Stormlord Rising

by Glenda Larke

  The timing of their attack would be all wrong, though. They had wanted to hit the Reduner camp immediately after the flood passed down the wash, but he’d miscalculated the speed of the floodwater build-up. His fault—he was the stormlord, yet he had not expected the hill slopes to drain off so quickly. The surge had followed hard on the heels of the zigger attack, instead of later, at dawn, as they’d intended.

  The men had not been in position; and now the scramble down the wash after the Reduners would be a nightmare of slipping and mud and falls and bruises. Iani and Feroze had pressed to go ahead, feeling that it was better to attack while Davim’s forces were still reeling from the effects of the water rush, before they had a chance to regroup at the mother cistern. “We have to grab every advantage,” Iani had said, “because they outnumber us and are better armed and more experienced. And right now they are confused and suffering.”

  Jasper swallowed his reservations and nodded to Iani.

  “On your signal,” the rainlord said.

  Around him, his personal guard mounted their pedes, their excitement and their fear tainting their water with the same sweaty sourness he smelled on himself. He turned his attention to the remnants of cloud overhead, forcing them a little higher. A light shower was to be the attack signal to his troops scattered on both sides of the wash.

  He swallowed, still nauseated, as the rain started again. He didn’t expect any more ziggers, but some of his men could soon die anyway, because he asked them to fight. They were no match for seasoned Reduner warriors. You couldn’t make an armsman out of an artisan in a matter of days.

  Men dying at his request: it seemed an obscenity; a disaster compounded by his mistake with the timing of the flood. He pushed back the doubt as Dibble turned their mount down the slope toward the remains of the Reduner camp. He was Jasper Bloodstone. Stormlord. Cloudmaster. He knew what he was doing.

  Mind you, it was so dark he doubted Dibble had any idea where the pede was putting its feet, but never mind, the beast seemed to know. Its flow down the slope was as smooth as wine from the calabash and surprisingly quiet. Those on foot were far less comfortable with the descent. Behind him, Jasper heard the slither of stones, the sounds liberally studded with only half-subdued curses.

  Irritably, he pushed away the rain drifting into his eyes, and directed it to where the Reduners were. From every side now, he could hear his men and their pedes pouring downward into the wash, rivers of men and beasts taking the easiest course. He reduced the cloud cover to allow the starlight to shine through, and a little later he spotted the camp, or what was left of it. To his chagrin he realized all of the Reduners were already mounted—apparently they’d decided to leave without waiting for the morning.

  Hearing their attackers, the Reduner pedemen whirled the beasts around with flicks of their reins and goaded them into fast mode. Their feet slashed through the mud as they flowed away into the darkness, back down the gully toward the cistern.

  With whoops and yells, Jasper’s pede-mounted men followed, leaving those on foot behind. Dibble pulled back into the middle of the pack, not wanting to expose Jasper to the dangers inherent in being among the leaders. Even so, for a moment they were racing at breakneck speed among the rocks and the mud of the wash. Jasper gripped the segment handle to the front of his saddle pad, something a more skilled rider would never have done.

  The rush ended abruptly in a swirling mass of pede bodies, of screaming men and the clash of weaponry as the Scarpen leaders caught the slowest of the Reduner pedes. Jasper drew his scimitar. His personal guard, on their own myriapedes, tightened the circle around him, beating off any mounted Reduner who came near. Someone screamed.

  Sunblast! What’s happening? In the darkness, it was hard to grasp the larger picture. Everything was fragmented, immediate, imminently dangerous. Small pieces telling him nothing of the progress of the larger battle. He glimpsed a pede laden with six or seven of his men ride down a slow-moving Reduner pede with a single driver. Gibbermen attacked the man with a mishmash of implements and makeshift weapons. The Reduner pedeman impaled the driver with his chala spear, and slashed the man behind with his scimitar, opening up a bloody gash on his leg. Jasper gripped his own blade tighter and yelled at Dibble to guide their pede closer. When the guardsman was slow to obey, Jasper in frustration gathered a ball of water from the pools left by the rain and flung it in the face of the Reduner. The warrior faltered, blinded. One of the Gibbermen took advantage of the moment and stabbed him with a bab cutter. As the man fell, another Reduner driver came to his aid. His pede carried six chalamen, and several Gibbermen disappeared from the back of their pede with spears in their bodies.

