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

by Sean Williams

“Your father, Sal.” The Syndic’s smile widened but was still without warmth.

  Sal stood frozen to the spot. Shilly could only imagine what he was feeling. Highson Sparre, the man before him, wasn’t the man who had raised him; that was Dafis Hrvati, who had died in Fundelry, helping Sal to escape from the Alcaide and the Syndic.

  Highson was the one who had married his mother, Seirian Mierlo, in order to bond two families from opposite sides of the Divide, the Earth Clan and the Cloud Line, into one new Line. Ambitious and well thought of, Highson Sparre might one day have been the Alcaide had it not been for the scandal of his wife’s affair with an untalented journeyman and her subsequent disappearance into the borderlands.

  Sal had been born on the run, and no one in the Haunted City had suspected he existed. It wasn’t until they had found Seirian when she was using the Change, and she had told them about her son, that they knew—but by then it had been too late to find him. Sal’s father had gone even deeper into hiding, frightened by the kidnap of the woman he loved from their very bed and certain that she would want him to do everything in his power to save her son, even if it meant turning his back on her forever.

  Dafis Hrvati had done his job well. For more than ten years, he and Sal had not been found. Only when Sal’s talent—passed on to him by his parents, Seirian and Highson—had begun to blossom in him did the man Sal called his father go looking for help. That was how they had come to Fundelry: seeking a renegade Stone Mage to help hide Sal’s talent, and inadvertently drawing their enemies down upon them. The long years of hiding had been for nothing.

  So what was Sal supposed to do now? Shilly couldn’t guess. The fact that the Syndic had manipulated Sal into meeting his real father at such a public event meant that he couldn’t just storm off or say what he truly felt, although if he did it wouldn’t be the first time that Sal’s stubborn sense of what was right had caused a scene. At the same time, there was no way he was going to embrace Highson Sparre as a father just because he had sired him during the brief time he and his wife had been together. Highson had led the search parties after the fugitive lovers; what would have happened if he had found them? To Sal, this man was a complete stranger. Without knowing what he was capable of, there was no question of automatically trusting him.

  On the other hand, part of Sal had come from him. Shilly could see it in the way they stared at each other—a stubborn, smouldering strength that might rarely be exercised, but when it came did so with all the force of a tidal wave. They were of a kind, whether Sal liked it or not. And that, unexpectedly, made her waver. Shilly had never known her real parents. The thought that there could be someone out there in the world who might be like her filled her with a strange curiosity. Had she been in Sal’s shoes, she might have backed down to see where that similarity could lead. There was a hole in her labelled “family” that ached to be filled.

  After what felt like a small eternity of silence, it was Highson who broke the impasse.

  “Your mother was the most remarkable woman I ever met,” he said, taking a stiff step forward. His voice was hoarse—utterly dissimilar to Sal’s—but not gratingly so. “I see her in you, more than I see myself. That is a good thing, I think.”

  Sal didn’t move or respond in any way as Highson took another hesitant step forward.

  “Toward the end, she spoke longingly of you,” he said. Another step, and they were within arm’s reach. “This is for you, Sal.”

  Highson Sparre reached into a pocket and produced a fat envelope, which he solemnly offered to Sal. Sal took it.

  “Thank you,” he said. Shilly could see tears in Sal’s eyes, but his tone was frosty. The envelope went into a pocket unopened.

  Highson waited a moment to see if Sal would say anything else. There was nothing. Both of their faces were determinedly closed, like masks. It was like watching two man’kin in a staring match, and Shilly wondered how long it was going to be like this. They couldn’t stand there all day!

  Again, it was Highson who broke the spell. He looked down at the ground, and backed away a step, symbolically retreating.

  “This is difficult for both of us,” he said. For the first time there was real emotion in his voice. “I am the closest thing to a father you have, and you are my only child. What will come of that, I don’t know. But I am here if you would like to give it a chance. Please remember that.”

  Sal nodded understanding, if not agreement, and Shilly wondered if he had heard the same note she had in Highson’s speech. The emotion underlying his plea wasn’t love or regret, or anger, or anything she might have expected. It was pleading.

  As the distance between father and son increased, the gathering around them seemed to come back to life. The Syndic raised her glass and proposed a toast to the new arrivals, praising their courage, determination and strength in surviving a journey few people dreamed of undertaking. There was a chorus of cheers led by the Alcaide in response, and much clinking of glasses. They were handed plates and told to lead the charge to the food. Shilly wasn’t hungry, but her stomach growled anyway, not having eaten anything since breakfast. She forced herself to sample some of the salads and cold meats laid out before them, not knowing when next she would get the chance.

  Sal responded politely but distantly to questions about their journey. Shilly, watching him, was distracted. Skender soon became the life of the party, filling in the details—real and imaginary—of their trek south. His enthusiasm for being the centre of attention was lapped up by the crowd, perfectly suiting their need for diversion.

