The Storm Weaver & the Sand (Books of the Change)

by Sean Williams

  Sal blanched. Shilly looked unsure of what to do. Skender took the opportunity to steal Sal’s uneaten toast and wipe his plate clean with it.

  “Do you know where to go?” asked Tom, blinking around him like a very out-of-place owl.

  “No,” said Sal, “we’ve only just arrived. No one’s told us anything, really.”

  “In the morning, first year students study theory and illusions with Warden Bohm. In the afternoon, we break into tutor groups to practise.” Tom broke off as one of the hooded attendants approached the table.

  “You won’t be joining classes just yet,” said the attendant. Skender matched the voice with that of the woman who had given them directions in the hallway. “First, you must make yourselves presentable. Come with me.”

  The three of them stood as, without another word, Tom hurried off to join the stragglers draining from the hall.

  “Aren’t we ever going to see anything of the Haunted City?” Sal was supposed to be the argumentative one, but Skender couldn’t rein in a small moment of irritation. Thus far, all they’d seen had been bricked-in tunnels and rooms of varying sizes, none of them with windows.

  “When you’re ready,” said the attendant. “The longer you delay, the later that will be.”

  Skender rolled his eyes and let himself be led away.

  Shilly hoped the shower would never end. Standing alone in an endless line of tiled stalls, she let the hot water scour away the weeks of dusty travel and sluice her hair clean. The water wasn’t particularly warm, but it was fresh and cleaner than any she’d found on the road. She assumed it was piped in from the sea surrounding the island on which the Haunted City perched, charmed to remove its salt. When she’d cleaned her teeth earlier, it had tasted faintly of metal.

  All too soon, though, the stream of water chugged three times and shut off. It wasn’t like the Keep, she thought, where she could bathe in boiling hot water for any length of time as long as she turned up to classes promptly. Standing alone in the echoing girls’ bathroom, she dried herself on a stiff, clean towel and dressed in the clothes an attendant had provided: a loose, grey top and grey, shin-length skirt; even the underwear they gave her was grey. She didn’t know if that meant they had been worn by dozens of people before her, or whether grey was just the uniform of the Novitiate. At least they were clean. Finally, she thought, she was free of the stink of camel—which, like the ache in her leg, she had wondered if she would ever be free of.

  Sal and Skender were waiting for her in the hall outside, dressed in matching outfits. She hadn’t noticed the difference in their sizes before; Sal had grown a lot in the previous month, and now looked more like a young man than the boy he had once been, especially next to Skender, who was almost a head shorter and thin with it. Skender looked uncomfortable in the long shorts—and he probably was, she realised, having worn robes most of his life. Just the one attendant was with them. The wardens had presumably decided to trust them not to run away, just yet.

  To be honest with herself, Shilly had to admit that her curiosity had been whetted. All her life she had heard of people going to the Haunted City to become Sky Wardens, but no one knew any of the details of that process. What she had seen so far—Warden Atilde, the attendants, the breakfast hall full of students numbering more than the entire population of Fundelry—had intrigued her. This was her chance to find out the rest, and maybe begin looking for Lodo into the bargain.

  It was not, therefore, hard to play the role she had been assigned, that of eager student ready to get to work.

  “Where to now?” she asked, running her fingers through her hair to make it stand up as straight as it would go.

  “I’ll give you a quick tour of the Novitiate grounds,” said the attendant. Shilly detected a faint note of warmth in the woman’s voice. “Master Warden Atilde has instructed me to ensure that you know your way around before I release you into the care of your tutor.”

  “Is Atilde in charge of everything here?” Shilly asked, as the warden guided them briskly away from the bathrooms.

  “In the Novitiate, yes. She answers to the Conclave, but they rarely get in her way. She has overseen the education of every Sky Warden in the Strand for more years than I’ve been alive.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” asked Skender more bluntly. “Is she sick?”

