Stormlord Rising

by Glenda Larke

  She took a hurried step backward.

  His anger, though, was not directed at her. He said, “Came t’tell you we leave for the dunes t’morrow morning.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her into Laisa’s room, his grip more urgent than rough. “Choose some clothes. Whatever you need. Bundle them up and I’ll see they are put in a pede pannier.”

  She found herself gaping at him, and quickly closed her mouth. “Reduners are abandoning the city?” she asked. Already? Her heart lurched with hope. Holy Watergiver, it can’t be that Taquar or one of the other cities has come to our aid, can it?

  His lip curled in sardonic amusement. “Hardly. Just me and the men of my tribe. My father has ordered us t’take the new slaves for Dune Watergatherer back t’our dune.”

  “Oh.” She kept her face a blank mask, but her feelings roiled—horror and hope entwined as she struggled to think how she could use this. “The men I saw in the courtyard today?” she asked.

  “Them, plus some women. The sandmaster is humiliating me by sending me home,” he added bitterly, “as you’ll doubtless be glad t’hear.” He grimaced. “’Cause I didn’t kill you when he ordered it. He let me keep you, but a Master Son’s defiance, however small, must be seen t’be punished.” He shrugged. “So Tribemaster Ravard is dismissed back to the dunes t’think on his lack of respect for the sandmaster. You cost me a cut to my pride, city-woman.”

  She snorted. “You have plenty left, Reduner.”

  He leaned against the bedpost, indicated the curtained wardrobes along one side of the room, and folded his arms. “Choose.”

  She pulled back the curtains and was faced with an array of silken dresses, many of them either embroidered or sewn with jeweled trimming. She sighed. Definitely Laisa’s, and a complete contrast to anything Ryka Feldspar liked to wear. She abandoned the first cupboard and looked at the next. These were more to her taste—traveling clothes: trousers and tunics. There was also a fine cloak lined with the fur of the red desert fox. She selected that and chose a number of the other outfits, grateful she and Laisa were not too different in size. And the fine cloth was beautiful, the weave tight enough to keep out the dust and the sand-ticks.

  “Take some of the dresses, too,” he said when he saw what she was choosing.

  “They aren’t my kind of clothes.”

  “Maybe not, but I like them.”

  “Then you wear them!”

  “You test my patience, woman!”

  “And you mine, if it comes to that.”

  He flushed angrily and came across to her, seizing her by the chin and forcing her to look him in the eye. “Don’t ever forget, Garnet, I’m the conqueror here, and you the conquered. I give the orders; you obey.”

  She returned his stare, unblinking. “You can’t intimidate me, Ravard.” A lie uttered in defiance, but she sensed it would be a mistake to give any appearance of total submission to this man with his odd mix of wilful youth and cruel warrior.

  “Oh yes, I can,” he snapped. “You wouldn’t like the slave women’s meddle, believe me. A different warrior every night? Two or three at a time, perhaps?”

  “You can’t fool me, Ravard. There is no way you can send me to the slave women’s meddle now. Your men would laugh at you—a leader who accepted a humiliating punishment for a woman who wasn’t even worth keeping?”

  He glared at her and she glared back, stare for stare. Suddenly he started to laugh. “Gods, but you are a woman! Did your husband know what he had, I wonder? Let me tell you something, sweetling; you’re mine when your three nights are up, and I’ll never let you go for any man. Not even my father. But if you mock me, I’ll make you regret it. I’ll see you naked and beaten raw while the whole tribe watches, till you have no pride under that tough skin of yours. Now, choose four of those dresses.”

  Without a word, she turned back to the first of the cupboards and began to hunt out dresses which were neither too revealing nor too impractical.

  “And call me Kher,” he added as an afterthought.

  I have to think of a way to kill him. But not yet. Now is not the time. She cursed silently. “As you wish, Kher,” she said meekly, with just enough sweetness in her tone to have him wonder if she was making fun of him. She held up one of the dresses against herself. “I had not thought dunesmen dressed their women in city finery.”

