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

by Sean Williams

  “He must have gone,” she said with wooden finality. “He’s run away. He has escaped.”

  “He can’t have,” Skender said, sitting next to her.

  “Why not? What if your charm worked and the bracelet came right off? He’d be free to go, then.” Shilly looked at him as though hoping he would disagree.

  He obliged. “Sure, but that doesn’t mean he would. And we would’ve heard something, even if he had decided to leave without us. Which I’m sure he wouldn’t.

  She rubbed her leg. “He tried to leave me behind once before,” she said.

  “On the way to the Nine Stars, when he summoned the storm?”

  “No. This was earlier. In Yor, before we reached the Broken Lands. He thought it would be better for me if I stayed behind while he went on.”

  “So? That was weeks ago.”

  “What if he thinks the same thing now—if he really believes I want to stay here to learn? He might leave me so I wouldn’t get into trouble. But I don’t want to stay here. I just want to find Lodo and go home!”

  “Hey, take it easy. Sal wouldn’t do that now. You know he wouldn’t.” Skender put all the certainty he could into his voice, hoping it was warranted. “He wouldn’t leave us here on our own.”

  It seemed to work. “No,” she said, glancing away, “he wouldn’t.”

  Her expression was strange. “What’s up, Shilly? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  She wouldn’t meet his eye. “No.”

  “You’re blushing.”

  “I am not!” She pushed him hard enough to knock him off the bed. He went over in a tangle of arms and legs and hit the floor with a thump.

  “Hey!”

  “Wait.” She helped him back up, looking less chastened, more as though she’d had an idea. “I’ve thought of a way to find him.”

  “How?”

  “Mawson will know.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because Mawson knew what was going on when Sal called the storm. He knew that Sal was trying to lead Behenna into a trap.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’ll know now. Or that he’ll help us if he does—”

  “He’s our only chance, Skender. We have to ask him.”

  She was clutching his arm and her eyes were pleading. He collapsed flat on the bed in mock exhaustion.

  “You want me to go back up there again—”

  “Yes.”

  “—crawl to where Mawson is kept, and crawl all the way back? Possibly for no reason at all?”

  “Please, Skender. I’m sorry to make you do it. I’d do it myself only I don’t know where Radi Mierlo’s room is, and my leg—”

  “All right, all right.” He brushed aside her protestations; that they were genuine didn’t make him feel any better about it. “Just let me get my breath back.” Clutching for a distraction, his eyes fell on a sketch she had put on her bedside table. “Who’s that?”

  “None of your business,” she said, tugging the picture out of sight. “Skender, could you go now? I’m seriously concerned that Sal’s in trouble. What if he’s lost somewhere, or hurt? Or the Syndic has kidnapped him? I won’t be able to think about anything else until I know he’s safe.”

  Skender groaned loudly. If there was one thing he hated, it was emotional blackmail. He, too, was worried about Sal, but he didn’t like being made to feel guilty for not jumping at her command.

  “What’s up, Shilly?” he asked. “It’s not like you to be so soft. You’re the tough one of us three. Sal said he’s never seen you cry. Not once. And you never ask for help.”

  “Sal’s wrong.” Her face tightened. “You’ve seen me cry, in the Keep. And I’m asking you for help right now. Why do I have to be the strong one all the time? Maybe it’s your turn for once. Are you going to be tough with me, Skender? Are you going to tell me to shut up and turn my back while our friend’s in danger? Or are you going to stop your whining and do your best to help him?”

  “Of course I’m going to help.” He sighed and sat up. “Okay. I’ll go ask Mawson now.” The muscles in his calves and back cursed him for giving in so easily as he shimmied up the cupboard and reached for the vent.

  “Thanks, Skender,” she said without a trace of victory in her voice. “I owe you a big one.”

  He looked back at her before raising himself up into darkness. The fingernail was back in her mouth. She looked very small, very different to the Shilly he had first met. Her short hair made her look younger than he knew she was, and she had lost weight on the trip. There were bags under her eyes.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, and meant it.

  Shilly collapsed onto the bed as the sound of Skender moving across the ceiling faded into silence. There was nothing to do now but wait. She hated it, being trapped in a cage while everything went to pieces around her. She was like some useless chattel dragged around from place to place as everyone else did the work. She was sick to death of it.

  She tried to make herself useful as best she could. The afternoon’s tutorial group had been held in the library. While Fairney thought she and Skender were dutifully looking for the information he had sent them to research, they were instead scouring every available tome for information on the Golden Tower. Sal’s mother hadn’t come right out and said in her note that it would help them get out of the Haunted City, but why would she when the letter was being kept for Sal by the man who had robbed her of her own freedom? If Highson Sparre ever learned that the way to salvation lay in the Golden Tower, he would do his utmost to keep Sal away from it.