  The attendant hesitated slightly. “There was an accident, long ago, and she wastes away as a result. She fights it every day, but how long she has left no one knows. She stands as a warning to us all that the Change can be dangerous, and that we should be careful when using it.”

  “What sort of accident?” Skender pressed.

  “That’s all I can say. If you need to know more, she will tell you herself.”

  They rounded a corner and passed through an archway leading outside. There, for the first time, they saw the light of day in the Haunted City.

  Shilly squinted in awe around her. It took her a minute to adjust to the brilliance of the sun—so bright after the mirror-lights and shadows of the Novitiate—but what she saw was no less magnificent than anything she had imagined. Impossibly tall and fragile-looking, the city towered above her like a waterfall of glass. Everywhere she looked she saw reflection and diffraction; light was seduced into the air between the towers and caught there, ricocheting among sweeping curves that defied the eye, bouncing forever between the seemingly infinite planes of glass. She felt as though she was inside a giant crystal, surrounded by silent, dazzling motion.

  A long time ago, it seemed, on the road to the Nine Stars, the ex-warden Shom Behenna had granted her a vision of the city. She had not trusted him then; the vision could have been an illusion designed to impress her or any other country yokel he needed to win over in his travels. But what she saw before her was every bit as amazing as what she had been shown then, perhaps even more so.

  “Wow,” Skender breathed, one hand shading his eyes as he turned in circles on the spot, taking everything in. “Incredible!”

  “Just like the city in the Broken Lands,” said Sal, “but alive, not dead.”

  “Don’t be fooled,” said the attendant. “We don’t call it the Haunted City for nothing.”

  As Shilly’s eyes adjusted, she saw—just as she had in Behenna’s illusion—shapes moving behind the glass. Silhouettes and shades—never seen clearly but visible nonetheless—were everywhere she looked. Thousands upon thousands of people moving on mysterious errands, dressed in odd-looking garments of a multitude of colours. They seemed as impossibly tall and beautiful as the towers they inhabited, and she found herself full of something like sadness, for they were surely echoes of things that had been lost, ghosts of another time that hadn’t existed for more years than she could conceive.

  “Do they talk?” asked Skender.

  “No.” The attendant ushered them across a wide, flat, cobbled space leading from the tunnel exit to the base of one of the towers. The massive structures weren’t as crowded together as they had been in the ancient city ruins she and Sal had found in the Broken Lands, but there was still a strong sense of being closed in; the only glimpses of the sky itself came from far above. Her gaze, almost reluctantly, dropped lower, and she saw that more recent habitation had left its mark on the city. Smaller buildings, such as the one they had just left, clung like limpets to the bases of the massive structures. The towers were being used as buttress and framework for new walls and roofs. Shilly wondered why on earth anyone would build such seemingly primitive and makeshift structures when far more interesting architecture lay abandoned all around. It was like sleeping on the floor in a house full of luxurious beds.

  The attendant must have anticipated the question. She brought them to the base of one particular tower whose lower levels remained relatively exposed. Again, just like the city they had found in the salt lake, the towers seemed to emerge from the ground as though partially buried. The floor l
evel of the tower before them was slightly lower than the ground, so they found themselves stooping to look inside.

  There were several people visible in the hazy interior of the building, blurry as though seen through water. Their movements were ponderous and as indistinct as their forms. Shilly could barely tell that they were moving at all.

  “The windows don’t open, do they?” said Sal, running one hand across the glass. Shilly did the same and found the surface to be cool and faintly waxy. Skender knocked, trying to get the hazy figures’ attention.

  “The towers are sealed,” said the attendant. “We gave up trying to open them long ago. It is said that on the day they open the world as we know it will come to an end.”

  “Invasion of the ghosts,” Skender joked.

  “Or we’ll become the ghosts,” said Sal.

