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

by Sean Williams

  Shilly was momentarily confused over the names. The reason for them came back to her only slowly through the fog in her head. In order to preserve their anonymity, she and Sal were travelling under assumed identities. The real Elina was a young girl in Fundelry with a sputtering of talent that would burn itself out before she turned five, just as Shilly’s had. The real Tom had applied for Selection in order to follow his brother, but had helped her and Sal escape when his devotion had been betrayed. Shilly had no idea what had happened to them in the wake of the visit of the Alcaide and Syndic to their tiny village. Their names felt odd through her disorientation, and the memories came with a deep sense of sadness and loss.

  Again Sal said something she couldn’t hear properly. When the man spoke next his voice was gentler.

  “I don’t know, Tom. We’ve done everything we can. With proper care, the bones should knit well. Her thigh’s as straight as anyone could make it, I guarantee you that. Given time and rest, I think she will walk again in three months.”

  “If not?”

  The older voice hesitated. “You must understand that when I say that she will only walk given time and rest, I do not mean that she will be the same as she was. She has been seriously injured. There will be consequences. She will have a limp for the rest of her life, for starters. The risk of another break will be high. Walking might be the most she will ever do. If she doesn’t get the time and rest, well...” Shilly heard a silence that might have been filled with a shrug. “It’s a hard road to the Lookout. If you don’t undo all the work I have done and she doesn’t lose the leg entirely, my guess is that she will be lamed. Crippled. Do you want to risk that?”

  “No.” There was a slight edge of desperation to Sal’s voice that sent more of a chill through her than even the word crippled had. “And that’s what I thought you were going to say.”

  The older man sighed heavily. “It’s not that I don’t sympathise, Tom —”

  “No, Engenius, I know you do. But there’s nothing else you can do. I’m more grateful for what you have done than I can say. It’s not your fault I don’t like where that leaves me.”

  There was silence for a moment, then the rattling of beads in a doorway. Shilly sensed someone in the room with her, and she opened her eyes.

  The first thing she saw was a fan circling overhead, stirring the air in the shadowed room. The walls were wood-panelled and carved in the likeness of animals she had never seen before. There were birds, beasts, reptiles, insects — a dizzying panorama that distracted her from the room’s contents. Perhaps that was the idea. When she did notice, she saw gleaming knives, extra-long tweezers, silver pans and clamps next to a black leather bag that was old, but had been lovingly cared for. She was in some sort of surgery.

  Sal stepped slowly into view, bending at the waist to look at her face. For all the attention she had received, he hadn’t wasted any on himself. He was filthy, covered in red dust across every visible inch of skin. His clothes were torn and stained brown with dried blood. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days.

  “You’re awake,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he was relieved or annoyed.

  The best she could manage in reply was a croak. Her mouth was parched. Sal put a tube into her mouth. The other end dipped into a glass of water and she sipped eagerly.

  He looked worried. “How much did you hear?”

  “You...” She stopped, then tried again. “You were going to leave me here, weren’t you?”

  His exhaustion didn’t cover the surprise on his face. “What? No, Shilly, of course not.”

  But he was lying. She could tell that. He had come into the room to say goodbye while she slept.

  “Would you have come back?”

  He warred silently with himself for a moment, then said: “Yes.”

  Even though she had guessed, the sense of betrayal surprised her. What had happened to together?

  “Don’t go without me,” she said. “Don’t leave me here alone.”

  “I don’t want to, but —”

  “Just don’t. We had a deal, didn’t we?”

  “Your leg —”

  “I’m going to have a limp even if I stay here. Isn’t that what he said? The chances are I won’t be any worse off in the buggy. We can use the Ch—”

  He put a hand across her mouth before she could finish the word and looked, alarmed, back through the beaded doorway. “Not here,” he hissed. “I haven’t told anyone about that.”

  She nodded, flushing at her lack of thought, and he took his hand away.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve thought of that, but I didn’t want to leave you with no other option.”

  “What’s the difference between that and abandoning me here?”

  “I would have come back, really.”

  “If they didn’t catch you first. Or me. What if you walked back into a trap? Did you think of that?”

  He shook his head. If she had thought he looked older during the crossing of the ravine, he looked young and vulnerable again now.

  “I don’t think I can stay awake much longer,” she said. And it was the truth. Whatever was keeping her leg numb was also having an effect on her mind. Her vision kept blurring no matter how hard she tried to keep it clear.

  “Engenius?” Sal called. The beads rattled again, and a large, white-skinned man walked into the room. His hair and beard were grey and close-cropped. His eyes were concerned.

  “You’re sleepy?” he said. “Don’t fight it, princess. It will make you strong.”

  Princess? No one had ever called her anything like that before. She wanted to ask him who he was, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Sal leaned close. “I won’t go,” he said. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I promise.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was lying or not this time, but had no choice but to let him go. His face receded to the end of a long, dark tunnel, then he vanished from sight.

