Beneath his feet, the dune god growled.
Scarpen Quarter
Breccia City
Breccia Hall, Level 2
“Mercy! Has he gone mad?”
Nealrith braced himself for the tirade that was sure to follow. His wife, Laisa, stared at him, her dark blue eyes wide with unfeigned shock. She had just freed her long blond hair from its combs and it tumbled over her shoulders in thick waves, but for once she appeared to be oblivious to the impact of her sensual beauty.
He took her question literally. “No, no, not that.” He was tired. Too much had happened. Too many things over the previous ten days, all worthy of worry. He sat down on the bedroom stool and chose to look up at his wife as he listened. Dispassionately he wondered just how she was going to react to all he had just told her, once she was beyond the initial surprise.
She said, obviously irritated, “It was bad enough to know that sick old man was sending you caravanning off on a fool’s journey with Iani, but now he would send
me
, too? To the most water-forsaken cracks in the world, looking for a new stormlord—this when we couldn’t find one after years of searching the most
likely
places?”
“Yes. You
and
Taquar.”
“His head must be stuffed with sand. He has gone crazy since someone stole his storm. Why me? Why Taquar?”
“He says he’s come to the conclusion that we are all needed to protect the sensitives we may find there. He feels that this rogue rainlord who stole the cloud wants all the potential stormlords dead. That he may have killed before. Remember all those deaths before we were married, when Taquar almost died?”
“That’s ridiculous! They were accidents, illnesses—”
“So we thought. But then someone stole Father’s storm. And, it seems, later dumped it into a drywash in the Gibber Quarter. Father sensed that much. He suspects the thief must be either a Gibberman, or someone who lives there. It’s another reason he wants us all there—to look for this man. Or woman.”
“This gets more and more silly. It must be fifteen years since Lyneth disappeared. And even longer since the others died. And he thinks the same person is responsible? And a Gibber plains-grubber at that? Your father is going senile. What’s to say the rogue who stole the cloud is not one of us?”
She started pacing, long hungry strides that ate up the floor space, forcing her to turn and start back the opposite way. Her silks—imported from across the Giving Sea—swished and shimmered, as intense and as beautiful as she herself. A concealed split up one side of the skirt allowed tantalising glimpses of a shapely calf and thigh.
She stopped pacing abruptly and considered him, head on one side. “Nealrith, could
you
do that? Seize a storm from him by force?”
He blinked, stupid with fatigue. “Of course not.”
“Not
would
you, but
could
you.”
“No.”
“Neither could I. A stormlord could, but a real stormlord could call up his own storm anyway; he wouldn’t need to steal one.”
“It must be someone with talent who needed my father to create the storm because he couldn’t do that part himself.”
“Hmm. A rogue indeed. There are fifty-two rainlords in Scarpen to choose from, but it must be someone who is stronger in water-power than either of us. That narrows it down a bit. I can think of only four or five. Highlord Taquar, Lord Iani and that awful wife of his, Highlord Moiqa. Your cousin Highlord Tolven, over in Denmasad, although he’s always struck me as the most unambitious man I’ve ever met. And then just possibly Lord Kaneth, whose power has always fluctuated from pathetically incompetent to flashes of remarkable skill, things even a stormlord might find difficult. Sunlord only knows why.”
“None of us would have a reason! It has to be someone who has the talent but who has never been trained.”
“Another kind of rogue, in fact.” She sounded more intrigued than frightened and he experienced a momentary irritation. Didn’t she realise how much his struggle to retain the storm had cost Granthon? Couldn’t she see how much it had cost the cities of the Scarpen? It had been days before his father had summoned the strength to create another.
Laisa was apparently following a different train of thought. “Why on earth would a rogue rainlord want to cast water on the Gibber?”
“Why would he want to steal it in the first place? Nothing about this makes sense.”
“All that water dumped on those plains-grubbers instead of where we could use it. What a waste!”
Something in the way she said that alerted him. “Kaneth’s been talking to you,” he said flatly.
“About abandoning the Gibber? Yes. So has Taquar on his last visit. But it wasn’t anything I haven’t thought myself.” She sounded matter-of-fact. “Your father is only delaying the inevitable. He’s far too soft.”
“Damn it, doesn’t anyone see how wrong that would be? We have a responsibility to the whole of the Quartern!”
She looked at him in surprise. “Oh yes, in good times, perhaps. But Nealrith, would you see Senya and me die of thirst? Of course we should cut off water to the useless desert-grubbers first! And to the ’Basters as well. That’s only logical. The Reduners are too dangerous to treat that way, unfortunately.”
He felt suddenly nauseated, and turned away.
She didn’t notice his repugnance. “How do we find this rogue?” she asked.
Another question he couldn’t answer.
Laisa
, he thought tiredly,
you have a genius for making me feel inadequate
. “I’ve no idea. The only thing we can do is to put every rainlord on their guard.”
She gave an unpleasant smile. “When all the time it could be one of us. Wonderful.” Her smile thinned into calculation. “An intriguing problem, Nealrith.”
“It’s all I can suggest. There is no way we can trace just who did this. He or she could have been many days away in any direction. Or in a house right here in Breccia.”
“I’ll give it some thought. I do so like to pit my wits against a worthy opponent.”
“This is not a game, Laisa.”
“I did not say it was. In fact, I look at it more as a—a battle of minds.” She slanted an inquiring look in his direction. “And what of Senya?”
“Senya stays. I am not going to drag our daughter halfway across the Quartern.”
“Who will look after her if we are both away?”
“Mother will, of course.”
“Nealrith, stop that. You always get an idiotic smile on your face when you think of Senya. You spoil her with your—”
She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and the entry of a servant to tell Nealrith that Iani was waiting below to see him.
