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

by Sean Williams

  I haven’t got all night, you know!

  When he finally felt it, he jerked upright in the seat as though starting awake from a light sleep. He looked around automatically, gathering his senses. The night was crisp and cool in the wake of the storm. There was only him and the stars and the road rushing by and —

  tap

  — at the back of his mind, like a guilty memory he couldn’t shake loose.

  Was it him? Sal concentrated on the faint sensation, wary of responding but not wanting to lose it. He didn’t want to be too hard to find. His foot eased off on the accelerator and the buggy slowed to a halt in the middle of the road.

  tap

  It wasn’t Van Haasteren or Skender. He could tell that much. It wasn’t the other Stone Mages, either. Their minds had a different flavour. There was no one else it could be.

  tap-tap

  Yes. Shom Behenna had given in to temptation. He had dipped into the source of the Stone Mage’s power and used it for his own. He had broken the golden rule. Once you cross the line, the Mage Van Haasteren had said, there’s no returning. You’re trapped in between, belonging to neither one nor the other. He had betrayed himself exactly as Sal had hoped he would.

  Sal quashed a feeling of triumph. He had at best only won a small battle, not the war. He didn’t know how far Behenna had gone to find him, and whether that amount was enough to mark him forever.

  tap-tap

  In order to give the warden a little encouragement, Sal eased back on the Cellaton Mandala so there could be no doubt at Behenna’s end that Sal knew he had been found.

  The words came immediately, travelling from mind to mind in the same way Behenna had spoken to Sal by the bridge over the ravine.

  “Not so clever this time, Sal.” The warden was unable to hide the self-satisfaction in his thoughts. “You didn’t really think you could escape from me, did you?”

  Sal concentrated on replying. He had never before attempted such a communication without physically touching the other person. All he could do was imagine the trail of Behenna’s words to their source, using the visualisation technique Shilly had taught him in Fundelry, and hope that his reply would follow.

  “No. I didn’t think that.”

  It worked. The warden heard and replied instantly. “Then what? You thought you could talk to them first, get them to change their minds? That’s not going to work, either. They don’t meet until the night after this one. Most of them won’t even be there until tomorrow, and we’ll have caught up by then. Youwasting your time.”

  “So are you,” Sal shot back.

  Behenna chuckled. “I admire your spirit; I really do. But you’re coming back with me whether you want to or not — even if I have to drag you back by the hair, every step of the way. You really don’t have any other options open to you.”

  The viciousness of the image surprised him. “Why not?” he asked, partly to give himself time to track the warden’s exact location, but also to learn the answer. Why did someone follow a single boy for thousands of kilometres across little more than desert and wasteland? “Why am I so important to you, Warden Behenna?”

  “Not you, Sal, but what you represent, what you can help me obtain. Bringing you back will make me, Sal. At the very least, it’ll guarantee that I’ll never have to do anything like this again — and that’s the point. Being a Selector is a minor honour, a desk job for bureaucrats and failures. I’m neither. I can do better. Fundelry was just one step up the ladder. What they give me when I come back with you will be more to my tastes.”

  “You’re risking everything just to get a promotion?”

  “I won’t fail, Sal. Don’t consider that a possibility. I will bring you back with me, and I will be rewarded. And if you think I don’t deserve it, ask yourself why there’s only me talking to you now. Where are the others, the dozens of other Sky Wardens the Syndic sent out after you? There aren’t any left: that’s the answer. There aren’t any because I’m the best, and I deserve recognition for it. If I’d been around when your parents eloped, they would never have got away with it. And neither will you.

  “You’ve had your time in the sun, Sal. Are you going to stop the buggy and turn around now or do we have to go through this ridiculous charade all night?”

  Sal didn’t answer immediately. Behenna’s arrogance woke an anger in him similar to that which he had felt for his grandmother. Radi Mierlo and the warden were perfectly matched, both more than happy to sacrifice someone else’s chance at happiness in order to further their own ends. Sal’s needs and feelings were irrelevant, except when they got in the way of their plans.

  But it was good to know that, he told himself — to be certain of it. If they didn’t care what happened to him, why should he care about them in return?

  He had followed the thread of the man’s voice back to its source. Behenna was moving north and west, presumably following the road toward the Nine Stars with the rest of the caravan. Sal knew the crossroad wouldn’t fool him. He wouldn’t let go, because he was right. Sal was trapped.

  The warden’s mind was hard to read clearly, unlike the storm, but it was clear enough. Sal had wondered once why Sky Wardens hadn’t descended on him in Yor when he had accidentally given away his position. He knew now that Behenna had kept the slip to himself in order to maximise his gain. The Sky Warden’s ambition, determination and pride shone like the sun through clouds of uncertainty and desperation. It was his desperation that Sal hoped to exploit. How far, he wondered, could he push it?

  “You think you’re going to be a hero,” he said.

  “For doing my job. That’s all.”

  “You’re very confident of it. Are you sure they’ll even want you back, after this?”

  “Words are nothing, Sal, and neither is looking for someone. Minor charms requiring the bare minimum of potential. No one will ever know about them.”