  “We’re not barbarians, as ignorant as Gibber washfolk!”

  “No? Yet you come into our land and destroy and thieve like the barbarian tribes of our histories. I see little difference.”

  “We’re a cultured people, with a love of the beautiful. As you’ll see soon.”

  Ryka almost threw up her hands in despair to mock him, just stopping herself in time. Watergiver help me, she thought. He is so damnably young, a puffed-up sandgrouse cockerel, full of a cockerel’s pride… And dangerous, nonetheless.

  “You will need sandals and undergarments. If this woman’s do not fit you, tell me, and I will get others.”

  With heavy distaste, she continued to search through Laisa’s things. When she unearthed some jewelry, Ravard insisted she take that as well. She spared a wry thought for how much that would enrage Laisa if she knew.

  When the pile of selected items was large enough, he gave a nod of satisfaction. “We breakfast before dawn t’morrow and head out before first ray. Choose something t’wear from this pile, and take the cloak as well.”

  She pawed through the selection, looking for the most practical and least attractive of the traveling clothes. Damn Laisa, she couldn’t have an ill-made garment in her whole wardrobe, could she? How the sweet waters do I calm down the passions of this silly man if I have to dress like a snuggery girl? Even as the thought crossed her mind, she shivered in a mixture of exasperation and fear. The trouble was, he was far from a boy in stature and body, and he had the power of a Master Son. She would have to deal with that. Oh, Beryll, maybe yours was the easier route…

  No. Never think that. You have a son to think of!

  “So, you’re taking all those slaves who were down in the courtyard this morning,” she remarked, pulling out a traveling tunic. “What was so special about that burnt man?” Her tone was casual, but her heart thundered so loudly she wondered he did not hear it. “The injured one.”

  “Him? Ah, just a whim of the shamans. They think he’s some kind of reincarnation of a mythical hero. He’s as dumb as a neutered pede, but strong. Fortunately he hasn’t the wits t’be disloyal.”

  That, she thought with grim satisfaction, is what you think.

  Back in Nealrith’s room and alone again, Ryka pondered her decision to seek out Kaneth that night. Their best opportunity to escape would be once they had left the city. There would be pedes they could use, and with the power of two rainlords and any other slaves willing to flee, their chances of success were high.

  But what if she was kept apart from the others? What if Kaneth and Elmar didn’t know she was part of the caravan? Best to let them know beforehand. She would try to reach the stables.

  She slept a little in the earlier part of the night, and then followed her plan to climb up to the balcony above. First she tried to sense the air to see if there was any living water in the room above, but could find none. All was quiet in the courtyard below as well.

  Hauling herself up was harder than she had thought it would be. She blessed the training Kaneth had insisted she undertake to strengthen her arms and shoulders after they had realized war with the Reduners was a likelihood, but still it took three attempts before she succeeded in scrambling to safety one floor up. Once there, she found the shutters were latched from the inside. She had expected that might be the case and had come prepared. It was the work of moments to slip the broken sword tip through the gap between the closed doors and flip the latch.

  The room beyond was small and pokey and dark. She paused on the threshold, tasting the air with her water-sense. There was no one there.

  Leaving the shutters open for light, she crossed to t
he door on the other side. It gave out onto a passage so narrow and dark she guessed this was part of the servants’ quarters. No light, no sound. Still no one around. Making a guess at the best direction to head in, she felt her way along. The passage led to another, slightly wider, and a faint light ahead proved to come from an oil lamp at the head of a set of rough stone stairs heading downward. Definitely servants’ stairs.

  She picked up the lamp and headed down to the next floor, but didn’t linger there. A further set of steps beckoned her on to the ground floor. At the bottom, she emerged into the kitchens where a coal fallen free from the banked fire gave a gleam of light. A candle lantern, designed for outdoor use with a handle and shutters to protect the flame against the wind, was hanging on the back of the door. Just what she needed. She lit it from the other lamp and looked around.

