"Respect not the spindevil wind and you reap its wrath," she said. "That is my prophecy to you, drover. You have stirred the sand of the dunes; your time will come to receive just harvest." Without haste she wrapped her shawl tight around her head and shoulders, gathered the reins together and pulled herself up onto the lead segment of her pede. One of the women gasped. Several of Davim's men stirred angrily and would have intervened except that Davim made no move to stop her.
She turned the head of the beast away, clumsily because she had never before controlled the reins from the back of a mount. Then she jabbed the riding prod between the segments, pushing deep into the vulnerable flesh. The animal-unused to such abuse-responded immediately. It raised itself up onto the points of its feet and leaped forward, plunging straight into the waiting group of Reduner warriors. Mounts scuttled sideways to dodge and Vara broke free of the encircling group.
Behind her one of the men gave a snort of disparagement. There was no way that a transport packpede laden with water could outrun a myriapede hack. "Shall I run her down?" he asked Davim, his eyes gleaming at the thought.
"Send a zigger," Davim said.
With a disappointed shrug, the man reached behind to his zigger cage. When he allowed a single zigger to crawl into his zigtube, the other ziggers went into a frenzy of frustration at having missed out on the opportunity of a meal. The man turned to face the direction that Vara had taken. The riders around him drew back to give him an open view of her flight, even though they doubtless all wore the perfume of the tribe.
The man raised the tube, sighted along its length, and tapped on the side to release the cover.
The zigger flew.
There was a collective sigh from the women as the animal flew true: straight at the first moving thing it saw when the tube opened. And then it was gone, gathering speed until it was a blur against desert sands, invisible to the naked eye, a tiny missile with deadly intent.
Davim did not even wait to see it hit. He turned back to the women. "Your menfolk no longer exist," he said. "The Scarmaker tribe no longer rules the Red Quarter. Choose your fates."
In the distance, the red of Vara's shawl momentarily flared as if caught in the wind, then the figure on the back of the packpede faltered and slumped. One by one the women dropped to their knees on the red sands, until the only person standing was the old woman, Zuzan, finding her final dignity.
Davim shrugged. "Kill her," he said indifferently. Then, as someone speared her with casual skill, he turned to the man who had sent the zigger after Vara. "Go get that packpede back," he said. "Leave the woman out there for the desert cats to fight over."
He turned to the rest of his men, smiling. "The Red Quarter is ours," he said. "The woman was right: there will be those who reap the wrath of the spindevil winds-but it is we who are the spindevils." He grabbed one of the Watergatherer banners from the saddle of another rider and waved it high. "The Quartern will feel the greatness of the wind sweeping out of the dunes!"
Vara would have said he was a man who wasted his water on flamboyant gestures, but Vara was not there to see. Far away, still slumped over the back of the running pede, her shawl clutched in her hand, she gave a smile, part grimace-and all hatred. She came from a long line of sandmasters, and in her family, everyone knew how to deal with a lone zigger. Her shawl, thrown like a bird catcher's net and then slammed against the pede's back with the zigger caught in its folds, was now soiled.
Playing dead, she clutched a dagger in her hand and waited for the warrior she knew Davim would send after her. By the time they realised he was not coming back, she would be on the next dune.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Scarpen Quarter Warthago Range Scarcleft mother cistern "This is not good enough."
The tone of Taquar's words was as sharp as a well-honed knife and cut Shale just as deep. Slowly he rose to his feet to face the highlord.
After more than three years in the mother cistern waterhall, he was as tall as Taquar and almost as broad in the shoulder. His daily swimming and frequent forays outside to climb the surrounding hills and explore the gullies had built muscles to match those of the man he faced. Shale wondered sometimes what Taquar thought about that; did he ever ask himself how Shale had come by his strength?
"I can do no better," he said in answer, his voice deep and even. He indicated the first three of a series of bowls on the table. A grain or two of salt stuck to the bottom of each. "See? I have no trouble creating vapour when there is not much else dissolved in the water. But those-" Frowning, he pointed to the remaining four bowls, all still full. "There's too much dissolved salt, and it anchors the water in place. Or that's the way it feels."
The appalling truth had been growing inside him like a gall for some time now: if he couldn't lift vapour from a salty solution in a bowl under his nose, how ever was he going to lift a cloud from the sea?
In frustration, he tried to lift the water with the salt still in it, and earned the rainlord's cynical amusement. "We have power over water, you imbecile, not salt. Nor anything else that happens to be in the water. When you move water, that's all you move."
His fury was controlled, but Shale heard it in the viciousness of his next words. "You have to be able to extract vapour from the salt water of the sea! Yet you can't even extract liquid water from a solution right in front of you. Even rainlords can do that much."
"Then perhaps I am not even a rainlord." Blood, ink, piss, fruit juice or even dead bodies-it made no difference to rainlords, he knew that. They could extract the water. And he could not.
"The trouble is that you came to training too late and we are running out of time." Taquar began to pace up and down. "Things have deteriorated throughout the Quartern. Gibber settles are raiding one another now. Davim has most of the Reduner tribes behind him as their water holes shrink. He rides out mounted on that great pede of his-Burnish-his men following like a huge red dust storm, and puts the fear of the dune drovers into every settle in the northern Gibber, not to mention 'Baster caravans."
Shale sat down again. When Taquar was in a mood like this, it was pointless to say much, because he rarely listened.
"Water theft is increasing across the Scarpen. The measures I take in Scarcleft do not make me popular-some fool had the audacity to throw a stone at me from a rooftop last week! At least Granthon has finally ceased sending regular storms to the Gibber and White Quarters."
Shale stared, unbelieving. "Storms aren't regular in the Gibber any more?" He went cold all over, unable to comprehend the enormity of the tragedy in the making. "You think people of the White Quarter and the Gibber Plains should die?" he asked finally, his rage building.
"No, of course not. I think they should learn to live without our storms. They did once." He did not sound particularly concerned. "With Granthon not able to make full use of all the natural clouds, they will have to go somewhere and some will drop rain. Those two quarters will revert to a Time of Random Rain. In fact, I have heard rumours that there has been unexpected rainfall in both quarters already.
"If Granthon and Nealrith had any sense whatsoever," he continued, "they would have stopped trying to please everybody long ago and spent more time learning how to save the Scarpen. And the Reduners, of course. We have no choice there-if we don't supply them with water, they'll be on our doorsteps with their ziggers. Even now, they are restless. If I ruled in Breccia, I would give them the White Quarter to do what they liked with, to placate them for the reduction in water. Leave the north to the Reduners and the south to us."