The Sky Warden & the Sun (Books of the Change)

by Sean Williams

  The Sky Warden & the Sun

  The Change Series: Book Two

  Sean Williams

  For Jessica

  Contents

  Acknowledgments:

  Part One: Running

  Chapter 1. Between Sky and Stone

  Chapter 2. The Broken

  Chapter 3. Where Cities Die

  Chapter 4. Division

  Part Two: Learning

  Chapter 5. Death, the Great Change-Maker

  Chapter 6. The Crossroads

  Chapter 7. Within and Below

  Chapter 8. Found Wanting

  Chapter 9. A Parting of Ways

  Chapter 10. The Light-Keeper

  Chapter 11. Dead Wood

  Part Three: Judging

  Chapter 12. Lust for Power

  Chapter 13. Iron and Glass

  Chapter 14. The Desert Craft

  Chapter 15. A Kind of Charm

  Chapter 16. Dangerous Seduction

  Chapter 17. Nine Stars, One Mind

  Epilogue. Sins and Wisdom

  Acknowledgments:

  Thanks to: Jo McNamara & Ben Mountford for Spider Lake; Ryan Meyer for writing down names on the way back from Cowell; the staff at the Prairie Hotel, Parachilna, for local knowledge and great food; Rob & Claire Brooks for the loan of their car (and their lovely daughter); Nick Linke and Simon Brown for providing valuable feedback on an early draft; Ian Hall for tech support; Shaun Tan for another wonderful cover; Rodney Stuard for excellence in nitpicking; Stephanie Smith for editorial sainthood; Richard Curtis for patience and good humour; and Jonathan Strahan, Heather Williams, Shane Dix, and Bill Gee for varying but all very deserving reasons.

  The “strandbeasts” referred to in Chapter Fifteen are very real. These amazing creations are the work of Dutch artist Theo Jansen. Images of them (under their real name: “strandbeests”) can be found at various locations on the World Wide Web.

  The support of the Australia Council, HarperCollins Australia, the SA Writer’s Centre and the Mount Lawley Mafia was essential during the writing of this book. Inspiration came courtesy of South Australia’s superb Flinders Ranges and Yorke Peninsula, plus a number of the City of Adelaide’s fine statues.

  But once again it is a certainty that without the many sacrifices made by Kirsty Brooks this book (and its author) would have been a much shabbier beast. For all those tyres we blew, for hiking in the rain, and for very much more, I will always be in her debt.

  Part One: Running

  Chapter 1

  Between Sky and Stone

  They were being hunted.

  At first, Sal wasn’t certain of it. When he and Shilly fled Fundelry ahead of the storm Lodo had summoned, he thought they might outrun pursuit. They drove furiously, pushing the buggy and themselves as hard as they could in the least obvious direction, heading east across the rolling, water-logged dunes, avoiding roads and all signs of life until dawn lightened the sky ahead of them.

  Crudely covered by a waterproofed tarpaulin, nestled between the banks of a narrow, stony-bedded creek, Sal and Shilly, with the machine that was their greatest hope of obtaining freedom, waited out the day in a state of feverish dread. Half-expecting capture at any moment, they slept fitfully. Silent under the shade, exhausted and grieving, neither dared voice the fears that urged them to keep running.

  And as the sun rode higher in the sky, burning the storm away, Sal found reason to be afraid.

  Bridging all the distance they had covered in an instant, the Syndic’s mental eye swept over them. Sal closed his mind tightly and concentrated on the exercises Lodo had given him, picturing himself as a slippery ball bearing that the Syndic’s fingers could not grasp. Once he had thought the owner of that far-seeing, unearthly gaze to be almost god-like, but he knew better now: she was just a woman, a person with limitations like anyone else.

  The last time Sal had seen her, his paternal great-aunt, she had been sprawled at the base of a dune, knocked flat by a raw outpouring of the Change that had come from somewhere within him when she tried to take him captive. The memory of that outpouring left him cold; he never dreamed he had anything like that at his beck and call.

