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

by Sean Williams

  Sometimes the cracks showed. They rarely saw the mage, except at meal times, and they were never alone when they did. Whenever the mage was there, Shilly tried to bring up Lodo and his relationship with the Keep. Every time she did, however, her questions were met with blank silence. None of the younger ones had ever heard of Shilly’s first teacher, and before she could explain, the Mage Van Haasteren would firmly change the subject.

  Sal himself never found a reason to talk to the mage after their first day at the Keep. Instead, he relied on Bethe to tell him what to do, and listened to information filtered down through the other students, mainly Skender. As a result, he learned some details about the Keep that he presumed didn’t fall into the official history.

  On one occasion, Skender was supposed to be introducing Sal to something called the Interconnectivity Dictum, but was instead showing him five rooms that no one else knew existed in the Keep. Only a tiny percentage of the cliff town’s many rooms were inhabited: the rest were empty. Along the way, Sal learned that the responsibility for the school and its students had been in Van Haasteren hands for more than ten generations. A long line of Stone Mages had sprung from their Clan, the talent passed through parent and child to the most recent generation, the adult Skender. The heirs weren’t always male; only since Skender’s grandfather had they been so. Before that, the senior members of the Clan had been female for four generations, an alternating series of mothers and daughters overseeing the education of the region’s most prominent would-be Stone Mages.

  “We almost lost it, though,” said Skender, as he guided Sal past a rockfall that appeared to have blocked a tunnel, but had in fact left a small crack that they could squeeze through. “My grandfather did something before I was born. I don’t know what. My dad won’t talk about it. It got us into trouble.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “I hear rumours. Other mages come here to visit and to teach. You met Jarmila Erentaite, right? She’s on the Synod, and it’s her job to make sure the various schools are running properly. She talks to me sometimes; she tells me things. Maybe she thinks I’ll take over the Keep one day, when Dad retires, and she wants me to be informed.”

  “Will you do that?” asked Sal.

  “Take over the Keep? I don’t know.” The boy shrugged with the gravity of an old man. “I’d want to see the world first. Dad’s been here all his life, you know. Sometimes I think he forgets there’s a world out there. I don’t want to end up like him. I’d rather be like my mother, wherever she is right now.”

  Skender’s mother, Abi, was a Surveyor who travelled the fringes of the Interior looking for Ruins. Sal could understand her unwillingness to stay cooped up here for too long, as Skender was. Anywhere would begin to chafe for someone used to travelling — even somewhere as interesting as the Keep. And the Keep was interesting, full of nooks and crannies and all sorts of oddities that few people visited. The views from the empty rooms were all the more spectacular for knowing that he and Skender might be the only ones who had seen them for decades. There were massive storage chambers deep in the hillside, large enough to hold entire ships. Natural caves led deeper still, containing delicate crystals and carrying echoes from underground rivers kilometres distant. Skender said that the cliff town was ancient, and had once been a winter retreat for an ancient queen. Sal could believe it. Even being responsible for cleaning the many empty rooms and sweeping the endless corridors didn’t take the shine off the Keep’s novelty.

  He thought about this while writing a short, belated note to send to Belilanca Brokate, letting her know that they had arrived and settled in. For the first time in a very long while, he began to feel something approaching safety. The work was hard, but that was all he had to worry about. There was no threat from the Sky Wardens. There was no Shom Behenna on his tail. There was nothing to threaten him at all, if he ignored the Mage Erentaite’s vague warning about the Weavers, whoever they were, and the fear of failing. If he worried, regardless of all this, he told himself he was just being stupid. Running was a hard habit to break, and he had been running his entire life. The time had come to stand his ground. If anything or anyone did get in his way, he would meet the challenge head-on, on his own terms, rather than let himself be pushed around again.

  It was at this time, when he was feeling the beginnings of independence and self-confidence, that his voice broke.

  “Squeak, squeak.”

  “Shut up!”

  “What’s that, little mouse? I can’t hear you.”

  “I said, shut up!” He’d thought his voice breaking would be a cause for relief, since it meant that his talent for the Change wasn’t going to evaporate after all, but in fact it had proved to be nothing of the sort. “I can’t help it.”

  His vocal chords betrayed him again on the last word, prompting another wave of laughter from Skender.

  “Be quiet, both of you!” called Shilly from the balcony. “I’m trying to study.”

  Sal threw Skender a dirty look and followed it up with a pillow. The boy ducked, and the pillow hit the wall, startling the yellow lizard that had taken up permanent residence in the corner. It scuttled for cover under the bed while Skender scrabbled for something more solid to throw back. His hand fell on Sal’s pack.

  “Don’t touch that.” Sal was across the room before Skender’s fingers could close. He pulled the pack reassuringly close to his chest, feeling the heavy weight of the globe in his arms.

  “Why? What’s in it?” Skender teased, dancing around him like a restless puppy. “Love letters from a little mouse’s girlfriend? Or a lock of Bethe’s hair?”

