Stormlord rising

CHAPTER TWENTY

Reduner Quarter Dune Sandsinger and Dune Watergatherer, Ravard's encampment Ryka sat on a stool outside her tent, warming herself in the early-morning sun.

Nearby, a pede lay stretched out on its side, its relaxed breathing producing a rhythmic purr as one of the mouth plates gently vibrated. The beast belonged to one of Ravard's bladesmen, one of the two men left behind to guard her, who was now whittling a picture story on a segment plate. Around the Sandsinger camp, women were cooking while men tended their pedes and goats and sandgrouse. The smell of bab-flour damper laced with goat's cheese, newly lifted from the ashes of the cooking fires, drifted through the air. There was a leisurely pace to life, a rightness about the way the people lived, as if they drew the measured nature of their existence from the orderliness of their dune's slow progress across the plains.

If she could have had her books and scrolls, if Kaneth had been safe, if the Scarpen wasn't in danger, if there were only stormlords bringing rain, Ryka might even have been content. She gave a snort, ridiculing the thought. None of those things were true. And she was bored. Apart from the few books of Nealrith's she had, there was no reading to be had, and as far as she knew Davim was still in the Scarpen, although she hadn't heard of him invading more cities. Sunlord only knew whether Kaneth had managed to keep out of trouble, or whether Jasper was even alive.

It was thirty-five days or so since Ravard had left her here, bleeding and too weak to even raise her head from her palliasse. Anything could have happened. And given her situation, how could she ever be content? The last time she remembered being anywhere near content had been-it took a moment to remember-probably at Gratitudes. However, she was better; the bleeding had stopped and she still had her baby.

When Ravard and the slave caravan rode away, he'd instructed the Sandsinger tribemaster, within her hearing, to ensure that the tribe cared for her as if she was Sandmaster Davim's daughter. If she died, Ravard added with a scowl, they could be sure of his revenge. And then he had gone, leaving two of his bladesmen behind, but without so much as another glance at her. That, she assumed, he would have considered showing weakness to his men. It had been Kaneth who had looked back, who had raised a hand in farewell. Too weak to acknowledge his gesture with a wave of her own, she managed a smile.

She had worried the tribe's fear of Ravard's threats would mean she was going to be subjected to a plethora of remedies and shaman medicine ceremonies. Instead she was handed over to the care of Arielker, the tribemaster's wife, who recommended little more than lying prone, drinking plenty and eating well. It might have been boring, but the regime appeared to have worked.

And so now, anxious to be gone, she sat and watched; learning, always learning, as the tribe went about their business. Her enforced rest meant she had done little work around the camp, but she had absorbed as much as she could and helped when not too much physical effort was involved. She had learned to weave a patterned pannier out of dune grasses and to carve needles and clasps for a cloak out of pede chitin. She knew how to make a damper and she could polish gemstones for hair beads.

At the moment she was knotting a goat-hair shawl, pausing only to watch as Arielker led her chosen group of women down to collect water from the encampment's waterhole on the plains. As was customary, they led the pack pedes; driving a pede was a privilege reserved for men, yet fetching water was a woman's business. If there was one aspect she despised in Reduner culture, it was their rigid division into men's and women's labor. Still, they seemed happy enough, in a way she never would have been.

Ryka watched them go-and planned.

"The water won't last much longer," a soft voice said at her elbow. She turned to see the aging, portly tribemaster standing by her tent, watching her. Plump-cheeked and long-nosed, with straggly hair almost too thin to bead, he was easy to ridicule, especially when she remembered his obsequious groveling to Kher Ravard. Yet she wondered, too. There was intelligence in his gray eyes. And unflinching respect in the way his tribesmen regarded him. And he spoke his language with a lyricism that sometimes touched her appreciation of the poetical.

And he had spoken to her in Reduner.

She glanced at Ravard's bladesman, but he was too far away to hear, and too intent on his carving to bother. Even as she looked at him, he moved further away to the last segment of his mount.

