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

by Sean Williams

  He agreed wholeheartedly with that. There was nothing to stop a blind, old mage like Jarmila Erentaite from permanently taking over a young woman in order to live her remaining years fit and healthy instead of infirm and weak. It didn’t matter that the woman’s body would have been empty when the mage moved in; it wasn’t hers. What if the young woman’s mind ever tried to come back? She would have nowhere to go. She really would be lost, then.

  He knew very little about what made a person who they were and where they went when their body was empty, but he couldn’t believe that the body before him would function if its mind wasn’t alive somewhere.

  “What was her name?” he asked the mage, thinking: If she can’t answer, I’ll know this is wrong.

  “Yeran,” she said, without hesitation.

  “And what happens to your body when your mind is — here?”

  “It sleeps under the watchful eye of my assistant. If anything should go wrong at her end, I would be summoned immediately.”

  “Do all the Stone Mages do this?”

  “Only the ones who are on the Synod, and then not everyone. All are required to travel in person at least once a year, and most usually choose the time of the solstices. Even I must do this. If I am unfit to take the journey, then I am unfit to be on the Synod. Does that seem reasonable to you?”

  “I — I guess so.” The answers to his questions didn’t entirely satisfy him, proving that the matter wasn’t so easy to resolve.

  “Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

  She smiled as he floundered for a moment. Who was he to question the ways of the Stone Mages? The decision the Synod would make should be most on his mind, not how they made it. But could he respect the decision of people who had anything at all in common with golems? He didn’t know.

  “When does it start?”

  “At sunset tonight.” The eyes of the mage’s vessel were clear and blue, lighter than his grandmother’s and his own. He couldn’t quite bring himself to call her “Yeran”, for that person was no longer there, but he still baulked at thinking of her as entirely Jarmila Erentaite. Sal wondered what it felt like to see again through such young eyes, even if it was only once a month.

  She took his arm and directed his attention into the heart of the bowl. “We will gather here to decide the issues of the Interior until the sun rises and sets them into stone. There are many things to discuss. Your matter will not be the first, but it will not be the last, either. You’ll need to rest in order to be ready. Even though you won’t be talking, you will still find it exhausting. That I guarantee you.”

  He nodded, knowing it to be true. His entire body ached from the night’s drive and the confrontation with Behenna. It was only his mind that resisted sleep.

  “What about the Judges?” he asked, curious about those who would ultimately decide his fate. “Do they travel here like you?”

  “Not all, Sal. Some of them live here permanently, in their own bodies.” A slight hesitation caught his attention, but she didn’t elaborate. “Come on,” she said, her manner instantly more cheerful. “Let’s go for a drive around the edge on the way. It’ll be quicker — and I’ve always wanted to do this.”

  The surface of the bowl was smooth and never steep. Sal drove the buggy cautiously at first, but the Mage Erentaite urged him to go faster. Soon they were speeding rapidly around the inside of the bowl as though it were a racing track, with the decaying tower-skeletons as an audience and the sound of the engine growling off the walls. The mage in her younger body stood up on the seat and revelled in the wind sweeping through her hair.

  “Yes!” She looked down at Sal, her smile wide and joyful. “There’s always time for happiness, Sal, no matter the place or the circumstances. Remember that. Just a small amount of light can dispel the deepest darkness.”

  He smiled back and urged the buggy faster still, taking it in sweeping turns back and forth across the bowl, great figure eights that swayed them from side to side and made Shilly’s crutches whip around on the tray. Only then did he realise that he had run off with them, and he instantly felt bad about it.

  His attention was off driving long enough for gravity to override his steering. The buggy drifted naturally inward without him intending it to.

  “No, don’t go into the centre,” said the mage, putting one of her vessel’s hands firmly on his shoulder. “Leave that for tonight. Go back to the edge.”

  Her tone was no longer cheerful, almost warning, and he did exactly as she said, putting the relatively small collection of buildings and pillars, and the glistening pool of water half-drowning them, behind him. Closer to, the pillars hadn’t seemed so small. Among them, he received the impression of giant upraised wings, although what they could belong to he had no idea.

  “There.” She pointed at a hole in the wall. It might have been the same tunnel through which he had entered. He had lost all orientation during the drive. “Drive right in. Slowly.”

  He did so, unable to see where he was going for a moment.

  “Over there.” She pointed. “Park under that overhang. The buggy will be safe there, I promise.” He did so, feeling her gaze on him all the way. “You understand that you’ll have to let Warden Behenna have it back when he arrives?”

  He nodded, feeling a flush rise up his neck and into his cheeks. Erentaite hadn’t mentioned the theft before then. He had hoped it wouldn’t come up.

  “Will it hurt my case?” he asked.

  “That depends.” The buggy’s engine died and they were left in sudden, startling silence.

  “Tell me why you ran here, Sal.”

  “To surprise Warden Behenna,” he lied, hoping she didn’t already know the truth. He didn’t want the Synod to know that he had deliberately tried to ruin the career of another Change-worker. “To put him off guard. He thinks he’s won, and I hate that. I want him to know that he could still fail.”