  Jasper gave up trying to follow the fight and concentrated on his small part. He grabbed water from wherever he could find it, shooting it like darts into ears and eyes and open mouths. Dibble, grinning, controlled their pede to keep his stormlord on the edge of the battle.

  The predawn air was filled with sound, every cry and clash grating along Jasper’s heightened nerves. The screams of men in intolerable agony. The wailing ululations of terrified pedes. Shouted orders no one could hear or understand. The rolling scream of ziggers released from a falling cage. Howls of desperation from men who knew they were about to die. Cries of triumph from others who knew they were about to prevail. Insanely, Jasper wanted to yell, to tell them all to stop, to be silent so he could think. So he could do something more than just fling water around.

  And then, above it all, the boom of an Alabaster horn, signaling a retreat. “Oh; Watergiver’s mercy,” Jasper thought. “We’ve lost.” And he hadn’t even used his scimitar.

  He looked around to sort out what had happened. Someone had a lighted brand. A few of the slow Reduners had been killed and their pedes captured, but—from the look of it—only after they had inflicted casualties out of all proportion to their numbers. Jasper drew in a sharp breath. The death of such experienced marauders came only at a high price.

  He could hear Iani shouting orders and cursing at the top of his voice, his anger directed at those mounted Scarpen forces who were following the Reduners escaping down the wash. Even though Feroze had sounded an immediate retreat, many of those exhilarated by their supposed victory had not obeyed.

  As light crept into the valley, Jasper surveyed the bodies of the men who had died where he had been fighting. They looked so young, so vulnerable. So very, very dead. Limbs and guts and organs and clothes in a horrible bloodied mix, like a knacker’s offal heap. Scimitar slashes. They were messier than swords or spears.

  And these had been people he knew. He felt his stomach constrict, radiating pain. Those who had followed the Reduners did not return. Their missing water, the empty spaces they left behind, were further wounds to Jasper’s soul.

  This was what it was to lead men to war.

  Surprisingly, the pain was bearable. It was the intensity of the pressure, not the pain, that made Ryka groan and drive her nails into the palms of her hands. The effort involved was so concentrated she wondered how she could ever survive it. How any women ever survived it. When she said as much, in between the spasms, one of the slave women tending her laughed and patted her hand.

  “Everyone of us is here because our mothers pushed us out into the world. You’ll survive this. You’ll even do it again one day in all probability.”

  “Pedeshit! Never!” she cried as the next crushing wave came to submerge her.

  When that one was over, and her head collapsed back onto the sacking, the same woman—what was her name again?—said with added satisfaction, “The next push will do it, I think. The baby’s head is ready to pop into the world, poor wee mite.”

  Sunlord damn it, she just wanted this over. Anina, that was her name. And the other woman was Maida. Ryka concentrated on feeling grateful that not only had the only people at the cistern been slaves from Qanatend, but that two of them were women who had delivered babies before. She hadn’t quite understood why they were there and the Red
uners not, but they were part of the Reduner army. Davim and his forces were ahead of her, invading the Scarpen. And they had dragged slaves along in their wake, then left them behind at the cistern. Camp followers, Anina had called them. Something about being there if needed. As whores. Or to nurse the wounded. Or something. Ryka tried to feel grateful, and she was, truly grateful. But right then it was hard to think of anything except how she would survive the next surge.

  When it came to consume her, she cried out—in real pain this time—and then was lost in a torment-lacerated world where the war didn’t exist.

  A boy, one of the women said. Ryka was too tired to care, let alone be glad. He lay curled in the crook of her arm. Red and squashed-looking, and not really much like a person. More like a kitten without fur. And tiny, although she supposed he was larger than a kitten. He’d certainly felt larger than a kitten.