  The sense of water was overpowering: the kitchen cistern, water in pots on the hobs of the two huge fireplaces, water held in fruit, bab-palm mash and other food in the pantry. A line of moving water marked the underground channel of a water tunnel. The only living water she could detect nearby was small and stationary—a cat asleep somewhere, she guessed. She edged the leaf-woven cover of the kitchen cistern back to expose the surface of the water.

  Then she turned to the door in the outside wall. It was heavily barred on the inside. Quietly, she lifted the bars and eased the plank door open. She was looking out onto a walled kitchen courtyard. Oil jars were stacked two deep and three rows high along one side. A rat scampered over the top of them, but apart from that, she could detect nothing alive nearby. She left the door open so she could return the same way.

  The courtyard was accessible through an archway, and when she moved quietly to the edge of the arch and looked out, she sensed people beyond. She cursed her inability to sense far, but thought she was safe enough from immediate detection. Better still, because she was aware of a number of prone bodies at the edge of her water-sense—the sleeping warriors in the entrance courtyard—she could place herself in relation to her knowledge of the layout of Breccia Hall. She needed to turn right to reach the stables. Shuttering the lantern so as to allow no light to escape, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the starlit world outside.

  To her right was a narrow lane running between the main hall building and some outbuildings, roofed by another storey of the hall. She edged her way along this covered way to the end, her footfall silent on the paving stones.

  When she peered from the archway at the other end, she could see the open rectangular courtyard in front of the main façade of the stables. The huge double stable doors, directly in front of her and large enough to allow the passage of a fully loaded packpede, were closed and barred from the outside. They were also guarded by two men, both squatting on their heels as they talked quietly. The sandmaster was wisely not taking any risks with his new slaves, sandblast him.

  The right-hand side of the courtyard was formed by the wall of the main hall. The left-hand side gave onto a large rutted road she guessed led between more outbuildings to Breccia Hall’s main entrance and its main gateway, the only gateway large enough for the use of packpedes.

  Ryka bit her lip, perplexed. How could she pass those guards unnoticed and enter the stables? Recalling the few times she’d been inside those doors, she remembered entering from the main building. If she went back inside the hall she may be able to locate that entrance. Or she could spend half the night searching, only to find that door guarded as well.

  She tried to conjure up memories of being inside the stables. Talking to a pede groom. A stablehand doing something. Shoveling manure. Now, why was that important? Of course—he was throwing it into a muck chute. A muck chute to the right of the main door… but how was that possible? That side of the stable shared its wall with the main hall building.

  She frowned into the darkness. To the right of the façade, a patch that wasn’t part of the brickwork showed up black as obsidian. An impasse, that’s right. She remembered now. A short piece of laneway going nowhere, a delivery bay, where they brought the pedes to unload feed directly into the bins through openings in the stable wall. And a muck chute, where the dirty straw and pede manure were shoveled from the stables directly into a handcart. Those openings would probably be boarded over, but they weren’t guarded.

  Her problem would be to reach them without alerting the guards at the main doors. With a sinking heart she stared at the surface of the courtyard. It was covered a hand-span deep in loose gravel, so as not to blunt the pointed feet of the pedes the way a smooth, hard stone surface would. And it was the noisiest surface in the world to walk across. Even if they didn’t see her in the dark, they could hardly fail to hear her.

  Diversion… she had to make a diversion. A noisy diversion to cover any sound she made. Something that would leave no trace behind. Come on, Ry, think!

  She retreated down the passageway to the other end, until she was close enough to the kitchens to pull a brick-sized chunk of water out of the uncovered cistern. She was not Jasper, and it took her time to maneuver it and then to keep it moving through the air in front of her without spilling or having it fly off in all directions in countless little drops. The effort of maintaining it as a single entity made her sweat. She gave an irritated grunt, recalling all those hours of frustration in Breccia Academy as she had tried to learn the art of watershifting. She had never been much good then, either.

