't like things that didn't make sense.
Some time later, when they rounded a turn in the gully where the last row of sentries was posted, they had a view up the wash to Pebblebag Pass. On the hill slope there were scattered lights and flickering camp fires.
"You're right, Medrim. That's not a scouting party," Davim remarked, keeping his voice low even though they were too far away to be heard. "Too large by far. This is an attack force."
"Not Taquar's, surely?" Medrim asked.
"Hardly. This is the stormlord's trap for us."
Ravard struggled with that. "The message was from him, not Taquar?" The bastard! Davim knew all along. But he was worried the other tribes might give us trouble if they knew we were riding into a trap.
"Did you doubt it? Seems they are bringing the fight to us." He smiled. "I've been expecting something like this ever since I found out there have also been sky messages for that old bag of bones, Vara Redmane. As if the sandcrazy old bitch could read them! I hadn't expected they would set the trap so far down the gully, but I am glad they have. We will teach them the folly of their leadership."
"We attack?" Ravard asked, trying to sound nonchalant. His heart beat faster in his eagerness. And yet another niggling thought refused to be cast out entirely: what if Garnet wasn't lying? What if Jasper Bloodstone and Shale Flint were one and the same person-and Shale was up there somewhere? Shale, always being beaten down by Pa, and yet so bleeding stubborn he never gave in.
"Ever the warrior; aren't you, Ravard! I know you'd rather wield a sword than a zigger, but there are better ways of winning a battle than poking your nose into a scorpion's hole and getting it stung." Ravard couldn't see the sandmaster's smile, but he heard it in his tone as the man clapped Medrim on the back. "Let loose some ziggers up there-they'll do a better job than we ever could."
"How many?" Medrim asked.
"Make a thorough job of it. Send five thousand. We wouldn't want any of the Scarpermen to miss out, would we?" His tone told Ravard he was wearing that feral grin of his, that glint in his eye only ever fuelled by blood lust. Davim loved ziggers in a way Ravard never had.
"Five thousand?" Ravard was taken aback. A zigger that had gorged on human flesh was sated and useless for three days. A third of their ziggers would be out of action. And only Dune Watergatherer had that many.
Medrim warned, "We'll lose quite a few. They'll fly into the flames or sizzle themselves on the lantern glass."
"Some, yes." Davim didn't sound worried. "But once those men start screaming and running, they'll be better targets than a lantern, believe me."
Ravard rubbed irritably at the back of his neck as they returned to the camp, leaving the sentry at his post. So many things seemed to be bothering him lately. He hadn't liked the idea of returning to the southern Scarpen in the first place. While he approved of the idea of being free of the power of stormlords and returning to a Time of Random Rain, Davim's quest for power and his hatred of all Scarpen folk smelled dangerously passionate to Ravard. Passion was fine in a warrior, but in a leader? A man wanted to feel he was being led by someone who used his head, not his temper, to make decisions.
When he arrived in Qanatend, Ravard had tried to counsel caution, but Davim had not been in the mood to listen, especially not when the usually bold Master Son preached prudence. Davim then asked him, with considerable asperity, if Ravard had lost his guts. Medrim, the sunblasted old bastard, had laughed.
"So what if it is a trap?" Davim had asked. "We will prevail. The rainlords of the Scarpen are doomed. Jasper Bloodstone will either die or be in our hands. Either way, we win."
Ravard's unease was with him still as he and Medrim ordered the zigger assault. It wasn't a simple matter; each dune used ziggers attuned to a different perfume. With their appetites satisfied, they were happy to return to their cages and ignore anyone else around, but until that moment it was essential only warriors doused with the correct perfume were anywhere in the release area.
They thought of giving everyone the Watergatherer scent, but a look at the stores convinced him there wasn't enough of it. Instead, Medrim pulled back everyone except the men of Dune Watergatherer, and sent them down the gully. Only Watergatherer ziggers were released, and he insisted that only cages with inbuilt zigtubes were to be used. This made the beetles crawl down a tube pointed in the right direction, one after another. They then tended to keep flying in a straight line. Haphazard release through an open cage door often meant more aimless flight as they hunted for a victim that smelled right. The last thing anyone wanted was fatalities among Reduners from other tribes.
Once he and Medrim had everything moving smoothly, and the
first batch of the ziggers were on their way, Ravard didn't wait to hear the screams. He returned to the camp to report to Davim.
