“That’s it,” breathed Shilly. “Hold the pattern and let it move, like it’s alive.”
The image in his mind swirled around the point between them, fiercely energetic yet focused at the same time. For every element that spun away, as though about to tear itself free, another fell back to the centre with even more momentum than before. It was almost like watching an explosion in reverse. He put every iota of his energy into encouraging the implosion to collapse, figuring that that was what it needed.
Just when he thought something was about to give, the pattern deflated and the feeling of gathering energies ebbed. He looked around, startled.
“What happened?”
“Not enough grunt,” said Skender, his hand slippery with sweat. “You’ll have to push harder, Sal.”
“It’s more than that,” said Shilly. “We’re not going to crack this by hammering at it. I have to help Sal push in the right spot while you help me keep my focus. We have to support each other in order to make it work.”
Sal’s doubts grew stronger. “Maybe it’s too much.”
“No,” Shilly said sternly. “We can do it. We will. All we have to do is concentrate.”
Encouraged by her determination, Sal again put every effort into their second attempt. He felt Skender’s pattern swirling through their minds, and Shilly’s insight into its nature guided him along. When the pattern was in place, Sal dipped deep into himself — into the reserves of the Change which he pictured as the muscles of invisible limbs, stretching back into the darkness of his imagination — and willed the pattern to change along the lines the other two provided. He felt them willing with him, guiding him in the right direction.
It happened so quickly he almost missed it. The swirling condensed into a tight, spinning lattice, then collapsed into a point at the heart of Lodo’s globe. It hung there for a split second, like a spark trembling on the verge of creating flame. Sal had just enough time to wonder if anything more was going to happen when the surface of the globe began to emit a warm, golden light. It wasn’t bright, at first; the light was similar to that cast by a campfire, but without the flickering. The glow revealed Shilly and Skender’s faces in the darkened room, gazing in wonderment at the globe, and Sal had no doubt his face showed the same expression.
The light grew brighter and whiter. Sal distinctly saw Shilly’s pupils contract. There was no heat or sound, but he began to feel an energy rushing through the air, as though something new was building up momentum. Staring at the globe left a purple afterimage on his retina. Soon he could barely look at it, and it was getting brighter. There was still no sound, but he felt as though they were sitting at the centre of a gathering storm.
Then something else happened. The light changed texture, became more fluid and more penetrating at the same time. He felt as though the light was cutting through him, stripping away his flesh to reveal the bones beneath. With a shock he realised that he actually could see the bones of his friends sitting beside him, as though their flesh had turned to glass. Their faces seemed to melt away and he saw their eye sockets, cheekbones and jaws standing out. He was reminded of the skulls he had seen in the Ruin the very first time he had consciously used his talent — and of the story of the baker, of the world’s bones and death.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
“It’s beautiful!” said Shilly. Her hand gripped his tightly.
“How do we turn it off?”
“Turn it off?” Skender’s skeletal face turned to confront him. His bony fingers clutched Sal’s. “Why would you want to do that?”
Shilly’s hair had melted back to a bleached skull white. She was gazing around her rapturously. Clearly neither of them could see what he saw.
“Why waste it?” he said anxiously. Their bones themselves were beginning to look faint. He didn’t want to know what happened when they vanished completely. “We don’t want to drain it, do we?”
“Good point,” Skender conceded. “Okay. We turn it off by reversing the pattern.”
“Like this?” An image from Shilly cut through the increasing disorientation of the glare.
“No. It won’t just turn off on its own if we stop pushing it. You have to turn it around and put it into reverse.”
Shilly struggled with the new pattern while Sal tried to maintain his composure. It was hard for Shilly to visualise while the light of a small sun was blasting between them. Twice she came close, and Sal felt a drain on him as Skender tested the pattern to see if it would work, but both times it fell apart and reverted to the original form. As his friends melted away, Sal tried to concentrate. Even when he closed his eyes, the ghostly images cast by the light were still visible. He could feel the light blossoming around him, as though he was a skull lying in the desert, experiencing a thousand years of bleaching sunlight in less than a minute. He was being burned away to dust, blasted into a stream of particles too small to see ...
“That’s it!” Skender’s voice brought him back to reality. The boy’s expression was invisible, just bones, but Sal heard the grimace of effort in his voice. “Got it, Sal? Push now, while Shilly has it.”
Sal clutched at every shred of his willpower and focused on the pattern, guided by his two friends. The invisible muscles of the Change flexed, then flexed again. The bright point at the heart of the globe resisted. He gritted his teeth and tried again.
It was like willing the sun to set. He pushed a third time, but still nothing happened. He felt as though something was sucking him dry, taking all the strength he had before he could use it. But what would do that? It couldn’t be the globe itself; Lodo wouldn’t have given him something dangerous. It had to be something outside — or someone.
Then the resistance unwound and instantly the pressure eased. At the same time, the globe responded to the pattern that Skender and Shilly had given him to impose upon it. A shadow passed over him as the spinning image assumed a new pattern. The glare flickered and began to die. Immense relief rushed through him. He must’ve just managed to get it right, when he really needed to.