  Shilly wasn’t convinced that finding the Tower would solve everything. It wouldn’t necessarily help them find Lodo, for instance, and the warning to beware was still vivid in her mind. But she found herself caught up in the mystery, in the thrill of the hunt. Through dozens of dusty old books she pored for any hint of the mysterious tower. Skender took one section, and she took another. They crossed paths every now and again to compare leads, or to show off strange new details they uncovered, but all they got in the end was trouble for not doing the work Fairney had given them. Kemp made certain that their inattention was discovered, and Fairney scowled at them, genuinely disappointed by their delinquency. Shilly had felt some remorse, although she knew he would be worse than disappointed if he knew the truth. And he was only half as disappointed as Skender was: she suspected Skender had honestly believed that with just one afternoon’s effort they would unravel the mystery that had puzzled Sky Wardens and their novices for generations. Finding the charm for Sal had given him a false sense of confidence.

  The image of presenting Sal with the secret of the Golden Tower when he finally turned up had been a pleasing one, Shilly had to admit. All they had to do was stumble across something: a clue, a map, a picture. A single mention would have been good. She wasn’t unduly crushed by their failure, though. She was realistic enough to know what they were up against. And she remembered something that she suspected Skender had quite forgotten.

  The secret message from Sal’s mother said The Golden Tower, but that wasn’t all. There was another part, one that had struck her as odd at the time but which neither of the boys had mentioned since.

  The message also said, Ask the ghosts.

  It wasn’t in any way clear how they were supposed to do that. One couldn’t simply walk into one of the glass towers, pick a ghost and ask it. There were no doors or windows into the towers, and the ghosts had shown no sign of being remotely aware of the people outside.

  Except once.

  She pulled the sketch she had drawn from under the covers where she had hidden it after Skender had shown interest in it. The likeness was good. She felt that she had captured the high cheekbones and eyes well, from memory, although she was a little unsure about the mouth and hairline. There was a gauntness to the visage that matched the original perfectl
y, and that was something to be proud of. She had economically defined the essence of the ghost she had seen through glass that first morning in the Haunted City. It was very clear in her mind.

  Fine, she thought scornfully to herself. So I’ve got a picture. Now what? Asking it is not going to do any good.

  She screwed the picture into a ball and threw it across the room. The paper bounced off the glowing mirror and rolled to a halt by the wardrobe. Maybe if she had some sort of talent, she might have used a charm to link her thoughts with those of the ghost—if it had thoughts. But she didn’t have any talent. All she could do was lie uselessly on her bed and draw. That was never going to help her and Sal escape.

  The thought of Sal brought a new brand of gloom to the evening. All day she had been questioning her motives for kissing him. Yes, she had been hoping to distract him from the pain of the tattoo…but why that way? What had possessed her?

  Part of her understood perfectly well why she had done it, and it was that part of her that worried her the most. She’d had, briefly, a crush on Tait because of his ordinariness. In the end, he had helped betray her, but the shine had already begun to wear off him by then. Tait was too ordinary. He reminded her of everything she had left behind in Fundelry—and most of it she had been happy to leave behind, eventually.

  Sal was almost the exact opposite of Tait. He was the exotic stranger who challenged everything she took for granted. He was constantly surprising her, and pushing her in directions she’d never imagined she could go. She learned more from him in two months than she had from ten years of School with Mrs Milka.

  And now he was gone. The absence of him was a hole deep inside her chest where normally resided a strange certainty of his presence: a shared sensation of nearness, of belonging, that had puzzled both of them in Fundelry, but to which they had become quietly accustomed. The lack of it nagged at her like the mending cracks in her leg. It ate into her confidence, into her sense of things. What if he had already escaped? Without her. Why was she busting her gut to help him when he cared so little for her in return?

  She balled her fists into her eyes, feeling like she was going in circles and wishing she could switch off her mind. One fist contained the ward he had left behind the previous night. She had been carrying it all day, waiting for him to appear so she could give it to him. She hoped it wasn’t going to be all she had left to remind her of him—and that he didn’t need it, wherever he was—

  Enough! she cried silently. There’s nothing I can do, but that’s no reason to torture myself.

  A faint rustling sound drew her attention from her misery. She uncovered her eyes and looked up, expecting to see Skender’s feet descending from the hole. But there was nothing there. And the light in the room was different—bluer, brighter, colder.

  She looked down—and drew the covers around her when she saw what was staring out of the mirror.

  “Yes,” said a soft, sibilant voice. The lips of the face in the mirror moved in time to the syllable. It was the ghost, standing behind glass and peering at her as though through a thin mist. Its features were exactly as she had remembered them. “A unique combination: moon and glass and image. Resourceful. Well done.”

  “Who—” Shilly’s voice failed her for a second. “What are you?”

  “I am one of the unliving. You brought me here, or partly here, anyway. This isn’t a full summoning. I can come to you like this, tonight, because of the full moon. We see in you the ability to go much further than this.” The headless face smiled. “You are a very special young woman. I knew you would be. What are you called?”

  “Shilly.” She glanced at where the balled-up sketch had come to a halt on the floor. The paper had flattened itself out and was blank. Somehow, the face she had drawn had disappeared—and reappeared on the other side of the mirror. “I didn’t mean to do anything.”

