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

by Sean Williams

Lutz didn’t look at her. “The last time someone tried to survey this place was fifty years ago,” he said. “My father was part of the expedition, and he never came back. None of them came back. But I know he’s still in here, somewhere. This place doesn’t let go easily.”

  “You’ve tried to find him before?”

  “Yes, but I don’t have a vehicle and few people will come here. Those who know of it are afraid. Those who don’t —”

  “Like us?” she broke in, angrily. “I suppose we have to be tricked.”

  “No, no.” He opened his hands, pleading with her to understand. “It’s not like that. I swear it isn’t. I lied about nothing. This really is the only way I know to get across the Broken Lands without Behenna following you. The road skirts the salt lake, so you would have passed by the city anyway. You wanted to come here as soon as you saw it. I would have been happy to wait until dawn, to look then, but it was you who insisted on coming here at night, when the things walk ...”

  He faltered. Sal had managed to hook one end of the stick under the object in the fire and drew it slowly into the light. It was brass, not gold, and it had been blackened by the fire. But it still had its shape, that of a squat X with a hole through its centre, attached to a long, heavy-linked chain. The loops of the chain were tied around the cross in numerous thick knots; one broken end hung free.

  “Oh, father,” said Lutz, weeping openly at the sight of it. “This belonged to him. I haven’t seen it for fifty years. Father!” Then he was on his feet again, railing against the figures he imagined lurking in the shadows, but never straying too far from the light. “Why did you come to them? Why didn’t you give it to me? Why?”

  Sal shook his head, irritated, as once again the surgeon’s energy was quickly spent, leaving him hunched and deflated with self-pity. The golem hadn’t been Lutz’s father. Only someone with the Change would be at risk from something like that.

  “What is it?” asked Shilly, nodding at where the object lay cooling on the white ground.

  “It’s nothing,” said Lutz. “A trinket. But it was his. It’s obviously a sign.” His eyes stared into the fire as Sal put the logs back together. “We waited at Yor for the expedition to return, and it never did. They thought I was mad for looking for him here. My mother ... even she gave up hope. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a chance he could still be here. It’s a terrible place, but it has power, too. The Wardens on the expedition knew of it. They were excited to be going along, nervous. They didn’t know what they might find, and we never found out. I’ve seen nothing here because I don’t have the talent, but I’ve never stopped hoping. All my life I’ve been waiting for a sign — and now I have it.”

  He reached forward, heedless of the heat, grabbed the blackened cross and held it triumphantly before him. “He was here, and he might still be here, in one form or another. Even if it’s just his body, that would be some reward. I can come back. If I look hard enough, long enough, I know I’ll find something ...”

  Sal nodded, understanding now why the surgeon lived so far from civilisation, but finding it difficult to believe that he would ever locate his father after so long a time. The creatures that inhabited the ruins might keep trinkets for amusement, but bodies that couldn’t be inhabited would be useless. Lutz’s father would have rotted away long ago.

  He wondered if Lutz had become hypnotised by the place itself — by the history, the mystery.

  “What difference would it make if you did find anything?” Shilly asked bluntly. “He’d still be dead.”

  Lutz winced, as though confronting that painful truth for the first time. He didn’t answer her question. “Fifty years it took me to find this much,” he said, his gaze slowly shifting to meet Sal’s, “and it was you they gave it to.”

  “We didn’t ask for it,” Shilly snapped. “Someone’s playing with us. If we hadn’t come here, you’d still have nothing.”

  Lutz didn’t say anything. Eventually he grunted, as though reluctantly taking the point. Sal was unnerved by the look in his eyes. Why he would resent them for leading him to the first positive sign in his long quest, Sal didn’t know, but it was enough to make him cautious.

  “You said you saw an animal out there,” he prompted, hoping to change the subject. “What sort of animal?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The big man stretched out on his side with his back facing the flame, effectively shutting them out. “They talked to you, remember.”

