by Glenda Larke
“Ye must learn not to be yearning too much for what ye cannot yet have.”
They exchanged rueful smiles.
She watched him walk away, a kind man who held an innate sorrow within. As far as she knew, he had no family, no lover. His life appeared to be governed by his reverence for his God and his loyalty to his land and the Bastion. There must have been much more to him, but she’d never found it. As he vanished around the corner of the passage, she wondered, not for the first time, where she’d seen that same shrewd, amused look in another set of pale eyes rimmed with white lashes. Whose?
She couldn’t remember.
An armsman brought Jasper a note from Terelle a little later, to say that she was helping out down in the kitchens and wouldn’t be back. Without thinking—because thinking would have paralysed him into inaction—he asked the armsman to find Lord Ryka and ask if she had a moment to spare.
When she arrived a little later, his heart dropped queasily. Both of them had come. Ryka and Kaneth. He unbarred the door, bracing himself for an embarrassing, distressing conversation.
What am I to say? Sunblast you, Mica! You have made things so withering hideous for everyone. When he thought of his brother forcing a woman like Ryka into bed, he wanted to be sick.
He waved the two rainlords over towards the chairs at the table but didn’t sit himself. “I got your message this morning about you both wanting to return to the Red Quarter,” he said to Kaneth, postponing the need to bring Mica into the conversation. “The Scarpen needs all the rainlords it can get. Especially Breccia. With Davim dead, his forces defeated and in retreat, why go back to the dunes?”
Ryka sat, but Kaneth leaned against the heavy wooden lectern where the map of the northern dunes was unrolled. He was wearing a sword, and had a dagger thrust into his belt as well. With his scarred head and puckered face, plus his look of tautly curbed tension, he looked every inch a veteran bladesman before a battle. “If you think Ravard considers himself defeated, you’re badly mistaken. Ryka knows what he intends.”
“He’ll fight to the bitter end,” she agreed, looking down at her hands. “And he still has the men to do it. You defeated an army, true, but not all Davim’s drovers were involved. Some of his marauding groups were over in Alabaster and another larger force was in the northern dunes looking for the rebels. They’ll still be itching to prove themselves. The Reduners may coddle their bruises for a while, but the war’s not over.”
“Vara wants to return home, obviously,” Kaneth added. “She wouldn’t let me attack Ravard’s defeated men because she hopes in time they’ll desert to join her. She needs more men, and I have some—ex-slaves with revenge in mind. Better still, I can recruit more. Men of the dunes, Reduners willing to listen to me because they believe I’m Uthardim reincarnated.”
“But you aren’t. And encouraging them to think you are is dishonest.”
“I’ve never encouraged that. In fact I deny it, and have done so ever since I regained my senses.” He gave a lopsided smile accompanied by a careless shrug. “But if they continue to believe it despite my denial, I will use that belief to help them. I’ve never been known for the niceties of my moral philosophy, Jasper.”
Oh, waterless damnation. I’ve lost them both…
“Are you sure you aren’t returning just to exact revenge on Ravard?” he asked. The words almost choked him.
Kaneth exchanged a glance with Ryka. “That’s not my specific aim,” he said after a long pause, “although I wouldn’t mourn him if it happened, and you shouldn’t either. Mica Flint is dead, and what you have in his place—Sandmaster Ravard—is someone else again.”
Jasper felt ill. “You’ll goad him into a personal fight, if nothing else.”
“If I can. The Red Quarter needs a new sandmaster, a dunemaster if you like, to lead all the tribes on all the dunes; someone who regards the Scarpen and its stormlord as an ally, not an enemy. Someone who won’t raid the Alabasters or the Gibber and who doesn’t hanker after the Time of Random Rain. In other words, someone who is not Sandmaster Ravard. I intend to be that person until such time as a suitable Reduner emerges.” He paused, and tilted his head at Jasper in query. “I can’t imagine that you’d object to any of this.”
Jasper’s stomach churned. Everything Kaneth said was true and logical. Mica had to be stopped. Somehow. He switched his attention to Ryka, but was unable, in his embarrassment, to maintain eye contact. “You’re a scholar. You don’t belong on the dunes, surely.” And Watergiver knows, I need your guidance, Lord Ryka.