  Engenius Lutz was the only surgeon in Yor, and therefore the only surgeon for many hundreds of kilometres. He dressed in grey smocks that hung to his knees, regardless of the temperature, and his breath smelled of the yukuri fruit Sal had used to soothe her headache. So she learned the next day, when she woke to see her leg unbound for the first time. The sight of it appalled her — a mass of bruised flesh, all yellow and purple, looking less like a part of her than a side of meat left out in the sun too long. To take her mind off the pain, Lutz told her about how she had come to him. She had assumed that Sal knew of the surgeon from his previous travels, but Lutz explained how Sal had roared into town during the town’s afternoon siesta the previous day, honking his horn and bellowing for a doctor at the top of his lungs.

  “He shook things up, let me tell you. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. People will talk about it for years.”

  Which was exactly what Sal was afraid of, she knew. The fewer people who knew about them, the better. At least the buggy wasn’t as much of an oddity as it had been in Fundelry. She heard the burbling of several similar vehicles in the street outside.

  “He told me what you did on the bridge,” the surgeon said, looking down at her from a great height. His face was broad and well rounded, as though moulded out of clay. “That was quick thinking, princess. You were very brave.”

  Was I? she thought. She’d never considered herself brave before. She’d just done what she had to do. If that was all it took, then it was easier than she’d thought.

  She blacked out again when he rebound her leg, but woke feeling better some hours later. There was a grey-haired old woman in the room, cleaning. She paid no attention to Shilly at all as she dusted in the corners and took away the old bandages. The tune she hummed was soothing and lulled Shilly back to sleep, even though she fought it. She was spending too much time asleep. They were losing ground.

  The next time she woke, it was night
, and Sal explained that the old woman was Lutz’s mother. His clothes had been washed since Shilly had last seen him. He was almost looking clean, if a little rough around the edges.

  “We need to leave here,” she said.

  “I know. Lutz won’t let us go until tomorrow, and even then he’s reluctant. I don’t want to push him. He knows more about this than I do, after all.”

  “It’s my leg,” she said, “and I decide what to do with it.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “but you’re not really in a fit state to make decisions, are you? Look at you. You can hardly keep your eyes open.”

  She was about to argue, but she truly didn’t have the energy. He was right: the last thing she wanted to do was go anywhere.

  “Tomorrow, then. You promise?”

  “I promise. We’ll have you out of here before you can say ‘apothecary’.”

  “Say what?”

  He smiled and answered her, but she only saw his lips move. Sense by sense, the world drifted away, and she slept deeply, dreaming of great purple clouds that hung swollen and heavy above a land already drenched with pain.

  Lutz helped Sal prepare a seat for Shilly in the back of the buggy, his features painted pink by the dawn sunlight. The big man folded the sleeping bag so it would support her back. There wasn’t enough room to lie full-length comfortably, so she would have to sit partially upright all the time, no matter how ill she felt. Her leg would be supported on water and fuel containers, suspended in front of her like a jetty jutting out from shore.

  “I strongly advise against this,” said Engenius Lutz for the fifth time that morning, his wide face set in a lumpy frown.

  “I know.” Sal lashed down the tarpaulin. He had washed again while she slept, and looked rested. “But we have no choice.”

  “Perhaps if I came with you —”

  “I’m sorry, Engenius. We’ve got to make it on our own. We have a long way left to go.”

  This was Shilly’s first proper glimpse of Yor. The town consisted of a collection of sun-bleached houses on either side of a gravel road leading straight as an arrow into the town and beyond it. It was much smaller than she had imagined, little more than a place to water camels or refuel after a long journey. What exactly the countryside around it consisted of, she couldn’t see, but she could smell it. The air was rich with an odour she associated with some of Lodo’s more arcane experiments: harsh and tangy, vaguely distasteful. A constant haze of dust, kicked up by wheels and hoofs, hung thick in the lazy air, making her eyes water.

  The thought of Lodo made her sad again, but she put aside the emotion. There were more immediate things to worry about.

  The surgeon shook his head heavily. “I am a simple man, Tom. I have no concern for anything but the wellbeing of my patients. That leg, in this instance. I don’t care who you’re running from or what you might have done to deserve it, but I will say this: in order to make your journey easier, I’ll do my best to ensure that you aren’t followed.”

  Sal glanced up from his knots. “Thank you,” he said. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I do. Gentle travel may make all the difference.” He looked up the road at a surly cluster of people watching from the shade of the general store’s verandah. “I can’t say, though, that everyone will share my opinion.”

  Sal nodded soberly, and together they helped Shilly into her improvised seat. She bit her lip as her leg was moved. They tried to be gentle but the pain was sudden and sharp, like red-hot knives twisting in her bones.

  When she was settled, Lutz pressed a small jar of tablets into her hand. “For the pain, princess.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she snapped in reply. Hurt throbbed through her, making everything difficult.

  Lutz backed away and watched from the shade as Sal started the buggy’s engine.

  “Drive well!” the surgeon called over the sound of the engine. His expression was concerned — and something else too. Jealous, perhaps. Shilly couldn’t define it.

  “I will.” Sal raised a hand in farewell. Dented and dirty, the battered vehicle drove off in a cloud of white dust.