  Shilly shot Sal an annoyed look that said as clearly as if she had spoken: And we’re supposed to be the kids.

  Sal couldn’t dismiss him so easily.

  “I’ve made stew, if you want it,” he said, reaching for the plates he and his father had once shared. The metal serving spoon had seen better days, but still performed its job. Shilly accepted a bowl, even though she didn’t look hungry. They ate in silence, and Lutz didn’t move.

  Sal slept poorly among the towers, in the midst of so much tragedy, real or imagined. He and Shilly took turns keeping watch and stoking the fire, but the golem didn’t return, and there were no more disturbances. Lutz did eventually stir from his inward-gazing repose and helped himself to some food, but he slept soundly afterward, stretched out as he had been the previous night under his thin rug with his head resting on the battered black bag and both hands clutching the trinket that had once belonged to his father. If he woke, he made no sound.

  There were no tap-taps from Behenna that night. The darkness seemed to soak up any attempts at conversation. The more it intensified, the more silent it became, until Sal began to wonder if he had become deaf. Only the soft crackling of the fire reassured him that he hadn’t. He huddled in the small bubble of light it cast and waited for the sun — and sound — to return.

  Dawn came gradually among the giant buildings. The light dispelled some of the anxiety he had felt during the night, but there was no birdsong to greet the sun, only a cold wind sweeping between the towers. The city’s ghosts were rushing to their beds, he thought, shivering, and the shadows retreated with them.

  The ruined surroundings returned in cold, pale colours. Sal stood to stretch his legs. Although he felt confident that it would be safer to explore during the day, he didn’t walk far. Empty-framed windows didn’t tempt him: what lay beyond them was universally dark and spooky, like the eye-sockets of the golem. He wasn’t going to push fate. >From those dark spaces he sensed invisible intelligences watching him, waiting for him to come closer, out of the sunlight.

  The sky far above brightened quickly. By the time he returned, Shilly was up, brushing the creases out of her clothes with one hand, frown lines deep in her forehead.

  “I wondered where you’d got to,” she said, sounding more irritated than relieved. “I thought our friend had come back and dragged you off.”

  “No, but I found its tracks.” He indicated the direction the golem had gone the night before. “They lead that way.”

  “Where did he go? Into one of the towers?”

  “No. They just stop in the middle of nowhere, as though he jumped up in the air and never came down.”

  Shilly’s look of annoyance increased.

  “I’m going to wet myself if you’re not quick,” she said, shifting awkwardly on the spot. “Could you ...?”

  He hesitated, hoping Lutz might stir and offer his assistance, but the surgeon did not. “Of course.” He helped her upright, then took her weight as she hopped along the way he had gone, to the nearest corner. She balanced herself against the building while he waited out of sight.

  “How’s your leg?” he asked, whispering in case Lutz was only pretending to be asleep. “Did we do any good last night?”

  “It’s a bit better,” she said. “I can’t bend it, but the pain is easing. I can think about other things, now.”

  He basked only briefly in the warmth of her gratitude. “That’s good,” he sa
id, “because we have a long way to go yet.”

  “To find Skender Van Haasteren?”

  And to get away from Behenna, he added to himself. “If that’s still what you want to do.”

  “Finished,” she said, hopping awkwardly back into sight. Her expression was cautious, as though she was afraid he might try to talk her out of her destination. “It’s not much to go on, I know,” she conceded as he helped her back to the campsite. “But itbetter than nothing at all. He was a teacher of the Change, so he must’ve been someone important — a Stone Mage, at least. He gave Lodo the scourge because he had high hopes for him.”

  The Scourge of Aneshti was a whip-like charm used to test which particular skill a student possessed; Sal had experienced it once, and it hadn’t been pleasant. Every great teacher of the Change has had one or something very much like it, Lodo had said. The same man had given Lodo yadeh-tash, the amulet he had worn around his neck and used to predict the weather.

