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

by Sean Williams

  Now there was only the storm, crushing her beneath the combined weight of water, wind and thunder. Fundelry was renowned for the storms that blew off the southern ocean, and she had endured a few mighty ones — but there had been nothing like this. The wind had ripped the roof off one of the wagons and tipped another onto its side. One of Zevan’s riders had broken her arm when a piece of debris carried by the wind had struck without warning from the darkness. The only other time Shilly had felt such weather had been when the Alcaide and the Syndic had arrived on their great ship of bone, Os, to take Sal away.

  Something pressed into her from the darkness.

  “Are you all right?” The words were shouted into her ear, but she could barely hear them.

  Lightning flashed, revealing a very wet face. It was Tait.

  “Yes!” she shouted back, brushing her saturated fringe from her forehead.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to get my crutches!” They were on the buggy’s tray, tied down to stop them being swept away.

  “On your own?”

  She didn’t try to explain. Tait and Behenna had moved her from the buggy once it had become clear that the storm wasn’t going to abate. They had covered the buggy with a tarp then disappeared into the storm — to join Radi Mierlo, she had assumed. She had been left alone in one of the food wagons, wondering what everyone else was doing, wherever they were. Eventually she had let frustration get the better of her, and attempted to fix the problem herself. And then she had got stuck.

  “I think it’s easing!” Tait shouted.

  She stared at him as lightning flashed again. Was he serious or just trying to cheer her up? Either way, it was so patently ridiculous that she didn’t honour it with a reply.

  “Any idea who sent it yet?”

  “No. Maybe it was no one. After all, who could make something like this, eh? Only one of the great weather masters in the Haunted City, and they’re a long way from here!”

  She shook her head, not disagreeing with his conclusion, necessarily, but disagreeing with the reason he offered. Weather-workers didn’t make weather; the Change didn’t work that way. They simply guided the weather along, coaxing it into more suitable forms with the help of subtle charms. They were more like shepherds than smiths, urging rather than forcing.

  “Couldn’t Warden Behenna at least tone it down a bit?” she asked.

  Tait shook his head. “He can’t. That’s what he’s trying to explain to Mrs Mierlo. He doesn’t have any power in the Interior.”

  Shilly acknowledged the point with a grunt, even though it seemed stupid to her that a Sky Warden, with supposed influence over water and air, could have no effect on a thunderstorm. She was still irritated with him for not telling her about Lodo, and wasn’t inclined to be charitable.

  A prolonged squall rendered speech impossible for a minute or more. Shilly felt the wagon rock violently on its wheels and was briefly afraid that it might also tip over. But it held. In the centre of the ring of wagons she could just make out the camels, tied together and knowing better than to move anywhere. Their stolid dispositions were quite unchanged. She tried to imitate them as best she could.

  “Shilly, you’re here.” Suddenly Behenna was standing over them, looming out of a flash of lighting like a primitive deity, his face grim.

  “Where else would I go?” she shouted back

  He ignored her. “Tait! Do you remember where we left the buggy?”

  The journeyman pointed across the ring of wagons into the darkness. “Over there!” he yelled back. “By Zevan’s wagon!”

  “That’s what I thought.” The warden’s face became even grimmer. “It’s gone!”

  “What?” But Behenna had vanished into the rain. Tait was instantly on his feet and following him without a word.

  “Hey!” Shilly forced herself upright on her good leg. “What do you mean it’s gone?”

  Her question vanished into the stormy night, and she was left alone with her fears. Could the buggy have been blown away? No, she told herself, that couldn’t be. Unnaturally strong though the wind was, the wagons around her were still there and the buggy was much heavier than them. Someone must have taken it away, then. But who?

  There was only one person she could think of who was likely to do that.

  “Damn you, Sal! I need my crutches!”

  She forced herself to move anyway, hopping more than walking from wagon to wagon, using whatever handholds she could find to take her weight and ignoring the stabbing pain deep in her thighbone if she put her right leg down even for an instant. The distance wasn’t great — not even half that across the square in Fundelry, she told herself, and that took only a moment to walk across — but it was the longest she had travelled on her own since the ravine. The muscles in her good leg were soon quivering with the strain and it took all her concentration not to slip in the mud.

  What the hell did Sal think he was doing? Escaping? There was nowhere to run to, which made the attempt seem stupider than ever. The fact that he had run off without her wasn’t helping either. He would have done it once before, in Yor, had she not caught him in time. Perhaps that had been his plan all along. She had always borne in mind the fact that they would part at some point — but that it might be real, there and then, this way, was a very different thing. She was suddenly struck by the reality that she might never see him again.

  He didn’t even say goodbye ...

  She hopped to where she thought Zevan’s wagon might have been, judging by the direction in which Tait had pointed. As she awkwardly manoeuvred herself around one of the wagon’s sturdy wheels, she heard voices growing louder. A group of people, shouting heatedly, were coming toward her. Before she could get a proper grip on the wheel, their leader, invisible in the darkness, knocked right into her.

  Screaming, she went down. The night lit up as though lightning had struck the wagon beside her — but it wasn’t light. It was pain. She clutched at her injured leg, and suddenly there were people all around her, lifting her, cursing, easing her leg back out into a straightened position.

