The Sky Warden and the Sun

by Sean Williams

  People from the small town moved among the wagons, filling waterbags and topping up rations. Sal found his way to a better vantage point and watched unobtrusively as Zevan negotiated with someone in charge. His arms gestured violently, but the woman he was speaking to didn’t flinch. One hand held a piece of paper; her index finger stabbed at something written on it for emphasis. Zevan grinned his alarming grin—with no trace of humour—then stalked away.

  Sal didn’t have to move to learn what was going on. Just out of sight, the caravan leader held a brief but intense conversation with Radi Mierlo. Sal would recognise her ingratiating yet rock-hard tones anywhere.

  “Prices,” said Zevan without preamble. “They go up.”

  “You said—”

  “I said, they said. Things change. You want to go on?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Prices go up. You pay four hundred extra. No questions.”

  “I’ll pay you when we get back.”

  “No good. Pay now.”

  “I can’t pay you now. I don’t have the money on me. Do you think I’m stupid? There are bandits on roads like this. There are people like you. I hired you to protect me, not rob me, remember?”

  “Business, not robbery,” said the caravan leader, and Sal could imagine his lips tight, his tattooed teeth grinding together. “You pay six hundred, then.”

  “Six hundred? You said four before!”

  “Six hundred when we get back. Or four hundred now. Your choice”

  “Thief!”

  “Pizta! You want to walk home?”

  There was a tense silence, then: “All right. Six hundred it will have to be. I simply don’t have the money to pay you now. Satisfied?”

  “When I see money.” The caravan leader loped off to talk to the woman with the piece of paper. Sal’s grandmother, meanwhile, went away to renegotiate her deals with the Stone Mages sharing the caravan with her, muttering under her breath.

  Sal didn’t listen for long. He had already guessed that the Mierlo family was broke and that any extra fee would be difficult for them to pay. The way his grandmother had leaned so heavily on Manton Gourlay’s generosity, the subtle hints he had picked up from Wyath Gyory and his friend Ori, the determination with which his grandmother clung to her chance to return to the Strand—a place she clearly associated with golden opportunity, so briefly in her clutches and so tragically lost—all spoke volumes to Sal. He didn’t need to hear her beg to know that she was desperate, even if it was buried under bargaining or outright lies.

  He retreated back to the wagon he shared with Skender and Skender’s father and sat on the running board, looking up at the cloudless sky, trying as always not to dwell on the things that hurt him most, but in the main, not succeeding. When the time came to move on, he was no surer about what he would do about them, but he was more certain than ever that he had to try.

  Over the camels and wagons stirring reluctantly back into motion, he heard the buggy’s engine turning over. Through the wheels of the wagon, before he could turn away, he caught a glimpse of the Sky Warden driving it into position at the rear of the caravan. Tait sat beside the warden in the passenger seat, facing backward to talk to Shilly, where she sat propped up on the tray as she had been on their journey together through the Broken Lands.

  The problem wasn’t going away, bringing tears of anger as well as sadness to his eyes. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, although he tried; he was constantly confronted by reality, no matter how hard it was to believe, or to what lengths he went to avoid it.

  He blinked away the tears. If he couldn’t change the situation, at least he could deal with it more maturely. It made sense that Shilly ride in the buggy. There was more space and she could be more comfortable there. She didn’t need him to change her dressings any more, or to help her to the toilet, or to drive her around. Once they had reached the Keep, they hadn’t really needed to stick together any more, even though everyone else seemed to want them to. It was perfectly natural that she might go her own way, without him.

  But—with them?

  He wished he didn’t care. But wishing didn’t solve anything, he told himself. He had only himself to rely on, now, and that would have to be enough.

  The mystery of how Behenna had overtaken them in the Interior—not just beating them to Ulum, but going beyond the underground city to Mount Birrinah, where the Mierlo family lived—had been solved on the first day of their trip to the Nine Stars.

  Behenna had the buggy. Not just any buggy, but the very same Comet copy his father had once owned, and which he and Shilly had driven from Fundelry to the Divide. When Belilanca Brokate had sold it on the far side of the Divide, neither she nor Sal had suspected that Behenna might see it for sale upon crossing himself, two days later, and recognise it for what it was. He had immediately bought it with Sky Warden funds—the irony not lost on him—and used it to set off after Sal, travelling more quickly than any caravan could manage.

  Luckily for Sal, the warden had assumed he would be heading for his mother’s family in Mount Birrinah, and had overshot Ulum completely. But he had soon turned the disadvantage around. It was Behenna who had brought Sal’s grandmother to the underground city in order to press for the Keep to let them in. And now he added it to the caravan as his own personal means of transport.

  No doubt he had enjoyed the look on Sal’s face when the buggy had appeared. It had seemed a miracle at first, until the truth had been revealed. Behenna had the keys. The symbol of Sal’s freedom now belonged to the Sky Wardens.

  It didn’t change anything, though—or so Sal tried to tell himself. He had sold it to Brokate, who had sold it in turn. If a complete stranger had owned it, it would have bothered him less. The best thing to do was to pretend it was a different buggy entirely. If that felt like pretending to be a completely different person, then maybe he should do that too. He had to get used to disappointment, especially if his plan failed and he ended up being returned to the Strand.

