by Glenda Larke
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, heВ· 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."
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
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.
And out of the dust the Reduners came, ululating their war cry to their dune god.
There were too many of them, Ryka saw that at a glance, and they kept on coming, leaping down through the hole in the roof. Kaneth dropped her hand, and they placed their backs to the wall, side by side, and groped in their tired bodies for the water-power to make men blind.
I wonder if Kaneth was right about Taquar? Ryka reflected. Would things have been different if he had ruled here? Because the rest of us made such a mess of it.
But there was no time to consider what might have been. To her despair, she realised the Reduners were using new tactics. They held chala spears, not scimitars.
She and Kaneth blinded the first few men who tried to throw them, but there were just too many chalamen. The guards began to fall under the onslaught. More and more blinded men groped their way through the battling warriors, until Ryka had no more power to call on. She clutched her sword, preparing for the first of the Reduners to reach her, but Kaneth grabbed her hand and yanked her away from the wall. He raced along the walkway between the open cisterns, towards the waterhall door, pulling her with him. Elmar, ever ready to follow his lord, pounded down a parallel walkway, heading in the same direction.
Kaneth yelled to the guards, ordering them out, too, although Ryka doubted many of them would make it-or even hear.
She didn't see the spear that hit him, but she saw his head jerk back, felt him stagger. Another spear tore at her tunic, pulling her off balance as it ripped the fabric and sliced a thin line across her skin. She flailed and fell backwards into the cistern. And Kaneth dropped face down on top of her, blood pouring from his head. He clutched her as they fell, his grip hard and tight.
She closed her eyes as his weight bore them both to the bottom. The water was cold. She felt stonework under her back and panicked. Instinct told her to surface. Rational thought told her all that waited there was death.
And then she was breathing air. She opened her eyes, to look directly into Kaneth's only a finger's length from her own. And there was nothing but air between them, a small pocket he had cleared for them to breathe. He winked and mouthed, "Don't move." They drifted upwards through the water, and at the surface he let her go. His arms floated on either side of her head, keeping her sunken beneath the protection of his body.
Waterless hell, she thought, he knows there's a good chance someone is going to plunge a spear into his back to make sure he's dead. How can he be so brave?
They were going to die, and she was flooded with regret. They should have run. They should have tried to save their child. Death was forever. I was wrong, she thought.
"Live," she said to Kaneth, just the tiniest whisper into the air between them so no one else would hear. "Live, for the three of us."
The water around their heads reddened with his blood. She could see it running from his wound, a crease through his scalp, a deep furrow that must have reached the bone. The edges of the air pocket weakened as the last of his power drained. She used her senses to feel its dimensions: just enough to cover their faces, with a narrow pipe running from the edge to emerge on the surface, hidden in the floating tangle of her hair. She shored up the sides by pushing water away. Sandblast, she was so weak. Only the faintest dregs of her power remained. How long could she keep the water at bay?
He must have felt her power take over from his, because his eyes closed, and she felt him slip away somewhere she could not follow. His last conscious action had been to protect her and their child.
She wanted to hold him. She wanted to tell him she loved him. And most of all, she wanted to reach out and pinch his wound closed with her fingers to stop the bleeding that leached his life away. Live, she told him silently. Live.
Yet she could do nothing. A single movement, a single sound would betray them both and bring certain death. She had to play dead. A slim chance, but the only one they had. So much blood…
Think, woman! she shouted in her mind, berating herself. You are a rainlord. You can stop the bleeding if you can find enough within you… As she floated there in a sea of his blood, her heart breaking, she searched for a fragment of power to dry his wound, to seal it with dry scabbing. Just a fragment, that's all she needed.
Oh, Kaneth, love, please don't die on me, not now.
Motionless and silent, she searched for power-and wondered, if he died, whether she would sense the moment his life left him. "Mother?" Senya asked, breathless after the climb. "What do we do next? I mean, if we go to Portennabar, Davim will just go there, too, and exactly the same thing will happen. We can't fight, because we don't have ziggers or enough rainlords or enough pedes."
"I'm glad to see you are finally thinking, child. Ah, here's the gully. I can sense the pedes, right where they should be."
"So what are we going to do?"
Laisa smiled in the darkness. "Don't worry, Senya. We are not going to Portennabar." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Have you ever known your mother not to have a spare water jar in the cupboard? We have the Quartern's only stormlord. So we will go where there are fighters and ziggers and pedes and a man with guts enough to lead us to power and victory."
Senya's eyes widened. Then she began to smile.
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