  Sal gritted his teeth. He should never have told Skender that he enjoyed doing his chores with the student overseer. The teasing had been merciless ever since.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s none of your business.”

  Skender flopped back on the bed and rested his head on one hand. “Which one is it? You can’t have it both ways.”

  Sal sighed. Skender had a way of getting what he wanted, either by resourcefulness or sheer persistence. The chances were it would be easier to just tell him, now that his interest was piqued. It didn’t come easy, though. He had kept the globe secret even from Shilly. How could he justify revealing it to a complete stranger?

  He glanced at where she sat in the balcony of the room they still shared, reading by the light of the evening sun. How she ignored the yawning gulf on her right he didn’t know, but she seemed unperturbed by it. Their chores were over, and they all were supposed to be studying.

  He was, however, certain she was paying close attention to what went on between him and Skender. Even if she never joined in on the teasing about Bethe — a fact for which he was distinctly grateful, since Skender was more than enough to deal with at one time — she wouldn’t want to miss out on anything. She certainly wouldn’t want to miss out on what he was increasingly sure he was about to do. He had to do it, he thought, to repay some of the trust Skender had shown him. And maybe to get a reaction from her, too ...

  He took a deep breath and reached into his pack.

  “This is a secret, Skender, so you have to promise not to tell anyone about it.”

  “I promise,” said the boy, sitting up with eyes wide.

  “Our first teacher gave this to me before we left Fundelry.” He heard a faint creak as Shilly shifted in her chair. “He didn’t tell me how to use it, but he said it might come in handy, one day. I’ve been carrying it around ever since.” He put the leather-wrapped bundle in his lap and began to unfold it.

  Skender’s eyes opened even wider when he saw what it contained. “It’s a light-sink!” he exclaimed.

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  “Or a light-keeper.” The boy inched closer so he could get a better look. “Different types have specific names — the Orb of Ardanoi, for instance — but they all do pretty much the same
thing. Where did you say you got it from?”

  Sal described Lodo and Fundelry in more detail. Skender listened with interest. The fact that it had come from — and presumably been made in — a small town as deep as you could get in the Strand fascinated him as it had fascinated his father.

  “Amazing,” Skender said, clearly wanting to touch the globe for himself, but, strangely enough, not bold enough to ask outright. “Only trained Stone Mages can make light-sinks, you know, and even then only under exactly the right circumstances. I can’t imagine how this Lodo of yours managed it so far on the wrong side of the Divide.”

  “What makes them so hard to make?” asked Sal. “I mean, there are hundreds of glowing stones all over this place. Isn’t this just something like that?”

  “‘Something like,’ yes, but the difference is crucial. What makes light-sinks really tricky is not that they store light or emit it, because doing either of those is easy; it’s doing both of them that’s hard. You’ve got to tell them to stop storing and start emitting, and that’s not easy. Fixed matter like glass and stone doesn’t want to change. You have to force it — and force it gently, or it’ll break. You have to seduce it.”

  “You know how to do that, then?” asked Shilly sceptically, moving from the chair on the balcony and coming into the room.

  “Only in theory. I’ve read about it and I’ve heard Dad talk to the more advanced students about it.”

  “I’ll bet he was the one who said ‘seduce’,” she said.

  “It was. So what? If he used it, it must be the right word.”

  “You’ve never tried to use one?” asked Sal.

  “No, but only because I’ve never had access to a globe like this. Making them is a whole other matter entirely.” Sal held the globe gently up to the window so it caught the last rays of the sun and Skender’s gaze followed it. “It’s beautiful, Sal. You’re very lucky.”

  Shilly’s lips tightened.

  “Wha—” Sal started, but stopped as the word came out as a squawk. Skender chortled.

  “What do you think?” he asked, handing it to Shilly. “Skender seems to think he knows how to make it work. Is it worth a go?”

  She took the globe as though he had offered her a very fragile, enormously precious jewel.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Then no. It’s not that I don’t believe you, Skender —”

  “Not just Skender,” Sal said. “All of us. Together.”

  The word caught her attention. She thought about it. “No,” she said again. “We still might break it.”

  “I’d be curious to try anyway,” said Sal. Still fresh in his mind was his dream of a bright light shining when everything else around was dark. “Lodo said I might need it one day. It’s not going to be much use to me if I don’t know how to make it work.”

  “But it’s too valuable,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Exactly!” Skender exclaimed. “Who knows how old it is? Who knows how much light is stored inside it? Look how grey it is. I think that correlates to how charged it is, in which case —”

  “It might even be dangerous,” she finished for him. “To us, I mean.”

  “Nonsense. What could happen?”

  “It could blow up, that’s what.”

  “I’ve never heard of globes exploding under any circumstances.”

  “We saw a bunch go off in Fundelry,” said Sal, remembering all too well the sudden violence and the showers of glass dust that had rained down after each one. “Shilly’s got a point. We could really be hurt.”

  “Aw, you’re nothing but a pair of spoilsports.” Skender flopped back onto the bed with a sulky expression. “I thought you were here to learn.”

