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

by Sean Williams

  “Me too.”

  “I should follow him.”

  “Go, then. We need to be sure.”

  “But you —”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Don’t let me hold you back. I’m just annoyed I can’t do anything to help.”

  “Shilly —”

  She shook her head and made a shooing gesture. He slipped off after the surgeon.

  At first he thought he had left it too late. Many men around the Lookout shared Lutz’s desert dress sense, and Sal couldn’t find him straightaway. Then he caught a glimpse of the surgeon’s grey-stubbled scalp a little further along the street, and he immediately set out in pursuit, ensuring there were people between them at all times.

  The crowd grew denser as they neared the Lookout, giving Sal more opportunities to hide but making it harder to keep up. There was an open-air market taking place on the northern slopes of the Lookout, between the tower and the way to the Interior. A large number of wagons and merchants had gathered there to trade stock and negotiate haulage. Some were clearly from the Interior, as pale as the robes they wore, while others were dark, hailing from deep in the Strand. Most lay between those two extremes, the inevitable result of mixing populations.

  Sal saw several black-clad Syndic representatives, checking to make sure that the laws of the Strand were being observed, but nowhere did he see any sign of the Sky Wardens. Lutz walked unhesitatingly into the market and looked around as though searching, then headed off to his left. He walked up to a tight knot of wagons and asked one of the men attending it a question. The trader nodded, listened some more, then nodded again. Lutz slipped him something that looked like a coin, and the man walked off.

  He returned a moment later with a tall, white-haired man wearing a long, black shift patterned with red flowers. They embraced and walked out of sight behind one of the wagons, talking intently, frowning.

  Sal couldn’t get any closer without drawing attention to himself, and he doubted the wisdom of trying. So far everything Lutz had said was true: the surgeon had gone to look for a caravan, the leader of which, if that was who the man in the black shift was, he knew well. But still the doubt nagged. There was too much riding on the surgeon’s honesty. Sal didn’t know him well enough to place their fate in his hands so absolutely, and he had been in an odd mood ever since the ruined towers. They had glimpsed a dark current running through the surgeon the night before, after the golem had come. Who knew how deep it ran, or where it might lead?

  He waited a minute longer to see if the two men emerged. As he watched, a lanky, pale-skinned woman in dirty grey riding clothes approached the first man Lutz had spoken to and initiated an angry exchange Sal could half-hear from the other side of the market. Something about a quota infringement. It was clear the woman held the entire caravan in poor regard. When the object of her anger shook his head and laughed, she spat onto the ground by his feet and stalked away.

  Sal watched her return to her own caravan, a larger affair than the other with solid, wide-wheelbase carriages designed to carry machine parts or other heavy goods as well as fabric and spices. The people working there deferred to her, and shook their heads when she explained what had happened.

  Sal would have watched longer but for a flash of blue nearby. A Sky Warden. He shrank back into the shadow of a nearby tent, his pulse pounding in his throat. Not Behenna. This was a woman with brown curly hair. But the robes were the same, and there was no mistaking the crystal torc at her throat.

  Sal retreated through the crowd, newly mindful of everyone around him. He didn’t know how many Sky Wardens maintained the Lookout, but there were bound to be more than one. Even if Behenna hadn’t arrived, they could communicate through the Void Beneath using thought — the same way Behenna had talked to Sal by the ravine. He didn’t doubt that they knew about him and Shilly, and would be keeping an eye out for them. Behenna was still tap-tapping for him. Half afraid that Shilly had already been discovered, he hurried back through the narrow alleys between tents and wagons to where the buggy was hidden.

  She was still there. He almost collapsed with relief. The sweat was dripping off him by the time he sat down under the shade and took a long drink of water.

  “What did you see?” Shilly asked.

  “Nothing suspicious,” he admitted, outlining Lutz’s actions in as much detail as he could remember.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” she said when he had finished. “There was no one here waiting for us, no one’s seen us since we arrived, and Lutz is doing everything he can to get us out of here. Why would he betray us now, after all he’s done?”