  “Don’t look so worried. You haven’t done anything wrong. Quite the contrary. This is something to be proud of. Many people have attempted to speak to us and failed. The requirements are quite strict.”

  “What—” She stopped, about to repeat her first question. Instead she asked, “What do you mean by ‘unliving’?”

  “Just that. I am not alive. I am not dead, either. I have never been born, and I will not die. I am…something else.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure I do myself.” The face smiled again. “Can you explain what you are, what your ‘life’ is? There are fundamental properties of this world that evade definition. I suspect that this is one of them. Sometimes we must accept that two things are simply different and move on.”

  Shilly stared at the face in the mirror, far from certain that she agreed. All things could be explained, surely. She wasn’t the sort to give up just because something was difficult. Whatever “unliving” meant, she wasn’t getting the same impression she had received from the golem in the Broken Lands city. There was no cold, no taint of evil. There was an emptiness to its eyes that unnerved her slightly—and the appearance of a young man felt entirely wrong in the context of the voice issuing from it.

  “You must have called me for a reason,” the ghost prompted.

  “Yes,” she said, glossing over the fact that she had called it by accident. “What can you tell me about the Golden Tower?”

  “Ah,” the ghost nodded slowly, “I am here for a reason. Good. I like a sense of purpose. And what could be more noble than opening the Golden Tower?”

  The question was clearly a rhetorical one. Shilly waited impatiently for the answer.

  It came in the form of another question. “Do you know the secret of the cities?”

  “I thought there wasn’t one,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “A golem told us, and golems can’t lie.”

  “A golem, eh? I see.” The face in the glass rolled its eyes. “Golems can’t lie, but that doesn’t mean they’re honest. There are ways to deceive using only the truth, and golems mastered the techniques millennia ago. The secret of the Towers is technically not a secret because someone did find out about it, once. It may never have been common knowledge, and it may have been forgotten since, but that’s enough to make the golem’s statement true. Technically it wasn’t lying, even though it didn’t tell you the truth. Remember this next time you talk to the creature.”

  She nodded. “So there is a secret?”

  “Yes, and that secret is the Golden Tower.” The ghost adopted a slight frown, as though aware it was going in circles and looking for a better way to put it. “The Golden Tower is the heart of the city, its core, its foundation, its cornerstone. Without it, everything would unravel.”

  “How?”

  “It is difficult to explain. The nature of the Tower is inextricably bound up in the Change, and the Change itself is a mystery. We understand how it works, and what it does, but why is an eternal question. It is the beginning of a road that has no end. Like life, for some.”

  “So where is it, then? The Tower, I mean. No one here seems to know. If it was like the other towers, but gold, you’d think it would stand out.”

  “Indeed, so therefore it’s not a tower like the others. You would have seen it if it was, all the times you’ve been in the city.”

  She frowned. “We haven’t been here before.”

  “You have. You just didn’t know it.”

  “When? I’m completely lost now.”

  The ghost tilted its head apologetically. “I’m sorry. This isn’t easy for either of us.”

  “Obviously. But you’ll have to try harder. There’s not much I can do at my end.”

  The ghost did try harder, or seemed to. “You see the world in ways we do not. We live in the city, and experience only the city. You see as separate that which we see as joined. The Golden Tower is the thing that binds everything together. It brings the �
��far away’ to the ‘near’ and vice versa. It is a means of crossing between.”

  “A means of crossing between…” she repeated, comprehension slowly dawning. “Are you saying that the Golden Tower is a Way?”

  “You might call it that.”

  “Of course!” Now she understood. The Golden Tower, wherever it was, held an entrance to one of the space-folding Ways the Stone Mages used to cross great distances underground. Lodo had used one to connect a hole in the side of a sand dune to his workshop a hundred odd kilometres from Fundelry. Similarly, the road from Ulum to the Keep travelled only a dozen or so kilometres but ended up many times that north of the city. Shilly didn’t know anything about the way they worked, but she knew what they could do.

  If there was a Way in the Golden Tower, it could be an escape route. And that had to be why Sal’s mother had encouraged them to find it. In hindsight, it was so simple.

  She leaned forward, her worry about Sal pushed out of her mind by the excitement of discovery.

  “If there’s a Way, it must lead somewhere. Tell me where, and how to find it. I need to know!”

  “The Golden Tower isn’t easy to find. I’m not sure I can help you there. And as to where it leads, we are back where we were earlier. I cannot answer that question in a way you will understand. There will be others who can help you, I’m sure.”

  “Like who?”

  “Your inquisitive mind will find a way.” The ghost beamed as though it had provided a perfectly satisfactory response.

  Shilly disagreed. The ghost was right: she was exactly where she’d started. She didn’t know where the Golden Tower was or how to find it. All she had learned was that it contained the entrance to a Way that might lead out of the Haunted City. The possibility was exciting, but at the moment far from likely to become anything more than that.