The Last Stormlord

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Scarpen Quarter Breccia City Ryka wondered, not for the first time, if she'd done the right thing. She'd denied Kaneth her body, moved out of his bed, avoided him as much as possible. She had concealed her thickening waist to punish the man she loved. It all seemed horribly childish now. She could hardly remember why she'd done it in the first place.

Perhaps the baby in her womb, almost half grown now, would be a stormlord. Perhaps he might be the future of the land, and she ought to hide herself away to keep her baby safe. And what right had she to deny Kaneth the knowledge of his baby's existence? She'd been thinking all along that she wouldn't have to tell him, that he would realise. That he would sense the baby's water. But he never had. That had hurt, had made her even angrier with him. How could he not feel his own son, there under his nose?

Yet if she told Kaneth, he would never rest until he had sent her to safety. And she couldn't live without him.

I can't.

He was sleeping, sprawled out on the stone tiles of the waterhall floor. She sat opposite, back to the wall, and drank in the sight of him: long, lanky, lean. Tousled hair, worry lines on his face smoothed away by exhausted sleep, snatching rest while he still could.

It wouldn't be long now before the Reduners realised Jasper had escaped. The next attack, when it came, would be vicious; she knew enough about Reduners to be sure of that, enough to know that any attempt at negotiation would be ignored.

She glanced over at the others in the waterhall. The remaining reeve and surviving guards had been reinforced by another eight guards, all that could be spared from the thinly stretched forces that remained to defend both the waterhall and Breccia Hall. She looked around at them. One of them, Pikeman Elmar Waggoner, was now replenishing the oil in the lamps in the wall niches and placing extra ones around the edge of the cisterns. His face resembled a battle-scarred tomcat, yet when his gaze lit on Kaneth, it softened to a gentleness at variance with his tough exterior. Earlier, both had thought the other dead, and their meeting in the waterhall had been a bright moment in an otherwise dark day.

She thought of her father, who had died fighting on the city wall. She wondered if her mother and Beryll were safe inside the hall somewhere. That exasperating, teasing sister who drove her sandcrazy-now Ryka would have given everything she owned to have Beryll live through this siege safely.

Something overhead started to thump, and dust sifted into the air from the hairline cracks that webbed their way along the daub ceiling. She frowned, watching. They were in the highest building in the city, the top of the escarpment. There was nothing above them.

The thump continued. Her hand crept to her womb, to rest protectively over the child within. Her mouth went dry.

When her gaze returned to Kaneth, she found he was staring at her, at where she had placed her hand. "They are coming through the roof," she said. "The Level One wall must be breached." So soon.

"Ryka," he whispered, "do you have something to tell me?" Around them the guards were waking, looking upwards to where the thump continued to pound. Men reached for their weapons and stood. No one spoke. Faces tilted towards the ceiling. The air thrummed with tension, with sound, with fear.

Ryka had eyes only for Kaneth, and his did not waver from hers. She nodded.

He paled. "Oh, Watergiver's heart! Ryka, why didn't you tell me earlier? You should not be here." He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet. He moved towards the concealed trapdoor, the one that led to the hidden room, tugging her after him. Someone had covered the entrance with a stone slab.

She pulled against him. "No. No time. If they were to break through now and see it open-What if Jasper and Laisa and Senya haven't left yet?"

He halted, in agony. Torn. "A child is our hope for the future, Ryka. Everyone's future. How could you endanger him? Or is it a her? How could you not tell me?"

"A boy, I think, but I could yet be wrong. And he would die of thirst long before he learned to cloudshift. Leave it, Kaneth."

Still he hesitated, his anguish a tangible thing between them.

"It's too late," she whispered, knowing she had made a horrendous mistake, but the words were drowned in shattering sound as the roof at one end of the waterhall collapsed. Several of the guards died on the spot, hit by falling debris. The rest were swamped in a cloud of dust. Kaneth grabbed Ryka with one hand and drew his sword with the other.

And out of the dust the Reduners came, ululating their war cry to their dune god.

There were too many of them, Ryka saw that at a glance, and they kept on coming, leaping down through the hole in the roof. Kaneth dropped her hand, and they placed their backs to the wall, side by side, and groped in their tired bodies for the water-power to make men blind.

