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

by Sean Williams

  “What Way?” asked Sal. “I thought the Tower was the Way.”

  The golem turned to face the sound of his voice. “You must open the Way to get into the Tower.”

  “Why don’t we just open the Way to somewhere else and get straight out of here?”

  “That’s not the deal,” snarled the golem. “You must open the Tower. Only then will you be free to do as you wish.”

  “Why didn’t we open it back in my room, then?”

  “And have every warden down on our heads within minutes? I don’t think so.”

  “All right, all right,” Sal said. “What do we need to do?”

  The golem nodded and rubbed its hands together. “Join as one. The three of you—here, in front of me.”

  Shilly crutched forward to stand next to Sal and took his right hand. Skender took his left. The golem moved closer behind them and put one hand on each of Sal’s shoulders. Shilly felt the shock of cold rush through him again, second-hand.

  “There is a charm,” the golem said. “Can you see it in my mind?”

  Shilly felt Sal tentatively reach out to touch the thoughts of the golem. They were dark and seemed to stretch forever, swirling with infinite complexities. It was unlike any mind she had ever seen. At the forefront of it was a pattern somewhat resembling a four-leaf clover, tumbling slowly.

  “We see it,” said Sal.

  “You must make it move thus.” The pattern twisted, seeming to stretch into a tube without actually going anywhere. Shilly struggled to grasp the way it had changed. “At one end is the portal before us,” the golem went on, “at the other is the interior of the Tower.”

  New information poured into them, this time of a place, but it came to them not in the form of a picture. She could only understand it in terms of planes and corners, of vertices and lines that, when combined, made the barest shape of the room, not its appearance. The knowledge was like a builder’s blueprint, but in three dimensions not two, felt not seen. The chamber was star-shaped, with five points and a slightly raised central area. She held the structure of it in her mind, as though someone had painted the room from floor to ceiling, then taken the room away, leaving just the paint behind.

  “If you know all this,” asked Sal, “why don’t you open the Way yourself?”

  “I can’t,” said the golem. “I am unable to use the Change as you do. If the Change is air, I breathe it while you fly in it. I am trapped on the ground, forced to employ others to do my will.”

  “Others like us.”

  “Exactly. I will not be able to participate in this exercise, so you must ensure that you have all you need. I will be watching your friends, to make sure there are no mistakes.”

  Shilly felt Sal’s anger at the threat, but he said nothing.

  “Show me the charm again,” said Skender. The distorted clover leaf returned. It collapsed then stretched again. Shilly still hadn’t got her head around it when Skender said, “Okay. Got it. You can go now.”

  The golem breathed in sharply, but did withdraw, letting go of Sal and stepping back away from them.

  The sense of cold instantly faded.

  “So what do we do now?” Skender asked, via the Change.

  “We do as it told us to do,” said Sal.

  “Why? We’ve got what we need. We know how to make a Way. Finally, we can escape!”

  “I’m not sure that we can.”

  “Why not? We have the charm, and we have a starting point. We don’t have to use the destination the golem gave us. We can go anywhere we want!”

  “And what about the golem? What will it do when it finds out we cheated?”

  “We close the Way behind us, stop it from following. If we’re not around, what harm can it do to us?”

  “But we don’t know how to close the Way.”

  “It can’t be hard.”

  “It could be,” broke in Shilly, sympathetic with Skender’s reasons for wanting to escape the golem, but not wanting to commit themselves to anything they couldn’t finish. “I’m good at this stuff, remember, and I can’t see how to do it from what we’ve got.”

  “I don’t think the golem has given us enough for us to get away from it,” said Sal, “not without doing what it wants us to do first.”

  Skender sent a disdainful noise down the link between them, but Sal kept talking.

  “And the others will still be here, if we do escape. What about them?”

  “We’ll get them through somehow.”

  Shilly could feel Sal shaking his head. “I don’t think so. It’s too risky. Too many things could go wrong. If we do as it says, we’ll get into the Tower and still be able to escape. We’ll get what we want anyway.”

  “If we can open the Way,” Shilly said.

  “You think we can’t?” asked Sal.

  “I think it’s a difficult charm, and we’re still learning. If Ways are so easy to open, why aren’t they everywhere?”

  That shut him up.

  “I guess there’s only one way to find out,” said Sal. His hand tightened on hers. “Have you got the pattern, Skender?”

  “Naturally.” The starting point, the four-leafed clover, appeared in their minds.

  “Shilly, have you got it?”

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on the form and feel of the image. The starting point wasn’t difficult. It was what came next that threw her.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, Skender. Give us the rest.”

  The shape slowly twisted in its impossible way, moving while staying in the same place. She felt the original image clutching for an anchor as the rest of it formed something like a tube that went nowhere. She thought of the oval shape in the rock before them, sensing that this would be one end of the Way: the entrance. The exit would be at the other end of the tube, inside the Tower. She felt Sal adding his strength to her mental efforts, and Skender bringing up the blueprint image of the star-shaped room as she stretched the tube “toward” it.

