The Storm Weaver & the Sand (Books of the Change)

by Sean Williams

  The golem turned away. She sagged against the desk, glad to be released from its stare and feeling like she was going to throw up. Tom and Skender had dragged the bodies inside and were in the process of rolling them under Sal’s bed. While the awkward job of poking various limbs out of sight was under way, the golem shut the door.

  “Don’t do that,” it said to Aron, who had undone two of the buckles on his harness and was preparing to lean Mawson back onto the table. The man’kin was as stiff and unresponsive as inanimate stone, and just as heavy. Aron looked up questioningly in mid-movement.

  “No one stays,” said the golem. “You’re all coming.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Sal angrily. “The deal was with me, not them.”

  “They’ve seen me here. If they stay behind, they’ll sound the alarm. I cannot allow that to happen.”

  “Can’t you lock them in here?” Sal looked desperately around him, as though hoping an alternative would appear out of thin air. “Tie them up or something?”

  “Not unless you want me to do to them as I did to the attendants—”

  “No,” said Sal quickly, “don’t do that.” To Shilly and the others, he said, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  Tom was breathing heavily from the exertion of moving the bodies and staring at the golem. “You’re not Lodo,” he said. “You’re something else.”

  “That’s right, boy. Very quick. Didn’t your dreams tell you that?”

  Tom nervously shook his head. “Where are you taking us?”

  “Down. Deep underground, via the unseen places.” The golem’s depthless stare swept over them all, one by one. “When we leave here, you will follow me wherever I take you and do everything I say. Even you, Mawson.”

  The man’kin’s name didn’t provoke a response.

  The golem flipped the hood back over its head, hiding Lodo’s ravaged face from view. Shilly was glad for that, even though it didn’t dim the malignant presence.

  “It’s time to go.” The golem opened the door.

  “Wait a second.” Sal grabbed his pack from where it lay in one corner and slung it over his shoulder. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

  Shilly forced herself to look away as she crutched after Sal through the doorway. The cold, dark place where Lodo’s face had been followed her hungrily.

  At the far end of the corridor she thought she saw movement.

  Help us! she wanted to scream. Don’t let it take us away!

  But the movement wasn’t repeated, and no cry of warning went up. They were on their own.

  Skender followed the others numbly. He felt like a puppet. His body moved of its own volition while his mind cowered deep inside it, deliberately cutting itself off from that face and those eyes and the memory of what those hands had done. Interspersed with the golem’s veiled threats were vivid images of those threats made real: kicking limbs growing limp; bright red blood on blue lips and cheek; cooling flesh where once had been someone real and alive.

  That could be any of them. He knew the golem’s threat wasn’t an idle one, and he didn’t want it to be him.

  You can’t escape me, Galeus Van Haasteren.

  Skender felt the cold eyes of the golem on him as it urged them along the corridor. He hadn’t been taught about golems at the Keep, but he had chanced across numerous references to them in old books and other texts. They were disembodied creatures that lived in areas around which reservoirs of the background potential of the Change were concentrated. That Sal and Shilly had met this particular golem in the Broken Lands city was no surprise, nor was the fact that it had also appeared in the Haunted City, since both places were enormously rich in the Change. That was what made the cities so dangerous: they were like oases in a desert, around which predators congregated.

  Worse than any physical goad was the knowledge of what it was that had captured them. Golems survived by inhabiting bodies that had been otherwise vacated. Some people lost their minds naturally, through age or illness; others forced themselves out by overextending themselves through the Change. In either case, a golem could take up residence in the husk left behind. Change-workers were particularly at risk, and it was in just such a victim that this golem had appeared both times to Sal and Shilly. Lodo was probably the latest in a line of such hosts for the powerful, ancient mind that now inhabited it.

  Where it had come from originally, though, Skender didn’t know. Golems were mysterious creatures and difficult to study. Some people thought that a golem could inhabit more than one body at once; others wondered if the boundaries between individual golems were blurry—so blurry that there might be only one individual golem in all the world, manifested in many different forms. Few people had communicated with golems in disembodied states, as Sal had, and no one knew exactly what they were made of when they had no bodies. Perhaps they were presences woven out of the background potential; perhaps they took their form from the Void Beneath. Speculation was rife among scholars.

  Nothing Skender had ever read or heard could tell him how to exorcise a golem from a victim’s body. And no one that he knew of had managed to kill a golem. Attacking it using the Change was futile, since that would only make it stronger. For all he knew, they could be invulnerable to any method of removal, and they would be stuck with this one forever.

  Until it grew tired of them…

  “Left.” The golem directed them deeper into the Novitiate buildings, through arched tunnels they hadn’t visited before. The fog of remembered terror separating Skender from reality lifted slightly in the face of new experiences, new memories to be laid down. The stone walls grew darker and smoother, as though worn down by more than time. The constant swish of robes, the brushing of fingers, the air itself circulating through the dark passages—all must have contributed to give the rough stonework a round, blunted feel. The ways were lit every four metres or so by mirrored panels in the ceiling, casting second-hand moonlight on the worn tiled floor.

  “Quietly, now.”