"Tribemaster," she said in her own tongue, inclining her head with the respect due to his position. "I'm sure you know I don't speak your language."

"I'm sure you do," he replied softly, still speaking Reduner. "I've been watching you these many days, and I've finally recalled where I've seen you before. Some fifteen cycles ago I traveled to Breccia City to sell pedes. You visited our camp outside the walls because you were learning our tongue and wished to practice it. You spoke it well, even then."

Fear grabbed her and her hand went protectively to the bulge of her abdomen. Sandblast, does he know who I am?

"Yes," he said in reply to her unspoken question. "I don't remember your name, but you are a rainlord. Does it amuse you to know we of the Sandsinger will soon thirst?"

Her heart plummeted. She might have to kill him, and the thought sickened her. Answering him in Reduner, she said, "You have the water the Master Son gave to you, stolen from Breccia and Qanatend. What of them, who now must thirst?"

He gave a snort of disgust. "I never asked for it. Besides, it's hardly enough to water the pedes for a quarter-cycle. What do we do when it's finished and the waterhole has dried up because the stormlord will not supply us any longer?"

"You should have thought of that before you marched to war on the Scarpen. The Cloudmaster who watered you died during the siege of the city. Your siege."

"It wasn't my sandblasted choice," he said. "Or the choice of anyone on this dune. We were friends to the tribes of the Scarmaker, who led the dunes well, until Davim came. The warriors of Dune Watergatherer wiped Scarmaker out, and so we grovel to Sandmaster Davim and that ill-mannered Master Son-whose bed you share."

"Not willingly."

"What else am I to believe? You're a rainlord. You could kill him with a nod."

She did not disillusion him. "And yet you speak to me of your antipathy toward him. You are a brave man."

"No. A brave man would not have groveled to Davim. A brave man would be riding side by side with Vara Redmane, wife of the man who was sandmaster of the Scarmaker." In scandalized tones, he added, "A woman leads the rebellion against Davim, not this foolish drover standing here who bowed his head in fear to a ruthless marauding sandmaster."

He shook his head sadly and looked away from her down the length of the dune to where one of his tribe's guards was outlined against the sky. "But now-now I am a saddened man who aches for the future of his tribe. An old man who listens to his shaman who says the dune god speaks of a parched people dying of thirst in the cycles to come." Then, swiftly, he turned his head to meet her gaze. "A desperate man who has seen something in another woman to stir the burnt-out ashes in his soul, and so to uncover a spark of hope. Kill me now, or give me a hint of a future that does not include our death by thirst, my lord."

Ryka considered her reply carefully before answering, "You are right. Not quite with a nod, but I could kill Ravard. A moment ago I thought of killing you to save my own life. I still could."

"I'll not betray you. I owe him nothing, least of all a rainlord's life."

"I hope not, for now I have other plans. The rainlords of Scarpen are not defeated yet, I promise you. Keep your hope, tribemaster, and await word. We will call on you when the time is right, and you will have to fight to reclaim your future."

"Water?"

"I can offer you none. I am no stormlord. Learn to live with random rain. Tell your women folk to have no more children for a while, until you know how to live in a water-poor world. The random rains will come and you must chase them as your people did in the past."

His fury surfaced. "Those shriveled sand-heads who would return us to such a time have baked their brains too long in the sun!"

"How many other dunes feel the way you do?"

"Four or five. And there are several others which are divided."

"Would you tell me who they are?"

He gave a faint smile. "We each risk much in trust of the other, do we not? Dune Stonebreaker, Dune Wrecker, Dune Widowcrest and Rarketim's Dune were all Scarmaker allies who hate this Davim. Dune Ravenbreak I am not sure about, but it is possible. Dune Sloweater and Dune Agatenob are divided. The western tribes on those two dunes are for Davim. On Dune Hungry One, the tribes themselves are divided. They say there that when he was hardly more than a lad, the Sandmaster got a son on one of their young women, but refused to wed her. Some laugh and say boys will be boys; others loathe him for the insult. Of the more northerly dunes, I know little."