  “I don’t know.” Sal had pondered this all the way back to the buggy. It was clear that Lutz was determined to strike a deal with Favi Kalish, just as he had been determined to help Sal and Shilly reach the Lookout safely. It was also clear, however, that Lutz had used them to conduct another, brief search for his father’s remains, and he had clearly resented them for being the ones the golem had spoken to. That resentment seemed to be gone — but was it really?

  Suddenly Lutz was there, flushed, out of breath, and alone.

  “It’s all arranged,” he said. “We’ll wait until it’s fully dark, then move.”

  Sal looked at the sky. An hour at most. “What do we do?”

  “Drive to the crossing point. It’s always chaotic there, no one will notice an extra buggy among the rest. The caravan you want has a red flower painted on each cart. The leader, Kalish, will be expecting you. He knows what you look like and will delay customs until you arrive. Once you are there, he’ll move out, taking you across with the rest of the caravan. You’ll be safe on the other side.”

  “And you?” Shilly asked. “What happens to you after we’re gone?”

  The surgeon shrugged bonily. “Don’t worry about me, princess. Just you concentrate on getting away and looking after that leg.”

  He smiled up at her and patted her hand. Sal could tell that she was ready to believe Lutz, and he was tempted to. Perhaps the weird behaviour in and since the Broken Lands had been nothing more than an aberration, the product of a bad mood brought on by difficult memories. Sal could understand that, he supposed.

  He just couldn’t believe that their escape would go so easily. The Sky Wardens would be watching every caravan closely as it went over to the Interior. Without some form of distraction, they would never slip by.

  Lutz resumed his seat as the day faded around them, but he soon became restless and fidgeted. Sal tried to distract himself by thinking about the Interior, thinking ahead rather than looking behind him, at what was chasing them. They would be there very soon, if everything went well, yet he had only a vague idea what to expect. For all that he had spent a lot of his life in the borderlands, he had never before made the leap across. The distance was relatively small, but crucial.

  And how much stranger it must be, he thought, for Shilly, who would soon be not only out of her depth but also completely out of her home country as well. At least there would be no Sky Wardens looking for her over there. The rest of their journey, he hoped, would continue uneventfully.

  The first stars were beginning to appear when Lutz’s barely-contained energy overflowed.

  “I’m going to make sure everything’s ready,” he said. “I’ll come back if it isn’t — so if I don’t come back, you’ll know that it is.”

  Or that something has gone badly wrong, Sal thought to himself, unable to sit passively by while a trap might be springing shut around them.

  “Be careful,” said Shilly.

  “I will, princess. I will.” He slipped out of their hiding place and disappeared up the street.

  Sal waited thirty seconds, then started the engine.

  “What are you doing?” Shilly leaned forward to grip his shoulder. “You can’t go early. They won’t be ready.”

  “I’m not going early. I j
ust want to get closer.” He turned to look at her. “Also, Behenna must be here by now. If Engenius is caught and they make him talk, they’ll know exactly where to look.”

  She nodded. The nervousness in her eyes perfectly matched the way he felt. They were coming to the crunch. After the accident in the ravine, the golem, all the hundreds of kilometres they had put behind them, this was it.

  He kept the headlights off as he inched the car out of the niche and onto the narrow roadway. It was cooler at night, and busier. People were everywhere, and none of them gave the buggy any special notice. Sal kept to the side ways, approaching the heart of the tent town by the most circuitous route, ever watchful for blue of any kind. When someone so much as glanced at him, he looked away then back again a moment later, to make sure no scrutiny lingered too long.

  His route was either well chosen or lucky, for they reached the edge of the market without incident. There the ring of wagons and caravans gave way to the customs staging area. Sal parked the buggy behind a large, empty wagon. They were within sight of the staging area but not likely to be seen. From their position they could watch what was going on, and finally Shilly could see what awaited them.