  They passed two large glass doors through which they saw a black shadow pacing to and fro. Skender bit his lip to stop himself from crying out. As afraid as he was of where they might be going, he didn’t want to end up like Radi Mierlo. He would do as he was told.

  They came to a shadowy dead-end. The golem rolled up the sleeves of its host body and reached to touch two points high in each corner. There was a metallic click. Skender felt something crawl across his skin, like bugs—then the wall before them fell heavily away into darkness. The golem had opened a secret entrance.

  “Inside,” it said, “but go no further than four paces. I will guide you further when the door is shut behind us. Make no sound at all.”

  Sal went first, clutching his pack, followed by Shilly, then Skender, who stood nervously in the utter blackness. Damp, chill air entwined itself around his neck, wrists and knees as Aron came through the opening behind him, silently bearing the heavy weight of the man’kin strapped to his back. Sal’s cousin wasn’t as blank as usual; his face showed signs of worry, perhaps even fear. Skender felt sorry for him as the golem shut the door and darkness fell with a soft thud.

  “Wait.” The golem held them still with its cold presence. “Your eyes will adjust.”

  Skender hugged himself as images of murder and blood loomed out of the darkness. If the golem killed them now, would anyone ever discover their bodies? If they escaped from it, would they ever be able to open that doorway? They were completely at its mercy.

  Out of the sides of his vision, a deep green glow appeared. It seemed to spread across his eyes like ink through water, revealing what lay before them in degrees of shadow. The first things he saw were the faces of his friends. Shilly’s eyes were wide and reflected the pallid, sickly light back at him; Sal watched the golem as it moved fluidly around them, wary of its sinister grace; Mawson was looking back and f
orth as though searching for something. Tom’s eyes were tightly shut, too afraid to look…

  Only then did Skender realise what lay beyond, on the walls and ceiling pressing in around them. What he had at first assumed were just random bumps and protrusions suddenly became faces: thousands of them crowding in on all sides, from the very large, with exaggerated bulbous, twisted features, to tiny mask-like heads peering from the cracks. They loomed out of the darkness like a manic crowd, threatening to overwhelm him.

  “W-what are they?” he heard himself say.

  “Bas-relief.” The reply came from an unexpected quarter. Mawson had finally broken his silence.

  “Are they alive?” asked Shilly.

  “No. They do not answer my call.”

  The light, Skender realised, was coming from fungus growing on the wider, flatter sections of the carved faces. Foreheads and cheeks were brightest, making the faces appear as though they were lit from above, but when Skender looked up, all he saw were more giant, waxy visages, leering grimly down at the others.

  “We’re not here to sightsee,” said the golem. “We have a long way to go.”

  “Lead the way, then,” said Sal. “We’re not stopping you.”

  The shadowy, hooded figure loomed in the near-darkness. “Where I step, you will follow. Tread carefully. Touch nothing unless I tell you to. We are in places not meant to be visited. The less we disturb, the better.”

  Skender nodded automatically. He could feel the Change swirling around him in the oily, thick air. Something about it reminded him of the Divide, the unnatural canyon that separated the Interior from the Strand. There were things that lived on the bottom of the Divide that made crossing it perilous. A whisper at the back of his brain told him that the place they were heading to was just as perilous, and not only because of the golem taking them there.

  The golem’s shadow seemed to foreshorten and shrink. When Skender’s turn came to follow Shilly, he realised that the face-lined tunnel descended sharply down into the earth, turning in a tight spiral. The ceiling was low in places, forcing Aron to crouch awkwardly in order to spare Mawson a solid crack across the back of the head. As they wound their way underground, they passed an endless procession of painfully depicted emotions: exaggerated grins, teeth-exposing grimaces, wide O’s of surprise. It was like travelling through a world of madness, Skender thought, where everything was too vivid, too intense.

  “The dark side of the city,” said Mawson into his mind. “The underbelly of civilisation.”

  “Are you reading my thoughts?” he shot back through the Change.

  “Only when they want to be read.”

  What that meant, Skender had no idea. “Why didn’t you warn us when the golem was nearby? You could sense yadeh-tash. You must have known it was coming.”

  “I knew.”

  “Well? Why didn’t you tell us? We could all be killed down here!”

  If Mawson was bothered by the accusation that he had been negligent, it didn’t show in his voice. “I do what I must.”

  “You’re supposed to be serving Sal. Or so I thought. Some help you’ve been to him so far. You could at least have called for help.”

  “I cannot. I am—”

  “Silence!” hissed the golem. “No unnecessary talking of any kind. You will do as I say, or I’ll leave you here alone!”

  Skender shuddered, imagining how it would feel to be left in the dark for hours on end—or forever. It didn’t bear dwelling upon. Instead, he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, and avoiding looking at the ghastly stares of the bas-relief faces surrounding him. The slope was steep and occasionally rough underfoot. He didn’t want to slip and wrench his ankle. He kept his eyes on the shadow of Tom directly ahead of him, watching his rate of descent and noting when he stumbled. By narrowing his universe to just the metre or two around him, he was able to avoid thinking about what they were doing and why they were doing it—and murder—as they descended through the bowels of the city.