  Facing the stables once more, she shifted the brick of water over to the left. Pressed up against the wall of the passageway so she would be hard to spot, she lowered the water into the gravel and then barreled it through the pebbles straight down the center of the road. The small round stones rattled and danced noisily as they were ploughed aside by the water brick. Both guards jumped to their feet and stood rooted, staring. The noise was uncanny, the cause invisible.

  “A cat?” one ventured, his question tentative.

  Ryka doubled the amount of power she was using and the gravel shot away, flung aside by the speeding brick. She eased herself out from the shelter of the passageway and skirted the wall to her right, keeping to the perimeter of the courtyard. If either of the guards turned his head, he would see her. Feeling exposed and vulnerable, she wanted to run but curbed the desperation that prompted such risky behavior. She flattened herself against the stones of the wall and slowly edged toward the murky darkness of the delivery bay. The gravel scrunched under her feet, but much more quietly than the noise made by her water brick as she reversed it and then spun it around and around in the gravel.

  “That’s no cat,” the other guard muttered in Reduner. “We’d better look.” He unhooked a lantern that had been hanging on the outer stable wall and directed a beam of light toward the noise.

  She swore silently, wondering if the water would glint in the light. Squeezing her eyes shut in concentration, she flattened and broadened the water into a plank instead of a brick, buried it just under the gravel and then moved it along broadside. The pebbles danced and clinked and jostled in a wave.

  Ryka crept on, sweating with the exertion. Blighted eyes, it was easier to kill a man than do finicky things like this. The water brick wanted to weep its contents onto everything it touched. Never mind, she told herself, if she did leave some behind, it would be invisible in the dark and would soon evaporate.

  The two guards followed it still, but were cautious about catching up. She slowed the water down, but when they approached it, she sent it furrowing through the gravel once more. She whisked it suddenly around the corner in the direction of the main gate. As soon as it was out of sight, she raised it high into the air and tossed it over the roof, deliberately splitting it into as many drops as she could and casting it wide enough not to be noticeable. At the same time she dashed into the dark bay along the side wall of the stables. Once there, she briefly cracked open the lantern shutter to cast a sliver of light on the wall.

  She could just make out a wooden cover of some sort projecting out of the wall at wais
t height, about a quarter of the size of a normal door: the muck chute. Next to it was the delivery door. Designed to be opened by someone standing on a pede, it was too high for her to reach. She cursed richly under her breath. Such a simple way to enter the stable: easy to unbar, out of sight of the guards even if they returned to their post in front of the door—and she couldn’t open it.

  Ryka screwed up her nose at the muck chute. It smelled, even with the entrance closed. The cover was easily unbolted from the outside and lifted away from the opening, to reveal a short chute sloping upward. She poked her head inside. Pede pellets were dry, so it was not slippery or slimy—but the smell was intense, reminiscent of dried antiseptic herbs mixed with ammonia. There did not appear to be a cover at the other end, but the stable beyond was in total blackness. Snorting sounds punctuated the darkness in an unattractive din. Not pedes, she decided. Men. Snoring, bless them.

  Withdrawing her head, she propped the chute cover against the wall, then hooked the lantern onto the back of her tunic belt, took a deep breath and ducked down inside the chute again. It wasn’t difficult to scramble upward, and a moment later she poked her head into the stable. She couldn’t see a thing. She waited for her eyesight to adjust, but even then the darkness seemed total. Unhooking the lantern, she looked to see if the candle was still alight. It was, but guttering badly. She unshuttered one side and shone it around.

  The stable floor was untidily scattered with straw and sleeping bodies. Stealthily, she hauled herself out of the chute and stood up. No one stirred, and the snuffling and honking and snorting helped to cover any noise she made. As far as she could determine, there were no guards inside the building.

  She began to walk between the rows of sleeping men. It was hard to make out faces and, short of waking everyone up, it seemed an impossible task to find either Elmar or Kaneth. As she hesitated, though, she saw one of the stall doors open. A tall man stood in the doorway, looking her way. She didn’t need to see him properly to know it was Kaneth.