  Shilly waved at the doctor and his grey-haired, hunched mother. She was glad they were on their way again, but she was sad to be leaving. Lutz had been kind and persistent in his treatment; she would miss that security on the road ahead. There was a certain amount of confusion about it, too. She had missed a lot of the previous day and two nights, including the mad dash from the ravine down to Yor, and the resetting of her leg. It seemed strange to her that they were going already, when from her point of view they had only just arrived. That was just an illusion, she knew, and staying longer simply wasn’t an option. The town itself would have to be a missing piece of their journey for her.

  Not a large piece, she gathered. >From her vantage point, she could see that the town was being slowly eaten away by the elements. There was no grass, no trees, no green at all. Everything was dead. How, she wondered, could people live there?

  “We’re in the Broken Lands now,” Sal said as he drove up the main road. “Yor is the gateway. Do you remember my dad saying that he’d buried my body here, when the Alcaide questioned him in Fundelry?”

  “Yes.” She thought she did, although she was still trying not to think about the past.

  “We always had to come here, to refuel and pick up water, but I wasn’t intending to make such a dramatic entrance.”

  They passed a dozen houses, a camel pen containing six of the tall, curious beasts, and went through a rusty gate. Not much of a gateway, she thought. Beyond that was only road — if it could be called that. The level, white surface that had led through the small town soon became a heavily rutted track winding through deep red soil. It led perfectly north as far as she could see over a landscape as flat as anything she had ever experienced. On the horizon ahead she could see what looked like hills, but the shimmer in the air made them hard to discern. They could have been anything: buildings, trees, mirages. On her right, a ghostly willy-willy whirled the red dust into the sky like a snake.

  Sal had the map unfolded next to him, in the passenger seat. Shilly couldn’t quite see it.

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “We’re heading for a place called the Lookout,” he explained. “It’s on the far side of the Broken Lands but on this side of the Divide. That’s where we cross — to Nesh on the other side. From that point on, we’ll be in the Interior. Where exactly we’ll go then, I’m not sure. We’ll have fewer options than we do in the Strand. The Stone Mages prefer cities to villages, so there will be fewer places to look. That could make it easier or harder.”

  She couldn’t imagine what it would be like, so she tried to concentrate on the immediate future. “What are the Broken Lands?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Sal replied without turning his head. His attention was on the road, avoiding sudden dips or bumps. Even so, the buggy lurched all too frequently, jolting her leg. “I always thought of it as something like a Ruin, but I’m not picking up any background potential. It’s just — there.”

  “What is?”

  “You’ll see. It’s not all like this.”

  “I hope not.” Yor lay behind them, swallowed by the cloud of dust they left in their wake. Her eyes could discern no detail on the terrible, flat plain — except for the enigmatic shapes far ahead. Above the horizon the sun was already burning fiercely, blinding her and boiling her at the same time. “Do we have to go through them?”

  He nodded. “This is the safest and most direct route to the Lookout. The Broken Lands stretch almost two thousand kilometres from side to side, so to go around would take forever. Luckily they’re narrower across than they are wide. At this point, they’re only two hundred kilometres across.”

  She was relieved to hear that. “It shouldn’t take us long, then.”

  “It’s not
all as easy as this.”

  “You call this easy?”

  “Compared to what’s ahead, yes. I’ve never driven it myself. I only watched while Dad did it.” Sal was silent for a moment, then said: “I’m thinking at least two days.”

  She winced as the buggy tipped suddenly to one side then righted itself. The track’s narrowness and roughness implied that it wasn’t designed for motorised traffic. She saw occasional black patches on the ground as they passed by, where caravans had camped on the outskirts of Yor. But for her leg, a camel would have been much more comfortable, she thought.

  The buggy lurched again and, despite her determination not to, she reached for the vial of pills Engenius Lutz had given her. Taking one of the rough, white tablets, she washed it down with a swig of water.

  “It’s weird,” Sal said, “coming back here without my father.”

  Shilly couldn’t tell if Sal was addressing her or just himself, but she was happy to let him talk.

  “The last time we came this way, we were caught in a storm. It was amazing. The sky was black with clouds and the rain was hot and thick, like taking a shower. We couldn’t drive in it; had to stop and wait it out and move on when it was over. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The ground isn’t good at holding water here, so the road was swept away in places, and then we came across a caravan that had been caught in a flash flood. They lost five people and two camels. We carried some of their goods in exchange for a room at Yor. Later, we heard that another caravan had been struck by lightning. The leader, a woman named Diamond Fargher, was someone we knew from the borderlands. She was hit when she was in the open and it instantly stopped her heart. Her team carried her body until the water subsided and buried her out here, somewhere. It’d be a lonely place to rest, that’s for sure ...”

  Shilly’s eyes drifted upward, to the sky. It was blue and flawless, apart from the sun. She couldn’t imagine it as Sal had described it: cloudy from horizon to horizon, teeming with rain. But she didn’t disbelieve him. He wasn’t the sort to exaggerate simply to impress her.