  “We are,” said Shilly, “but —”

  “So learn! Look, extending yourself beyond the syllabus is the only way to excel, right? And don’t tell me you’ve never taken a chance before, Shilly. You struck me as a troublemaker the moment I first saw you, for all that you’re on your best behaviour now. Why the act? Who are you trying to impress? Me? I’m not my father, you know.”

  She pulled back from him, and Sal could tell that Skender’s words had stung.

  “All right, then,” she said, measuring every word. “Let’s try — but carefully. We stop if it looks like we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “Okay.” Skender nodded happily. “If we screw this up, anything could happen.”

  “Not just anything. You can be certain that I’ll kill you, for starters.”

  Shilly made herself more comfortable on the floor, stretching her leg out to one side. The pain of her injury didn’t seem to bother her as much, since their visit to see the Mage Erentaite. Sal and Skender sat down in front of her with the globe in the space between them. The last rays of the sun were draining from the sky behind her; her dark skin was dissolving into the gloom.

  “Do we need light for this?” Sal asked.

  “If this works, we’ll have as much light as we could possibly want.” Skender reached out and took his right hand. They formed a triangle on the floor of the room with the globe between them. A sense of flow that was difficult to pin down swept through them. Sal felt his skin tingle all over, and could see his two friends quite clearly, despite the darkness.

  “So, how do we do it?” Shilly asked.

  “Well...” Skender paused. “Hmm. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I know in theory —”

  “So you said. You made it sound easy a minute ago.”

  “Well, it’s not, okay? The patterns are very complicated.”

  “Tell us how to visualise them,” said Sal. “And we’ll all try at the same time.”

  “No, there’s a better way,” Shilly said. “We’re linked, right? You show us through the link, just like we did playing Blind, and we’ll look at it together. It can’t be that difficult.”

  “Something that most mages struggle to master? Sure. Not difficult at all.” Despite Skender’s scepticism, Sal felt his hand tighten in readiness. “I’ll show you what I know.”

  Through the link, a complicated image surfaced. It appeared in Sal’s mind like a thought of his own, although it came with a flavour that he knew belonged to Skender. The image was difficult to fathom, consisting of an uncountable array of spheres dancing around and, sometimes, through each other. The spheres were transparent and solid, but weren’t glassy. Their centres were connected by thin, black lines that whipped around like the antennae of an army of agitated ants.

  Sal tried, but he couldn’t follow it.

  “Are you getting this, Shilly?” asked Skender. “You picture the balls, and you imagine them moving —”

  “Shh,” she said. Sal could feel her concentrating so much that she was reluctant to interrupt herself. “I’m thinking.”

  As she thought, something happened to the image. The balls began to form a pattern. It wasn’t a fixed pattern, or one that repeated with any regularity, but Sal could sense that there was reason to the dance, unlike before.

  Shilly sat back slightly, as though seeking a different perspective. “Does that look any better to you?”

  It looked to Sal as though all the myriad winds on a gusty day had suddenly got together to form a willy-willy, sweeping across a plain. The transition felt natural, not forced. Watching it, Sal could see how she manipulated the image, applying pressure to the illusion to make the balls slow down or speed up. A nudge in one spot changed their behaviour completely; a simple push sent a new order cascading through the pattern.

  “Indeed it does,” said Skender. “I’ve never made it look so good.” He sounded impressed. “That’s a really high-level adjustment.”

  Barely had he said it when the pattern dissolved into chaos again. Shilly harumphed in annoyance.

  “Where did you say you learned
to do this?” she asked Skender.

  “I saw the pattern in a book.”

  “And you just happened to remember it?”

  Skender didn’t answer. Shilly concentrated furiously, and the pattern reformed. Skender let it wobble for a moment before suggesting a slight adjustment based on another text he had read. Shilly applied it and the pattern stabilised immediately. They watched it dance in their mind’s eye for several minutes until Shilly was certain she had it more or less under control.

  “So what now?” Sal’s voice squeaked again, but this time no one commented.

  “I suppose we try it,” said Skender.

  “That was the whole point,” Shilly commented.

  “But what if someone senses us?” It was Sal’s turn to be nervous. “Lodo could always tell when we’d been mucking around with the Change.”

  “Not here,” said Skender. “This place is a Ruin. It’s full of background potential. You’d have to really let something go before — well, you know what I mean. We’ll be okay.”

  “If this thing does blow up,” said Shilly, “getting caught will be the last thing on our minds.”

  “True.” Sal nodded and tried to ease the nervousness nibbling at his gut. “Let’s go, then. Slowly at first. We don’t want to take it too far all at once ...”

  He stiffened as the will of the others slid through him, like something slippery yet sharp crawling up the inside of each of his arms and down his backbone. A deep hum arose out of nowhere, throbbing silently in the air as though the earth itself was vibrating. Unlike the first time his talent had brought light from a stone — in a cave under another Ruin, at Shilly’s instigation — he didn’t feel a sudden blossoming of energy from all around him. He could feel the Change gathering within him and concentrating itself into a single point just above floor level in front of him, where the globe rested.