The Sky Warden and the Sun

by Sean Williams

  We will give it to you freely, Behenna had said. All you have to do is come home…

  She was too afraid to ask, Just me?

  Tait launched into another tale of his exploits in the Haunted City. She couldn’t concentrate on it. Feigning tiredness from the exercise, she lay back on the buggy’s tray and tried to think. So lost in her thoughts was she that she barely noticed the lengthening shadows as the sun set upon the stony plains. Neither did she see the looming darkness on the horizon ahead, like a giant wave about to crash over the land. Wisps of cloud fled before it, whipped along by a rising wind.

  They stopped at sunset to study the phenomenon. The camels were very nervous by then, their restless hoof-falls and groans loud over the wind. Zevan strolled along the road ahead of them, one hand cupping his eyes as though to shield them from the sun. But the sun was behind them, and cast a blood-red pall over the cloudbank to the east.

  Shilly could understand why the camels were wary of walking in that direction. The clouds looked like a solid wall blocking their path. Lightning crackled in the darkness beneath them. The wind carried occasional rumbles of thunder, as though the earth was complaining. The air smelled of moisture, thick and portentous. The Van Haasterens had come out of their wagon to look, and Sal stood between them, his expression apprehensive.

  Behenna guided the buggy close to where the wagon containing Radi Mierlo had stopped. He jumped out, and Shilly took the chance to stretch her good leg. Hopping off the tray, she gathered her crutches and followed to where the warden and his journeyman had entered the wagon.

  Inside, she saw a very peculiar sight. Sal’s grandmother was seated on a low camp bed, dressed in a pale blue cotton robe with her grey hair tied back in a practical bun. Her grandson, the enormous, white-haired Aron, sat opposite her, steadying on his lap what looked like the bust of a stern-looking man with a high forehead and long nose. The head was slightly larger than a normal person’s, and it was obviously heavy; Aron’s muscles bunched as he held the bust upright before his grandmother. Shilly couldn’t see why he would possibly be doing that, until the bust spoke.

  “I know nothing of this storm you say is approaching.” Its mouth didn’t move and its voice was a buzz of insects from a great distance, yet its words were perfectly understandable. She eyed the man’kin with fascination. The Mage Van Haasteren had explained at the Keep only that the man’kin were relics from a bygone era, creatures of stone animated by the Change but not controllable by Change-workers. They existed more deeply in the background potential than humans, and that gave them subtle insights into the past, present and future. Some people kept them as advisors, and Shilly assumed that Radi Mierlo was one such person, even though “taming” the stone intelligences was apparently very difficult. Perhaps that explained the legendary tenacity of the Mierlo family.

  “Nothing at all?” asked Sal’s grandmother.

  “Water and air are not my field of expertise,” it said. “At a guess, I’d say you’re going to get wet.”

  “Who sent it, then? Can you at least tell us that?”

  “I do sense a charm at work.” The bust turned at the neck to look at Behenna. Like the giant statues guarding the way to the keep, it moved in tiny but discrete steps, lending the motion a slight jerkiness. “As you know,” it said, “the spoor of weather-working is difficult to follow. It is probably aimed at us, or something nearby.”

  “Could it be someone trying to stop us getting to the Nine Stars?” Radi Mierlo asked.

  “Of course it could.” The man’kin head didn’t look at her. Its stony gaze slid past the warden to where Shilly peered through the flap. “That face. I recognise it.”

  She stood rooted to the spot as Radi Mierlo glanced at her in surprise. “Shilly? How?”

  “Yadeh-tash knows her.”

  The familiar name snapped Shilly out of her daze. “Lodo’s necklace?”

  “It feels storms in the bones of the Earth. Were it here, it could help you determine the nature of the one approaching.”

  “But it’s not, is it?” snapped Sal’s grandmother. “You’re worse than useless, Mawson. I don’t know why I bothered to bring you.”

  “Neither do I,” shot back the man’kin with a flash of irritation.

  “Put him away, Aron.”

  Her enormous grandson went to take the bust off his lap, but it wasn’t quite done with Shilly. “I will tell yadeh-tash that you are safe,” Mawson told her. “It wonders.”

  “What about Lodo?” she blurted. “Is tash with him?”

  The man’kin hesitated. “Yes and no. The essence of your friend is in the Void.”

  “But he’s still alive? His body is alive?”

  “Yes. It still lives, and yadeh-tash is with it.”

  A giddy sense of relief mixed with dread rushed through her. Lodo wasn’t dead! But she was sobered by the thought that he wasn’t really alive, either. It was just as the golem had hinted in the ruined city: Lodo had pushed himself too hard in summoning the earthquake that had helped Sal and Shilly escape and, in doing so, had emptied himself. He was either still empty or something else had moved in.

  She owed it to her old teacher to try to save him. This was much more important than just trying to open his workshop. “Where is he? His body, I mean.”

  “In the place you call the Haunted City. The Wardens have it in their care.”

  “What?” Shilly turned, appalled, on Behenna. “Did you know about this?”

  The warden looked cornered for a moment. He shot an angry glance at Radi Mierlo, then his attention was firmly on placating Shilly. “I did, yes, but didn’t know how to tell you. It’s not good news, on top of everything else.”