  “It’s not as if we have any choice, now,” said Sal. “We can’t go back.”

  “I know. But it’ll be okay. We’ll find him. Someone will know who and where he is.”

  “And what then?”

  “We talk to him. We tell him Lodo started our training and failed to finish it. That we came to him because we had no one else to turn to. He doesn’t have to train us himself. He must be a very old man now, not taking students. But he’ll know someone. He must be able to help.”

  “We’ll be lucky if he even talks to us.”

  “Do you think so?” Her expression was uncertain for a fleeting instant.

  “I don’t really know what to think. All I know is that Lodo ran out on him. He might not want anything to do with us, all these years later.”

  “I’m sure he will,” she said, “when he meets us.”

  “Right.” He smiled. “How could he possibly resist?”

  But she wasn’t joking. “He’ll want you just as much as everyone else does: the Alcaide, the Syndic, Shom Behenna ...”

  The conversation ended on that unsettling note. They had reached the campsite and, although Lutz was still asleep, Sal wasn’t prepared to risk the surgeon overhearing anything to do with their past. The less he knew, the better.

  As it turned out, Lutz only woke when everything was stowed back into the buggy and Sal had finished burying the embers.

  “What, no breakfast?” the surgeon asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

  “I want to get moving,” Sal replied. “If we push hard, we might make the Lookout today.”

  “We should be there this afternoon.” Lutz’s joints cracked as he got up and began rolling up his rug. “The ground eases once we’re out of the Broken Lands. We’ll make good time, the last hundred kilometres or so.”

  “Can we avoid the main road?”

  “I suggest coming in from the east. That means going out of our way for a stretch, but it’ll be safer. There’s a chance your Sky Warden friend might get there before us, and I’d hate to lead you straight into a trap.”

  Sal was all too aware of that possibility. He had been to the Lookout before, and remembered it as a large tower overlooking the bridge across the Divide. It had once been just a guard post with room enough for a garrison inside, but a fluctuating community had grown around it like coral, living off the proceeds of trade between the Interior and the Strand. It wasn’t a proper town, lacking permanent buildings and all but the meanest of streets, but it would give them numbers to hide among. He didn’t know exactly how many people passed through there, but it had seemed like a lot when he was younger. More than Yor, easily.

  He accepted the surgeon’s plan with a nod, knowing too little about the surrounding terrain to propose another one.

  The morning passed much as it had the previous day. The Change-rich ambience of the city was soon behind them. Once they crossed the northernmost banks of the blissfully flat surface of the lake and re-entered the Broken Lands proper, heading north, it was back to numerous terrain changes and constant vigilance. Lutz was incommunicative, except to give directions; he was obviously troubled by their encounter with the golem and refused to talk about it, but his resentment seemed to have turned into determination during the night. He urged them on with eyes firmly forward and white-knuckled hands gripping his father’s blackened cross.

  Shilly forewent her daily painkiller and remarked on how unusual the jumbled terrain looked to her. Sal wished only that it would end. He felt as though he had been driving forever. A poor night’s sleep didn’t help his mood.

  And as soon as they left the salt lake Behenna’s faint tap-tap returned, an endless reminder of why they were running.

  By mid-afternoon they had reached a stretch of red sand not dissimilar to that surrounding Yor. Sal’s hopes rose as the patches of jarringly out of place terrain thinned out, then fell behind them entirely. The way became easier, less circuitous.

  Navigating by the sun, they headed north-northeast in a straight line. Although glad of the speed, Sal was acutely aware of the cloud of dust they were throwing up behind them. It would be visible for kilometres.

  “How far to the main road?” he asked Lutz.

  “Forty to fifty kilometres that way,” the surgeon said, pointing west. “Have you thought about how you’re going to cross the Divide?”

  Sal hesitated for a second, then said: “Not really.” He’d been concentrating more on driving, not what he would do when they got there. “There are caravans crossing all the time. I thought I’d pay my way across.” Where he would get the money, though, was a problem he preferred not to examine until he had to.