  The caravan rode for another hour, then stopped just before sunset at a stone cairn where, judging by the wide space worn into the desert plain around it, caravans had stopped for generations. Zevan didn’t waste any time setting up provisions for the evening meal; barely had the fattening moon risen over the eastern horizon than dinner was over, the dishes were being cleaned, and all there was left to do was settle in for the night. Like most deserts, it was going to be cold.

  Although the landscape hadn’t changed at any point in the previous two days, it was easy enough to encourage Skender to set off on an expedition of discovery. You never knew what might lie hidden among the boulders and the dust, Sal told him: coins dropped by other caravans, fragments of pottery, old charms…

  When they were out of earshot of the camp, but still within easy sight of the campfire, Sal felt safe to begin probing.

  “Do you think people might have lived here, once?”

  “Not likely. There’s nothing to eat but dirt.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t always been like this. What if the weather changed one year and the rain stopped coming? Things like that happened elsewhere, you know. Crops failed; rivers dried up; settlements were abandoned. If it was long enough ago, there might not even be ruins left.”

  “We could be standing on one of them,” said Skender, his eyes wide in the moonlight.

  “There might have been forests from horizon to horizon right here, and we’d never know.”

  “There would be stories about that, if a forest suddenly vanished.”

  “Maybe there were stories, but it happened so long ago that people don’t tell them any more. It’s all forgotten. Dried up like the land.”

  “Why didn’t they use weather-workers?” Skender asked. “Rain doesn’t just stop overnight.”

  “Could they summon enough to live on?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on how much rain there is floating around up there.” Skender pointed vaguely up at the sky, then added: “Whate
ver. You can’t get blood from a stone.”

  Or flowers from a desert, Sal thought to himself. But he remembered what Skender’s father had said about the stony plain being a deluge waiting to happen. All the weather needed was a nudge in the right direction.

  “Do you know how to summon rain?” he asked as innocently as he could.

  “Probably. I’ve seen the pages in Dad’s books. The patterns are reasonably simple. You just need a bit of grunt behind you to make it work, as always.”

  “My dad bought a jar of pearl shell and blood mix from a vendor in the Strand.” The vendor had been Lodo, but Sal didn’t feel it was necessary to explain that. “That’s supposed to be good for getting rain, isn’t it?”

  “Pastes and ointments are generally applied to the place you want a charm to take effect, then activated by the Change. I don’t know how that would work with weather.” The boy looked at Sal through narrowed eyes. “If you’re about to suggest we extend the syllabus again, I’m definitely interested.”

  “I don’t know.” Sal feigned uncertainty. “I’m just curious. If the people who lived here couldn’t do it, I doubt we could.”

  “That’s if there were ever any people here. Maybe no one’s tried before. Do you want to or not?”

  “I suppose we can muck around. See what happens.” He thought of what Skender’s father had said. “It’d be nice to see the flowers, if it worked.”

  “We should get Shilly in on it too,” Skender said. “She’s great with patterns. Remember how well the trick with the light-sink worked?”

  “I remember.”

  “I’ll go get her, if you want.”

  “No,” said Sal, a little too sharply, and Skender noticed.

  “What’s going on with you two?” he asked. “You’re barely talking to each other these days.”

  “It’s nothing. She’ll be tired after the trip, and I don’t want to bother her.”

  “You sure? She hasn’t done anything to you?” the boy asked sharply.

  Sal feigned innocence. He didn’t want to risk Behenna or Tait finding out what he was up to. Everything would be ruined if that happened, and he simply wasn’t sure he could trust Shilly not to mention what they had been doing—even if he didn’t tell her why he wanted to do it.

  “No. We’re just—not getting on, I guess.”

  The half-truth seemed to satisfy the boy. He shrugged and looked around. “Well, here’s as good a place as any.” He squatted and held out his hands. Sal took them and formed the circle they used to share images and words without speech. “Okay. Here’s one pattern. See it? The idea is to make the lines turn—not like tops, but like a stick rolling between your hands. Pretty simple, huh? Or there’s this one: you visualise little clouds forming out of nothing then collapsing into points, like flowers in reverse. You combine that with this one—the spinning boxes—and that’s supposed to do something. I don’t know what, exactly, but that’s what the book says.”

  They ran through several such patterns, from the simple to the fiendishly complex, and Sal committed as many of them as he could to memory. He made a few token efforts to see if the patterns would work, but he always stopped short of trying too hard. They didn’t want to attract the attention of the mages in the caravan—let alone the sole Sky Warden—any one of whom might put a stop to things. Behenna might have been toothless, but he wasn’t blind as well.

  They gave up when the moon was halfway up the sky. In two more nights, it would be full, and at that time the Synod would sit.

  “Do you know how long it would take for rain to come,” he asked Skender as they walked back to the camp, “if we could get it to work?”

  “No idea,” said the boy. “That would depend on the place you tried it. Here, we didn’t even get a nibble, so it might take days. Maybe it would never come. In the Strand it might just blow in off the sea in minutes. If the people who lived here had had that, maybe they’d still be here now.”