He dared to open his eyes and he saw the light fading, retreating back into the globe like water down a drain, returning to normal as it did so. The faces of his friends returned.
Blinding afterimages danced across his vision for a disconcertingly long time. When they were gone, the globe was back to its initial, warm-yellow state, and all three of them were staring at it. Shilly’s expression was one of shock.
Sal flexed one more time, and the globe went out. He felt drained, weak. There was a moment’s silence during which their hands stayed linked. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Sal could see stars shining through the window. A cold, refreshing wind played across his sweat-drenched skin. He felt like the baker in Belilanca Brokate’s story, freshly back from the land of the dead. Exactly what had just happened, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he had imagined the light boiling through flesh. Maybe he had imagined, too, the sense of being drained, or hollowed out from the inside.
Worried that he had over-exerted himself, he said nothing. He didn’t want them thinking that he was weak. As no harm had been done, there seemed no point alarming them.
Shilly was the first to move. Her hand slid damply from Sal’s. He heard her get up and reach for her crutches.
“Well,” said Skender, likewise letting go. “That was interesting.”
Light of a gentler kind entered the room. Shilly had brought a glow stone from the corridor and put it on the end of her bed. By its light, her eyes were glowing.
Sal’s gaze strayed to the open window.
“Do you think —” He swallowed back a squeak. “Do you think anyone saw it?”
Skender followed his gaze, then shook his head. “Maybe,” he said, without his usual flippancy. “I can’t hear anything, so even if they did it hasn’t caused any alarm. We aren’t the only ones likely to experiment around here. You
get used to odd things going bang in the middle of the night.”
A sense of accomplishment rose in Sal and drowned out the fear that they might get into trouble, or that he had pushed himself too hard. They had done what they set out to do. They had brought the light-sink to life. That was something to be proud of, he told himself, even if it hadn’t given him exactly what he had expected.
“We did it,” he said.
“We did, indeed,” said Skender, staring at him.
“I wonder what else we can do? With your knowledge, Shilly’s understanding, my —”
“We can sleep,” said Shilly. She seemed very tall as she stood over them, her shadow cast onto the ceiling by the gentle light of the glow stone below her. Her expression was unreadable. “It’s late and I’m tired. It’s all very well for you, Skender. Yougot years on us. And you, Sal: you come with talent to spare. But me, the only advantage I’ve got is the ability to work hard, and I’ll bet we won’t be allowed to work as a team when it comes to exams. So if you don’t mind ...”
She turned away to tug back the covers of her bed, and Skender pulled a mock-terrified face.
“Okay, Shilly,” he said. “I understand.” He climbed to his feet. “Goodnight, squeaker. See you in the morning.”
“‘Ni — oh, hell. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight to you too, Shilly.”
“Take this with you.” She handed him the glow stone, and he took it out into the hallway with surprising obedience.
They got ready for bed by starlight. Shilly said nothing, and seemed to fall asleep straight away. Sal lay awake, looking out at the stars. The feeling of the globe coming to life stayed with him, tingling in his bones. He felt as though he had exercised vigorously: completely exhausted yet strangely invigorated at the same time. He wondered how Shilly could sleep if she felt anything remotely the same. She was wrong about herself, he knew that much. She could do more than just work hard. She understood Blind better than either of them. She instantly grasped things that even Skender failed to understand. He suspected that her comprehension of the deeper workings of the Change was greater than his would ever be. The Mage Erentaite had said that he and Shilly complemented each other almost perfectly, and that simply wouldn’t be true if she had nothing to offer.
His invisible muscles twitched, like wings waiting to unfurl and propel him upward, into a waiting sky.
When he finally fell asleep, it was to the sound of soft crying from the bed next to his, but he was too deep in his own imagination to hear.
Chapter 11
Dead Wood
Life in the terraced cliff-city had changed little for generations, judging by the paths worn in stone steps. The cycle of cold nights and burning days seemed unchanging, too, and Shilly imagined that students had been going through the same motions as she for hundreds of years, constantly putting on and taking off layers of clothes, depending on the time of day. The extremes of temperature were taking their toll on the old stone walls, however. She could see where brickwork had been repaired or the cliff itself had collapsed. One whole wing of the city had been swept clean away in an avalanche two hundred years earlier, Raf told her, and she believed him. But for the students whose duty it was to maintain the ancient structure, it might have fallen completely away long ago.
She was beginning to feel that way herself, after just one week. Stretched in one direction, pressured in another — her first few days in the Keep had almost been enough to make her snap, after everything that had brought her there. The security she had hoped for was painfully absent, leaving her feeling over-extended, dangerously off-balance.
She refused to let it get to her. Instead of snapping, she devoted herself to her studies with a determination so great that she almost managed to convince herself that she was enjoying them. And in truth the lessons on theory were fascinating. They took everything she had learned from Lodo and raised it to new levels. Almost immediately she began to understand just how much more there was to learn. She was a child who had been locked in a cupboard all her life, able to see the outside only through a keyhole. A key had been inserted into that lock, blocking her sight for a moment; then the key had turned, the door had opened, and now she had the entire world before her, vast and mysterious.