  “I can help you with that, too, if you wish,” Lutz said. “There is a trader whose child I saved. He owes me a favour. If he is there, he will smuggle you across the Divide, I’m sure.”

  Sal took his eyes off the road to study the surgeon. “You’d do that for us?”

  Lutz patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. “For the leg, Sal. For the leg.”

  His answer only made Sal suspicious; Lutz had made no effort in that regard since the previous day. He hadn’t helped Sal tend to Shilly at all. Only with great reluctance had he bothered to help put her back in her place on the buggy.

  But Sal nodded as though he thought the idea a good one. They said no more of it until a muddy haze appeared on the forward horizon, indicating that they were nearing the Lookout. Sal knew he should be relieved to be so close, yet he felt nothing but a rising tension. If Behenna had overtaken them, he would be waiting for them at the Lookout. And even if he hadn’t overtaken them, he wouldn’t be far behind. He wished he had a glamour like the one Lodo had used in Fundelry, to hide himself from prying eyes.

  “What’s that?” asked Shilly, pointing northward, to their right.

  Sal looked. They were within sight of the Divide. Not much could be seen through the heat-hazed air, but it was apparent that a vast chasm lay to the north. The southernmost edge gave the horizon a foreshortened appearance. The northern side was too distant to be seen at all. Mrs Milka had apparently neglected to describe the Divide, for Shilly plainly had no idea what she was looking at.

  “Wait and see for yourself,” Sal said. “We’re not far away now.”

  “Is it the Interior?”

  “Not quite.” The Divide remained a steady distance away as they drove to the Lookout. He hoped that Lutz wouldn’t give anything away.

  Lutz didn’t. Now that the job of getting them to the Lookout was almost done, the surgeon said nothing for the rest of the drive. He stared ahead with a fierce concentration as the sun sank slowly toward the horizon. Only as the brown haze resolved into the dust thrown up by a small town did he speak.

  “Join that track, over there. It’s not often used. People here go either north or south, rarely anywhere else.”

  “Won’t we stand out?” Sal asked.

&nb
sp; “No one will notice. Trust me.”

  Sal’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel as he did as he was told. Before long, he could see that Lutz was right.

  There was no clear-cut edge to the town, consisting as it did of white and brown cloth tents spreading in vaguely ordered rows across a slight rise in the surroundings. The air was full of strange smells and noises, and the buggy blended in perfectly with other vehicles weaving through it all. Scores of camels strode regally about in enclosures set well back from the main encampments, and it was between two such enclosures that Sal guided the buggy. Most of the tents opened inward, away from them, facing into the centre of the makeshift town. There, shorter than he remembered, stood the white tower of the Lookout, visible over the tops of tents.

  “It’s a lighthouse,” said Shilly, “without an ocean.”

  “Function dictates form,” said Lutz, directing Sal down another side street. Surrounded by tents, Sal felt less exposed. There were other buggies and people everywhere: dark-skinned and fair, dusty from travel, and none wearing the blue of the Sky Wardens. The air was full of shouts, engines chugging, clanging metal, and even music.

  “Let’s find somewhere to put the buggy,” the surgeon said, looking through every gap they passed. “That’s our greatest risk at the moment. Kids your age are common enough, but few of them drive.” He half-stood in the passenger seat. “Over there.”

  There was an unattended space between three tents just wide enough for the buggy and deep enough so people walking by wouldn’t notice them. Sal slowed and backed in. The engine rattled to a halt as though pleased to be resting.

  Lutz got out.

  “Where are you going?” Sal asked.

  “To find Favi Kalish. He’s the leader of the caravan I told you about. If he’s here, your troubles will be over.”

  Sal settled back into his seat as Lutz slipped out of their hiding space. Looking up at Shilly, he saw her face was drawn with pain and concern. She was watching him right back.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” he said.