“Kaneth, Khedrim and I are a family, and I’ll not have us parted again.” Her reply was firm, allowing no hope she would ever change. “We’d like to have your blessing, and your aid, too, once you’re back in Breccia. More pedes would be useful, for example. I’ve made a list.”
A list.
He wanted to laugh, more in derision than amusement. Waterless skies, now I know why Taquar thought I couldn’t rule and stormshift too. How can I make decisions about what to do, organise a war, rebuild Breccia, arrange for Qanatend to be evacuated, all at the same time? And now Kaneth wants above all else to kill my brother—and I need to help him do it? There were too many problems, and whatever he did, he was supporting his brother’s defeat and death. Mica, always scared pissless, who’d nonetheless done his best to help him when Pa had turned on him with irrational savagery. He resisted an impulse to sink into the nearest chair and bury his head in his hands in maudlin self-pity.
Instead, he squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. “Leave me your list when you go,” he said. “I’ll see what can be done. But remember, I also have Breccia to consider. What’s left of it. Oh, and Kaneth, why don’t you take Davim’s pede? It was one of those we captured. Burnish—magnificent animal. Can’t hurt you on the dunes to be seen riding Davim’s mount.”
“Thank you,” Kaneth said, obviously pleased. “If it’s any help, we don’t need storms sent to our rebel camp. The water in God’s Pellets is permanent. Take some out, it refills.”
“But I sense no touch of water out there, none!”
“It’s encircled by stone hills and the water is actually inside a cave. I guess all that blocks your senses.”
“Ah. Let’s hope that keeps you safe from Ravard’s water sensitives too, then. When do you want to leave?”
“Tomorrow morning. One other thing: Elmar Waggoner, my Breccian armsman. I’m leaving him with you.”
“You are?” Jasper was startled. In the past, when it came to action, the two men had always been inseparable.
“Elmar is not that fond of the dunes. He’s a good man in a fix, though, and a fine fighter.”
“I remember. My gain, then.” He hesitated, then added, “Bear this in mind: Mica was a victim.”
“Perhaps. But he abrogated all rights to be treated as such the moment he threw in his lot with a man like Davim.”
“What choice did he have? Kaneth, he was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old! He’d have been killed if he’d stood up to the sandmaster.”
“And we’d have been a lot better off if he’d had the guts to do just that. Don’t ask me to pity him, Jasper. Not after what he did to me and mine.”
He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. Jasper suspected it was either that or throw a punch at his stormlord. With a grimace of annoyance, he turned to Ryka, but she forestalled anything he might have said.
“Jasper, the choices Mica made back then don’t count any more. He—Ravard—has choices now, choices which could change his direction. Those are the ones that count, and the ones he will be judged on.”
“The ones he’ll die by?”
“If he makes the wrong choices, yes. Do you doubt it? Haven’t you seen the look in Kaneth’s eyes?”
“Did—did he treat you so very badly? He was once a gentle person. It was the war—” He almost took a step backwards when he saw the look she gave him. Spitting sparks, Terelle would have said. You witless waste of water; where’s
your sense? It was the kind of remark Shale might have made, but he wasn’t Shale any more and he should have known better. He did know better.
But oh, it was Mica…
Ryka took a deep breath before she answered. “Did he physically mistreat me? No. In his strange way, he was at times even kind. But he took away both my liberty and my freedom of choice. He used my child to chain me for his personal use. Yes, while he was still a lad he was kidnapped and raped and whipped, forced to slit the throat of his best friend in order to save his own life.”
He stared at her, appalled. “Best friend?”
“Chert, I think he said it was.”
Chert? Oh, weeping shit. Rishan the palmier’s son from Wash Drybone. What the withering spit have you done, Mica? How could you?
Remorseless, she continued. “I know all that, so I can feel compassion. And because I do, Kaneth hates him all the more. I wish I did hate Ravard; it’d make things a lot easier for both of us. Don’t mistake my compassion for lack of resolve, though. If Ravard continues down the same path, I’ll see him dead—by my own hand if need be.”