  Even by night the Divide was impressive. The Lookout was situated on the inner lip of a chunk taken out of the side of a massive canyon which was kilometres across and seemingly bottomless in the dark. A wide, iron bridge, lit by lanterns all along its length, crossed the gap from the Strand to the Interior, but not in one single span. Instead the bridge comprised several stages. The first led from the Lookout to the top of a conical “island” standing upright in the canyon, where time had eroded the soft rock around a hardier central core. There were several such islands in a rough line, and the bridge leapt from one to the other, zigzagging across the gap until the two sides were joined. The bridge was a glowing thread hanging in darkness, a frozen lightning bolt arcing through space.

  Activity on the bridge provided the only true sense of scale. A single cart, dwarfed by the gulf around it, was travelling from where the much larger settlement of Nesh shone brightly on the Interior side of the Divide to the Strand side. A medium-sized caravan crawled to meet it, strung out in a line even though there was enough room for four wagons to proceed side-by-side. At the Lookout end, three other caravans queued at the staging area, their leaders completing declaration forms and waiting their turn to proceed out over the abyss.

  Shilly’s hand had stayed on Sal’s shoulder through their short journey, and it gripped him tightly now. “It’s beautiful.”

  He could appreciate what she meant. As on the other occasions he had seen the Divide, Sal couldn’t help the feeling of awe that overtook him. It was too big to truly comprehend, wider across than the city in the Broken Lands was long. Sal knew that in its length, the chasm divided Strand and Interior across the entirety of the two lands, as though the continent had been rent in two by some unimaginable force.

  Its nature was as mysterious as its size was awe-inspiring. The Divide wasn’t a canyon for there was no river at its heart; it wasn’t a rift valley, either, for its sides were almost vertical. The air at the base of the winding cliff faces seemed to boil during the day, strange sandstorms swirling and dancing even though no air stirred on the top. It was, Sal thought, a crack in the landscape, a break in reality that might let something strange and unknowable in.

  But there were more important things than sightseeing on his mind. Two caravans were vying for seniority at the Lookout checkpoint. One belonged to Favi Kalish and was the one they were supposed to join. The tall woman who had argued earlier with one of Kalish’s riders led the other. The two of them and a Syndic representative were arguing heatedly, although Sal couldn’t make out their words over the clatter of axles, the snorting and stamping of camels and the sound of orders being shouted. The geniality of the market was gone, replaced by the pressing need to move on, either home or to another marketplace.

  As Sal watched, a Sky Warden stepped out of a guardhouse and approached the arguing trio. He spoke a few words, rebuffed another angry outburst from the female caravan leader, and then gestured for them to disperse. Sal watched with interest as the tall woman strode back to where her wagons were assembled, waiting to move out. But they didn’t move. They just sat there, waiting. Meanwhile Favi Kalish walked back to his own caravan to talk to none other than Engenius Lutz. Kalish looked pleased, while the surgeon was the picture of nervousness.

  Tap-tap.

  Sal felt like Lutz looked. One thing bothered him: if the surgeon had sold Sal and Shilly out, why hadn’t the Sky Wardens just taken them there and then? It would have been easier than mounting such an elaborate deception and risking a double-cross. They had no reason not to trust Lutz, who had actively helped the pair escape from Yor and knew exactly where they were. How could the Wardens possibly hope to benefit from delaying?

  Sal couldn’t answer that question, but it wasn’t going away. And the more it nagged, the more important it became. The next question was: what to do about it? If he tried to explain it to Shilly, he was afraid he’d make himself look stupid, but he couldn’t just sit there, either, waiting for the axe to fall.

  Finally, he could take it no more. He slid out of the driver’s seat. “I won’t be long,” he said, ignoring Shilly’s startled query.

  He ducked and wove through the chaos to where the lanky woman stood fuming, watching Favi Kalish and his caravan on the other side of the staging area.