  Although Shilly couldn’t clearly see the attendant’s face, a slight stiffening of the woman’s posture suggested that Sal’s comment was taken more seriously than it had been intended. “There has been at least one Cataclysm in the past, and there will almost certainly be such times again. It’s beyond our means to know what causes them or lies beyond them.”

  “Look,” said Skender, “one’s coming closer.”

  Shilly returned her attention to the other side of the glass. Skender was right: one of the ghosts had broken away from the others and seemed to be approaching. Its slow, measured steps, the sluggish swinging of its arms, the feeling of timelessness, as though the passage of seconds was different for it than for her, hypnotised Shilly as it came nearer, resolving by minute increments into a tall man with narrow, distinguished features. She wasn’t aware of anything else around her; the eerie glamour of what lay before her had captured her completely.

  The ghost—the man inside the glass—snapped into sharp focus as he loomed as close to the window as she was, but on the other side, looking up at her in her slightly elevated position, eyes wide and almost pleading…

  A sharp squawking broke the spell. She blinked and turned away, startled. Behind her, two large seagulls descended to the ground with a flutter of feathers and glared at her with black eyes.

  Sal said something, but she didn’t hear it. Her gaze drifted back through the glass as though pulled there, but the ghost was gone. As quickly as though it hadn’t ever moved, it was back with the others, little more than a person-shaped blur far away.

  “Are you okay, Shilly?” asked Sal, louder this time.

  “Did you see him?” she asked, her voice seeming to echo in her ears.

  “Of course,” said Skender. “One of them looked as though it was coming over to look back at us, but it turned away. Teasing us.”

  “They don’t know we’re here,” said the attendant. “We must keep moving. I need to show you the practice rooms, the tutor hall and the library before taking you to the lecture theatre to join the others. You’ve been assigned a tutor; he will look after you from there.”

  As she led the three of them away, Shilly looked over her shoulder at the trio of ghosts trapped inside the building. She couldn’t make out any details at all and she was beginning to wonder, as her head cleared, if she had imagined the whole thing. But she knew, somehow, that one of them was watching her closely. The feeling didn’t fade when she turned a corner, and the trio were out of sight.

  Chapter 3. the Curl of A Lip

  It was never easy, walking into a new classroom, no matter how many times one did it. Sal had learned that the hard way. After years of travelling with his father across the Strand, he had seen more classrooms than comfortable beds, and more curious stares upon entering them than hot meals. It was something he had learned to endure but never grown accustomed to.

  Walking into a lecture hall filled with over a hundred students was a new type of hell entirely…

  Ten minutes earlier he had been absorbing the rarefied ambience of the Novitiate Library, a strange, doglegging hall sandwiched between several of the Haunted City towers. It looked as though a deranged architect had taken several perfectly ordinary meeting halls and stuck them in a row at increasingly odd angles. From the entrance he could see, over the many rows of tall bookcases, the ceiling zigzagging away into the distance.

  “Here we keep the histories and researches of all the Sky Wardens who have served down the years,” the attendant had said, waving one hand expansively to encompass the peculiar space. “You’ll also find copies of every Survey Report handed in over the last four hundred years.”

  “What happened before then?” asked Shilly.

  “There are gaps. Materials decay; records are lost. It’s inevitable, even here.”

  “What about the Book of Towers?” Skender asked.

  “That’s up the far end,” replied the attendant, “in its own section.”

  Sal had heard Skender mention the Book of Towers before. “What makes it so important?”

  “It was written thousands of years ago, some say, by many different authors, and contains accounts of the old times when the Cataclysm we know of was at its peak. Surveyors use it as a map in their search for lost things, even though the book itself contains no maps. The world was too changeable then.”

  Sal remembered the story of the baker told to him by Belilanca Brokate—the story of a town that had been swallowed in a cloud of death back in the days when nothing was fixed, when the old world was in the process of becoming the world he had been born into. The Cataclysm was as good a name for that time as any.

  “Have you read it?” he asked, intrigued despite himself. It was difficult to play the role of troublemaker with so much to fascinate him everywhere he looked.