  Time passed with nightmarish slowness. Their footsteps and the regular tap-tap of Shilly’s crutch were loud, but not as deafening as the sound of Skender’s breathing to his own ears. No one dared speak, except to mutter a curse when they stumbled. He began to feel as though he had been trapped in the tunnel forever, and would never leave.

  He had no idea how long they had been descending the hideous spiral when, with a sharp cry, Shilly slipped. There followed a confusion of sounds from Sal and the golem, and everything came to an abrupt halt. Skender bumped into Tom’s back, and Aron very nearly walked right over both of them, struggling to deal with Mawson’s momentum as well as his own.

  “Are you okay?” Sal’s words sounded shockingly out of place in the darkness.

  “I—uh, I think so.” There came the sound of Shilly’s crutch scraping the tunnel floor. She was being helped to her feet, Skender thought. Strangely muffled echoes swept around them, making it hard to tell what was happening.

  “Can you walk?”

  “I’ll try.” Shilly’s voice was strained. “I’m not sure how much longer I can go on like this, though.”

  Skender concurred wholeheartedly. The atmosphere in the tunnel, now that they were no longer moving, was suffocatingly dense. He felt as though it was pouring down his nose and throat and filling up his lungs with choking blackness. The walls and ceiling were drawing in around them; he was sure of it. They were going to be crushed, buried alive, lost forever.

  They weren’t moving. The golem hadn’t warned Sal and Shilly to be quiet, and it wasn’t urging them forward. Had it left them to their fate? A whimper came out of the greenish darkness. Skender couldn’t tell where it came from. It sounded like Tom, but it could have been anyone—even him. He was melting into the walls, losing all sense of himself. The faces pressed in, leering and mouthing unheard obscenities. They wanted to eat him—to make him one of them. He felt a scream bubbling up inside him, and he was afraid to let it out in case the faces caught him in the act and preserved his terror forever in the walls of the tunnel—another victim of some terrible, ancient magic.

  A flash of yellow light split the darkness. Skender shrank down as though someone had struck him. The walls and ceiling reared up over him. Faces pulled back in alarm as the light bloomed, dispelling the shadows with a powerful white glare. He straightened, and sensed the others doing the same. Tom looked around in dazed shock, his pupils pinpoints and his dark features washed out by the brightness. Aron, light-skinned like Skender, seemed to shine with a painful intensity as he leaned on the nearest wall for support, straining under Mawson’s weight. Even the man’kin, grey and age-scarred, looked shocked.

  Only one of them stood upright, holding the source of the light aloft in both hands. Skender barely recognised Sal: his features were tight, as though with pain; every muscle strained. Skender watched, amazed, as the light grew brighter then receded with a sudden flicker.

  “I can’t hold it for long,” Sal said through gritted teeth. “Shilly—you have to help me.”

  Shilly put her hand on Sal’s shoulder. The light stabilised, bright enough to see by but not too bright. Sal’s fingers made a semi-transparent cradle around the light, painting the stone faces around them an almost natural shade of pink.

  The light-sink, Skender realised. Lodo had had the rare talent of making glass globes that absorbed light during the day then released it at night. The globe he had given Sal had been much smaller than usual, and a deep, dense grey, indicating that it had absorbed a very large amount of light. The one time they had tried to waken it in the Keep, its intensity had seemed almost dangerous, as though it might explode.

  “The golem,” said Tom. “Look!”

  All heads turned to where he pointed. Lodo’s body lay on its side a half-turn down the spiral. It lay unmoving as they shuffled toward it, keeping the light high above them.

&nbs
p; “I knocked him—it—over when I fell,” said Shilly.

  “Is he dead?” asked Skender, not sure what to hope for.

  Tom tentatively pulled back the hood. The old man’s eyes were open but empty of life. There was nothing in there at all, good or evil.

  “I—I can’t tell.” The boy reached under the robe to touch the man’s tattooed neck. “There’s a pulse, but—”

  Lodo blinked, and something dark and cold settled back into place behind the old man’s features.

  “What are you doing?” asked the golem, pushing Tom away. “Get that light out of my eyes!”

  “What happened back there?” asked Shilly.

  The golem scowled and struggled upright. “This vessel is old and weak. I yearn for something younger, stronger.”

  “It wasn’t just you,” said Sal. “We all felt it.”

  The golem looked at him darkly before replacing the hood. It seemed rattled beneath the thin facade of annoyance. “Our presence has been noted, now. The unseen places are dangerous, and we mustn’t linger. The light is a good idea. Keep it burning steadily, but no brighter. No funny business. We’re almost at the bottom.”

  The golem headed off down the tunnel at an increased pace. They followed as though trapped by its wake.

  Skender bit his lip. He wanted the golem to answer Tom’s question. What had happened to change the atmosphere in the tunnel from oppressive to actively dangerous? Was it Shilly’s fall that had triggered the change, the brief pause in their descent, or had they done something else wrong? What might they do next, and what could be the response?

  “There is another,” said Mawson.

  Skender glanced behind him. The man’kin was reading Skender’s thoughts again, not to mention risking the ire of the golem by giving him what he assumed was supposed to be an explanation.