  He had wondered then if she was dead, if he had killed her, but Nu Zanshin of Farrow clearly didn’t give up easily, or quickly.

  Her fingers did slip. Clumsy in their eagerness, they went reaching away past the two fugitives, heading northeast. He didn’t allow himself to relax. They might have evaded her this time, but he would have to be careful in future or their freedom would be short-lived.

  When night fell, they followed the creek inland as far as they could go. The buggy was no stranger to rugged terrain, but Sal was unused to driving and didn’t want to risk a broken axle on the jagged rocks and crumbling banks. He figured that slow progress was better than none at all. Taking that into account, and the need to avoid human contact wherever possible, he didn’t let himself hope to travel more than a hundred kilometres that second night. The buggy had fuel to last almost a week at that rate of travel, and the more ground he could put between them and Fundelry, the better.

  They hit relatively open country shortly after midnight, under cold skies with stars glinting like hail waiting to fall. Sal focused his attention on the buggy and the controls he had watched his father use so many times before. He tried not to think about his father’s death or the revelation that had preceded it: that the man he thought of as his father might not have been his father at all. Instead, he concentrated on the roughness of the ground ahead, glowing faintly in the light from the shuttered headlamps, on the gears and on the whine of the motor. He felt the mental wheels of the exercise Lodo called the Cellaton Mandala turning behind the effort of driving, and had faith that it would deflect any further attempts to find him by the Syndic. He ignored the rumble in his stomach telling him that they hadn’t eaten the previous day; not since the Alders’ Feast in Fundelry, the night before last, when his father had still been alive and it had seemed there was still a chance that Lodo could save them from the Sky Wardens.

  Driving gave him an excuse for not talking, although the truth was that he couldn’t find the words to express what he wanted to say. He wanted to tell Shilly that he was sorry. He wanted to say, You don’t have to come with me; this isn’t your problem; you can leave whenever you want, but he was afraid. What would he do if she did leave? He didn’t want to be alone. And he didn’t know how to say that, either. So he said nothing.

  They drove straight through the second day and slept that night in a Ruin he knew of near an abandoned town called Cleve’s Well. There they were safe from the Syndic, since the signature of his mind would disappear in the ancient place’s unique aura. The ambient levels of the Change were strong there, not rooted so much in living things or particular rock formations, but in events that had taken place long ago and left their mark forever. The high level of background potential had an additional effect on them beyond providing security. He dreamed that night that he was being followed, among other things, and woke to find Shilly crying silently in her sleep.

  The next morning, after a breakfast consisting solely of the fruit and bark from a desert pear bush, he tried to talk to her.

  He told her the story of his parents: how his mother, Seirian Mierlo, had married an ambitious older man named Highson Sparre in order to increase the prestige of her family. Lodo, who had explained this to Sal, had known little more about the history of Seirian’s family beyond the fact that they had emigrated from the Interior to the Strand in order to es
cape a scandal. That was enough, however, to place the rest in context. Sal’s mother had fallen in love with Dafis Hrvati, a journeyman bound in service to an acquaintance of her husband, and neither her divorce nor their union had been condoned by any of the families involved.

  So the lovers had run away together, into the borderlands. They had remained fugitives for a year, until the Sky Wardens, led by Highson and his aunt, Nu Zanshin — who was not yet Syndic, but would be before long — located Seirian by virtue of her use of the Change. They spirited her back to the Haunted City, whereupon they had learnt of Sayed, her son, who had been given the use-name of Sal. Why his existence made so much difference, Sal didn’t know, but it seemed to. For some reason the Sky Wardens were more interested in him than either of his parents.