  Am I supposed to love him? she wondered. Watergiver help me, I wish I had paid more attention to—to all that domestic stuff. It had always seemed so boring in comparison to her books, or to a ride into The Sweeping, or talking to the outlanders in the foreigners’ market.

  Her lack of attention had caught up with her. Taking a closer look at his crumpled face, unexpectedly she found herself smiling.

  She was stroking her son’s tiny cheek with a finger when she heard a sound she could not identify. Loud, rushing, frightening. She had heard it before, somewhere. Here, it felt out of place. What was that? She wanted to jump to her feet, to run out of the cistern cave where they lay, but everything hurt when she tried to move too much.

  Beside her Anina sat up, her eyes wide in the lantern light. The noise outside was louder, more invasive. Growling its way down the wash in the dark like a runaway meddle of pedes. Or a hillside on the move. Or—

  “What is it?” the woman asked, her fear a tangible thing, reaching out for comfort.

  Ryka felt a fleeting amusement. She was as weak as a day-old pede wobbling after its mother, and the woman was coming to her for assurance?

  “Water,” she said, lying back down and holding her son against her body. She could feel it in her mind now; water on the move, tumbling, bucking, churning. “Water on its way down the wash.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve heard it before. In the Gibber. I hope there’s no one out there.”

  The woman shook her head. “No. None of us, anyway. We were all asleep here in the cavern. But why would there be water in the wash?” She shook a puzzled head. “The Cloudmaster never sends water this way. Qanatend rain falls in the valley behind the cistern, much higher in the mountains. The water seeps down into caves. The cistern intake pipe taps it there. I know that because we’ve all been looking for a way to escape the valley without those red bastards seeing us. Haven’t had any luck because the caves don’t go anywhere. I doubt there’s been water in this wash since, oh, since the Time of Random Rain.”

  Ryka forced her mind to think. “Perhaps the stormlord has just drowned a lot of Reduners.”

  They stared at each other, thinking about the implications. Outside, dawn was beginning to tinge the sky and simultaneously they turned to look. Nothing visible moved, but there was no doubt that water was tumbling down the gully; to Ryka, the roar was unmistakable.

  When Anina spoke again she said softly, “Garnet, I think we had better get a hiding place ready for you and the babe, just in case. Unless you want to give up on the idea of running away.”

  “No, of course not. I just need time to rest.”

  “I will fix a pallet for you behind the oil jars in the storeroom. If any Reduners return, you can hide there. You will have to keep the baby quiet, though.”

  “Storeroom?”

  “Not a room exactly. It’s just another cave off this cavern. A small one, over there.” She pointed. “You’d be less obvious in there, and the Reduners never fetch and carry the stores. They leave that to us.”

  Ryka was overwhelmed with a surge of fierce protectiveness, laced with intense rage. No one must hurt her child. She would not allow it. Shaken by the rawness of her response, she tried to joke. “Maybe it’s just as well he sounds like a mewling pebblemouse. No one would think it a baby’s cry. I’ll be gone as soon as I can, though.”

  “Where?” the woman asked. She pushed a lock of hair behind one ear. She was forty years old and still beautiful, except for the bruised look in her eyes that spoke of recent tragedy endured and survived—and still raw. “Don’t you think we’d all be gone from here if we could? But the sandmaster’s army is up there somewhere in the gully, and below us there are only more of the bastards in Qanatend. You can’t leave the gully, you know. The Warthago is too rugged.”

  “I have the pedes. In fact I could take some of you. Oh—the pedes! The Reduners mustn’t find them. Can they be hidden?”

  “Where? If the Reduners return, they’ll be crawling all over the place. I’ll just say they belonged to a Reduner who left them behind because they were too small. If that doesn’t make sense to them, we can all plead ignorance. Slaves aren’t expected to know stuff. And if they think they belong to someone, no one will touch them.” She brought the lamp close to look at the sleeping child. “Have you thought of a name for him yet?” she asked.

  “Khedrim,” Ryka said.

  Anina stared at her in surprise. “That’s a Reduner name!”