  Shilly didn’t know who most of them were, but they clearly felt more comfortable with Skender’s tall tales than tense confrontations between those at the heart of the story. Those, she noted, stayed at the edges once the gathering developed a life of its own. Radi Mierlo watched enviously as the people she longed to be accepted by moved around her, not including her in their conversations. Highson Sparre and his aunt, the Syndic, conversed in low tones from the edges of the crowd. Sal and Shilly stood to one side, pretending to listen to Skender’s tales but in fact barely noticing them. There was still no sign of Behenna and Tait. If all this was supposed to make her feel more comfortable in the Haunted City, it was failing dismally.

  Of those at the heart of the story, only the Alcaide moved freely among the crowd, greeting everyone by name and joining in on their jokes. He seemed perfectly relaxed, a charming foil to the authoritarian coolness that the Syndic exuded. Shilly remembered how well he had hidden his true feelings regarding Sal’s adopted father in Fundelry, and was on the lookout for any signs of deception, but she saw none. He was so effusive in his welcome, and naturally friendly to everyone. If he was on their side, as Master Warden Atilde had suggested, he might be able to keep the Syndic and the others at bay.

  But there was one moment when she caught him looking at Sal a little too intently. The light of the sinking sun caught the bright, pink glare of the burn on his face and scalp, and there was a curl to his lip that undermined everything he was trying to project.

  In that moment Shilly realised that nothing would ever be simple in the Haunted City. If she and her friends were going to save Lodo and take him away from their captors, they would have to do it on their own.

  Chapter 4. Echoes of the Dead

  That night, alone at last, Sal sat in his room and opened the letter. The envelope was tightly sealed with a smear of wax and contained a single sheet of paper wrapped around an ancient, slim book, the title of which had been worn away by age. Neither appeared to have been tampered with. Sal glanced briefly at the book, but put it aside to concentrate on the sheet of paper. It crackled thickly as he unfolded it and spread it out on his lap. Someone had written upon it in a sloping, looped hand.

  By the silver light of the mirror, he read:

  My little Sayed,

  I do not know what sort of life you will have. I do not know if you will ever re
ad this letter. But if you are reading these words, or having them read to you, then the very worst that I imagine has come to pass: I am dead, and you have been found.

  There are so many things to say and so few words to contain them. I am sorry at the way you were brought into this world, but I am not sorry that you were mine. I am sorry because I will never hold you again, but I would rather know that you are free, without me, than see you caged like me. I am sorry I can’t give you the peaceful life you deserve, or all the riches of the land, but I am not sorry at all that I loved you, and love you still. While I was with you, I have never been happier.

  I will never see you again. You will grow up not knowing who I am, or why I did what I undertook for you, or how much it hurts that I cannot be with you now. This letter is all I can give you, and I hope you understand how it breaks my heart to imagine even for a moment that I have lost you forever.

  But I have. These words will be a testament to all Dafis and I did to keep you safe. That I can be sure of. Highson has strict instructions to keep this letter for you, unopened, but to destroy it if you are found while I live. He will carry it to the grave with him, waiting for you to return, should I die before seeing you again. I made him promise, and he will hold to it. He is the only one I can trust. He is the only one I will let myself trust. In his own strange way I think he loves me, or thinks he does, and that is an honour you cannot buy. (If Highson himself put this in your hand, remember that he was loyal to me, even after I betrayed him.)

  Even if I am wrong, I have little choice. I am alone here. Mother and Father returned to Mount Birrinah long before I was taken from you. I was brought here with nothing but my wits and my grief, and both have served me well. I am grateful for the chance to send you this message, even if I cannot give it to you in person, and even as my heart breaks at the thought of it.

  Whatever life you have, remember those who gave it to you, who nurtured you, who guided you. I was there for only a small part of that journey, but I would have held your hand the entire way had I been able to, and let you go when you no longer needed me. You will find your path with or without me, and I have faith that you will follow it to the end.

  I love you, Sayed—my son, my heart, my life—always,

  Seirian

  Sal read it through twice from beginning to end. At the bottom, in much shakier hand, Sal’s mother had added:

  Resignedly beneath the sky

  The melancholy waters lie.

  He didn’t understand that part, but the rest was very clear. His mother had written those words years ago, and although he had never heard her voice, he could imagine her saying them to him now. He could hear her sadness and her despair—and her determination, too, that what she had done had been the right thing. She and her lover had been trying to protect him from the ones who had taken him from them; the ones who had him now. The very worst that I imagined has come to pass…

  He hadn’t noticed that he was crying until a tear dripped from his cheek and smudged the fading ink. He dried the letter on his shirt and folded it away in the envelope for safekeeping. In his pack he found the silver clasp that had once belonged to his mother and he put the letter next to it on the bed. They were all he had of her. His grandmother had promised a picture, once, but hadn’t delivered. The clasp and the letter were the only things he had to cling to.

  And the book.

  He turned to it in puzzlement. The pages within the leather bindings were tissue-thin, and he leafed through them with exaggerated care. Row after row of tiny printed words stared back at him, some of them in languages he couldn’t understand. They were poems or song lyrics, but none of them had titles. He couldn’t tell if they had been arranged in any particular order, or were supposed to tell a story.