  She nodded. “And by running to us, you’re telling your grandmother that you feel safer with us than her. That you can trust us to be objective. You’re telling the Synod that, too.”

  He hadn’t thought of that. “Do you think it’ll help?”

  “No more than talking to us would have. The theft can be used as much for you as against you. It’s up to those speaking on your behalf to do it properly.” Her gaze held him fixed a moment longer. “Whatever you do, Sal, let those words prevail or fail as the Judges decide. This is a council of reason, not passion. The Judges will not be swayed by shows of force, and such certainly cannot injure them. Strike out and you will only hurt yourself.”

  Sal nodded. The serious tone of her voice left him in no doubt as to what would happen if he let anger or frustration stir his wild talent.

  “The Weavers —”

  “Don’t say their name here!” Her eyes darted past him, deeper into the shadows. “Don’t even think of them.”

  Alarmed, he shrank back in the seat. “Sorry. I didn’t know that I shouldn’t.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Sal. Just be careful. They have eyes everywhere.” The Mage Erentaite startled him by slapping both hands on the thighs of her vessel body. “I’m the one who should be sorry, if anyone must. Neither Yeran nor you has been eating well lately. We both need food and rest.” She climbed out of the buggy. “Come with me and we’ll rustle up a meal, then it’s off to bed. The ceremony will go for a long time tonight.”

  “What do I need to do?”

  “Perhaps nothing. The fact that you have chosen not to speak will make it harder for you to defend what you think is right, but it will also make it harder for the Synod to ignore you. If that makes sense,” she added with a smile.

  “Do you think it’s right?”

  “It would be wrong of me to say in advance.” She put a thin arm around his shoulder and pointed toward a door. “All I can do is ensure that you don’t make thing
s any worse for yourself.”

  With that, she launched into a long and detailed description of the history, rituals and protocols of the Synod. Whether it was her intention to bore him mindless with the litany of dos and don’ts she poured onto him, he didn’t know for certain, but it worked anyway. He almost nodded off in the middle of the meal — simple bread and vegetable broth served in a kitchen deep under the ruined city, where other vessels served themselves or were handfed by the orderlies who tended them. He lost track of all the Judges and the decisions they’d made. The names, an endless litany of them, began to sound the same. By the time she showed him to an empty dormitory and he collapsed into bed, his thoughts were on nothing but sleep.

  He didn’t rest long, however. He was awoken from a dream in which he had asked the Mage Erentaite, in her original body, how the city of the Nine Stars had earned its name. She smiled and pointed upward. In the sky above shone nine bright lights that turned in a giant circle. They looked like stars but obviously weren’t: apart from their unnatural motion, they were too bright and clear, too close. He soon became dizzy with his head tipped back, watching them spinning around, getting faster and faster with every turn until they were just a blur, a bright circle in the sky, and he lost his balance completely and fell upward, into the stars — into the Void, where all the little parts of his mind that he’d lost wrapped around him like a web, choking him.

  He woke at the sound of a voice inside his head.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Sal.”

  “What?” He sat up, blinking, and found himself staring at a lizard frozen on the far side of the wall, splayed as though caught in mid-motion. Apart from that and the low cot he was lying on, the stone-walled room was empty. “Who —? Where are you?”

  “I’m not there with you,” said the voice, “although I soon will be.”

  Sal placed its source, finally. The voice belonged to the Mage Van Haasteren and came to him via the Change.

  “What time is it?” The only light came from glow stones in the hall outside; it could have been either midnight or midday for all that he could tell.

  “Almost sunset. They’ll come for you in a few minutes.”

  “Where are you?” he asked again.

  “We’re within sight of the Nine Stars and will arrive in time for the beginning of the Synod. We’ll certainly be there for your hearing.”

  Sal rubbed his eyes and thought of all the miles the caravan had travelled without a break. It had been hard enough in the buggy. “I wasn’t trying to hold you up.”

  “I know, Sal. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Your idea was a good one. Perhaps a little ruthless, but the victim did bring it on himself. You simply guided him — just as your grandmother guided you into his hands back in Ulum. Behind every powerful solution, as they say, there lies a powerful need.”

  “But it worked, didn’t it?” Sal said, breaking into what sounded like the beginning of a lesson. “He could use the Change, even though he wasn’t trained the right way?”

  There was a slight pause, as though the mage was reluctant to admit that he had been wrong. But in the end he did so with only a slight edge of bitterness to his voice. “Yes, that’s true. Whether he knows what this means, though, I’m not sure. He is asleep at the moment. Hence this communication, while he won’t notice.”

  “Can Tait sense anything?”

  “I doubt it. The journeyman isn’t half as talented as he would like Shilly to believe. I gather the Haunted City sent him home before he finished training, and I can understand why.”

  That was pretty much what Lodo had said, back at Fundelry. And he had been right about the rest, too. But that was only half Sal’s problem. “What about Shilly? Is she okay?”

  “She’s angry, Sal, and confused. She suffered a minor injury during the storm, and she resents you for leaving without her. I haven’t said anything to her about what you did, though, and neither has Behenna. He wouldn’t, of course, even though he won’t be able to hide what’s happened to anyone sensitive.”

