The Stone Mage & the Sea (Books of the Change Book 1)

by Sean Williams

  He stared at her, then, for a long, shocked moment.

  “I’m joking, you fool,” she said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Get out of here before the old man starts charging you rent.”

  He stepped out of the hole and into the night, relieved to be out of the heat--and alone at last.

  When the door shut behind him, he felt as though he had been dunked in a bucket of tar. It was very dark, much darker than it had been before. There was no moon, no stars, no light at all. His eyes took forever to adjust. It was cold, and the wind seemed to have picked up dramatically.

  He had only a few seconds to realize why before the storm hit.

  Chapter 4. “The Eye of the Storm”

  The rain struck him like an avalanche of water. He was nearly deafened by an enormous crack of thunder from directly overhead. The storm filled the night, leaving no room for him. He dropped into the lee of a dune for shelter, but it was no use. He was instantly soaked.

  There was no way, though, that he was going to ask Shilly for help getting back to the hostel if she came looking for him. He would manage it on his own. This was something he could do himself.

  He forced himself to stand up and set off through the storm, searching with every flash of lightning for visible landmarks and hoping his sense of direction remained true. He was certain the town lay to the left of the entrance to Lodo’s underground workshop. No lights were visible over the dunes, but that wasn’t surprising. He had only ever seen so much rain during the monsoons that swept through the borderlands from the north--and if this had been a monsoon that had caught him and his father on the road, they would have taken shelter beneath the buggy, well away from any obvious flood paths. Here, he was brutally exposed. There was nothing between him and the naked ferocity of the storm--which was getting more powerful, not less.

  And it was cold. He was shivering in minutes. It felt as though the rain had come directly from the great icy wastes that lay far to the south, over the ocean. Not even in the dead of desert’s night had he ever been so frozen.

  He pressed on, slipping and staggering up one side of a dune then tumbling and splashing down the other. Time passed in a blur. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but he didn’t have any choice other than to keep going; even had he wanted to go back to ask Shilly’s help, he could never have found the entrance to Lodo’s workshop again.

  Soon he was covered in scratches caused by the plants he stumbled across, invisible in the utter darkness. He felt like he’d been flayed, and imagined his blood running freely and washing away in the water running off his skin--as though he was dissolving in the rain, losing his identity. He wondered what would happen if he fell over and couldn’t get up; perhaps the wet sand would absorb him like salt, and take him away forever.

  It was then, after he had been stumbling blind for half an hour without finding any sign of the town, that he felt, again, as though he was being watched. Or if not actually watched this time, then passing under the gaze of a huge and distant eye, peering over the horizon at the storm and its work. The eye of a giant, or a god. It didn’t frighten him, but it did make him feel very small. A giant might reach down and crush him, or a god simply snuff him out of existence.

  He offered a half-hearted prayer that neither would happen. He didn’t believe in the deities whose worshippers he occasionally encountered in his travels, like Lodo and his Goddess--but something in that distant stare left him in no doubt of its existence. Whatever it was, it was real. And if it could spare a moment to think about him, going around in circles in a storm, kilometers from the nearest fire, he would be grateful …

  Clang!

  He stopped in his tracks, refusing to believe his ears. He couldn’t credit that he had just heard the chiming of a bell from somewhere in the dunes. That’s it, he told himself, hugging his arms around his chest for warmth, the chattering of his teeth almost drowning out the thunder, his muscles aflame. Might as well lie down here and give up. It would be a relief…

  Clang!

  The sound came again, cutting through the downpour from somewhere to his left--faint but clear, no hallucination.

  He turned to face the sound, then forced himself to climb to the top of a dune that lay between him and its source. Wiping the water from his eyes, he saw a light.

  He still almost didn’t dare believe it. It was a long way off and barely visible through the rain. Not one of Lodo’s globes, but a real lantern, flickering and sputtering. Probably not Fundelry, then, but he wasn’t about to turn away from the only hopeful sign he’d seen so far.

  A flash of lightning revealed a shadowy figure standing next to the lantern, on the top of a distant dune, waving something in one hand.

  Clang-a-lang-a-lang!

  The boom of thunder following on the heels of the lightning almost drowned out the bell, but there was no disbelieving it now. Sal slipped down the dune in an ungainly rush and hurried up the next. The light was still there when he reached the top. Two dunes later, the lantern had gone out, smothered by water no doubt, but the bell remained to orient him. He followed it as best he could, and when he became confused, he waited until lightning struck to find the person who wielded it. The bell-ringer looked familiar, but not until Sal was only a dozen or so meters away, limping along a dune valley with water up to his ankles, did he recognize him.

  It was the small boy he had seen at School that day, with Kemp--the one who looked like a bilby. He hadn’t seen Sal, that much was clear; his eyes were narrowed against the rain, searching the dunes, looking determinedly over Sal’s head. He was dressed in a raincoat that was probably as useless against the rain as Sal’s clothes. The lantern lay at his feet, given up as a lost cause.