I wonder if Kaneth was right about Taquar? Ryka reflected. Would things have been different if he had ruled here? Because the rest of us made such a mess of it.

But there was no time to consider what might have been. To her despair, she realised the Reduners were using new tactics. They held chala spears, not scimitars.

She and Kaneth blinded the first few men who tried to throw them, but there were just too many chalamen. The guards began to fall under the onslaught. More and more blinded men groped their way through the battling warriors, until Ryka had no more power to call on. She clutched her sword, preparing for the first of the Reduners to reach her, but Kaneth grabbed her hand and yanked her away from the wall. He raced along the walkway between the open cisterns, towards the waterhall door, pulling her with him. Elmar, ever ready to follow his lord, pounded down a parallel walkway, heading in the same direction.

Kaneth yelled to the guards, ordering them out, too, although Ryka doubted many of them would make it-or even hear.

She didn't see the spear that hit him, but she saw his head jerk back, felt him stagger. Another spear tore at her tunic, pulling her off balance as it ripped the fabric and sliced a thin line across her skin. She flailed and fell backwards into the cistern. And Kaneth dropped face down on top of her, blood pouring from his head. He clutched her as they fell, his grip hard and tight.

She closed her eyes as his weight bore them both to the bottom. The water was cold. She felt stonework under her back and panicked. Instinct told her to surface. Rational thought told her all that waited there was death.

And then she was breathing air. She opened her eyes, to look directly into Kaneth's only a finger's length from her own. And there was nothing but air between them, a small pocket he had cleared for them to breathe. He winked and mouthed, "Don't move." They drifted upwards through the water, and at the surface he let her go. His arms floated on either side of her head, keeping her sunken beneath the protection of his body.

Waterless hell, she thought, he knows there's a good chance someone is going to plunge a spear into his back to make sure he's dead. How can he be so brave?

They were going to die, and she was flooded with regret. They should have run. They should have tried to save their child. Death was forever. I was wrong, she thought.

"Live," she said to Kaneth, just the tiniest whisper into the air between them so no one else would hear. "Live, for the three of us."

The water around their heads reddened with his blood. She could see it running from his wound, a crease through his scalp, a deep furrow that must have reached the bone. The edges of the air pocket weakened as the last of his power drained. She used her senses to feel its dimensions: just enough to cover their faces, with a narrow pipe running from the edge to emerge on the surface, hidden in the floating tangle of her hair. She shored up the sides by pushing water away. Sandblast, she was so weak. Only the faintest dregs of her power remained. How long could she keep the water at bay?

He must have felt her power take over from his, because his eyes closed, and she felt him slip away somewhere she could not follow. His last conscious action had been to protect her and their child.

She wanted to hold him. She wanted to tell him she loved him. And most of all, she wanted to reach out and pinch his wound closed with her fingers to stop the bleeding that leached his life away. Live, she told him silently. Live.

Yet she could do nothing. A single movement, a single sound would betray them both and bring certain death. She had to play dead. A slim chance, but the only one they had. So much blood…

Think, woman! she shouted in her mind, berating herself. You are a rainlord. You can stop the bleeding if you can find enough within you… As she floated there in a sea of his blood, her heart breaking, she searched for a fragment of power to dry his wound, to seal it with dry scabbing. Just a fragment, that's all she needed.

Oh, Kaneth, love, please don't die on me, not now.

Motionless and silent, she searched for power-and wondered, if he died, whether she would sense the moment his life left him. "Mother?" Senya asked, breathless after the climb. "What do we do next? I mean, if we go to Portennabar, Davim will just go there, too, and exactly the same thing will happen. We can't fight, because we don't have ziggers or enough rainlords or enough pedes."

"I'm glad to see you are finally thinking, child. Ah, here's the gully. I can sense the pedes, right where they should be."

"So what are we going to do?"

Laisa smiled in the darkness. "Don't worry, Senya. We are not going to Portennabar." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Have you ever known your mother not to have a spare water jar in the cupboard? We have the Quartern's only stormlord. So we will go where there are fighters and ziggers and pedes and a man with guts enough to lead us to power and victory."

Senya's eyes widened. Then she began to smile.