He ducked his head inside the flap of the sandmaster's tent. Davim was there, and so was a Qanatend slave woman, crying softly in the corner of the tent.
"You want me to get rid of her?" Ravard asked neutrally.
"No need. She doesn't speak a word of our tongue, and I shall have more need of her before the night is over. You can avail yourself of her reluctant services if you like. We will doubtless be fighting tomorrow, and this could be your last night on earth. What better way to spend it? The bitch bit me, though, so be careful."
There had been a time when he would have taken up the offer without a second thought, but now, since Garnet-
God, what had that woman done to him?
He thought of her wistfully. And wondered, not for the first time, why he hankered so after a woman who must be ten or fifteen cycles older than he was, and who was probably still in love with another man.
She looks me in the eye, he thought, as if she is my equal. A strange reason to like a woman, when he came to think of it. Maybe she is my equal. He didn't pursue that thought. It made him uncomfortable.
"All done?" Davim asked.
"The ziggers are on their way. Do you want to follow with an attack by the chalamen?"
"No. Not until we see in the morning what happened. Come in, come in. Have some amber with me. Best brew I could find in Qanatend." He held out a drink skin.
Ravard withdrew his head from the tent and glanced around. Down in the dry stream bed, rows of warriors were trying to get some sleep wrapped in their bedrolls against the cold; small fires of pede droppings glowed between the prone bodies, helping to take the cold cutting edge from the air. On the higher flat ground, the tents-belonging mostly to the sandmasters of other dunes and all the tribemasters-had their flaps laced shut. Ravard knew without being told that many of them contained other slave women, or men, brought upwash to use, just as Davim had used the girl now shivering in the corner.
Where men were still up, they were quiet, chatting around a fire perhaps, or eating a late meal. Everything was as it should be. It would be at least half a sandglass run before the first ziggers returned. There was nothing to do but wait, so he entered the tent, accepting the skin as he sat. He tossed a blanket to the girl before lifting the skin to his lips.
Davim gave a mocking smile. "You are too soft, tribemaster," he said.
Ravard shrugged. "Not where it counts."
"Don't disappoint me tomorrow."
"Do you expect me to?" He handed the skin back to Davim. He wasn't interested in drinking and had taken little more than a sip. If he died in the fighting to come, he didn't want it to be because he was slurped. He didn't like drunkenness; it reminded him too much of his father, Galen the sot. Dune god save me, I hate the bastard even now.
"No, I don't think you will. I made a man of you. You were nothing when you came to the dunes. Nothing but a sniveling Gibber grubber scared of his own shadow." Davim took a long drink. "I beat that out of you. In fact, I beat the fear out of you. You're not afraid of anything now, are you?"
He grinned. "I have a healthy fear of my sandmaster."
"Here, drink up." Davim handed the skin back and lay down on his pallet, hands behind his head. The girl watched him fearfully, but he drifted off into a doze.
Ravard wanted to see whether the ziggers were already returning, but decided to wait a little longer in case Davim woke. He ignored the girl, now wrapped in the blanket in the corner, and stared at the sandmaster instead. Asleep, he looked almost benign.
Those unwelcome thoughts intruded again. What if the sandmaster had known who Mica was right from the beginning? What if Davim was the one who had killed Citrine just to teach Shale a lesson?
Ravard's memories of that day were blurred by the terror of the event, muddied by the intervening years. If Davim was the man who had come and spoken to them outside the huts, who had seized Citrine, Ravard was unaware of it. The Reduners had all looked the same to him then-redmen, heads and lower faces wrapped in red cloth, red tunics, red breeches, every one of them armed, merciless and terrifying. He had no recollection of anyone in particular. He'd been so scared he'd pissed in his breeks, he remembered that much.
The rest was just one horror piled on the next. Citrine first, then his mother, then his father. Shale starting to scream like a desert cat caught in a trap, screaming and clawing like a wild thing, until one of the redmen had punched him in the stomach. The air had gone out of him, the redman had picked him up like a sack of bab fruit under one arm-and Ravard had never seen him again. He hadn't turned up among the slaves, so he must have been killed, like so many others that day. Another grief he'd had to bear. Or so he'd thought.
He'd never spoken about it to Davim. Never asked him why he had chosen that settle. He'd just assumed it was one of many attacked by the Reduners in their desire to end the dominance of the Quartern.
But Garnet had said the sandmaster had gone there to find Shale…
Because Shale was a stormlord.
She'd said he was still alive. A wave of nausea swept over Ravard.
