Glenda Larke: Stormlord rising

"You have it all worked out already, it seems." He sat back in his chair, absently swirling his wine, while he considered her proposal. It was some time before he added, "One other thing before we seal the bargain, something I have idly wondered… I want an honest answer to a query."

Laisa raised a questioning eyebrow. "You trust me to be honest?"

"There's no reason not to be, now Nealrith is dead. Who is Senya's father?"

She laughed then, with full-throated amusement. "So you have wondered? I'll give you an honest answer: I don't know. It could have been either of you. I doubt she's dark enough to be your daughter, but I could never see anything of Nealrith in her, I must admit. But you-everything I've heard seems to indicate you don't leave a trail of bastards behind you. Is it possible I could be the only woman who ever bore yours? It seems unlikely. Does it matter, anyway?"

He shook his head. "Not really. Stormlord children would have been an asset, but apart from that, I have never hankered after brats, especially not one as spoiled as Senya. You are going to have to rein her in, Laisa, if she is to reside in my household."

With an airy wave of the hand she dismissed that problem. "That won't be a problem now that Nealrith's not here to spoil her."

"Very well. It won't harm me to have a decorative wife, I suppose-will it?"

There was more than a note of warning in his tone, and she raised her eyebrows in acknowledgment. "I know where my interests lie, Taquar. But tell me, what happens now you have Jasper again? Where does that leave Sandmaster Davim? Is he still going to go on the rampage around the Scarpen?"

He rose to put another couple of seaweed briquettes on the fire. The Scarpen sun may have seared the land by day, but at night the cold had an edge to it. "No. I think I can bridle him, if I have Shale. Jasper. Davim knows I'm no Granthon, and no Nealrith either, with silly scruples about bringing water to everyone. I shall tell him he will not receive any water at all-random or otherwise-unless he holds to his end of the bargain. He can have the White Quarter, and I will assist him if any of the other dunes in the Red Quarter prove restless under his rule. He wants his Time of Random Rain, true, but until he has the logistics of that worked out, he needs predictable water."

"At the moment he is stealing it," she said. "He is draining the Qanatend mother wells dry, and doubtless he intends to do the same thing to Breccia."

"That water won't last forever without a rainlord replenishing it. We can bargain with him. He needs us. Any trouble and I will see to it the dunes will not receive any rain. As long as I have Jasper and Davim fears the power I have over water as a consequence, he will behave. In exchange, I get to call on his troops if I need them to quell a rebellious city or a recalcitrant Gibber settle on my own. And so, Laisa, it seems we have a bargain. Now tell, where is Jasper?"

"Not far from here. I killed the pedeman shortly after we left Breccia, and I drugged Jasper's water." She laughed. "The little idiot made it so easy for me-he even gave me his water skin to carry when he was organizing his rather spectacular departure from the city. Senya is keeping an eye on him at the moment. He's been befuddled out of his mind for a couple of days now, and I fear he will wake up in a fury when he realizes I led him here and not to Portennabar."

He laughed and stood, holding out a hand to her. "Then let us go find them, my dear. I cannot wait to see the look on that Gibber grubber's face when he sees me again!"

Laisa stood, a little too close to him for normal social conventions. He took the hint and pulled her into his arms, kissing her roughly, deliberately bruising her arms and lips, kneading her breasts with a shade too much force. When they parted, she was still smiling.

Softly, full of menace, he said, "M'dear, do not ever treat me as you treated Nealrith. Never. Or you will regret it."

Her smile didn't waver-but he thought her confidence did.

Which was exactly what he wanted.

The Scarpen to the White Quarter Caravanner routes The two waterpainters left Scarcleft on the morning after the earthquake, just as dawn was breaking over a tattered city. Crumbled walls, collapsed roofs, broken pipes and cracked cisterns, water gushing into the streets, fires raging through the lowest level-they'd seen it all on their way to the city gate.

And they were the only two people alive who knew who was to blame.

Only one of the two looked back as they left, and she cried, water-wasting tears that no one else in the Scarpen ever shed unless they had something in their eye. She cried because she knew people had died that night-died because she had inadvertently killed them; she cried because she wasn't going to Breccia toward the only friend she had in the world.

Oh, Shale. I'm sorry.

And then, because she hated people who whined about their fate, she dried her tears and looked resolutely ahead. She was Terelle Grey, nineteen years old, and one day she would be truly free. She swore it. Perhaps she'd even find Shale again.

Russet Kermes had not hired a guide or a pedeman. Terelle had naively assumed her great-grandfather knew what he was doing; after all, years before he had made the trek from his home in the Variega mountains of Khromatis, through the White and Gibber Quarters to the Scarpen Quarter. He'd spent years traveling the Quartern in search of her mother, Sienna. He must have ridden myriapede hacks as well as the huge packpedes capable of carrying up to fifteen people.

However, soon after they left the Scarcleft livery in the aftermath of the earthquake, she was forced to revise any assumption about his competence. He had bought a single myriapede, and piled it with their supplies on the back four segments, leaving the first two segments for the two of them. He took the front, sitting cross-legged on the padded cloth saddle as pede drivers and riders did, but as they headed along the trail up the scarp heading directly north, he had trouble organizing the reins. The pede sensed his incompetence and indicated its irritation by clicking its mouthparts and flinging its long feelers around.

"Never be driving pede before," he confessed when Terelle, seated behind him on the beast, asked him how much experience he had. "Always be passenger in caravan, or hiring pedeman. Offered tokens, but nobody be going White Quarter now. Dangerous. Reduners be raiding the 'Basters and killing caravanners. So-we go alone."

Terelle felt her mouth go dry. Dangerous? "Do you know the way?"

He pointed ahead with his riding prod. "There be trail. We follow."

"Aren't we heading north now? The White Quarter is to the east, isn't it?"

"I be knowing the way!" he snapped. "Waterpainters never forget a route. We turn northeast at second caravansary."

She wanted to ask if he knew how to harness the pede, or any of the hundred and one other things that must have been necessary to cross a desert safely, but before she could frame the question, he said, "If anything wrong, ye can be painting our way out of the problem, no?"

"No, I can't. I'm not painting anymore. At least, not in order to shuffle up the future."

He twisted in the saddle to look back at her in open surprise. "What ye mean? Of course ye will! Why ever not?"

"Because we can't tell what will happen! Artisman, people died when the earthquake came. They died just so I could walk free of my prison." The horror of it was still fresh in her mind, as raw as the moment it had occurred.

A mother rocking her dead child in her arms, keening her loss…

No, don't remember. Some things are better forgotten.

But there was no escaping what had happened. True, she had not been the one who had painted the wreckage of Scarcleft Hall with her scrambling over the ruins; that had been Russet. Nonetheless, she had been the one who'd made the quake possible. Russet no longer had the power to shuffle up the magic into his paintings; he could not now move water through the motley undercoat and the layers of paint, nor couple it with his waterpainter's power and fix the future of whatever it was he had painted.