“I want to rescue Lodo,” Shilly said with a ring of determination to her voice. “To do that, I have to go to the Haunted City. And as I’ll probably need your help to do it, it would be wrong to lie about my motivations at the beginning. I’ve decided that Lodo told you not to tell me about the globe because that would only make me more determined to get it working. But no matter how determined I am, I still need you to help me do anything with the Change. I can’t trust anyone else.”
“How do you know you can trust me?” Sal asked.
“Maybe we should trade,” she suggested, her eyes catching the light of the quarter moon in the darkness. “Really help each other, this time, instead of just pretend we’re working together. Is there anything you want to do that I can help you with?”
Confront my problems, he thought, in a flash of insight. If neither running from them nor into their embrace didn’t work, then maybe confronting them head-on might.
He wasn’t ready to make that sort of a decision yet, or such a commitment, but it seemed as if someone might have guessed Shilly’s desire well in advance.
Lodo’s heart-name is Athim, the Mage Van Haasteren had said. Remember it, and use it well. It seemed certain to him that they would need that name to bring him back from the Void.
Even without it, Sal didn’t doubt that Shilly would succeed. She, like her leg, had been put under pressure during their journey. Unlike her leg, which had snapped and might never heal, she was stronger than ever. Not all bones heal the same way, he thought, remembering the story of the baker yet again.
“It’s a shame we don’t have Skender here,” he said. “He knows more than both of us put together, even if he doesn’t understand it.”
“Yes — and it’s interesting you should mention him,” said Shilly. “Mawson keeps talking about our ‘third’, the person we need in order to do what we have to do. I don’t know who that is, though. Mawson sees the past, present and future all at once, so it’s sometimes hard to tell what he’s talking about. He must be referring to someone we haven’t met yet, since Skender isn’t coming with us.”
“Has he told you what’s going to happen to us?”
“Maybe.” She looked uncertain. “If he has, I haven’t understood it. He used to make me angry because I thought he was trying to confuse me, but it’s not that. We just think differently, that’s all. We confuse each other.”
“That sounds familiar.”
She laughed and reached across him to take his plate. Her smell, of rosemary and sweat, filled his nostrils. “Don’t think I’m going to do this for you every night,” she said. “And I expect breakfast. You get up before me.”
“I take it you’re moving in?”
“If there’s room.” Hopping off the wagon and onto her one good leg, she peered at the shadowy recesses behind him. The wagon didn’t contain much more than a large chest buried under rugs Brokate hoped would find a home in the Haunted City.
“I think there might be,” he said.
“Good. Even if there weren’t, it’d be better than bunking in a supply wagon.”
“Is that where you’ve been sleeping?”
“Of course. Where did you think I’d been? With Tait and Behenna?”
He didn’t answer.
Perhaps, in the darkness, he saw her smile.
Neither of them heard, in the dead of the desert night, a muffled sound from the chest at the front of the wagon. Sal rolled over, in the grip of an ominous dream, but he didn’t wake. Even if he had, he would have assumed the noise came from Shilly, wound in a tight ball by his feet and breathing evenly, or from the outside where, somewhere on the ground she preferred as a bed, Brokate snored with patient regularity. He probably wouldn’t have recognised the sound for what it was.
The glow stone seemed blindingly bright in the confines of the chest, but in fact it provided barely a glimmer, just enough to read by. The book passed the time, however little of it there was left. There was enough food and water in the chest to last another day.
The reader thought:
This is crazy! I wonder if dad’s deciphered the note yet?
And:
But if I’d stayed I would’ve gone crazy, so it works out even.
And:
I wonder if they’ll turn back when they find me?
Another page turned, rustling very faintly in the stillness.
In a nearby wagon, Mawson’s marble eyes saw the past, present and future as one, and he never slept.
Continued in
The Storm Weaver & the Sand.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2002 by Sean Williams
ISBN 978-1-4976-3475-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Sky Warden & the Sun (Books of the Change) Page 40