  “But I still deserved to be told!”

  “Would you have believed me? Or would you have thought I was using the promise of Lodo as a lure to get you to agree to come home?”

  She acknowledged the point to herself but refused to admit it aloud. “If it was the truth—”

  “There’s no way I could have proved it to you. In fact, I can only assume that what I’ve been told is true. What if I’d been wrong and given you false hope?” The Sky Warden’s eyes held nothing but a desire to convince her. “Lodo’s body was found after you and Sal escaped. He was still alive, but in a coma. The Syndic tried to reach him, but he was beyond even her, so they sent him to the Haunted City where he could be treated by experts. His condition is grave.” He touched her arm. “All isn’t lost, but it would be wrong of me to promise anything. I can only assure you that we’re doing all we can.”

  She nodded, feeling tears on her cheeks and Tait’s gaze, in turn, on the tears, as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. But she didn’t care what people thought of her. Lodo was alive and needed her help. That was more important than anything else—more important than any new family she might find, more important than Sal, more important even than learning the Change. Lodo was her family. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try to help him.

  “If I went home with you,” she asked, “would he be there?”

  “Should he survive that long, yes.” The warden’s face was grave in the greying light. “Feeding them is the problem, I understand.”

  “This is all very well,” broke in Radi Mierlo. “But what do we tell Zevan? Keep moving or wait here for the storm to pass?”

  Behenna looked up at the sky. Shilly hadn’t noticed the sunset, and was surprised to see several stars already gleaming above. To the east, however, was nothing but blackness and lightning. The thunder was louder, clearly audible over the whipping wind.

  “If we stay still, we’ll only lose time,” Behenna eventually said. “At the very least, we must avoid that. We can’t afford to miss the full moon.”

  “We might not see it,” said Tait, nodding eastward, “under all that.”

  “Irrelevant,” said Sal’s grandmother. She waved at Aron, who lifted the granite bust and put it aside with effort. The man’kin’s attention staye
d on Shilly as though fascinated by her. “Shom is right. We must keep moving. It’s only a thunderstorm.”

  Behenna gestured with his left hand and Tait ran off to pass on the news. A gust of wind sent dust rising between them and the flaps at the rear of the wagon rattled. Shilly shivered, even though the air was still warm. There was a rising sense of electricity in the air.

  She hugged herself, thinking of the Void Beneath. She had never experienced it, but she imagined awful things. What would it be like, she wondered, to be trapped alone in there as Lodo was?

  “Be careful, child,” said the man’kin.

  She turned to meet its stare. “Be careful of what?”

  Everyone looked at her. “What did you say?” asked Radi Mierlo.

  She stared back at them. Clearly they hadn’t heard the man’kin speak.

  “Be careful of the Void.”

  Shilly glanced at Behenna, confused. The man’kin was trying to tell her something privately, and she knew she should listen. Because of it, she had learned something very important: that her old teacher’s body was still alive and in the Haunted City. She didn’t know when Behenna would have told her that, without its prompting. What else did it know that was being kept from her? And what did it mean by warning her to be careful of the Void?

  She wanted to ask it what it was talking about, but she couldn’t with everyone around.

  “Can we take him with us, on the buggy?” she asked Radi Mierlo. Maybe she could whisper to it over the sound of the engine.

  “Why?” Sal’s grandmother shot back, suspiciously. “And it’s an it, not a he.”

  Shilly couldn’t very well say that she thought Behenna might be lying to her, so she lied herself. “I’m curious about it. I’ve never seen a man’kin this close before.”

  “Well, it’s heavy and no good for conversation,” she was told. Behenna added: “All they do is lie, anyway. You can wait until the next rest stop.”

  She let herself be led away from Radi Mierlo’s caravan by the firm pressure of the Sky Warden’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Choose well,” the man’kin said as the canvas flaps were drawn closed over it. “We will talk another time.”

  Shilly was still trying to work out what it had meant an hour later, when the storm hit.

  Only a thunderstorm.

  Radi Mierlo’s words came back to Shilly as she huddled in the lee of a wagon, deafened by rain, wind and thunder. The night was utterly black apart from the frequent flashing of lightning. Earlier, one of the Stone Mages in the caravan had tried to activate a handful of glow stones he carried in his pack, shouting over the wind that they would at least keep them warm. But there was too much background potential in the air to do it successfully. The first didn’t work at all. A bolt of electricity stabbed out of the sky and destroyed the second stone. He abandoned the attempt after that, and joined the others in finding what shelter they could.

  The wagon creaked and swayed beside her like the sides of a leaky ship. Shilly had no idea what time it was or how long the storm had lasted. She was soaked right through, hungry and more than a little frightened. The ferocity of the storm belied Sal’s grandmother’s words with such violence that their inaccuracy was hard to forget. For a brief moment Shilly had been pleased to see the rain, since she had experienced none of any kind during her journeys in the Interior. It had been refreshing, although heavy, as the fringes had passed over them, washing away the dust and the dirt. It had become heavier as the cloud cover thickened over them, until no stars at all could be seen. And it had kept getting heavier; it seemed to Shilly as though they were receiving an entire year’s rainfall in one night.

  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 yo
u, 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.