"And where can I find Vara Redmane?"

He laughed. "Some call her Vara the Spindevil and say she travels the wind with the men she has gathered around her. Who knows where the wind blows? Others say she uses the sand-dancers as her warriors. All I know is she came here once, and when she left in the middle of the night, a number of my young drovers went with her, taking their pedes with them. Some say she has no home because there is no water out there where she can set up a permanent camp. Others say she found the Source."

"What's that?"

"The unending spring where water gushes into the world from the mouth of the Over-god. It is a myth. A dream. In truth, Vara begs from tribes like mine. She steals from tribes like Kher Ravard's. She robbed several of Davim's caravans full of water stolen from Qanatend. I did hear she is a water sensitive. That she can smell water. It is possible. There are such women, although they usually don't talk about it. Men don't like the idea of a woman being better than they are at something like that."

She almost laughed. She liked this man.

He shook his head in reluctant admiration. "If anyone can stay alive out there, she can. She's old and wizened and wise, that one. Killed one of Davim's warriors, you know, when she escaped. She's death to ziggers. I used to wonder what sandmaster Makdim could ever see in her. Now I know what my blind heart could once not see. Her face is as weathered as granite in the sun, but she has the heart of a sandmaster and the favor of the Scarmaker dune god watching over her. Folk say the day Makdim died, the dune god left the dune and followed her."

He regarded her solemnly, and his podgy face contained a dignity she had not noticed before that morning. "You must leave, you know," he said. "Arielker tells me you are fit enough to travel and your baby is safe. I can do one of two things. I can give you a pede and you can go where you will. I will tell Kher Ravard you escaped and stole one of our animals. Or I can send you to his dune under the escort of his two bladesmen, as he asked me to do."

"He would punish you if I disappeared. He has the power to wipe your tribe off the face of your dune."

"I put my trust in our dune god."

Ryka just managed not to roll her eyes. She had no faith in his god, which meant she held the fate of his tribe in her hands. She sighed, but knew her decision would have been the same anyway. "I will go back to Kher Ravard," she said. "I have an unfinished matter that needs completion." Ravard's encampment on Dune Watergatherer was much better guarded than any other she had seen. All the peaks of the dune tops had a sentry, and there were outposts at intervals along its foot. Pedemen rode between them on a regular beat.

To stop slaves escaping? Ryka wondered. Or to spot an attack from the elusive Vara Redmane? Neither, perhaps. More probably because Ravard-much younger than the men he ruled-believed in keeping his men busy and well disciplined.

She first saw the dune from the back of a pede, seated between the two bladesmen. They rode in past the tribe's waterhole, just ten minutes' walk from the first of the dune's red sands. The boulder-strewn waterhole was tucked into a rocky gully; wild jute plants and bab palms clad the sides, their roots intertwining and writhing across the rock face looking for patches of soil. A pulley system had been rigged to haul water up to the level of the plain.

The first dune guards were there at the winch. Without being asked, one of them drew up a bucket of water for the pede. "So the Kher's whore is back," he said as the animal drank.

He thought she wouldn't understand, of course. She schooled her expression to bland disinterest, but it was impossible to stop the flush spreading to her cheeks. Casually she looked away, shading her face from them with her palmubra and a hand to its brim. She was glad when they started off again, heading into the dune.

The sand dales twisted and turned and branched like the spreading gullies of a drywash rising toward a hilltop. Easy for a stranger to become confused and follow the wrong branch, but the driver knew his way.

On a flat valley floor, an orderly array of red tents and canvas privies spoke of discipline and system. The surrounding slopes were anchored tight by creeping vegetation buzzing with insects and ablaze with wildflowers-yellow, pink, scarlet, white, soaking the air with perfumes. Ryka blinked in surprise. It was astonishingly beautiful, even though her defective eyesight blurred the details.

