Glenda Larke: Stormlord rising

She could, though. When Highlord Taquar Sardonyx had sent the waterpaints to her prison room, she had even tricked the magic and done what was supposed to be impossible. She had influenced her own future. How could she have known that shuffling up her shadow would also give power to Russet's concept of an earthquake?

Behind them, the lowest level of Scarcleft still burned. If she turned, she would see the smoke. "Sunlord help me, how many innocent people did we kill, the two of us?"

Still looking at her, Russet shrugged. The pede moved steadily ahead in spite of his inattention. "Who cares if folk died? Scarpen folk only. Not be our people. They imprisoned you to use you. Deserved to die!"

Furious, she glared at him. "You're sun-fried! Taquar imprisoned me, not some poor boy asleep in his bed who'll never wake up because a wall fell on him. What kind of monster are you?"

He shook his finger at her. "Ye matter! They not matter. Ye are Pinnacle heir. Must be going home. Quartern folk no more than sand-ticks beneath your feet. Ye be not even knowing them."

"Do you think that makes me feel one sand grain better?" she asked, incredulous. She took a deep breath. "I am not shuffling up, not ever again." She pressed her lips together in what she hoped was a determined line.

Russet scowled. "Foolish frip of a girl! We could die." When she didn't reply, he looked behind them, as if he expected to see someone following. "Best we leave this trail. Taquar might be finding out we left city and sending enforcers after us."

She looked at the stark brown dryness of the fissured land to either side. "Strike out across the desert? We'd be lost in minutes!"

"Not if I be painting me riding into Fourcross Tell, and ye use waterpainting skills to make that the future." He was intent on her now, still paying no attention to the pede. "Try it."

"Taquar's far too busy coping with the earthquake," she said. "We'll take our chances following the track."

"Ye defy me, girl? After all I be doing for ye?"

Her knuckles whitened on the handle driven into the segment in front of her saddle. "I owe you nothing! Not since you painted me into your pictures to take away my freedom to determine my own future." Worse, every time she had tried to defy the magic of the shuffled-up paintings, she'd been sick. He'd done that to her. To her mother, too. Sienna had been ill for a long while, probably because she'd tried to resist her painted future, until she had died giving birth to Terelle.

Murderer.

With sudden resolution she met his gaze squarely, ignoring the disquieting fanaticism in the glare of his age-rheumed eyes as the pede lurched and scrambled up the steepest part of The Escarpment trail. "I don't want to be here. I escaped from Highlord Taquar to go to Shale, not to you. I am only here because you painted my future and I cannot fight the magic of your art. But don't ask me to like it. Or to feel loyalty to you. Or even to obey you."

"Be for your own good."

"My good???or yours?" she snapped.

"Ye be kin! Ye could lead a nation."

Watergiver help me, he's crazed. "That's my misfortune, not my obligation! You can't think your people would welcome me simply because my mother was the heir."

Forced to turn his attention back to the reins, he didn't reply. Her stomach roiled, protesting her rebellion, and she suspected he would not forgive her. However, he did not turn off the caravan trail, and that was her first small victory.

Instead, he started to teach her the spoken language of Khromatis. The journey was a nightmare, yet a nightmare painted on a background that stirred Terelle's soul. The wide skies, the strange orange light of dawn, the burning white sun of midday and the crimson dusks; the shadowed scarps, the gnarled trees clawing their way into barren soils, the weathered rocks and sculpted cliffs: she remembered it from her childhood's single journey, but then she had seen it with a child's eye. Now the artist in her saw the beauty of the land's raw roughness. It murmured to her, stirring a restless desire to record it, to capture it, to make it her own.

But there was no time to paint the scenery, and the nightmare was always there, riding with her: her great-grandfather was a murderous old man who didn't care that he had killed people to pursue his quest for power. Worse, she couldn't free herself. She was chained to him by the paintings he had done when he still had the power to make them come true. She would never be free until she stood on a green slope next to running water; the scene he had painted all those years ago.

It was a lonely journey. All trade between the quarters had ceased because the White and Gibber Quarters had been under periodic attack from Sandmaster Davim's marauders. Where once there had been a thriving trade route, a deserted trail was now often covered by wind-blown dust unmarked by any pede prints. Where there had been Alabaster salt and soda traders and gypsum merchants, where pede caravans of Reduner drovers had passed, laden with minerals and gems from the Gibber Quarter or herding a meddle of pedes for sale, now there was nobody.

The first caravansary along the route was a huddle of deserted buildings just a day's ride from Scarcleft. The cistern was still half-full, even though the windmill normally drawing water from the Scarcleft tunnel had been shut down and disconnected.

"Used to be caretakers here," Russet muttered. "Reeve too, to stop water theft from tunnel. Must be leaving after Qanatend taken by Reduners. Afraid Reduners come this way."

"I don't understand," she said to Russet. "Why did the Reduner sandmaster attack Qanatend? Reduners benefited from trade with the Scarpen as much as everyone else. They bought our bab oil and our beads and Gibber gems, our cloth and bab-weave canvas for their tents-so many things. They sold us pedes and animal pelts and dyes and wild herbs."

"Street gossip say Davim be thinking to return people to old time of noble warrior. Nomads, raiding and stealing and hunting. Hear he says dune gods be angry because tribesmen deviated from nomadic ways." He shrugged. "Foolishness of ignorant man hungry for power."

And you? Terelle thought. That describes you, too, you frizzled old driveler.

They lost the trail half a dozen times the next day when the hardened ruts left by generations of pede feet disappeared under sifted dust. Russet's remedy was simple. He gave the pede its head and hoped it at least knew where it was supposed to go. Sooner or later, the trail would magically reappear under the points of the animal's feet and Terelle would breathe a sigh of relief.

Late that night they arrived at the second caravansary. It was larger than the first, but equally deserted. Fortunately there was a small grove of fruiting bab trees, so they ate well and the pede gorged itself on the fallen fruit until it could eat no more.

The language lessons continued until they went to bed. The trail divided at the caravansary, one branch veering off to Pebblebag Pass and Qanatend, a second heading northeast toward the White Quarter, and a third due east. "Goes to Pahntuk Cistern," Russet remarked about the last in the morning. "Route to Breccia."

She thought nothing of that until later in the day when they were following the middle trail up into the foothills of the Warthago Range. The way was steep, the views spectacular. Ahead were the savage peaks of the range scarifying the sky with their clawed edges. When she looked back, she could see for miles across The Sweeping, the rugged gullies they had crossed now no more than insignificant cracks on the landscape. Maintenance shaft towers cast their shadows across the land in lines, one to the west, one still ahead of them, marking the water tunnels to Breccia and Scarcleft respectively.

And far below, a spindevil whirling up the dust in his dance…