  For a moment, Sal wondered if the boy had been sent to look for him. Why else would he be out walking on the dunes, trying to attract attention? But no one knew Sal had gone; even if they had found him to be missing, they couldn’t have known where he had headed. The boy had to be hoping to catch someone else’s eye.

  Behind the boy, when darkness had returned and thunder seemed to split the sky in two, Sal saw the lights of Fundelry shining against the sky.

  He almost sobbed with relief. The town lay in a completely different direction from the one he had been following before he had heard the bell. Offering silent thanks to the boy who had unintentionally guided him to safety, he followed the dune valley as far as he could, then began the up-and-over trek back into town.

  It would have been easy to believe, the next day, that the whole night had been a dream. A nightmare. Some events stood out, but his memories of them were faint and confusing: Shilly and Lodo, the storm, the god-like eye in the sky, the bilby-faced boy and the bell. He could hardly credit that they had happened in just one night.

  His legs were covered with scratches and bruises, his legs and back were stiff and sore, and his clothes were damp. He vaguely remembered staggering up to the hostel foyer, bitterly cold, and undressing before going inside to avoid leaving splash marks on the stairs. How late it had been when he’d climbed shivering into bed he didn’t know, but dawn had come all too quickly. His father’s hand shaking him awake, telling him not to be a lazybones, had come as a shock. He had rolled over and gone back to sleep with a surly grunt.

  When he did get up, the storm had wound down to a light drizzle and his father had gone. He cursed his tiredness: the morning would have been a perfect time to see if Lodo was the man his father was looking for. Now he would have to wait until later, when his father finished work, to ask him.

  Von had some cereal left over for him in the kitchen. When she asked about the wet clothes hung to dry in his room, he explained that he had washed them in the night’s rain while his father slept.

  “Why not wash all your clothes?” she asked, looking at him strangely.

  “I had to have something to wear today.”

  “What about your f
ather’s?”

  “Half he was wearing, and I didn’t know what he wanted done with the rest.” Sal could feel himself reddening under her penetrating stare. “Is rain like that normal around here?”

  Von shifted her gaze out the window, to where gray clouds covered the sky. “This time of year, anything’s possible.” She scowled back at Sal. “Foolish to get your clothes wet when you don’t need to.”

  “There’ll be work for dad, after the storm,” he said, trying again to change the subject. “I can see damage from here.”

  “He said he’d be looking,” she said. “If you want to find him, try Josip, the mechanic. He’ll know where to go. Otherwise, you go to School.”

  Sal groaned. He’d forgotten about that.

  “Mrs Milka came by earlier.” Von looked as though she was enjoying Sal’s discomfort. “She supervises the senior class and is looking forward to having you for the next week or two. It’s not often we see people from the Interior down here. There’s bound to be a lot you can tell the class about it.”

  Sal opened his mouth to protest that he wasn’t from the Interior, but shut it before a word came out. This far south, pale skin and the dry lands invariably went together in people’s minds, even though there was a large degree of mixing in the zones where Interior and Strand met. If Von and the teacher thought he was from the Interior, that could only have been because his father hadn’t corrected their misconception.

  “There’s no reason to be nervous, Sal,” said Von, although her wide smile said she hoped it was otherwise. “And the school’s in the round building. You can’t miss it. Look for the weathervane on top of it.”

  Sal thanked her, even though he had no intention of going. He had more important things to do.

  When he reached Josip’s, he was surprised to see the buggy out in the open and his father leaning into the bonnet.

  “I thought you were working,” Sal said.

  “I thought I would be too.” His father’s head and upper body appeared. “And I thought you’d be at School.”

  Sal shrugged. The thought of facing Kemp on so little sleep made all his aches and pains double in intensity. The only reason he’d consider attending School that day was to ask Shilly what “scabs” were, as he’d forgotten to do so the previous night. Finding out what he was doing in Fundelry had been the greater priority.

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead. While you’re at it, hand me that number eight spanner.”

  Sal walked over to the toolbox and found the spanner. On the way back, he saw Josip watching from the shadows of his verandah with a lazy grin on his face.

  “Hi, Sal,” the man called.

  “Hi,” Sal said back, annoyed that he and his father weren’t alone.

  He turned to hand his father the spanner and banged his head hard on the upraised bonnet.

  “Ouch!”

  “Are you all right?” His father looked up at him.

  Sal rubbed at the sore spot, more irritated than hurt. The ward supposedly protecting him from bumps and scrapes didn’t seem to be working this morning. “I’ll get over it.”

  His father studied him with mild concern. “Didn’t you sleep well last night?”

  “Guess not.”

  “You can blame the sea air for that. It’s meant to be good for you, but I’ve never believed so. Can’t stand the smell of fish, personally.”

  “Is that why we’ve never come to the sea before?”

  “No,” said his father, wrinkling his nose. “But it’s good enough for starters. Now, what did you want to ask me?”

  “It can wait.”