She raised her head to look at the surrounding ridges of the dune. Sentries everywhere. Like a trap…

Before she had time to dwell on that, the driver halted their mount close to the open tract in front of the pede lines. A crowd of men had gathered there, a mixture of the slaves Ravard had brought in from Breccia and Qanatend, the Reduner warriors she already knew and older men of the tribe she didn't. No women. Startled, she realized something unusual was happening. No one gave her a glance. All eyes were riveted on the two men in the center of the tract. She squinted, trying to focus.

Kaneth and Ravard.

Her heart lunged against her ribs, thudding.

The two men faced each other like goats preparing to battle, motionless and tense, each waiting for the other to break. A playful skitter of wind whisked red dust into eddies across the area; neither of them even noticed. What the withering hells was happening?

She had stepped into the middle of a nightmare, and all she could do was watch.

At the other side of the open space, a boulder was half-buried in the sands. It was decorated with a body. A living body, Ryka realized. A slave tied there, trussed belly down. A Reduner stood next to him holding a dagger.

The guard mounted behind Ryka slid to the ground. "What's going on?" he asked the nearest Reduner in a mutter.

Ryka leaned down to catch the answer.

"The slave over there tried to escape," the other murmured, without even glancing around to see who asked the question. "About to be punished when Lord Uthardim stepped in. Wants to stop it."

No. This time her heart missed a beat. Several beats. Sandblast him to a waterless death… Kaneth, you fool.

Kaneth was saying, "You caught him, ended his dreams. Let it be enough." He was calm, apparently without fear. "And what you intend is not punishment; it is torture."

"You push me too far, Half-face. The rule of this tribe is mine." Ravard's voice was as rough as blown sand, his gaze steely. "The usual punishment is death. I am being merciful."

"He is weakened with thirst. Your men have already broken his ribs. He will die under the cuts of the knife."

Ryka's heart beat again, pounding a warning. She knew then what the punishment was. They called it "a small death"-the back of the victim was repeatedly cut with a dagger and coarse salt rubbed into the wounds. The salt stopped infection, but it also increased the pain and resulted in raised, ugly scars. She sat on the pede, motionless, her view of the drama unimpeded. The driver stayed where he was, too, seated in front of her.

"Take his place," Ravard said suddenly, still staring at Kaneth, "and I will untie the man unharmed."

The pinioned man began to struggle, striving to look back over his shoulder, crying out, "No, Lord Uthardim! Don't!"

Kaneth ignored the slave and answered Ravard. "As you wish." He undid the ties of his robe at the neck and, with a shrug of his shoulders, he bared his back and allowed the garment to slip to the ground. Underneath, he wore the white pantaloons of a Scarpen pede rider, now stained red by the sands of the dunes.

Ryka went cold. As yet neither of the two men had noticed her; their attention so concentrated on each other that everything peripheral had become irrelevant. Her gaze focused on Kaneth, hungry for information. He was thinner now, broad shoulders all rippling muscle and sinew with the excess flesh stripped away. The burn scars were there, mostly on his face where they puckered the skin and changed his appearance, but with patches extending down his neck to his shoulder and back. Oh, Sunlord, his back! Ravard couldn't have him cut, surely, not when the scar tissue was so fresh. She felt sick.

She didn't think. She couldn't. "No," she said, and it was Ravard she addressed, her gaze steady, her voice without quiver. "It would cost you too much, Kher."

Both men whipped around to stare at her. She was vaguely aware she had become the focus of them all-the watching Reduners and the slaves. Even the man tied to the rock twisted as best he could to see.

"The Kher is ever wise," she said, meekly dropping her gaze. She prayed he would understand what she meant: Kaneth was under Davim's protection. To scorn the sandmaster by harming a man he had favored, especially one considered a symbol of a heroic past by the tribes, was surely foolish.

When she risked lifting her head, Ravard's gaze locked on hers. She dared not glance at Kaneth. Even the sand crickets stopped their singing, as if hushed by the taut edginess of the atmosphere.

"Garnet," Ravard said at last, shattering the fragility of the silence with brittle politeness. "I trust you have recovered."

