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

by Sean Williams

  “I remember you saying that, yes.” The phrase “clever boy” was exactly what Behenna had called him when Sal had outsmarted him at the Divide. “You do have a choice, though. You can tell me the truth or you can say nothing at all.”

  “Which would you prefer?”

  “I would prefer that you stopped playing games, and did what you came here to do.”

  “Very well, then.” The golem paused for a moment, as though considering its options. “Since we cannot reach an immediate agreement, I’ll give you half an answer and you can think about it. I’ll tell you what I have to offer you.”

  “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I know where Lodo is,” breathed the golem into his ear.

  The words were completely unexpected. Sal sat up straighter on the bed, addressing the empty air. “You do? Where?”

  There was no reply. He clambered onto his knees.

  “Hello? Tell me where he is so we can rescue him!”

  But the voice was gone. The background buzzing faded as Sal’s natural levels of the Change returned. The presence of the golem disappeared with it. It obviously wasn’t going to answer until he agreed to help it—and even if he wanted to, he didn’t know how to call it back to tell it so.

  Or was it playing with him, teasing him? Watching his frustration from its invisible viewpoint, enjoying the way it had tortured him?

  Frustrated, head pounding, Sal fell back onto the bed and accidentally squashed something under his palm. It was his mother’s book. He picked it up, hoping he hadn’t damaged it. The book fell open at a particular page as though the spine was weakened at that point. Before he could close it and put it with the letter and brooch, a dozen familiar words caught his eye on the page before him. They were two lines from a much longer poem that began:

  Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

  In a strange city lying alone

  Far down within the dim west

  Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

  Have gone to their eternal rest.

  The verse concluded:

  Resignedly beneath the sky

  The melancholy waters lie.

  So blend the turrets and shadows there

  That all seem pendulous in air,

  While from the proud tower in the town

  Death looks gigantically down.

  The book had definitely seemed to fall open at that page, as though he was meant to see it.

  He peered closer. There were tiny pinpricks beneath some of the letters. With a growing sense of excitement, he opened the book wider and held it up to the light.

  Skender had been just about to blow his cover and come through the vent when Sal stirred. Blinking and rubbing his head, Sal sat up and looked around, dazed but fine. Skender breathed a heavy sigh of relief. It was obvious what had happened: Sal had over-exerted himself trying to get the charm off his wrist and knocked himself out cold in the process. The effort had been a magnificent one: Skender could still feel the aftershock ringing through him. The dust motes in the crawlspace were dancing in the light from the mirror below.

  But it wasn’t enough, and it would never be. Brute force clearly wasn’t going to see the bracelet off. Skender assumed that it bounced any effort to remove it back at the wearer, so Sal had effectively punched himself with everything he had sent at the charm. There had to be another way. It was just a matter of finding it.

  Skender waited long enough to make sure his friend was okay, then headed off through the crawlspace, resolving to do something about the charm. There was no question of Sal joining him: not only was it easier for one to travel in this cramped space, but the bracelet would sound the alarm before they got very far. Sal probably wouldn’t try anything like that again in a hurry.

  The route to the library was as ingrained in his memory as everything else he had seen that day: beginning with breakfast and followed by the tour of the Novitiate grounds, their first lecture, Fairney’s tutorial, and the weird reception with the Alcaide and the Syndic. Try as he might, Skender still couldn’t see the point of the last. Why go to such trouble just to make Sal and Shilly feel welcome, when clearly they weren’t? Why do it when they were supposed to be in classes? Why drag him along with them? At least, he supposed, he had got to see somewhere else outside the Novitiate, finally.

  Dinner had been a repeat of breakfast and lunch, with mountains of food dished out to the hungry students. Many of the wardens involved in the Novitiate joined them for the evening meal, but sat apart on a table at the rear of the dining hall talking quietly among themselves. Master Warden Atilde hadn’t been among them. Skender pictured her eating alone in the heart of the Novitiate, pecking at a plate of grain like a giant crow.

  After dinner came the moment he knew Sal and Shilly had been dreading all day: the homework session. He too was nervous as four attendants guided them to an empty classroom where Kemp and Tom had awaited them. Skender gathered that Tom was bright in an introverted, overly focused way. He had helped Kemp pass his Selector’s exam back in Fundelry, and that assistance was probably continuing now that they had reached their serious studies. Tom certainly looked excited at the opportunity to help out his friends, while Kemp watched with sullen ill grace as they filed into the room.

  Locked in together, there was nothing for it but to face the problem head-on.

  “Anyone fancy a round of Quintuple Blind?” Skender asked.

  “We’re here to work,” rumbled Kemp, “not play games.”

  “Just trying to break the ice.”

  “Well don’t. Sit down and shut up.”

  “Don’t talk to him like that,” said Shilly, bristling.

  “You can shut up too, Shilly. The sooner Tom tells you what you missed, the sooner we all get out of here.”

  Kemp gestured dismissively for Tom to start, looking almost bored in the face of their anger. Skender swallowed his pride and took a seat with Sal and Shilly. He could feel their tension and anger radiating off them like heat off a fire.