The look in her eyes was as hard as ironstone. Jasper kept quiet.
“At this point in time, his fate is in his own hands. All he needs to do is approach you with a plan for reconciliation, and his future—and ours—can be different. If he doesn’t, good men will continue to die until one of us wipes him from the face of the dunes. Either way, Kaneth is right. Mica Flint is dead.”
She added, more kindly, “I’m sorry we have to part this way, Jasper. What your brother did has made it impossible for either of us to return to Breccia, to serve you as rainlords. Maybe… maybe, one day. But now things are too raw.”
He nodded dumbly, hearing what she did not say: Every time I look at you, I will see Ravard, and remember what he did to me…
Still she did not leave, and he waited, knowing she had something else to say. Ryka always did.
“How long will you be able to keep up the storms?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Terelle told me yesterday she has to leave for a time to settle a family matter in Khromatis.” She looked at him quizzically. “Of all places.”
He nodded, not making it easy for her.
“I’m beginning to think the most monumental mistake we ever made was not taking you seriously when you spoke of her talents.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
She came up to him, put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. “Look after her, Jasper. I like her, and I don’t think you should marry Senya Almandine.”
He smiled slightly. “Neither do I. I’m sorry, Ryka. About everything.”
“So am I.” She grimaced, and was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
Scarpen Quarter
Qanatend City, Level One and Level Three
The windmill above their heads rattled and creaked in the wind, canvas and metal vanes spinning in the hot, dry breeze that swept down the northern slopes of the Warthago and across the Spindlings. Dust stung Terelle’s face then was blown on, towards the Red Quarter. She covered her nose with her palmubra.
Of the six of them up there on the roof of Qanatend’s waterhall, only Messenjer, the Alabaster mine manager, ignored the battering with unmoving stoicism. Jasper ducked his head as if he could escape the worst of it. Ouina, using words more appropriate to a pede driver than a highlord, swore as wind-blown hair whipped into her eyes. Iani was constantly brushing away the sand that stuck to his dribble-wet chin. Feroze had lifted an arm so that his loose white sleeve sheltered his face.
Squinting against the battering dust, Terelle looked up. She’d never seen a windmill until they’d arrived in Qanatend. In the other parts of the Scarpen and the Gibber, winds were unpredictable things, rare, hardly more than playful gusts soon gone, although sometimes they could be mischievous and destructive enough to be called spindevils.
“I don’t understand how a wind can shift water,” she remarked to Feroze. “I must ask someone to show me the workings.”
“I wish we could use the wind in Samphire,” he said.
“What do you use?” She hadn’t thought to ask when she was in Samphire.
“You’ll be finding out soon won’t you?” Ouina asked. “I hear you are leaving for the White Quarter.”
“Not yet.”
“But the Alabasters leave tomorrow. You’re going back to Breccia first?”
“Yes.” And I’ll bet Lord Gold asked you to find that out.
“The fewer people Breccia has to feed, the better.”
“I suppose that means we won’t be seeing you in Breccia for quite some time, then, Lord Ouina?” she asked sweetly. “That is thoughtful of you.”
Behind Ouina’s back, Feroze waggled a chiding finger, but his eyes twinkled. He waved his hand at the line of pedes now leaving the city to wend its way northwards. “There go Kaneth and Vara now.”
They all lined up along the rooftop rampart to watch. In the late afternoon sun, the shadows of the caravanners were stretched thin, their skeletal shapes painting dark lines on the landscape. No one needed to ask why they’d chosen to leave in the evening; they all knew there was nowhere to hide out on the Spindlings in the daylight.
Those at the head of the column—Kaneth, Ryka and Vara Redmane—reached the top of the small ridge just to the north of the walls before the last of the followers were out of the northern gates. Ryka was sharing Kaneth’s mount, her baby in her arms. Vara drove her own packpede. At the crest they all turned to raise their hands in farewell. Those under the windmill waved back, the pedes moved on, and Vara and the rainlords disappeared from sight.