She slid from the pede and smiled, but it was an effort to speak. She had no breath. Her throat ached with fear. Each word was a separate agony as she let it slip. "I am well, Kher. Awaiting your pleasure."

They all heard it then: the deep-seated cry of the dune god, weeping beneath their feet. The pede stirred restlessly, its feelers swinging outward, scattering men as they tried to dodge the serrated edges. Ryka ducked, falling to her knees. The rock under the roped man shook, and ripples moved outward, shivering the sand as they passed. Men fell, unable to keep their footing on the shifting ground. Ravard went down on one knee. The cry changed to eerie music, twisting and keening under the ground, a sinuous serpentine thread passing beneath.

Kaneth stood, unmoved, unmoving. Around him, there was fear on men's faces.

Ravard struggled to his feet and rapped out a question to his shaman. "What says the dune god?"

The shaman rode the moving ground like a pedeman on his bounding mount, dancing his skinny shanks to shift his weight. "He says free them both; the punishment is his to make. And his is the justice to mete." There was no mistaking the hint of fear in his tone. As if in response to his words, the ground stilled.

No sooner had the last trickle of sand ceased than an ululation started on the dune crests around them. The sound was so unexpected, Ryka jumped in shock.

They all looked up, to see the sentries gesturing from their vantage points. Ryka had no idea what it portended, but the Reduners obviously did.

"To your posts!" The cry came from Ravard. The tableau around the flat space broke up into frenzied movement. Men ran toward their tents, and they had purpose. Even the slaves obeyed the call, racing to saddle pedes and ready them for their drivers.

"Get to my tent," Ravard snapped at Ryka. Then he turned to the bladesman still mounted on the pede beside her. "Get that baggage off," he ordered the man. "I'm taking your mount. You can sit behind."

"What's happening?" she asked Ravard as the bladesman scrambled to the back of the pede to untie their belongings.

"A large caravan coming," he said and hauled himself up into the driver's saddle. "Could be a raid. Could be my father. Take your things and get to my tent and stay there."

The bladesman tossed everything down at her feet. She bent to sort through the bundle as Ravard turned the pede and rode rapidly away without a second glance.

Elmar detached himself from the bustle around the pede lines. Seeing him approach, Kaneth bent to roll up a trouser leg and retrieve a dagger strapped to his calf. He gave it to the pikeman, saying, "Cut Bartles down and get him to the slave tents. He should lie as low as possible for a few days and hope everyone forgets about this."

Elmar took the dagger, then glanced over at Ryka. "Welcome back," he said morosely and headed for the pinioned man. She suspected he was battling a desire to ask Kaneth if he'd been out of his tiny shriveled mind, trying to provoke Ravard like that.

She scowled at Kaneth. "You have no more sense than a senile sand-tick."

"Sense? Sense? And what about you? You scolded the Master Son in front of his whole tribe! You risked as much to keep me safe as I did to save Bartles. More, in fact. That was madness, Garnet!"

"Can't you call me by my name yet?"

His irritation fell away. He shook his head. "I-I remember a child I used to play with. She looked a lot like a younger version of you. I struggle to remember her name, but when I open my mouth to say it, the memory slips away like curds from the spoon."

"You were the bane of that girl's life."

"She was diabolical in her revenge. I remember the honey."

"Ah." She recalled a picnic and an incident that had involved trickling the remains of the picnic honey onto his clothes while he was dozing… and Scarpen ants loved honey.

She smiled at the memory; smiled, too, because he remembered.

The encampment seethed around them, but in the bustle no one paid them any attention. Elmar helped a limping Bartles toward the camp. Warriors were already riding out; pedes bristled with their weaponry.

"Think we are under attack from one of the Scarpen cities?" Kaneth asked.

Ryka shook her head. She could sense the water in the approaching caravan, and she could feel the panniers full of looted water. "Reduner. It would be a good time to escape now if we could find a pede somewhere."

He risked reaching out to touch her face. She shivered, feeling his concern. Not love. Not yet. Kaneth, remember me… I don't know how much of this I can bear.