  Although the Sky Wardens recommenced their search immediately, Sal had disappeared along with his father. The two of them had remained hidden ever since, protected by the father’s denial of everything he had ever known in the past: music, the Change, and his lover. His priority was to protect Sal, as his mother would surely have wanted. In the end, only Sal’s growing potential at the Change — and his father’s attempt to hide it by seeking help from Lodo, a renegade Stone Mage — had given them away. It was then that they had learned, from the Alcaide himself, of Sal’s mother’s death: she had wasted away when attempts to find Sal and his father had failed. Despairing of ever seeing them again, she had died of a broken heart.

  Shilly listened patiently — or seemed to, at least — as he spoke. Everything after his arrival in Fundelry she knew about, since she had been involved in it. Although she, like Sal’s father, had no natural talent, Lodo had been her teacher too, and his instruction had enabled her to bend another’s talent to her own will. In many respects, her understanding of the Change was much deeper than Sal’s, who had, until two weeks earlier, never suspected what potential he had. When the Sky Wardens had come to take him so they could train him in their way, he had decided to keep running, and Shilly had been swept up in the storm.

  He didn’t need to tell her about that, just as he didn’t want to tell her how to think or to feel about it, since he himself was still trying to work that out. He just wanted her to know the full story.

  If she understood it, or him, any better when he had finished, she gave no sign. She sat silently beside him in the buggy, as dark-skinned as he was fair, skinny under the simple cotton dress she wore everywhere. Her sun-bleached hair strayed across her face and her green eyes revealed nothing, betraying not the slightest hint of what she was feeling behind the mask. One finger doodled patterns in the dust that caked the side of the buggy.

  Eventually she said, “Your mother had family in the Interior, right?”

  “Yes.” He knew very little about them except that they had come from somewhere called Mount Birrinah and been expelled from the Strand following his parents’ elopement. “The Mierlos.”

  “You’ll be looking for them, I suppose.”

  Sal opened his mouth to tell her that he hadn’t decided where he wanted to go. But he didn’t say it. After a lifetime of following his father around, he wasn’t used to making decisions.

  “I was thinking about Skender Van Haasteren,” she said.

  “Lodo’s teacher? What about him?”

  “He’d help us, I’m sure.” She turned to look at him. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes were brimming over with tears. “That’s where I want to go. You can drop me off on the way to visit your family. You don’t have to come with me all the way.”

  Sal nodded. Lodo’s teacher was from the Desert Port region; the old man had told him that much. Sal didn’t know exactly where that was, but he knew one thing: both Mount Birrinah and Skender Van Haasteren were in the Interior. Maybe, he thought, the details weren’t important. For the moment, his destination and Shilly’s could lie in the same direction, if he so chose. Away from Fundelry. Away from the Syndic and her Sky Warden bloodhounds.

  “Do you think Lodo is dead?” he asked her.

  Her eyes were red. “They killed your father, didn’t they?”

  He nodded. It seemed too much to hope that Lodo had somehow beaten the Sky Wardens and escaped. They had heard nothing from him since they had fled the tremor that had saved them. The obvious assumption was that Lodo had been overwhelmed by the Alcaide in the same way that his father had been.

  “It’ll be tough,” he said. “It’s a long way.”

  “But we can make it, can’t we?”

  He shrugged. “We might just get there in the end, if we work together.”

  Only then did he remember that she had never been more than a few hundred metres away from the sea, not once in her entire life. Confronted by the distance they had to travel, he quailed inside. He had been to the Divide several times, but never beyond it, and that had been with his father, whose absence ached inside his chest as if a hole had been opened there. If he was uncertain, he thought, then she must be terrified.

  But if she could do it, so could he.

  “North it is,” she said, her gaze returning to the horizon ahead. “Together.”

  And that was that. He turned the steering wheel to point the buggy inland, and he drove.