“I have to make arrangements,” he said as the servant left. “Laisa—”
“Yes?” She came close and raised an innocent face to smile at him.
“Don’t be difficult about this.”
“No, of course not.” She touched him, running her fingers over his crotch, arousing and tormenting as she moved her own body in a provocative gesture against his thigh. “When am I ever difficult?” Once she had elicited a response, she stepped back and waved him away in a swirl of silken sleeve. “Go, Nealrith, dear. You have more important things to do.”
He thought,
You are always difficult, Laisa
. His throat tightened and he mourned, although for what he wasn’t sure.
As usual, she had left him baffled, not knowing what she wanted or why a deep anger inside her burned at him through her eyes. After fourteen years of marriage, he had no idea what she thought of him. No idea if her playful sensuality was part of her loving or part of a deeper need to humiliate and tease. Her bedroom behaviour alternated between a passion so intense it frightened him, and a scornful coolness that left him both frustrated and at a loss.
He sighed, loving her, hating her, despising himself as he left the room.
Iani was waiting in the entrance hall, admiring the waterpainting that floated in the shallow tiled pool set into the floor. It showed a picture of a storm crossing the Warthago Range, of rain descending from a broken cloud—a picture of turbulence and plenty falling onto a barren landscape. It had been painted at Laisa’s request by an outlander, a strange old man whose art had become fashionable in several of the Scarpen cities.
Its potency made Nealrith uneasy; the idea of wasting water on a piece of art reinforced his disquiet, especially as every now and then the water under the paint had to be topped up, otherwise the colours lost their vibrancy and the painting lost its impact.
He descended the stairs and clapped Iani on the back. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said simply. “I need to talk to you. Let’s go sit in my study.”
“You have another job for me?” One corner of his lips quirked upwards. “I know you think keeping an eye on the tunnels and mother wells is what keeps me sane.”
This was so close to the truth that Nealrith reddened. Left too much to his own devices, Iani became increasingly odd, muttering to himself, refusing to leave his room, forgetting to eat, shaking his fist at the sun and the sky, shouting blasphemies about the Watergiver or the Sunlord. Nealrith preferred to keep him busy.
“Father has set four of us a task,” he said as he ushered the rainlord into his study.
Yet another man who has aged faster than anyone should
, he thought as he told Iani all he needed to know. At fifty, the man looked twenty years older. His face was crisscrossed with a network of lines as fine as a crocheted jug cover, creases put there, perhaps, by the many years he’d spent riding the Scarpen Quarter looking for any trace of his beloved Lyneth. Worse still, a later apoplexy had left him with a sagging lip and a dribble, a left hand that had trouble grasping things, and a dragging left leg.
“Four rainlords?” he asked after Nealrith had finished explaining. “We can divide up the Gibber and have it all done in less than a hundred days.”
“I’m afraid not. Father wants us to stay together. To protect and train the sensitives we find, for a start.”
“Then it will take us the better part of a year.”
Nealrith turned his face away. A whole star cycle: Senya would be a year older before he saw her again.
“That’s a long time for you and Taquar to be away from your cities,” Iani added.
“Merqual Feldspar will keep an eye on Breccia for me. Taquar has his rainlords and that shrivelled bastard of a seneschal of his, Harkel Tallyman. They are so well trained that Scarcleft just about runs itself.”
“That’s true.”
“We might be back sooner than we think. If we find water sensitives in Wash Dribarra—”
“We won’t be coming home early,” Iani warned. “Even if we find a potential stormlord on the first day. If Granthon thinks this is worth doing, we have to scour the Gibber, every mud-cracked drywash and every dust-blown settle of it, from one side to the other. We need as many young stormlords and rainlords as we can find. None of us is going to live forever.” His voice trailed away into a mumble. “Lyneth didn’t.”
Nealrith gave a heavy sigh. “I know. I just hate the idea of being away so long. Let’s hope it produces results.”
“Improbable. Reckon I have a better chance of finding Lyneth alive.”
“Father has always thought we will find solutions in the histories he so loves to read.”
A servant entered with a tray of drinks and sweet cakes; they paused the conversation until he had left. Nealrith poured a glass of lime juice for each of them. The servant had supplied a grass straw; everyone knew Iani found drinking a messy business without one.
Iani took the proffered drink, but his mind appeared to be elsewhere. “Granthon is dying…” His voice trailed away as if he’d started to think of something else.
“Yes. So?” Nealrith prompted.
“She was so beautiful, Lyneth. She had this way of ducking her head and then looking up at you from under her lashes—”
“I remember.”
“Once we had quite a few young rainlords who were probably going to be stormlords when they were older, Nealrith.”
Something inside Nealrith lurched in terror. Why was everyone harping back to what had happened in the past? “Don’t tell me you, too, think they might have been murdered?”
“I don’t know, really. But there was a time when I was confident that there would be a line of succession after Granthon.” He sipped his drink and looked out of the open shutters. “My Lyneth responded well to her training, you know. And that’s not just the hopes of a besotted father. She
was
a true stormlord.” He put his glass down. “Do—do you remember how lovely and sweet she was, Nealrith?”
“I remember.”
“She would be nearly twenty-one now, if she was alive.” He looked back at Nealrith. “But she’s not. I know that, even though her body was never found. Whatever got the others got her, too. Too many deaths, my friend. Far too many. And now there’s only two rainlords under thirty. Your daughter and Merqual Feldspar’s Ryka.” His gaze held Nealrith’s intently. “You have a beautiful daughter. I would be careful of her if I were you.
Very
careful.”
Nealrith stilled. Iani couldn’t be
threatening
her, could he? No. Not Iani. Never Iani. It was a warning, not a threat. The idea of anything happening to Senya chilled him beyond thought, became a darkness that loomed out of nowhere and swallowed him whole. He struggled free of the panic, seeking calm.