  Tait was one of them. He cradled her head while they put her in the nearest wagon — Radi Mierlo’s, judging by the great stone head of Mawson watching her from the corner.

  “Shilly, are you okay?” the journeyman asked, wiping her wet hair out of her face. “We didn’t see you, honestly. Van Haasteren almost knocked you right off your feet!”

  Of course it would be him, Shilly thought through the pain and embarrassment. “W-what’s happening?” she gasped, struggling to sit up against the hands holding her down. “Is it Sal? Has he gone?”

  “Well, he’s not here,” said the Sky Warden with a snarl, climbing into the wagon with Skender right behind him. The mage’s son looked like a drowned rat.

  “He’s done a runner!” the boy said, his eyes bright with excitement. “He must have summoned the storm to cover his tracks. I should have known he wasn’t going to take this lying down.”

  “You know something about this?” Behenna asked him, his expression one of too-intense calm. Outside, the storm raged like a living thing. The wagon shuddered from the force of it. It was inconceivable that Sal could have brought such a force into the world. “Did he tell you where he might go?”

  “No, but anywhere apart from here would suit him, I imagine.” The boy cocked his ear at the ceiling. “Listen. I think the rain’s easing. Sal told me he had some sort of fixative — a blood and pearl mix he brought with him from the Strand. My guess is hesomehow rigged the buggy as the focus of the storm. It’s following him wherever he goes, and will keep on doing so until it blows out. Unless he sets it free, of course, in which case it’ll just go wherever it wills. There’s no way of knowing what he’s doing. Isn’t this brilliant, Shilly?”

  “Be quiet,” said the warden, his voice low and dangerous, “unles
s you have something useful to say.”

  Skender glared at the Sky Warden. “I’m a damned sight more useful than you are, here. You’d better start being nice to us, if you want us to help you find him.”

  “He does not want to be found by you,” said the man’kin, its voice cutting through the rain and wind.

  Shilly glanced at the stone bust, and caught Skender doing the same. Tait and Behenna, however, didn’t react.

  “I’m sorry,” said the warden, annoyance giving away to weariness and frustration, or at least a good imitation thereof. “I don’t mean to be rude. Will you look for me? I’m worried about him, you see. The storm —”

  “No need to go on,” said Skender, frowning. Shilly could almost hear his thoughts racing, even if she couldn’t understand them. “You want us to look? That’s fine. We want to find him too. He has to be at the Nine Stars tomorrow whether he wants to be there or not. Dad’s looking for him right now.”

  “He does not want to be found by you,” the man’kin repeated firmly. “That is not his intention.”

  Not his intention, Shilly echoed to herself, frowning. Of course he didn’t intend to be found, she thought. No one who ran away wanted to be caught. Why did the man’kin think that worth saying?

  Skender opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked at Shilly with intense curiosity. Something was going on that she didn’t quite understand.

  Skender tried again. “It’ll be tricky, though,” he said. “The storm is huge, and all the energy it’s kicked up will hide him pretty effectively. I reckon we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, with so few of us looking.”

  “He can’t get away,” Behenna said. “He must be located.”

  “We can only do as much as we can do,” said the boy, unfazed by the determination in the warden’s gaze. “You can’t ask for more than that.”

  Skender glanced at the man’kin and gave a very slight nod. It didn’t repeat its assertion, although Shilly half-expected it to. Skender had said nothing different, so why didn’t the man’kin protest yet again?

  Then it hit her. Mawson hadn’t said that Sal didn’t want to be found. It had said: He does not want to be found by you.

  Shilly leaned back into her seat as Skender slipped out of the wagon, presumably to talk to his father. Behenna would think he was going to pass on the word, to look for Sal, but she knew better. He would actually be telling them not to try too hard.

  Tait put a hand on her shoulder as though to comfort her. The truth was that she no longer felt the pain. All she could think of was Sal driving off in the centre of a storm with all the minds of the Stone Mages looking for him, hoping that someone would realise what he was hoping to do in time.

  And she was left behind. Was this to be her family, then — Behenna and Tait and Mawson and Radi Mierlo? If she spoke up, it certainly would be, even if they brought Sal back. She was far from certain that that was what she wanted. But was staying silent the same thing as supporting Sal’s actions? Did being indecisive mean that she had to let someone else make her decisions for her?

  Mawson watched her closely as she warred within herself over whether to say anything or not. How had the man’kin known? Had it just guessed from what people said around him? Everyday wisdom told her that what Sal was hoping for simply wasn’t possible, but Lodo’s own history had shown her that it was very possible indeed, and had given her some idea of what the consequences might be. The man’kin must have been aware of that too — and, like her, knew that it would probably work. Human nature told her that much.

  She felt a small stab of pity, deep inside her — but ultimately she said nothing. She wasn’t the only one who knew the risks.

  The rain had indeed eased slightly, but it kept coming down heavily as, across the wagon from her, the Sky Warden Shom Behenna closed his eyes in concentration.