"I can't," he said.

"Why not?"

"The slaves. I may not remember who I am, or who I was, but you were right in what you said about the slaves and slavery. It means something to me. I don't know where I belong, but I do know that they don't belong here and the way they are treated is wrong. They look up to me, Sunlord knows why. If I leave, so do they. Every blighted one of them. I will not leave them behind. I don't quite understand why I feel that way, but I know I do."

"You are a rainlord. We were taught that all the Quartern is our responsibility."

"I am a rainlord no longer. Whatever happened to me took it all away. But it left something in its place. I cannot speak to water, but I can speak to the dunes."

She fluttered a hand at the patch of disturbed sand. "It was you who did that, just then?"

"Yes. As I did that other time and harmed you. Then, I did not know what I could do."

"No, you're not talking to the dune, Kaneth. It's your rainlord connection to the dampness deep inside the dune. You call to the water and the sand shifts. You are a rainlord still."

He shook his head. "I do not feel the water even in my own water skin. But I feel something there, beneath our feet. A soul, something living. It speaks to me, and I can make it answer."

"Are you saying there really is a dune god?" Kaneth? Kaneth the disbeliever? So utterly uninterested in Temple he refused to go to Sun Day worship? She gaped at him.

"No. All I know is that inside every dune we crossed on our way here, I felt a-a presence. Something that I connect to. A god? I don't know that I believe in gods."

"You are a shaman then, like that man who interpreted what he heard?" Ryka tried to keep the scorn out of her voice, but wasn't sure she had succeeded.

He gave a laugh, raw and sarcastic. "He's a faker, playing on the weakness of men. A clever one, though, and a frightened one now. He no longer understands the dune, so he fears there may really be a dune god. Little does he know it is only me, playing with the sand entity like a desert child chasing ant lions in the sand. I don't know what I'm doing. Or how I'm doing it. I just know I can." Something he saw in her face brought a gentler expression back to his. "Don't worry. I know I am neither the Uthardim of legend, nor a dune god nor a mythical hero returned. I'm just a man who sees something that has to be done. And someone who can feel the heart of a living dune."

"Kaneth, if there was anything alive under the sand bigger than a dune lizard, rainlords would have felt its water long ago. There's nothing there."

He shrugged. "I know what I feel. It's not an animal. It's the dune."

She abandoned the argument. "I'm worried about you," she said. "You are antagonizing Ravard. You have no fear in you, and therefore I am afraid for you. Kaneth, a man who does not fear dies because he does not know when to turn from danger."

"Is dying so bad a thing? I have nothing to live for because I have no memories, no idea of who I am or why I should live. So I weave a worthwhile aim based on a future, not a past: freedom for these slaves. A purpose for this nameless man, this possessor of a past hidden in mists. When the mists tease apart to give me a glimpse of that past, it tantalizes, but it's never enough. Sunblast it, Garnet, I'm like a flower that's been picked. I look as though I am alive, but in truth I am already dead."

His words were spikes into her heart, into her being. She wanted so much to take him in her arms, to murmur words of love. But to him, she was almost a stranger. She could do nothing.

"It is different for you," he said. "You have a reason to fear death. You have a reason to live growing within your body."

Her calm shattered, gone in an instant as his words splintered her control. "So do you!" The cry ached with her pain. "It is yours! Yours, you idiot! Your son."

The lump in her throat stopped her breath.

She turned from him to go, to run. Anywhere. Just to escape from the hurt. To be able to breathe again.

And came face to face with Ravard.

He stood close enough to have heard everything she had cried out in her final burst of unbearable emotion.

His stare, the darkness of his eyes depthless, swallowed her alive. His voice when he spoke was as toneless as mud brick, but his eyes said his tone lied. "I asked you to go my tent," he said.

She stood still, hearing his words, yet unable to say what they signified, not caring what they meant. It was the look in his eyes that stopped the breath in her throat.

Watergiver have mercy, she thought, one of us is as good as dead.

She just wasn't sure if it was Kaneth or herself.