“Kaneth and Ryka should never be going with that shrivelled old crone,” Ouina muttered. “Let alone taking a baby who could be a rainlord, or even a stormlord. We have to build ourselves up into strength. How are we going to do that if rainlords like them spend their time in the Red Quarter?”
Jasper cleared his throat and said politely, “We still have rainlords.”
“Breccia doesn’t.” Ouina made it sound like a personal triumph for her as the highlord of a city which did possess rainlords. “But never mind, I understand Lord Gold is offering you waterpriest rainlords.”
Terelle resisted a desire to roll her eyes. I don’t like her. She has a mean heart.
“I still think you ought to be leaving with us tomorrow,” Iani said to Jasper. “It may not be safe here.”
“I have fifty men with me and I’m not staying long. I have more stormbringing to do here before I go south,” he added vaguely. Terelle, who tended to flush whenever she deviated from the truth, marvelled at the brazen way he could lie when he put his mind to it.
As they dispersed from the rooftop, Jasper detained Iani with a hand to his arm and she heard him say, “I’m sorry we have to abandon Moiqa’s city. I know it seems like a betrayal of her, and all who died here.”
“Yes,” Iani agreed, his voice grim.
“One day we’ll be back, I promise.”
Iani gave a terse nod.
“On your way home to Scarcleft, look in on Taquar, will you?”
“I intend to.”
“Be careful, Iani. Never underestimate him.”
Iani gave a thin-lipped, twisted smile. It wasn’t pleasant, and Terelle looked away with a shiver. Around them, the dust-laden air swirled; above, the windmill rattled.
Out on the Spindlings, the light began to fade.
Later that night, Jasper left Terelle sleeping and made his way out of Qanatend Hall onto Level Two. He stood for a moment in the middle of the paved street and roamed with his senses. There was no one to be seen, no one to be felt outside the buildings. After dark, Qanatend died. Few citizens remained to keep the streets alive. Even though he’d brought only the uninjured Scarpermen and Alabasters with him, most were still too exhausted to celebrate their victory over the Reduner forces. Of the usual haunts a bladesman might have sought at a time like this—a snuggery, a bar w
ith good amber on tap, a bath house with hot water—none survived. Not any more. Not in Qanatend.
Descending to Level Three, he walked the main street seeking two men—his guardsman, Dibble Hornblend, and Elmar Waggoner, Kaneth’s armsman—sensing the air for a hint of their water. His senses brought him ultimately to what had once been a luxurious villa and he peered at the gate, broken and hanging half off its hinges. A name had been carved into the bab wood. He ran his hand over it, reading it with his fingers: Peridot. A rainlord family named, as many were, after a gemstone, all of them gone, slaughtered when the city fell. He touched the gouges in the wood where gems had been prised out. War didn’t only devastate people, it destroyed all that was beautiful.
Inside what remained of the villa men slept and moaned in their sleep, their dreams scarred by war, their peace tempered by grief.
Elmar Waggoner… He suspected there was a story to be told about why Elmar and Kaneth had separated, but he wasn’t about to puzzle over it. What was the saying? Don’t look for cracks in the jar when someone gifts you water. He liked Elmar and trusted him; he’d seen him fight, too. That was all he needed to know.
He slipped through the broken gateway and started across the outer courtyard. The feel of water on the move alerted him; he looked that way and saw a shadow detaching itself from the darkness under the porch.
“Elmar,” he said as he heard a sword scraping out of a scabbard. “No need for that, though I’m glad to see you’re as alert as ever.”
“Shale?” The name jerked out of the armsman in astonishment and for a moment Jasper was transported back to another city, to another fight, on the day they had met, before Shale Flint had become a stormlord who called himself Jasper Bloodstone.
“Oh—my apologies. Lord Jasper. Cloudmaster.”
“Technically not Cloudmaster yet. Not until the Rainlord Council decides I am. Come, can we go inside? It’s withering cold out here.”
“Oh. Of course.” Elmar hurriedly went to open the main door. The lock was broken and the hinges damaged; it scraped across the tiled floor. “But m’lord, you really oughtn’t be wandering about like this without a guard, specially not at night.”