  “No?” Sal closed his eyes and concentrated.

  Using every iota of his raw, wild talent, he shouted down the thread connecting his mind and the warden’s, putting all his anger and resentment into one wordless, primal roar.

  The warden responded as he had hoped, by putting up barriers to resist the mental flood. But he did more than that: he fought back. Sal felt Behenna’s resolve strengthen once the surprise ebbed. He was going to teach Sal a lesson. The defensive wall tightened, gathered itself around the warden’s mind, formed a sharp point and lunged.

  Sal felt the power of it, the rage that fuelled it, and didn’t know how to resist it. It knocked his attack aside as easily as a knife through rain. He had just enough time to be afraid, to think that maybe he should have thought more carefully about attacking a fully-fledged Sky Warden, to steel himself however ineffectually for the impact —

  — when it was gone. The attack vanished as abruptly as it had formed. The line between him and the warden had been cut from the other end. Behenna’s mind was absent from his, leaving nothing but a faint aftertaste of annoyance in its wake.

  Annoyed at whom? Sal wondered. Sal or himself? There was no way of telling, now that the line was broken.

  He waited for a good ten minutes before starting the buggy and driving on. The long-distance conversation had exhausted him, left him feeling hollow and weak. One thing Lodo had taught him all too well was the inherent danger of sending even a part of himself to another, across any sort of distance. All that separated minds of every kind — talented or not — was the Void Beneath. Stretching across that emptiness took effort and attracted risk. He wondered, briefly, if part of him had been lost when Behenna had broken the link between them, but decided that if it had been, it wasn’t much he would miss. The fading echoes of the shout, perhaps; maybe a gasp of surprise. Not even a fully formed word.

  He waited. No tap-tap. Behenna knew where Sal was headed, and had decided to leave well enough alone. It was only a matte
r of time, now, before the caravan caught up. The trap had been sprung, Sal thought, but found himself wondering: on whom?

  Dawn brought light to the still damp world, revealing just how much it had changed overnight. Instead of a vast, stony plain, Sal saw nothing but orange sand everywhere. The horizon appeared to be nearer, since the sand lay in dunes, some of them many metres high, but the lack of anything other than sand made the eye slip and skid in a way that was worse than flat infinity. A single rock would be enough, Sal thought, to give him something to look at.

  The road was all that existed for him, stretching forward and behind in a perfectly straight line. Water still lay pooled in places. The sun would quickly evaporate what didn’t soak into the sand, but until then the desert was a different place. Everything smelled fresh and sweet, with a strange pungency that Sal couldn’t identify. Long-dormant seeds would already be stirring below the surface, revived by the water and warmed by the sun. Within days, if the Mage Van Haasteren was to be believed, the desert would be transformed again; life would return for a week or more, until the last drop burned away and this cycle ended. It might be months or even years before another storm visited the desert — but the times between rainfalls didn’t matter. The life in the sand followed its own seasons, far removed from the ordinary procession. Winter and summer were irrelevant in a land like this.

  He realised with surprise that he could feel the life all around him, itching at the back of his mind. It wasn’t like the Change. It reminded him of the way he could feel Shilly when she was near, but more spread out, infusing the whole land. The storm had stirred the desert from its long slumber and he was there to witness its awakening. As a result he didn’t feel alone as he drove. The sensation that he was, briefly, part of the desert’s cycle of rebirth buoyed him along.

  There was no fighting his exhaustion, though. The ancient paved road was treacherous. Apart from the water, the storm had deposited sand in small drifts, requiring him to concentrate in case the wheels slipped. Sal didn’t know how long it would take the caravan to catch up, but camels were better suited to this sort of terrain and they wouldn’t rest with Behenna urging them on. He didn’t want to sleep for fear of waking in captivity again. He wanted to arrive at the Nine Stars free, even if he didn’t leave that way.

  The sun rose ahead of him, drying his clothes on him. When he stopped to stretch, his limbs felt as stiff as the fabric. He wondered what Shilly was doing, whether she knew what was going on or had missed the implications of what he had done. He imagined Behenna fuming at the loss of the buggy, being forced to travel with the other passengers. Sal wondered if he had done enough to undermine the warden’s determination. Then it was back onto the road for another long stint driving endlessly onward. It was too late for doubts ...

  Sal didn’t see the turn until it was almost upon him. The road swung right without warning and his eyes, half-dazzled by the sun, had been lulled into complacency by the unchanging terrain. Spinning the wheel as hard as he could, he wrenched the buggy wildly into the turn, skidding on the sandy road surface and almost losing control. The back of the buggy slid for a split second and he spun the wheel the other way. It skidded again, then righted itself, heading due south along the new section of road.

  He braked when he saw what lay ahead through the vast dunes, feeling a shock of recognition go through him — albeit one followed by a contrasting sense of strangeness. A mighty sandstone escarpment lay directly across his path, barely a kilometre away. There was a wide, mouth-like arch at its base that reminded him of the entrance to Ulum, but the scale was completely different. This archway was much bigger — and so was the city that loomed above it.