  Tremulously at first, Tom began to speak. With surprising succinctness, he summarised the portions of Fairney’s tutorial that they had missed, then brought them up to date on some of the more general concepts he’d been taught since arriving at the Haunted City. He explained in a singsong way that people had lived among the towers of the Haunted City for centuries without ill effect. Skender had been taught this at home, but he had never expected to see the proof of it so intimately. The Novitiate buildings were old—not as old as the towers themselves, or the Keep, but they had stood for more years than he could possibly guess at, and might stand for many more yet. Compared to the Nine Stars, below which only a handful of people lived, and the city in the Broken Lands, where no one lived at all, the Haunted City was a thriving metropolis.

  “Why here?” asked Shilly, perhaps genuinely curious, not merely maintaining her role as interested student. “It’s not as if it’s near anything, or easy to live off the island, either. They must ferry food across every day, and—”

  “They live here because they can,” interrupted Kemp. “That’s all we need to know—and that Fairney gave us homework. I suggest we get on with it before some of us get into trouble.”

  “I’m surprised, Kemp,” said Sal, rising to the challenge. “I didn’t think you’d be so frightened of the wardens.”

  “Who said anything about me and them?” the bully responded. “I was talking about you getting into trouble with me.” He cracked his knuckles loudly in the echoing room. “Want to try me?”

  Shilly made an exasperated noise. “Give us the homework, Tom, and spare us this bulldust. I’m getting tired.”

  From then on it had been nothing but work, for which Skender suspected everyone was grateful. Kemp was a walking firework, just looking for someone to light his fuse. What he was so angry about, Skender didn’
t know, but he had no intention of being around when Kemp went off.

  After what seemed like a small eternity, the attendants had let them out. Kemp stalked off without so much as a goodnight, with Tom not far behind. Sal, Shilly and Skender were marched off to clean their teeth, after which they were taken separately to their rooms and locked in for the night.

  The moment Skender’s bedroom door had closed behind him, he had rearranged his furniture and escaped through the ceiling. After checking on Shilly and then Sal, the library seemed the logical place to go. He could be there in under an hour, he estimated. If he was careful—or lucky—he could locate what he wanted straight away and be back well before dawn. That was the plan, anyway.

  The dusty ceiling-spaces of the Novitiate dormitories wound for an appreciable distance, much further abroad than he had explored the previous night. Skender had noticed during that day’s brief tour how many of the buildings embracing the bases of the towers were joined, like weeds that spread and overlapped as they grew around the trunks of trees in a forest. Their roofs overlapped too, and as he followed the route he had taken that day, along corridors and around the dining hall, he was able to do so entirely from the ceiling. Enough light shone up through vents to illuminate his way, and only occasionally did he have to brave fragile boards. Sky Wardens had numerous charms to preserve the wood they used in buildings; even on an island, with the sea on all sides, there was very little water rot or salt damage.

  Eventually he ran out of roof. He dropped down into a corridor by the exit, as lithe as a cat. The corridor was lined with wooden plinths he would use to get back up through the vent, if he couldn’t find a better way. The door outside wasn’t locked, and didn’t seem to be charmed. He opened it as quietly as he could and slipped outside.

  The coolness of the air surprised him, as did the amount of light available. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness of the crawlspace. Outside, there was the moon—riding high, nearly full, among the glistening towers—and a faint glow from the towers themselves. The view was magical and eerie at the same time. By night the ghosts were faint silhouettes in the light, featureless and faintly threatening. He felt as though every one of them had turned to stare at him the moment he walked through the doorway, but when he looked at them they pretended he wasn’t there.

  Shivering with delicious fear, he hurried through the narrow laneways in the direction he knew the library lay. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that he could walk unnoticed through the front door, so when he got close he scrambled up the side of another building and onto its roof, and from there went through a ventilation shaft and back into welcoming darkness. He sat for a moment, relishing the absence of the ghosts, then crawled on his way.

  Five minutes later, he dropped from a sliding panel onto the top of a musty bookcase. Something skittered away from his feet, and he shushed it nervously. Frozen, he waited to see if anyone or anything had noticed his arrival.

  Silence greeted him. There was just enough light to see that the library was empty. Taking care not to knock anything over—all the shelves were crowded with books, folders, sketches, and strange artefacts he couldn’t identify—he climbed down to the floor and looked around.

  The irregular shape of the library made it hard to immediately discern any kind of system among the hundreds of shelves stretching off into the gloom, but there had to be one. The Sky Wardens were as organised as the Stone Mages, in their own way, and they wouldn’t allow their major reference source to fall into any sort of chaos. Increasingly certain that he was alone, Skender wandered along the aisles, glancing at volumes at random to see if he could work out how they might be ordered.