The trouble was, she couldn’t explore it on her own. Because she had no innate talent, she was forced to rely on others just as she relied on the crutches to walk. Nothing brought that fact home harder than the practical lessons, where they learned the basics of lifting, forming, binding, shaping. While the others did what came naturally, she could only watch and imagine what it was like. If she did have the opportunity to try for herself, using the talent of one of the other students, she was conscious of the fact that she was holding someone else back by doing so. What she took, they missed. And she had already taken enough from Sal. After the night experimenting with the light-sink, guilt nagged at her every time he offered.
The suspicion that, given talent or an unlimited source, she could be better than any of them, made her fate harder to accept. Her skill at drawing, which Lodo had fostered and Wyath had encouraged, served her in very good stead, assisting her when it came to visualising and experimenting with known patterns. Raf noticed her ability almost immediately, and even Mage Van Haasteren commented on it. If just half his students had half her intelligence, he said privately after one lesson, the Keep would have the highest graduation rate of any school in the Interior. She became more angry about it the more she thought about it. The talented ones like Sal had it so easy. They didn’t appreciate how lucky they were.
Worst of all was the fact that they had an expression for people like her. She overheard it a couple of times, when they thought she wasn’t listening. They called people without the Change dead wood. They spoke about dead wood in derogatory tones and laughed at the things dead wood couldn’t do. Shilly was dead wood. She knew it, and they certainly knew it, and it didn’t seem to matter that she was in the Keep, anyway, determined to prove them all wrong. The reminders of what she was were constant.
She was in the Keep, yes. There were mountains visible from her window and there was snow on them. She was being taught the Change; she had made it to the end of her journey. But it wasn’t anything like she had expected. She was being taught the things she longed to learn, but everything else was wrong. The Mage Van Haasteren was hardly to be seen around the Keep. Senior students took all their lessons, and they thought she was dead wood. They knew as little about Lodo’s past as she did.
Only the Mage Erentaite’s words, whispered to her at the end of her healing session with the old woman, kept her going.
“Endure.” The old woman’s depthless sight had filled the world. “Be the stone wall that stands against the storm. Be strong and resilient. You will find your place.”
She tried to be the wall the elderly mage wanted her to be, to remember that she was supposedly part of a one-of-a-kind pairing. It was hard when the storm came from inside her — when the feelings that threatened to snap her in two wouldn’t let her rest, even at night. Resenting Sal for having the Change solved nothing, she told herself, and wanting to hurt him solved even less. It shouldn’t matter that he was fitting so effortlessly into the place she so desperately wanted to be hers, or that he had lied to her about Behenna and kept the light-sink to himself. That was old news. She shouldn’t let it get to her.
But it did. It left her feeling isolated from him, and ignored by him, her supposed partner in whatever it was that made everyone think that she and Sal were special. And she was frightened by the ease with which she could hurt him, if she wanted to. It was clear he hadn’t noticed what she had done during the light-sink experiment — or almost done, she told herself. It hadn’t even felt like her doing it, more as if she had been outside her body watching someone else. Sal probably thought it was nothing more than the effort of making the globe shine, and it would be better if he co
ntinued to think that, she decided. She hadn’t quite snapped, after all. It would never happen again. No one needed to know.
The night before the Mage Erentaite was due to return, she was sitting in her usual spot on the balcony with a blanket draped over her shoulders, reading as the sun set. There were books on hundreds of subjects in the Keep’s library. As well as learning about the Change, she was attempting to fill in some of the blanks she had uncovered on arriving in Ulum. She read about vast paper mills, tanneries and iron refineries; a complicated bureaucracy consisting of clerks trained to expedite the many tasks required to keep the giant cities working; an equally complicated system of checks and balances designed to ensure the cities traded as equals, with communication between them encouraged by messengers and Stone Mages. The decisions of the Synod filtered down through Interior society in much the same way those of the Sky Wardens’ Conclave spread from the Haunted City. When the Synod gathered at the Nine Stars every month, it did so both to provide broad guidelines and to judge specific cases in which an injustice might have occurred.
The Nine Stars hadn’t appeared on the maps Sal’s father had kept in the buggy. When she finally found out where it was, she hadn’t believed it at first. The northern edge of most of the maps of the Interior ended at the Long Sleep Plains from where, Brokate had explained, much of the country’s grain and stock came. Beyond that, she learned, lay an unnamed desert. In the very heart of that desert was the Nine Stars. What sort of place it was, the map didn’t reveal, but the fact that the nearest town was easily five hundred kilometres away was remarkable enough. Only one road led from Ulum to the place where every major decision affecting the country was made.
It was a strange arrangement, Shilly thought, but no less strange than the many other things she had to assimilate before she would ever feel comfortable here. She was still having trouble with the food. They put spices in everything.
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