  Where the escarpment was so substantial it looked like a mountain, the city was in a state of greatly advanced decay, almost a ghost of itself. Its towers were jagged and incomplete, many of them just girder frameworks held up by their neighbours, which were themselves crumbling away. No glass glinted in the sun; there was none of the cold beauty of the city in the salt lake. This city had been stripped by time back to its skeleton, and remained trembling on the edge of complete ruin like a vast and terrible monument to mortality.

  Sal couldn’t tell if the natural wall of rock hid the base of the city, or was its base. But if the escarpment formed the top of a buried giant’s head, he thought, then the city was the giant’s crown. A crown of iron thorns. The image grew increasingly powerful as he pressed his foot down on the accelerator and drove nearer.

  It took a surprisingly long time. He didn’t truly grasp the scale of the escarpment until he was in its maw, feeling like a bug braving a grain silo. The archway yawned over him like the mouth of a god.

  As he drove into its shadow, the words of the golem returned to him: Know this, Sayed Hrvati: there are three places to which creatures such as I are drawn. This one is in decay; the second is north of here, beyond my influence; the third lies far to the south.

  If this was the second place, Sal thought, maybe he had made a mistake coming there on his own. Even if it was beyond that particular golem’s influence, others still might live there. He and Shilly hadn’t escaped the first one so much as been allowed to leave. It wasn’t safe to assume that he would be so lucky another time.

  He kept driving. The tunnel mouth shrank behind him until it almost looked small. Just as he reached to switch on the buggy’s headlights, a gate rumbled open ahead of him, dispelling the gloom. Light blinded him for a second, and he braked until he could see properly. The road led through the gate — a fraction of the size of the tunnel wall, but easily five metres across — and into the heart of the city.

  Or so he had expected. He was surprised to find himself on the edge of a wide, stone bowl, easily a kilometre across. It looked like a giant crater, ringed by the jagged remains of the towers. The image of the city as the crown on a giant’s head turned out to be perfectly apt, for it was completely hollow. The city was shaped in a ring, with the giant circular space in the middle.

  He stopped the buggy before he went too far and looked around him. Sand had pooled where the walls met the floor of the bowl, but the rain of the previous night had disturbed the drifts, spreading them down and inward in large, feathery shapes. At the centre of the bowl was a cluster of structures that looked as though they had been added later. Sal couldn’t quite make them out. Heat haze obscured the details. They looked like pillars of granite, or the trunks of branchless grey trees.

  A ripple of light at the base of the pillars suggested that the bowl was partly full of water. The recent rains were obviously collected there, perhaps to be siphoned off into subterranean reservoirs rather than left to evaporate. Water would be precious, so deep in the desert.

  Another thought struck him, then. The bowl and the city surrounding it appeared to be completely uninhabited — but someone must have opened the gate for him. The small of his back itched.

  “Hello?” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Is anyone there?”

  A faint echo returned. A breeze swept through the bowl as though in reply. Apart from that, for a good thirty seconds, there was no other movement.

  Then, from behind him, the gate mechanism clanked and began to shut. He turned in alarm — there was no way out of the bowl apart from that gate — and saw a skinny young woman standing in front of the wall.

  “Hello, Sal.” Her cheekbones were prominent and her brown hair looked unwashed. She seemed to have come out of nowhere. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. We weren’t expecting you so soon.”

  An inflection in her voice reminded him of someone. There was a weird feeling in the air, as though things were moving that he couldn’t see.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “Yes. I am the Mage Erentaite.”

  “What? That’s —”

  She raised a hand. “This will seem impossible to you, Sal, but I assure you that it is so. I am too old to undertake
the journey here myself, in person, so I use this body as a temporary vessel instead. It is my thoughts alone that travel.”

  Understanding dawned. He had wondered how the Stone Mages could warrant such a long journey to and from the Nine Stars every month, and now he knew how they managed it. They sent their minds instead of their bodies.

  But was it so simple? What happened, for instance, to the people who were in the bodies they took over? Did they swap places with the mages, or were they dislocated for a brief time, stuck nowhere at all in the Void Beneath.

  A chill went through him. Creatures such as I, the golem had said. Sal had assumed it had meant other golems, but it might not have been talking about that at all.

  “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” the Mage Erentaite said through another woman’s lips. “Apart from that, you look just as I imagined you.”

  Of course, he thought. In her real body, she’s blind. He licked his lips and forced himself to speak. “I’m sorry. It’s just I’ve never heard of anything like this before. It’s...” He faltered, lacking the right word. Horrible? Frightening?

  “Necessary,” said the mage. “The mountain won’t come to us, so we must go to the mountain. No harm is done to any of the vessels in the process. In fact, they are looked after rather better than they would be without us; they would have starved to death years ago without our care. The empty-minded are easy prey for those who hunt the weak, and it is our duty to ensure that they are protected. This way, we solve two problems with one action.”

  “So...” He struggled to get his head around it. “They’re like this anyway? You didn’t force your way in?”

  “No, Sal. We would never do that. To force our way in when not wanted, or to stay any longer than was necessary, would be abominable.”