No. Garnet was a liar. He couldn't bear to think what she had told him was true.
What if he, Ravard, was just a weapon to be used as Davim willed, when he willed, and discarded when it was convenient? Used, manipulated. A hostage for Shale's good behavior, if ever that became necessary. Davim had two legitimate sons. The eldest was not old enough to braid his hair yet, but when he was-what then? Would he be named Master Son in Ravard's place?
Shale, his enemy. The ziggers he'd just ordered released-one of them right now burrowing into his little brother. An agonizing death.
No.
No. He wouldn't believe it. He wouldn't.
Outside, someone screamed. A hideous, jagged sound, scarifying furrows of panic through his mind. He shot out of the tent, scimitar drawn, Davim right behind him flinging on his tunic as he came.
A chalaman raced past, his eyes wild with shock.
"What is it?" Davim shouted.
"Ziggers!" the man screamed, the whites of his eyes large in the dark of his face. "Tens of them!"
Davim grabbed Ravard by the arm and wrenched him back into his tent with him. Then he closed the tent flap. Ravard automatically began checking to see there were no gaps or holes anywhere. The girl watched them, wide-eyed.
Davim gave a half-laugh. "Now, there's a good idea!" He reached out a hand and ripped the blanket from her to expose her nakedness. Opening the tent flap just wide enough to accommodate her, he made her crawl out on all fours, but kept a hold on her ankle. Then he yanked at her so she fell flat just outside the entrance. Still clutching her foot, he tightened the tent flap around her ankle and tied it tightly. "There," he said, "that should save a few lives at least."
Ravard, disgusted, tried to keep his expression neutral. "If these are the ziggers we released, they are all from Watergatherer. You and I are in no danger." He didn't need to ask if Davim wore the perfume; no one ever neglected to do so, even when they were at peace.
The foot wriggled, but Davim kept a tight grip. The girl continued her wailing, not understanding, but knowing something bad was about to happen. "Blasted female," Davim complained. "She never would stop that hideous noise of hers."
A moment later the crying melted into a sound of pure terror, and the sandmaster grinned at Ravard. Gulping sounds followed, as if she was experiencing pain so severe she could not even scream. The noises continued for five or six minutes before she was quiet.
"In the end she proved herself useful after all," Davim said carelessly, and released his hold on her ankle. He pushed her foot outside the tent.
Ravard swallowed back his bile. She's only a slave. He didn't know her. It shouldn't worry him, but it did.
In the distance, they could hear other cries of anguish. Withering hells, Ravard thought, it takes a lot to make a Reduner wa
rrior shriek like that.
Davim asked, "Now tell me why, if they are our ziggers, they would return without having fed?"
"If not ours, then whose? Taquar's? Scarcleft's the only city that has any number of them."
Davim didn't answer.
The screaming outside subsided, but Ravard dreaded what he would find. Most of the Reduners did not have tents. If the ziggers were Watergatherer ones returning unsated, then only those from other dunes were vulnerable. If they were Taquar's, then everyone was at risk.
"Why did you attack Wash Drybone Settle?" he asked suddenly. The question startled him. He hadn't thought about asking it; he'd just blurted it out. He didn't even know what he would do with the answer when it came.
Davim stared at him as if he was mad. "What?" he asked. "Where?"
"Wash Drybone. Where I was born."
"What has that to do with anything? Are you sun-fried?"
"I need to know."
Davim threw his hands up in the air. "I heard there was a boy there who had water-powers."
"Did you find him?"
"Does it look as if I found him? Can you see him anywhere? I counted us lucky we found you. Although who would have thought then that you would become a water sensitive with enough water skill to be a tribemaster?" He pointed at the tent flap. "Now get the sand hells out there and see what's happening. Let's hope they were Watergatherer ziggers, eh?" The glare he gave was a challenge. He'd given an order and he expected obedience, knowing it could mean Ravard's death if there were stray ziggers from another place-and not caring.
I mean that little to him. Garnet was right. Burning with anger, he went. No warrior defied a direct order, ever.
He took a lamp with him. As Davim retied the tent flap behind him, he stepped over the girl She was dead, of course. Blood oozed sluggishly from the ruin of an eye. It looked as if she had been attacked by only one beetle. It still sat on her chin, cleaning the flesh from its wing cases with its back legs. When it had finished, it opened the cases, displaying its gauzy delicate wings in a rainbow of shimmering color, and flew away.