  And they drove: out of the sand dunes and into firmer country, with round, weathered hills the colour of brown, lifeless dirt. They stuck to dry riverbeds and isolated road fragments as often as they could. Maps in the buggy’s tool box gave them a rough idea of where to head, although many of the landmarks had changed over the years and they were passing through places Sal had not visited before. They travelled under the cover of night when there were signs of habitation, but the daylight was better for navigation. With the sun burning down on them out of a sky now utterly free of clouds, they took great care to maintain a shade, unfurling the buggy’s tarpaulin to act as a roof which flapped noisily as they drove. But still they burned. Even Shilly’s dark skin was tender for the first few days, and peeled after a week.

  They passed ancient and recent life, among them spindly metal towers, many metres high, that had rusted and then slumped when their bases could no longer support their weight. A craterous mine ate into a hillside like a terrible, wasting disease, grey around the edges and half-filled with black water. By its edge rested an enormous crane, gutted for its parts but still glittering with the Change. Crumbling cemeteries made poignant companions to equally derelict buildings, some little more than chimneys and hearths standing alone in fields untended for decades. Some structures were welcome shelter from the heat, the best of them hollow, gap-toothed silos that reverberated with the buggy’s engine when the two runaways arrived, and hummed with the wind when all was still again.

  Shilly lay awake in the silos, listening to the hum and feeling as though she was privy to one side of a conversation between gods, so slow and ponderous that she couldn’t decipher individual words.

  But it was the landscape that threw her off-balance the most. It smelled different, and it looked different. She was used to gently rolling sand dunes and the occasional cliff face, a world defined by its relationship with the sea.

  Here, the world extended in all directions the same, and it was alien in ways that weren’t immediately obvious. The ground, for a start, grew redder the further north they travelled. The trees were taller and less bushy than the ones she was used to. Once they came across a forest of slender trees that had been burned in a recent bushfire; their hearts still lived, and new leaves grew green in vivid contrast to the blackened bark. As with the trees, the distant hills were larger, but had fewer angles than those closer to the coast; they were like the rolling shoulders and hips of reclining giants, their eyes closed just over the horizon. Everything around her was worn and dusty and hot — and seemed utterly empty.

  Up close there was detail aplenty. Three-cornered jacks waited for her if she was careless enough to wander off in bare feet. Insects jumped around
them in great hordes — tiny flying ones that stung, and heavy hoppers that could hurt from momentum alone. Fat, black flies dangled in the air as though on the end of invisible strings, and many-legged creatures left furrowed tracks in the dirt. Birds with wings like outstretched hands drifted in updrafts, sharp eyes seeking insects and small animals below. Shilly hadn’t seen any of the latter yet, although she heard them rustling at night.

  The bugs and sun didn’t seem to bother Sal as much as they did her, thanks to the protective earring he wore through a hole in his ear. There was no point to wishing she had a ward like that. She gathered that they were very rare; it was one of the things that had tipped Lodo to Sal’s importance when he had arrived in Fundelry. His mother had given it to him when he had been born to protect him from minor injuries.

  But they weren’t so minor, she thought, when there were lots of them at once. All she could was grit her teeth and endure.

  By Ottewill Peak, Stonehouse and the Devil’s Brook they went, across fields once sown but now fallow and stony. Some were infested with purple-flowering weeds that Sal called “the curse” but which Shilly found startlingly beautiful. Sal let her handle the navigation, while he drove. The maps didn’t tell her anything about where she was going: they didn’t describe how the air smelt, or if there would be people nearby, or what there might be to eat. It was simply her job to read the names and watch the places go by, having learned little more about them in the process. They didn’t stop anywhere interesting — if there was anything of interest in this arid, stony land. All they did was travel and sleep. She forced herself not to fight the buggy as it bounced across the hard, new world she had been propelled into, even when it felt like her muscles had been pounded to jelly and her bones were on the verge of shattering.

  On the fifth day, with the sun high in the sky, she begged for a rest stop. A headache painted bright, flashing dots behind her eyelids and she was afraid she might scream the next time she had to get out and push the buggy from a sandy patch. While she leaned back into the seat with her hat over her eyes, trying to remember why she was putting herself through this, Sal ducked away to investigate a nearby patch of vegetation.