Glenda Larke: Stormlord rising

"Are we eating them now?" someone asked, amused.

"You sand-tick, Ankrim! The sandmaster ordered all the dead burned as soon as possible. Easier, I suppose, than burying them, when we have all those bab palms to fuel the pyres."

"Nah. More to teach a lesson to the living, I reckon. Here, let's get this pede loaded."

She stopped listening. Burned! Sandblast the bastards-if Kaneth was unconscious, then… Being taken outside the wall began to sound like a rotten idea.

The packpede was loaded, but no one approached the heap of dead Ryka was on. The nearby voices were gone, leaving only far-off screams and shouting. She risked opening her eyes. No one. Cautiously, she raised her head and looked around. She was in front of the main entrance to the pede stables adjoining Breccia House, and as far as she could see, there was no one in sight. As she climbed down, bodies squelched under her sandaled feet and the odors of death intensified. Rot, shit, piss, blood. She gagged.

Boys, some of them. Not all soldiers, either…

In death, there was little difference between those who had their skin stained red by desert dust and the fair-skinned Scarpen folk like herself.

Her feet reached the gravel surface of the courtyard and she stood up. She was sore all over, and stiff. She moved like an old woman. After another swift glance around to make sure she was unobserved, she poked through the piled corpses. The Reduners she ignored, and those wearing a guard uniform. Kaneth had never been one for uniforms. "If I am going to fight, I want to be comfortable," he'd said as he chose his oldest tunic and trousers. She'd joked that he looked like a brass worker from Level Twenty, but she had followed his lead and worn clothes more suited to a laborer than a woman of her class.

She couldn't find him. Tall, broad-shouldered, muscular, long-limbed-he was hard to miss. And that sun-streaked fair hair he kept tied at the nape, it would stand out among the Reduners.

Again she searched, even more carefully. He wasn't there. There had been a second pile of bodies, but it had disappeared. If he'd been among those…

Panicking and weak and thirsty, she swallowed back a surge of dizzying nausea.

"Looking for something?"

The voice, and the accompanying sound of a weapon being drawn from its scabbard, dulled her fear for Kaneth, smothered it in more immediate terror. Her heart skipped, pounded. Slowing its beating by force of will, she turned to face the speaker. A Reduner man, for all he spoke the Quartern tongue with a strong Gibber accent. He'd just stepped out of the stables. Slim, athletic, armed, his red skin streaked with dust and blood. His dark red braids were untidy with beads missing or broken. His sword was blood-drenched.

The darkness of his eyes contained no hint of mercy, no hint of anything. She guessed he was at least ten cycles younger than she was, but he carried himself with assurance. His belted robe was elaborately embroidered, so she knew why: he came from a wealthy and important family.

Probably learned his Quartern tongue from his Gibber slaves, she thought, her bitterness deep. Reduners had been raiding the Gibber, almost with impunity, for more than four years. Kaneth and his men had done their best to curtail the raids, but their success had been limited.

"My husband," she said, keeping her voice level and respectful-but not meek; she would not grovel, even though she knew she was a finger's breadth away from death. Or worse.

He held his scimitar up and took a step toward her, the blade pointed at her chest. She did not move.

"Find him?" he inquired, his tone deceptively mild if the sword was to be believed.

"No."

"You're supposed t'be in the big room." He waved his free hand toward the hall. "In there. How did y'get out?"

The point of the scimitar came within a whisker of her left nipple. She refused to look down and held his gaze instead. "A woman will risk much to serve her husband."

Something flared in his eyes then, but she wasn't sure she could read it. "Not in my experience," he said, his lip curling in cynicism. "These folk," he added, indicating the heap of bodies, "came out of the waterhall. Your husband-guard, was he? Fighting up there?"

"He was up there," she said, "but he wasn't a guard. He was a brass worker from downlevel. He went to help." She did not have to feign grief; she knew it was written on her face and captured in her voice for anyone to see and hear. "He brought me up here for safety. He knew nothing about fighting."

"Then I think you can be certain he's snuffed it. Everyone in the waterhall died."

No, they didn't. I'm here.

She didn't move. Every piece of her being concentrated on not showing fear. Reduners valued courage and despised weakness, even in their women. Not, of course, that he would think twice about lopping off her head with his blade if it pleased him. "Doubtless you're right," she said, fighting her nausea, "but I would like to know one way or the other."

"What's your name?"

I shan't make you a present of that, you bastard. If he realized she was a rainlord, she was dead-and someone among the Reduners might know the name of Ryka Feldspar. "Who wants to know?"

He stared at her as if he couldn't believe his ears. "My name's Ravard," he said finally. "But what should count with you, woman, is the weapon I hold t'your body. What's your name?" The blade tip brushed her nipple this time, then traced a pattern up to her throat.

"Garnet," she said, appropriating the name of the cook in Carnelian House and then adding another gemstone at random, "Garnet Prase."

"Dangerous for a woman t'be out on the streets after a battle," he remarked with heavy mockery. "You never know what nasty thing might happen. There's men wanting their reward for a battle well fought, and they'll take them anyhow they please."

"So your men are out of control already?" she asked, and then bit her tongue. Why could she never learn to keep silent when it counted!

His eyes narrowed. "You play a dangerous game, woman, with your Scarpen arrogance. Perhaps you care nothing for yourself." The sword point dropped to her abdomen. "But what about the brat you carry?"

This time she couldn't control her shock. "How-?" she began, and then closed her mouth firmly, though her hand dropped to cover the roundness of her belly, as if she could protect her son from his weapon. If only I had my water-power-

"I have eyes in me head," he said. "Suggest you keep a still tongue in yours, Garnet, 'less you want t'lose your life and your man's get, as well. I'll take you to the other women in there. Tonight you sleep with a man who's not your husband, or you'll lose more than your man. Think on it."

He turned her roughly and started her walking in front of him toward the hall's main door. She hugged her arms about her to stop the trembling.

A complete stranger works out I'm pregnant at a glance? It took Kaneth nearly half a cycle to wake up to it! This fellow was strange.

When she slipped in a patch of blood on the gravel, he grabbed her by the arm, wrenching her upright before she hit the ground. "Careful, sweet lips," he said in her ear. "We want you undamaged, don't we?"

Ryka gasped in pain. The sword-cut on her upper leg-not deep but raw and throbbing nonetheless-had opened up.

He hadn't noticed it before because the cut in her trousers was almost covered by her tunic, but he saw the fresh blood now and gave an exasperated grunt. "Why didn't y'tell me you were hurt?"

"It's nothing."

He pulled up the hem of the tunic and looked at the wound. A makeshift bandage around her thigh had long since come loose and fallen off. "Hmph. Maybe not, but needs covering nonetheless, t'stop that bleeding."

He left her where she was and went back to the heaped-up dead. With his scimitar, he slashed at a dead man's tunic and brought back a piece of the cloth. She wanted to take it from him, but he ignored her gesture and knelt to wrap it around her thigh himself, over the top of her trousers. She braced herself for an intimate touch, a leer or a sneering remark, but all he did was bandage her.