She touched his hand in commiseration. "If I were you, I'd play the hypocrite. Pretend you believe; it makes them happier. One day, who knows, maybe it will all make sense to you, but if it doesn't, you will at least be in a position to tell them you think it's all about as real as a sand-dancer."
He pulled a wry face and decided she was right. "We've got off the subject," he said. "About why the Gibber is so much poorer than the Scarpen."
"Not entirely. It's connected. The priests say it was because the Watergiver went first to the Gibber, but they laughed at him and drove him out. So the Sunlord punished them by making the sun hotter and the washes of the Gibber the last places to be given regular water."
She laughed at Jasper's disgusted face and continued, "It took generations for the stormlords and the rainlords to refine their skills, to nourish enough water sensitives to bring the Scarpen back from the edge of disaster. At the same time, they had to battle the Reduners for their freedom. In the meantime, the Gibber suffered. The Reduners raided the Gibber Plains, too, just to make it worse.
"Eventually there was controlled rain, and the Other Siders built ships to come to us, so there was trade once more. We defeated the Reduners, and there were no more raids, but by that time, your people were so poor that you've never quite caught up."
"And our darker skin colour?"
"The religious texts say it was the Sunlord's mercy, to save you from his burning heat, since you had to spend so much of your time looking for food on the plains and fossicking for resin and minerals to trade."
Religion again, he thought with a sigh. Things would be so much easier if I could believe it all.
She continued, "If we believe the priests, it was the Watergiver who changed everything for the better in the Scarpen. He not only showed us how to use a water sensitive's power to make and break the clouds, he gave us the skill to kill using our water-powers. That gave us the edge we needed to send the Reduners back to the dunes. The pedemen of the Red Quarter have hated us ever since."
He stared at her, not bothering to hide his astonishment. "But that must have been almost a thousand years ago! They still hate us after all that time?"
"Men have long memories for slighted pride."
That's ridiculous, he thought. Then he remembered the bitter dislike in Davim's eyes. The cold core of fear inside him grew. Confound Ryka; the more he learned from her, the more uneasy he felt. Nothing was as simple as it had been once, when all he had to do was keep out of the reach of Galen's fists and somehow earn or steal enough food and water to fill his belly.
"The Reduners don't believe in the Sunlord, of course," Ryka continued. "They have their dune gods, one for each dune. They say their gods speak to the tribes, using a language only the shamans understand."
Jasper snorted. "So a dune shaman could be a very powerful man."
"Indeed," she agreed blandly. They exchanged a smile.
"What about the Alabasters? Where do they come from?"
"Ah. There you have an intriguing mystery. No one knows. The Reduners call them the forbidden people, but they can't say why. And the Alabasters themselves don't say. Or won't. I have interviewed many of them, trying to find out, and I have the feeling that they do know. We have a saying here, 'to keep a secret as well as a 'Baster.' "
"What do you think?"
"They have their own language, although they don't speak it any more. They use it to read and write, though. To me that means they were one of the original people, like the Reduners. I think they know far more than they say. They are cultured, and I suspect they have a written history they don't care to share. But I am just guessing."
"You like them."
"Yes, I do. They are gentle and generous. We need more people like them, not fewer." Her tone was troubled as she added, "Ah, Jasper, sometimes I think the world we are heading towards needs much more than we know how to give." His lessons with Kaneth were exhausting, but fun because they were unpredictable. Better still, he found he had a talent for combat. He enjoyed the physicality of it and liked nothing more than repeating moves over and over until they were graceful and instinctive.
Sometimes Ryka or Nealrith would come to watch the lessons. Nealrith evaluated his progress with a practised eye and offered advice. Ryka just watched Kaneth.
And Jasper wondered about the dread he sometimes glimpsed in her gaze when she looked at her husband. He didn't think anyone else noticed, but he was an expert at seeing fear in a woman's eyes. He'd seen it in his mother's gaze when she looked at Galen. He'd seen it in Terelle when she looked at Russet. But Ryka didn't fear that Kaneth would hurt her, surely.
So why those flickers of panic?
He had no idea. Another complication he didn't understand.
The days bled into one another, one hardly different from the next. Yet each day made him a slightly different person. More competent, more knowledgeable, a better rainlord, a little closer to being a stormlord, a little further away from Terelle, from Mica, from the rawness of Citrine's death. More Jasper and less Shale. Then, when he had been in Breccia for just over seventy days, Nealrith took him back to Granthon.
"You are needed now," the highlord told Jasper. "Even another day might be too late."
"But I still can't extract pure water-or vapour-from water as salty as the sea!" It was the one area where he had made no progress.
"My father will cloudmake," Nealrith said. "You will cloudshift." The tone he used brooked no protest.
The Cloudmaster looked weaker than ever. Jasper concealed his despair at the man's decline. He listened carefully as Granthon took him step by step through what he needed to know. Granthon would devote all his strength to the separation of fresh water from salt and its conversion to vapour. The moment the water vapour rose from the surface of the sea, Jasper was to take over. Nealrith would tell him where to send the clouds, and Granthon would help him break them.
And so he started shifting clouds, taking what the weakened stormlord made and teasing them across the sky at Nealrith's direction. At first he found it especially hard to do once a cloud moved out of sight across the Sweepings, to the north of the city. But as the days passed, that became easier, too. He could use his senses to track and guide the unseen cloud to force it higher and higher above the Warthago Range, until it finally broke and released its life-giving water.
After that, he and Granthon worked alone, raising at least two storms every day.
Even though he still could not extract water from the sea, he was making a difference, and he was proud of that. Granthon would live longer because of him. The Quartern would survive longer.
He knew who he was now. Jasper Bloodstone, rainlord. Useful, talented-but still an imperfect vessel, doing no more than postponing the Quartern's day of reckoning.
He knew that, ultimately, his failure to do more would condemn them all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Scarpen Quarter Breccia City Level 3 and Level 2 Lord Basalt, High Waterpriest of Breccia and second in the hierarchy of the Quartern's one true faith, stood on the suntower that rose above the Sun Temple and watched as Jasper, on his way home after his religion lesson, threaded his way through the crowd on the streets of Level Three. Several guards, dressed as ordinary citizens, unobtrusively followed.
I hate him, Basalt thought, surprising himself by the degree of venom he felt. I hate the Quartern's next stormlord. He's a dirty Gibber sand louse with the soul of an unbelieving lowleveller. In front of me he pretends to worship the Sunlord, but I can see through him, even if Lord Gold does not.