  “If there was a sea here,” said Sal, “the place would be crawling with Sky Wardens.”

  “True.” The boy yawned. “One’s quite enough for me, thanks.”

  Sal waited until he was certain Skender was asleep, then waited another half-hour to make sure that no one else in the camp was awake. When even the crackle of the fire had died down, he crept out of the wagon and dropped to the ground in his bare feet, the jar of pearl and blood paste in his hand. The desert night was still and cold. Dispassionate stars crowded in the sky above. A camel coughed as Sal wound his way through the darkness, but nothing else stirred. Zevan didn’t mount sentries, since potential bandits rarely came so deep in the desert. The dangerous portion of their journey had been on the plains, long past.

  Sal came to a halt when he was within a few metres of the buggy. Behenna was asleep on a bedroll by the passenger side. For a moment, he couldn’t find Tait, but the journeyman turned out to be propped up by the fire, dead to the world. Shilly was asleep on the tray, and she stirred as Sal approached. He held his breath, but she just turned over and muttered something under her breath.

  Sal moved closer, one careful step at a time. The keys weren’t in the ignition, and he was grateful to be spared that temptation. He doubted his father would have approved. He had to be cleverer than that.

  He hoped he was being clever. Crouching in the dark by the buggy’s right fender, terrified that he was about to be caught, he was pretty sure his father would have discouraged what he was about to do as well. But no other plan had come to mind, and he had given it plenty of thought. He had thought until he’d realised that thinking had become a means of avoiding action. He had only one chance, and he had to take it.

  Opening the jar, he scooped out a portion of the paste on the tip of one finger. Reaching under the fender, he painted a thick, curving line, then repeated the motion in reverse to complete a circle. Inching his way back along the buggy, he repeated the procedure at the rear. With half the jar left, he reached under the chassis and painted another circle by the exhaust pipe, then moved back to the front and put the last behind the bumper. No one would see any of the marks, he was sure. If all went well, he’d soon know if the paste was just a sop for wishful buyers, or if Lodo had known his stuff.

  Really known his stuff, Sal thought. When it came down to it, his plan rested on Lodo being right and the Mage Van Haasteren being wrong. Given that the mage’s own father had chosen Lodo over his own son to run the Keep, breaking generations of tradition, Sal felt as though he should be confident of his decision, but if there was one thing he was certain of it was that there were few certainties where the Change was concerned. How could anyone hope to pin down something as nebulous as change itself?

  When the job was done, he wiped his finger on one leg and backed away from the buggy.

  “Sal? Sal, is that you?”

  Shilly’s whisper froze him to the spot. Barely an arm’s reach away from him, she stirred on the tray and blinked around her in the darkness. Sal couldn’t guess what had disturbed her: maybe the same sixth sense that told him when she was nearby. He had become so accustomed to it that he worried that the loss of it would hurt more than her silence when they were together—but he hadn’t known that she felt it too.

  He waited. She didn’t seem entirely awake, and he couldn’t be sure that she had actually seen him.

  “Sal?”

  Tempted though he was to answer, he knew that doing so would be foolish. She had made her choice. No one was making her ride with the Sky Warden and his journeyman. She didn’t need him or his problems any more.

  He took five slow steps backward until the corner of a wagon stood between him and the buggy. Shilly didn’t call again. He was free to finish the job he had to do.

  An hour later, he returned from the desert with Skender’s patterns still turning in his mind. He had felt something this time, when he had really tried: a potential right at the edge of his senses like storm clouds lurking just below the horizon. And the paste had responded, burni
ng like tiny brands in the darkness. If rain would come or not, he couldn’t tell. But he had found something, and it had heard him in return.

  Crawling into the wagon, he fell exhausted into bed. The mage rolled over as the wagon shifted slightly beneath them, but Sal had worn out any fear of being caught. He was too tired to worry.

  The first proper charm he had ever performed on his own was done. He had set the Change loose, and all he could do now was wait to see what effect it had on the world.

  Chapter 15

  A Kind of Charm

  “You’re kidding,” said Shilly, not believing her ears. “No, it’s true.” The sound of Tait’s voice was a musical contrast to the abrasive chugging of the buggy. “I’m telling you, there used to be creatures everywhere in the desert. They weren’t alive like animals, but they weren’t properly machines, either. They looked like a cross between a box kite and a…” He struggled for the right word, literally clutching with one hand as though to pluck it out of the dry, desert air. “…and a…”

  “A ladder,” supplied the Sky Warden in the driver’s seat beside him, glancing away from the road for a second to join in on the story. “Several ladders that have been in an accident and ended up wrapped around each other.”

  “That’s exactly it!” Tait gesticulated enthusiastically. “And they’ve got sails, see, that catch the wind. The wind tips the sails forward, which rotates a wheel, which in turn moves some of the tangled ladders ahead a step, then the sails tip back, and it all goes round again. They can’t control where they’re going. The wind just drives them along like tumbleweeds—only they’re a lot bigger than that. Bigger than this buggy. Wider than all the wagons in this caravan tied together end to end. But not very deep. They’re like hedges that have come to life and gone marching across the land.”