  Chapter 16

  Dangerous Seduction

  Like everyone on the great desert in the north of the Interior, Sal knew of only two directions to run: west and slightly south would take him back to Ulum, while east and north led to the end of the road, where the Nine Stars and the Synod of Stone Mages awaited him. Beyond, there was only desert. As far as he knew, there was no other alternative, and the maps in the buggy’s toolbox told the same story.

  So it came as a surprise to him, an hour after leaving the camp, to encounter a crossroad.

  He stopped the buggy and got out, braving the fury of the storm to take a closer look. The wind was deafening and threatened to knock him off balance. In his hour’s travel, the ground beneath him had become sandier and less stony. It was hard to tell through all the rain, but the landscape was definitely beginning to undulate around him, as though the road was cutting through dunes rather than skimming across an endless plain. Both road surfaces were made from cracked, black bitumen across which the water ran like a multitude of snakes.

  There were no markers to tell him where the new road led. He didn’t know what might lie to the northwest of that point, since all the maps he had seen ended just north of the Nine Stars. Maybe it led to the jungles inhabited by the yellow-skinned people that Lebesh the cab driver had told him and Shilly about. He felt safe assuming that the road to the east ultimately ended up at the Divide, most probably at Tintenbar, the second of the two crossings that joined the Interior and the Strand. If he was trying to escape that way, a right turn would have been advisable.

  He wasn’t, but the thought of turning worried at him as he walked back to the buggy and kept driving northeast, toward the Nine Stars. Running to his fate rather than from it might confuse his pursuers for a while — it might even give him a slight margin of control that he had lacked thus far — but he was still running to it. The closer he came to his destination, the more ominously he felt the weight of his possible future pressing down on him.

  Back to the Strand. Back to his great-aunt and the Alcaide. Back to the man who claimed him as a son: Highson Sparre, his mother’s jilted husband. Back to face the consequences of his parents’ defiant love.

  He didn’t want to go back. That much was certain. But he didn’t want to run any more, either. Although going through life like a stone skimming over water had its appeal, he knew now that he needed to learn how to control the Change if he was ever going to live with it. The only way he could learn was to settle down somewhere, and he would never be able to do that with his relatives baying at his heels. He had to find an alternative. There simply had to be another way — and if hurrying to apparent doom was the means to make it happen, he thought, so be it.

  Come on, Behenna. You can’t know where I’m going yet. Don’t let me get away that easily!

  He gunned the buggy on through the rain. The storm was drifting south now that he had set it free. For a while he had travelled at its heart, marvelling at the raw power he had coaxed out of the desert atmosphere. It had been like driving in the centre of a hurricane, surrounded by lightning and a continuous wall of thunder. More than just water was carried by the wind: uprooted plants whipped out of the darkness then were snatched away again. He stung in a dozen places where more substantial objects had struck him. A couple of times the wind had been so severe that it threatened to make even driving impossible, snatching at the buggy’s frame and rocking it violently, lifting one or more wheels from the ground. Had Sal himself not been firmly strapped in, just as the rear tray was firmly secured under the tarp, he could well have been snatched right out of the seat and tossed into the sky.

  He hoped the caravan was enduring the downpour well enough. He didn’t want to hurt Zevan or the riders — or Shilly.

  But he couldn’t make the storm selective; he could only summon it and look after himself. That alone was inconceivable enough. The thought I did this? ran through his mind like a mantra. It was inconceivable that he had been responsible for it. I’m just a kid. What’s the weather doing listening to me?

  But
it wasn’t the weather. It was the Change, ultimately, doing as he willed it. He had set it free for a moment, loosing the pent-up potential buried in the desert. The realisation of what lay at his fingertips sobered any brief fantasies he’d entertained in Fundelry of using the Change for fun. The wild talent was dangerous, Van Haasteren had said. Now he could really see why.

  Although his destination lay northeast, he kept his thoughts firmly on southeast, as though he had in fact taken the right-hand turn. He’d felt the minds of the Stone Mages pass over him earlier, but they hadn’t returned. They weren’t the ones he wanted to succeed. If they found him first, it would all have been for nothing.

  Come on, Sky Warden. Show me what you’re made of!

  The road was slippery, but thankfully almost perfectly straight. Had there been any other traffic, he doubted he would see it in time to stop. Slowly the rain eased. He began to feel surer of his command of the wheel. Within an hour the rain had almost completely abated. The nearly full moon peered through the northern fringes of the storm. Ragged clouds chased each other south, lagging behind the main body yet seeming eager to catch up. That was where all the action was. That was where, he presumed, most attention would be. Certainly, if he had been trying to escape, that would have been the place to do it, in the confusing mass of water and air, almost impenetrable to the Stone Mages, going anywhere but to the Nine Stars.

  He was getting tired. The road was treacherous even without rain to make visibility poor. Huge sheets of water barely distinguishable from the asphalt occasionally lay across his path. His hands and arms grew tired from constantly working to hold his course. The Cellaton Mandala slipped more and more frequently from his mind as his concentration flagged. He began to wonder if he hadn’t miscalculated, just as the tactics behind games like Blind and Advance sometimes eluded him.