  The books ranged from slim volumes containing only a handful of pages of beautifully executed drawings and little explanation—probably issued as limited or unique editions to accompany a major practitioner’s notes, shelved elsewhere—to massive tomes he could barely lift. Bigger generally corresponded to well thumbed, so it was to such books he turned for guidance. The first one he looked at consisted of detailed anatomical sketches that made him blanch. The second had no illustrations at all, just page after page of tightly spaced script in a language he couldn’t read. The third contained sketches of plants with details of their uses; someone had scribbled corrections in the margin, detailing in an acid tongue where the original author had got it wrong.

  Skender soon lost track of time. Every book was a window into knowledge he had never seen before. No one knew exactly when or why the Stone Mages and Sky Wardens had drifted apart, but the difference was now absolute. Not only were the sources of power for each discipline utterly removed, but the ways they were used and the effects they had rarely overlapped. Although in principle wardens and mages were all Change-users, and at some point, Skender supposed, the sources themselves had to have a common origin, the difference was like sugar and salt: they looked similar and they both dissolved in water, but the taste couldn’t have been more different. The consequences of straying from the proper paths were severe, as Shom Behenna had found out.

  Or so Skender and everyone he knew had been taught, until Sal and Shilly appeared. Their teacher, Lodo—a former Stone Mage and friend to Skender’s father—had taught a very different message: that anyone could use the Change anywhere. The background potential—a formless, weak field pervading all things in various degrees of concentration, regardless of whether a thing was alive or not—had apparently been critical to Lodo’s teaching methods. Skender wondered if the old man hadn’t been slightly wrong in the head. The background potential was useful for parlour tricks, nothing more. The real power exercised by mage and warden alike came from the wells of potential bubbling up from within, with the help of repositories like the sea or the bedrock.

  Still, Skender was smart enough to know that he didn’t know everything, as both Sal’s wild talent and the library in the Haunted City attested. It would take years to commit every page to memory, and much longer to understand it all. It probably wasn’t even possible, he thought. The study of the Change had been going for so long that no one person could hold all of the accumulated knowledge in their head.

  Skender browsed, fascinated, through all that knowledge with a patience that began to flag only as he grew tired. Think what his father would say when he returned with all this new theory! This would more than make up for his disobedience, and rendered his adventure perfectly justifiable. However, he knew he couldn’t stay in the library all night. Amongst so much information on the Strand and its Change-users, there simply had to be something about the Interior.

  Metal Wards…Imitative Charms…Skender didn’t have the resources to do anything with those; he needed something that could be put into place unobtrusively and which Sal’s wild talent could put into practise. Curative and Preventative Mnemonics…getting closer. Restorative Images…

  Aha.

  Skender pulled out the heavy book and settled back to read.

  Shilly woke in the middle of the night from a dream of breaking her leg. It was a dream she’d had many times since the day she and Sal crossed the ravine on the edge of the Broken Lands. Every time, she relived her terrible helplessness as the buggy slewed from side to side across the derelict bridge, crushing her between its bumper and the guardrail. It was never the memory of the pain that woke her up, though. The pain had come later, when she realised what had happened to her. It was the sound. The sound of her leg breaking in numerous places at once, an awful crack that would reverberate through her life for decades to come, despite the best efforts of the many people who had tried to heal her along the way…

  She sat up and wiped the sweat from her forehead. No blame, she had told Sal at the time, and despite reconsidering that decision at odd moments in the Interior, she still held to it. It had been an accident, and Sal had done everything in his power to save her life. He was as innocent of malice as she was. They had both been lied to and manipulated from the start,
and even now, when everything they had set out to do together appeared to have come to nothing, she still couldn’t give up hope. They weren’t criminals. They didn’t deserve to be locked up. It was only a matter of time before someone saw reason and let them and Lodo go…

  A low moan came through the walls of her room. It sounded like the wind, but at night, in the near darkness, her mind entertained other, more sinister possibilities. She had been glad to come back inside after the official reception. That it had been strained and awkward was bad enough, but she would have sat happily through twice as much homework with Kemp just to get out of the sight of the ghosts. She felt them staring at her wherever she went. Even now, in the safety of her room, she felt as though she was being watched. In her mind’s eye she saw the face of the ghost that had pressed up against the window as clearly as though it was hanging before her. His expression wasn’t pleading, as she had first thought; it was puzzled, hurt, as though not understanding where he was or what had happened to him. His pale eyebrows were drawn together in a slight frown; his grey eyes were enormous, staring right into hers…

  “Shilly!”

  She jumped and pulled the bedcovers up to her neck. “Get out!” she hissed. “You can’t come in here.”

  “It’s me—Skender,” came the whisper in reply. “What are you talking about? Why can’t I come in?”

  She looked around the dimly lit room, then up at the vent, only slowly remembering something Skender had furtively whispered about using the crawlspaces to sneak around. She’d thought he was joking.

  “What are you doing?”

  With a soft grating noise, the vent receded up into blackness and Skender’s filthy face appeared in its place.

  “I’ve been exploring,” he said, as though it was perfectly normal behaviour to appear out of the ceiling in the middle of the night. “If I come down, will you boost me back up afterward?”