  Sal rubbed at his scalp, and bent into the bonnet to see if there was anything he could do to help his father. A chance to fully service the buggy’s engine came rarely and had to be taken advantage of. The noisy gearbox his father had been complaining about for weeks lay partly dismantled on a tarpaulin by the buggy. In stages, over the coming days, each piece would be cleaned and greased and put back in its place. Sal took it on faith that the buggy would work as good as new afterwards.

  He didn’t like working under the bonnet much, despite knowing how useful such skills would be one day. The buggy was an important part of their lives. It carried them from place to place; it was shelter when they had nowhere else to stay; it even earned them money at times, ferrying goods or people from here to there, the machine being much faster than camels or horses on proper roads. His father had never told him where it had come from, and rarely talked about the future, but Sal assumed that it would one day be his. He needed to know how it worked for those times when it didn’t.

  Josip didn’t move to offer them a hand. Sal revised his estimate of the age of the mechanic. Instead of an old-looking young man, he now thought Josip might be a well-preserved man in his late thirties.

  “I heard a story once,” the mechanic said, “about a Sky Warden who ate a fish and turned into a dolphin.”

  “I know the one,” said Sal’s father. “That was Velzeboer, a third-century Syndic. He’d been drifting to water and a dish of raw fish tipped the balance. He turned before the eyes of his dinner guests, who carried him out to sea before he drowned in the air. He slipped out of their grasp and was never seen again.” Sal’s father looked up from the engine. “All these years later, his Line still carries the dolphin on its herald.”

  Josip put down his empty glass and applauded lightly. “You know more about our history than I do. Unusual for sand folk, I would’ve thought.”

  “We’re not from the Interior,” his father explained for--Sal thought--the millionth time. Yet his tone was patient, accepting the confusion. “Neither quite in the Strand nor quite out of it. We hear a lot of stories from both sides that way, sometimes lots of different versions of the same story. It helps to know the facts behind them.”

  “Have you any more you’d care to share?”

  Sal’s father looked embarrassed, then: “I’m sorry. I really should concentrate.”

  Josip’s smile broadened. “Of course. Another time, perhaps.” The mechanic stood and went back into his workshop.

  Sal took his chance now they were finally alone. “Dad,” he whispered, “that man you’re looking for. Have you had any luck finding him?”

  “I haven’t had time yet.”

  “What does he look like?”

  His father shifted nervously under the bonnet. “Well, it’s been a long time, and he’d be quite old now. But he has rank markings on his face, like tattoos. They wouldn’t have changed, so he’d certainly stand out around here. I’ll find him soon enough, if he’s here.”

  Sal kept any feelings of satisfaction to himself. “Why don’t you just ask someone?”

  Again his father seemed nervous. “I’d rather people didn’t know I was looking.”

  “Why not?”

  Sal’s father glanced at him. “Why are you so curious?”

  “Because I think I’ve seen him.”

  “Really?” It was Sal’s father’s turn to bang his head. “Ow! Where?”

  Sal had considered how to answer this question. He wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing going to Lodo’s workshop the previous night, especially if Lodo wasn’t the man his father was looking for, so he wasn’t going to admit to it. It would be better, he’d decided, to get the two men together. If Lodo did turn out to be Misseri, then Sal could tell the truth in a much better light.

  “At the market, yesterday,” he said, following Lodo’s own lead. That’s where the old man had said he was heading, the previous day.

  “Did it look like he’d be back there again today?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Well,” his father said, “it’s worth taking a look. Help me get this manifold out, then we’ll clean up.”

  Sal tried to concentrate on the engine,
but he couldn’t keep his mind from wandering. Something in his words had triggered a shift in his father’s mood, a subtle restlessness that was as infectious as a cold.

  “Dad?”

  “What now, Sal?”

  “Were you ever a Change-worker?”

  His father looked at him in surprise. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Just wondering.” He tried to sound idly curious, although in his mind’s eye he saw the weird fire Shilly had lit in Lodo’s workshop.

  “I wasn’t a Change-worker, no.” His father’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t have a drop of talent in me, and that’s the truth.”

  Talent wasn’t essential in order to use the Change, judging by the way Shilly had used the old man’s strength to light the fire. But Sal didn’t argue. “What happens if the Sky Wardens find someone using the Change in ways they don’t like?”

  “That depends,” Sal’s father said cautiously. “Most people fake the Change in order to rob you. But there have been rogue sorcerers and necromancers--mad Change-workers using their talents for evil rather than good. When they’re caught, they’re tried and dealt with. Some are executed. Some are imprisoned in places where they can’t harm anyone else again--places that suck the Change out of them like a desert sucks water.”

  “What about the ones who don’t want to join the Sky Wardens--or the Stone Mages? People who aren’t evil, just different. What happens to them?”

  “Well, that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether they’re caught,” said Sal’s father.

  Sal was about to ask why they had to hide from the Sky Wardens all the time when the workshop door slammed shut with a loud bang. Josip had returned with another drink. Sal’s father’s face closed up.

  “Did I interrupt anything?” asked the mechanic cheerily.

  “No, no.” Sal’s father returned to his work. “I was just telling Sal to make himself useful and hand me the screwdriver.”