  “I have read some translations. It’s a very difficult text to understand in its pure form. Even when you have the words, the images are difficult to interpret. It talks about places that no longer exist, and omits places we take for granted. The Divide, for instance, is not mentioned, but the three cities are: the Nine Stars and the Haunted City are exactly as they are now. The third was moving even then—”

  “How can a city move?” interrupted Shilly.

  “That’s one of the mysteries we’re still trying to fathom. The third city relocates from place to place in the Broken Lands. Part of the Surveyors’ task is to find it, each time it moves. That can be a dangerous pastime, even for those with experience. Many people have been lost in the process.”

  “Sal and Shilly have been to the third city,” said Skender, glowing with vicarious pride. “It’s in a salt lake. They’ve seen it.”

  The attendant showed no sign of being impressed, although it was hard to tell anything beneath the hood. “We must move on,” she said, motioning them to the door. “You’ll return here in due course…”

  She had whisked them through a series of crooked quadrangles to the lecture theatre where the rest of the first years sat in steeply mounted, curved rows to hear a balding, fat Sky Warden talk about the importance of fish-blood in particular charms. The attendant had shown them to seats at the front of the hall and left them there, basking in the heat of a hundred stares. The back of Sal’s head felt as though it was about to burst into flame. Although he was acutely conscious of every sound, every whisper, he didn’t hear a single word the lecturer had to say. He hoped, afterward, that he would never find himself in a situation where knowledge of the precise acidity of a sea bass could save the day.

  Thankfully, it was over quickly. Another deep-toned bell rang and the lecturer strode stiffly out of the room. As the tiered rows of students dissolved into the noisy crowd it had been after breakfast, a nervous young man with close-cropped black hair and chocolate-brown skin came up to them and explained that he had been assigned as their tutor.

  “It’s my job to ensure that you’re learning to do, as well as just learning the theory. Or listening to it. Or not even that.” His smile was white-toothed and nervous. “My name is Fairney.”
/>   “You look young for a Sky Warden,” said Skender.

  “I’m not a full warden yet,” he explained. “I have one year in the Novitiate left, then I’ll serve as a journeyman for two more. Then, fingers crossed, I’ll get my torc.” He indicated an exit on the far side of the hall. “I take my tutorials through here. I hope you’ll like it. The view can be a little distracting, but if you’re as inspired by it as I am then you’ll think it a fair trade.”

  He led them through a series of tunnels then out into narrow streets that took odd turns and followed unpredictable paths through the city. Sal had lost all sense of direction long before, and couldn’t even have hazarded a guess as to his approximate location. It felt as though they had walked kilometres that morning without doubling back even once. Still, it came as a surprise when they suddenly walked into a clear space that was open to the sea on one side. The blue of the sky seemed painfully vivid after so much glass and reflection. They had reached the edge of the island.

  His eyes slid around. The edge consisted of a lip of stone that, for all he could tell, plummeted vertically to the sea below. He could hear waves pounding against rocks. The smell of salt brought back memories of the sickness he had experienced on the crossing from the mainland to the Haunted City. He swallowed automatic nausea. Seagulls mocked him with piercing jeers as, crinkled and impossibly flat, the ocean stretched away before him to the horizon and beyond. Sal wondered if the area was or had once been a lookout.

  A hand tugged at him. Shilly was trying to drag him to where a number of other students were seated at the base of the nearest tower.

  The lookout, if that was what it was, was an oval-shaped bowl tucked like an afterthought between two looming, ancient towers. The island’s stone lip had been naturally sculpted by wind and spray, giving it the likeness of a cupped hand. At that time of the year, the patch was shaded even at late morning, and the ground was cool.

  They sat on a patch of dirt. There was no grass, no weeds or moss. The stone bowl was scoured by wind, and as dead as the rest of the island. The only living things that Sal had seen since arriving at the Haunted City were people and seagulls.