  “Excuse me.” Sal didn’t want to come too close for fear of exposing himself. The woman turned at the sound of the voice, and saw him in the shadows.

  “What do you want?” she snapped.

  “My father is in the caravan behind yours and he sent me to find out what the hold-up is.”

  The woman looked past him as though trying to find evidence to disprove his story. “The problem isn’t mine,” she said. “The Wardens have given Kalish preference but he won’t go through. There’s a problem with one of his axles, apparently. A replacement is coming, he says; it won’t take a moment. But he is just stalling. I can tell. He is enjoying making me wait.”

  That accorded with Lutz’s plan perfectly. Kalish was waiting for Sal and Shilly to appear before making his move across the bridge. Lutz looked nervous because defying the Sky Wardens was dangerous even on the northern edge of their territory. Sal had no reason to be suspicious ...

  Except he still was.

  “So you are going across,” he said. “After Kalish?”

  “That’s right. We’re headed for Ulum.” The woman’s lips and cheeks were tattooed with fine, grey lines as though she was wearing a mask. Numerous black rings hung in her ears. She was studying Sal just as closely as he was studying her. “Why do you ask?”

  He warred with himself for a split second, then opted to follow his instinct.

  “I’m not really with another caravan,” he said. “I want to get across the bridge, and quickly. Is there any way to get Kalish moving?”

  “None. He’s as stubborn as a camel. The harder I push, the deeper he digs his heels in.”

  “Couldn’t you jump the queue?”

  “Sure, and I’ve done it before, but tonight the Syndics are on edge. They’re jumpy, and I don’t want to...” She stopped. “Wait. I know who you are. You’re one of those kids the Wardens are looking for.”

  His blood congealed in his stomach. “Which kids?”

  “Don’t play dumb. I hear things. No wonder you want to get across so quickly. I should turn you in before I get myself into trouble.”

  Her voice was disapproving, but she stayed exactly where she was.

  “Or you could help us,” he said.

  “Tell me how I might.”

  “Let us mix with your caravan while you jump the queue.”

  “In return for what?”

  This was the weakest point of his argument, such as it was.
“For the look on Favi Kalish’s face.”

  “That’s a small price for pissing off the Wardens.”

  “You said you’ve done it before.”

  “I have, yes, but not when things were like this.” She nodded slowly. “Yes, I see it now. Kalish is waiting for you, isn’t he? Not for some busted axle to be fixed. And you’re selling him over.”

  “He might be selling us over first.” That was true enough: even if Lutz was innocent, there was always the possibility that the caravan leader had other ideas. “If he is, the Wardens will catch us when he goes to cross. That’s what they’re waiting for. They’re distracted from everything else. They won’t, therefore, be ready for you when you break the queue. We’ll take them by surprise and get past easily.”

  “And it’d be in character for me to do something like that, so they won’t be suspicious.” She nodded as though the plan met her approval. “Fine. But it’s still a risk. Why shouldn’t I just hand you over and see if there’s a reward? That way, I ingratiate myself with the Wardens for a change, maybe make some easy money, and still get to put one past Kalish. What do you say to that?”

  He thought desperately. “That it’s not your style?”

  “No, but I’m no fool, either.”

  “I haven’t got any money —”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “I can offer you...” He stopped, knowing that the moment he had dreaded had come. For all his hoping that another idea would occur to him at the last moment, it hadn’t. “I can offer you our buggy. It’s in perfect working order. Get us across, and it’s yours.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Working vehicles are rare. People don’t just give them away on a whim.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You must really need to get across.”

  “I do.”

  She regarded him a moment longer, then said: “Okay, I’m interested, despite myself. Reward or no reward, I don’t like anyone screwing over a customer. It’s bad for our reputation. And Kalish is far from a friend. I’ll have a look at your buggy and see what we can do. If it’s in good condition, you have a deal.”