Sal felt Shilly tense beside him. “You--”
“No.” Sal let go of her hand and stepped forward. “I’ll talk to him.”
“You’ll have to do more than that,” Kemp sneered. He reached behind him and produced an axe handle.
“Is that your answer to everything, Kemp?” Sal still felt drained by his attack on the Alcaide, but there was a vestige of talent still left in him. He felt light-headed, dangerous, over-confident. He had told Lodo that he didn’t want to kill anyone, but he might already have broken that promise once. It would be all too easy to do it again.
“You’ve done enough already, I think,” he said to Kemp. “You stole the necklace and everything else to make us look guilty. You lied to get us into trouble. You kept us here, and we couldn’t escape. You,” he spat, “killed my father as much as the Alcaide did.”
Kemp’s eyes glittered in the darkness. He flexed the axe handle, but no longer looked as confident. “Your father’s dead?”
“That’s right, Kemp, and I’m going to take the buggy. Are you going to kill me to stop me? Are you going to kill Shilly and Tom as well? Are you going to die trying? I thought you wanted me to go!” Sal felt a horrible knot curling in his gut. “I swear that if you so much as try to stop us, I’ll do everything I can to finish this now rather than later. What’s it to be?”
Sal didn’t know what was showing on his face, but it made the bully think twice. Kemp swallowed, and lowered the axe handle.
“You’re a freak,” he said, stepping out of the barn. “We’re better off without you.”
Shilly moved forward. “You can talk, whitey.”
Kemp made to go for her, but Tom stood between them. “Not now,” said the boy. “Not now.”
Voices carried from the scrub behind them. Sal looked and realized that the light had faded from the sky. He pushed past Kemp and into the darkness of the barn. He knew the buggy well enough to navigate it by feel, but he wasn’t used to sitting in the driver’s seat. An image of his father sprang to mind--as he had looked when they traveled those thousands of kilometers together, hair trailing in the wind, a satisfied smile on his face, but Sal pushed it down, with the grief. There would be time for that, too, later.
The keys were in the ignition. He turned them, and the engine started first time. He put the buggy into gear and drove it out of the barn. Shilly climbed in awkwardly, but without hesitation.
“Tom?” The sound of the engine almost covered the approaching voices. No doubt their pursuers had heard the engine and would be hurrying to head them off.
The young boy shook his head. “Later.”
Sal glanced at Kemp. The big albino was looking uncertainly from them to the front of the property, in the direction of their pursuers. Before Kemp could change his mind about letting them go, Sal put his foot down and let the sudden acceleration press him back into his seat.
Epilogue:
Glimpses of the Sky
Two days out of Fundelry, Sal dreamed.
First he saw the women on the horizon. He recognized two of them, now. The small one was Shilly, as he had thought before. She was the closest of the three, her arms outstretched as though to embrace him. The second was the Syndic, crouched jealously below her segment of the sky, waiting for her chance to strike again. The third was far away but coming slowly nearer, watching him as closely as the other two. Sal couldn’t guess who she might be.
There followed a series of strange, disjointed images: Kemp in a golden tower looking out at a city of glass; a globe of light, burning painfully bright and surrounded by nothing but darkness; another city, this one half-buried in sand and inhabited only by ghosts; Tom’s brother, Tait, leading a blue-robed man across a desert; two desiccated bodies hanging on either side of a shadowy tunnel mouth; a woman with features similar to Sal, but much older, talking to what looked like a granite statue twice her size; lastly, a crippled, hollow man who couldn’t possibly be--but was--his first teacher: Lodo.
Then the dream settled down again, and he found himself in the end of the Polain story. The world had moved on by the time the butterfly merchant saw trial before a judge, his mind broken and his life in tatters. His beloved city had already forgotten him, finding new heroes to glorify and new villains to condemn.
In the dream, Sal wasn’t listening to the story his father never had a chance to finish. He wasn’t any of the major characters, either. He was Nemdo’s grand-daughter, the girl whose birthday the elderly clerk had missed. Thrust into the spotlight of grief by another man’s greed, caught up in tale of obsession, deception and self-destruction, she cared little for butterflies.
All she wanted was her grandfather back.
Sal stirred in his sleep, half-awake, and felt Shilly doing the same. But he didn’t move other than to get comfortable. He rolled over to face her and watched the starlight reflecting off her wet cheeks. When sleep finally returned, he didn’t dream. By the time the sun rose, they had already resumed their journey.
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.
The lines quoted in Chapter 11 are taken from the poem “A Dream Within A Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe.
Copyright 2001 by Sean Williams
ISBN 978-1-4976-3490-9
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Stone Mage & the Sea (Books of the Change Book 1) Page 31