  “Yes. He—he is named after a lad who died.”

  A child who was sent after me by those who thought I was just a pregnant woman who would never fight back.

  “I botched the timing,” Jasper admitted to Terelle after he returned to camp to do the day’s stormshifting. “I guess I did a good job of throwing water, though.”

  His tone was flat, but she knew the depth of his self-inflicted pain. It was there in a tightening around his eyes, in a remoteness in his gaze and a drop in the register of his voice. Most people might not have noticed his moods, but she read him as well as she could read her waterpaintings.

  “It was your first battle,” she said cautiously.

  He cut her short. “It was the first battle for many of us. But I am the stormlord and the only thing that passes for Cloudmaster, thanks to you. I am not supposed to sit dumbly on a pede like a block of salt and do nothing except chuck water at the enemy.”

  “No. You’re right,” she told him with rising ire. “You are a stormlord. The stormlord. You are supposed to stormshift and sit in Breccia City governing the water matters of this land. You aren’t supposed to rush about waving a scimitar, especially when you don’t really know much about using it. If you do more good throwing water about, then that is exactly what you ought to do. I am sure it is safer. You are too important to risk your life. Dibble was quite right not to allow your pede into the heart of the fighting.”

  “That’s such—such a girl thing to say. You don’t understand.”

  They glared at each other.

  “To most people in the Quartern,” he said at last, “I’m too young to rule. To them, I’m not another Granthon. I don’t have the validity of Nealrith, either, even when they considered him weak. They might not have liked Taquar, but they respected him. Me—I’m too young. A Gibber urchin at that. I have to prove myself worthy. Otherwise, how can I rule? And today I made a mistake of timing. I saved a few lives chucking water about, it’s true, but my mistake cost more lives.”

  “And rulers prove themselves worthy by acting like idiots with a sword?” she asked, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Such a boy thing to do. Anyway, it is Iani and Feroze who are supposed to be in charge of the fighting. And have you also considered how many people you saved with our deception that killed so many ziggers? I don’t understand why you want to fight, or rule, for that matter. Your value is in your stormbringing abilities. Why not let someone else govern?”

  He stared at her, amazed. “You don’t understand, do you? Yet you just said it yourself—I am a valuable commodity. Don’t you see, Terelle? Whoever rules would
also gain control of me, and of my power—by law. I’ve endured years of not being my own person. I didn’t like it. I’d rather do the controlling myself.”

  “What about if someone like… oh, Iani, for example, ruled?”

  “Wash-stones, Terelle, he’s half-mad. He used to be obsessed with Lyneth. Then Taquar. Now it’s Davim. To get revenge for Moiqa’s death.”

  “Well, one of the others, then.”

  “They are all playing their own politics. If Nealrith were alive…” He sighed. “Yes, I would have served him, gladly. Or Lord Ryka. Because they were wise and they had a way of seeing all the facets of something. Yet others thought Nealrith weak and Ryka headstrong, so maybe I’m not much of a judge of people.”

  “Never mind.” She grinned at him. “I am. And I would follow you anywhere if that’s what you wanted.”

  Her grin was so infectious he couldn’t help laughing. “You must be biased. I use your skills to cover my weaknesses, and hide your talents from everyone while I take the credit, and you can still say that?”

  “Sun-fried idiot.” She said it fondly enough for him to have no doubt of her affection.

  “No. The wisest thing I ever did was—” He stopped short, flushing.

  She felt sure he had been going to say, “to love you.” Oh, Shale, can’t you just say it?

  He looked so tired, so dejected, she changed the subject. “What happens now? About Davim, I mean.”

  “We think he will have hunkered down at the cistern. He knows he can’t get past us without losing a lot of men, so he’ll wait for us to go to him. Of course, he could head for the Red Quarter too, but we all think his pride won’t allow that. If he looks weak, more Reduners will join Vara Redmane’s rebellion.”

  “Are you sure there is no other way through the Warthago? They found a route before—could they do it again somewhere else?”

  “I’m here this time. If they do that, I will know.”