  Sal closed the book and rested it on his lap, feeling the wrinkled leather covers and wondering if his mother had been holding it when she died. He had visited the land where she was born; now he was holding something she had once held. It should have comforted him, made him feel closer to her, but instead all it did was frustrate him. She had been taken from him before he had really come to know her, and she had died alone, missing him. The same people responsible for that had tried to take him as well, and had killed the man he loved as a father for getting in the way. Now they had him, would they kill him, too?

  Anger welled in him, as dark and dangerous as the storm he had dreamed of the night before, the storm he had summoned from the heart of the Interior. He was tired of being pushed around. What right did the Sky Warden have to decide what he did with his life? Who were they to say what was best for him? He doubted they even cared about him, really. They just wanted him because he was gifted in the Change. They wanted his wild talent for themselves. If they could rip it out of his head and wield it without him, they would have done it without hesitating—just as they had captured Lodo and Shilly and Skender simply for being associated with him.

  Sal’s right hand plucked at the bindings around his left wrist, causing faint trickles of warning pain up his arm. He had to get out of the Haunted City. The first and perhaps only thing stopping him was the ward Behenna had put on him. If he could only break it, he could free Shilly and Skender, find Lodo, somehow, and get the hell out of there. How hard could that be? If he was so powerful, he should be able to do it. It was only pain, after all—and if it came to a choice between pain and dying…

  The Change rose in him like clouds boiling over a thunderhead. The tears dried in his eyes as he sent all his will in a concentrated surge to the charm on his wrist. He felt the ward in his ear flame as the charm responded by tightening like a wire around his wrist. His mouth opened in a silent scream, and he clutched his left arm to his chest, but he didn’t stop trying. Instead he redoubled his efforts. The charm couldn’t hold forever. If he pushed hard enough, it would break. Purple blotches swam across his vision. He felt as though his hand was being sliced right off his arm. A strange, keening sound was coming from his throat, but he didn’t hear it. All he felt was the Change rushing through him and a lightning bolt of pain at his wrist.

  And sure enough, something broke…

  (There was a hum. Not really a sound, though, more a deep, resonant vibration that droned through him as it did through the entire universe. Ever-present, unchanging: if time had a voice, this would be it. He had felt it before, somewhere. But for an infinite moment, he couldn’t remember where and he had only the vaguest idea who he was; there was something he had to do, and he hadn’t done it; he had to go back…)

  Someone was calling him.

  “Sayed.” The man’s voice was unfamiliar, yet he was sure he had heard it before. “Sayed Hrvati. Wake up.”

  Sal opened his eyes. He was lying on his side on the bed, left arm stretched out before him. The charm was still fixed to his wrist, surrounded by a bright red welt that looked as bad as it hurt. His very best effort had failed to remove it.

  He winced and sat up. His head was pounding. There was a faint buzzing in the air, as though his exertion had set it ringing like a bell and the resulting vibrations went on forever. He hadn’t realised he had been pushing so hard, and he told himself he should have known better. There were consequences…

  He frowned, remembering then that someone had spoken to him, called him back. But the door was shut, and the room was empty.

  “I am all around you, Sayed,” said the voice. “Don’t you remember me?”

  A torrent of icy water seemed to pour down Sal’s back. He knew what that voice belonged to. He had met it once before, when he had inadvertently attracted its attention. And only it called him openly by his heart-name, Sayed, plus his father’s family name, Hrvati.

  “You said we might meet again,” Sal said, hoping his fear wouldn’t show.

  “I did,” said the golem—or the thing that inhabited golems—out of thin air. Although it seemed to be invisible now, Sal remembered how it had
looked in the city of the Broken Lands: in the body of a stocky Sky Warden, it had robbed its host of all vitality, leaving him hollow-mouthed and with eyes of shadow. Cold had radiated from it, and menace. Drawn by Sal’s use of the Change to heal Shilly’s leg, everything it said had been calculated to unsettle them, to encourage them to use the Change in an attempt to drive it away.

  It had told them about Lodo. Shilly’s teacher hadn’t died saving them from the Alcaide. Lodo had burned himself out on the inside, over-exerted himself and made himself vulnerable to things like the golem. The news had been shockingly hurtful, but the golem couldn’t hurt them directly. Only if they gave it a clear opening would it come inside, possess them as it had possessed so many other bodies down the years. And they hadn’t used the Change for that reason.

  That, Sal supposed, was what had drawn it to him now: his exertions in trying to break the charm on his wrist. Not enough to take him over, but enough to attract its interest.

  “What are you doing here?” Sal asked it.

  “I have always been here.” Its voice whined out of the air like a finger making a glass sing. “I told you that there were three places creatures like me congregate. You’ve seen all three of the great cities of the Strand and the Interior now. I am not the only one who inhabits them.”

  Sal wished there was something he could look at, something that might give him a focus for his fears. With the voice coming from all around him, he felt very vulnerable.

  “I meant, what are you doing here? With me.”

  “I came to you to offer my help, Sayed. I have something you want.”

  “What is it?”

  “If I tell you, will you help me in return?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what I have to offer, or on what I want you to do for me?”

  “Both, I guess. Will you tell me?”

  The golem chuckled. “You are a clever boy. You know that I can only speak the truth—that I cannot lie, no matter how much I might want to. That is my nature, and I am bound to it.”