  “Like the Synod?”

  “Yes. Everyone there will know the moment they see him. His torc may not have exploded or turned green, but it might as well have. He’s marked, now, like Lodo, as you wanted him to be.”

  Sal felt a moment of satisfaction. Serves him right, he thought to himself. Behenna had got exactly what he deserved.

  A sudden and unexpected rush of shame followed that thought, though. Did he have any right to destroy the career of a Sky Warden to further his own ends? Even though that was what everyone around him, it seemed, was doing to him, he didn’t want to adopt their strategies in return. That would make him as bad as them — one thing his father most definitely had not wanted for him.

  He guessed that deep down he had thought it wouldn’t work. That there would be no consequences. All he wanted was to stay in the Interior, his mother’s birthplace. Hurting someone in the process of making that possible wasn’t part of the plan.

  He couldn’t even say that he’d had no choice, because there were always choices. He knew that. His father could have chosen not to pursue his feelings for a married woman. His mother could have chosen not to encourage the advances of one of her husband’s acquaintances. From those two choices had flowed so many ramifications — and they were still flowing.

  Along with the questions. If anyone could use the Change, anywhere, why were the two schools of thought kept so separate, and where, ultimately, did the Change come from? There were so many secrets and mysteries surrounding something that had seemed relatively simple — if awe-inspiring — when he had first found out about it.

  He almost asked about the Weavers, wondering if they were the ones the Mage Erentaite had hinted that he and Shilly had to learn to defend themselves against, but the elderly mage’s warning not to even think the name stopped him from mentioning them, too.

  “What do you think will happen?”

  “Time will tell, Sal. If your plan doesn’t work — and it hasn’t yet, note — I don’t know what will happen. Shom Behenna is not a man to be happily thwarted. You tried at the Divide and he persisted further than you or I ever expected him to. Perhaps he will simply accept it if the Judges’ decision goes against him, but I doubt another loss at your hands will sit easily. If he doesn’t decide that the cost already has been too great and lets you slip through his fingers, I’m sure he will make every effort to make sure you remain in his grasp.”

  “And he’s not toothless now, is he?”

  The mage hesitated a moment before answering. “No, Sal. I won’t lie to you. He’s not. He has nothing left to lose.”

  The thought hung between them for a good minute. A heavy dread settled into Sal’s stomach and dragged his spirits down with it. The sense of accomplishment he had felt on the way to the Nine Stars was gone. All he had left now was the knowledge that he had done everything he could, whether he should have done it or not.

  “We are almost there,” said the mage. “Tait will soon wake his master, and I don’t want him to suspect that I’ve been talking to you. We’ll see you at the Synod before long. Jarmila has met you, I gather?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do as she says. She has only ever done the right thing, as long as I’ve known her, and only ever told the truth.”

  Just like a golem, Sal thought.

  “I will,” he promised.

  “And one more thing,” the mage added. “In case I’m not able to talk to you afterward, in private, there’s something you should know. Lodo’s heart-name is Athim. Remember, and use it well.”

  “How?”

  “You will understand when the time is right.”

  Then the mage was gone. Sal was left alone with the lizard — and his puzzlement — for far too brief a space. But long enough. By the time the Mage Erentaite came to take him to the Synod, with Yeran’s body wash
ed and fully clothed in white formal robes, he could feel Shilly again. The caravan was therefore very close, and the moment of confrontation had almost come.

  As he readied himself, he came to a sort of conclusion. No matter what happened next — whether he was dragged back to the Strand against his will or freed to return to the Keep — he would never regret his last, headlong flight in the buggy. As a farewell to the life he had loved with his father, it couldn’t have been fitter. As a sign of what he could do when he put his mind to it, likewise. He had crossed a boundary in his life, and now it was time to move on.

  Straightening his clothes, he went to face the Stone Mage Advisory Synod and the Judgment of the Interior.

  Chapter 17

  Nine Stars, One Mind

  A frill-necked lizard hissed at Shom Behenna as he passed. Shilly, leaning on Tait not far away, saw the warden flinch as though struck.

  “What’s wrong now?” asked Radi Mierlo, at his side.

  “Nothing,” he said, although his dark skin had turned ashen. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  The lizard watched him go, then scuttled into shadows cast by the torchlight guiding their way and disappeared.

  “What was that all about?” asked Shilly. The warden’s behaviour had been decidedly unusual since Sal had run off with the buggy: impatient and dismissive until Sal had been located again, then moody afterward, as though worried about something. Tait had been odd, too. Shilly couldn’t understand what they had to worry about. Sal had been found and the Synod would go ahead as expected. The warden was getting exactly what he wanted.

  “Lizards are the eyes and ears of the mages,” Tait said, “just as seagulls are for Sky Wardens.”

  She nodded. That made sense; lizards were as common as gulls in the desert, and people tended not to notice them. But why had it hissed so venomously at the warden as he walked by and not the others? Because he had used the Change in the Interior? She didn’t understand why that should make such a difference.