  She missed. The Way went snaking off into emptiness. She felt a sudden wrench as something tugged at it, and she lurched forward, toward the entrance. A hum rose around her, deep and powerful. There was a moment of grey dislocation during which she lost all concentration—

  The Way instantly unravelled. Whatever was pulling at her disappeared. She was left standing next to Sal, shaky and feeling slightly foolish.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “I don’t know what happened there.”

  “The Void,” breathed Sal. “That was the Void Beneath.”

  “What was?” asked Skender.

  “That hum, the emptiness.”

  “I thought I imagined it,” said Shilly.

  “No, it’s real. And dangerous. Remember, Shilly? Lodo told us that if you look or talk through the Change, you send part of yourself through the Void. If you’re interrupted, you can lose that part of you forever.” His frown echoed along their linked hands. “Maybe that’s why Ways aren’t common. It’s not just difficult to make them. It’s dangerous, too. We’re sending all of us through, after all. If the Way breaks, we could be completely lost.”

  Shilly shuddered. That brief glimpse of the Void was enough to convince her that she never wanted to go there. “Well, let’s make sure we get it right this time, and that it doesn’t break. Okay?”

  “Okay,” agreed Skender.

  Sal didn’t say anything, but she felt his readiness through the link. There were three of them, each skilled in their own particular way. What they lacked in experience, they made up for in natural talent and determination. If this was the way to escape, they would take it, and take it well.

  They got it on the third try. With Sal’s talent behind her and Skender shoring up the pattern, Shilly guided the open mouth of the Way from the entrance in front of them to the exit inside the Tower, to
the image the golem had given her. She felt the ends connect and grip tight; she felt the space between snap taut, as though straightening a wire between her hands; she felt the entrance and exit open, and heard a faint gasp from somewhere nearby.

  She opened her eyes. Tom was staring in amazement at the wall before them. Where previously there had been nothing but the oval inscribed in dust by the golem, now there was an entrance to a tunnel that snaked up and to the right. What lay at its end couldn’t be seen.

  “We did it,” said Skender in awe, breaking the link to rush forward and peer up the tunnel.

  “Wait!” Sal grabbed the boy on the shoulder and held him back. “Let’s make sure it’s stable, first.”

  “It’s stable,” said the golem, moving blindly around them. “Once it’s in place, it will exist forever, unless you deliberately shut it down—and that’s an entirely different skill.” It put one hand on the edge of the oval entrance and sniffed blindly at the air in the tunnel. “Good work. Your side of the deal is almost completed.”

  “‘Almost’?” Shilly echoed. “What do you mean, ‘almost’? We did what you asked us to. We’ve opened the Tower.”

  “You’ve opened the Way inside. That’s not the same thing as opening it.”

  “Oh, really? Is there anything else we should know that you haven’t been entirely clear on?”

  The golem didn’t stick around to argue. It stepped into the Way and scurried up and around the bend.

  Sal went to follow, with Skender close behind.

  “I will wait here,” said Mawson.

  Shilly glanced at the stone bust. As always, Mawson projected an air suggesting that it knew much more than it was letting on.

  “Was this the right thing to do?” she asked him. “Have we done something terrible?”

  “Not yet.” The man’kin faced her squarely. “You will do what you must do, regardless of what I say. Do not let your conscience be troubled.”

  More than Shilly’s conscience was troubled by Mawson’s words. “What do you mean? What’s going to happen?”

  “The outcome is not clear. Sal has stirred the pot, put much in motion. I see many possibilities.”

  “But—”

  “I will wait here. You must go.”

  There was an edge of command to Mawson’s voice that she hadn’t heard before. She instinctively went to obey it, but hesitated on the threshold of the Way. She had always thought the man’kin could see the future perfectly well, that the difficulty was in explaining it because of the different ways human and man’kin viewed the world. What did it mean, then, when Mawson said that Sal had “stirred the pot”? How had he managed to change things so the man’kin could no longer tell what was going to happen?

  Changing the future was what the Weavers did, wasn’t it?

  She didn’t understand, and it was pretty clear that Mawson wasn’t going to explain any more than he already had. There was only one way to find out what lay ahead, and that was to walk boldly to meet it.

  Tom had already ascended the Way. Voices echoed down to her from the other end as she carefully crutched the length of the upward-sloping spiral, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. In cross-section, the tunnel perfectly matched the shape of the oval entrance they had created in the stone. The curved floor was smooth and slightly slippery. Whatever it was made of, the walls and ceiling were identical. There was no light from within, although the strange Change-glow that filled the chamber of the Tower filtered into it from both ends. She walked slowly and carefully until she had completed a full turn, then the exit came into sight.

  “This,” she heard Skender say, “is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Shilly stepped out of the Way into the star-shaped room in the heart of the Golden Tower, and was inclined to agree.

  The room was larger than she had imagined it in her mind. It wasn’t as large as the hall in which the three Conclave members had judged Lodo’s fate after the murder of Radi Mierlo, but it was large enough to make her feel small nonetheless. The walls were polished obsidian, or something much like it, and shone with an oily blackness. The Way opened onto one of the sharply angled walls near a four-metre-wide circular podium on which the others were standing, raised half a metre over the rest of the room. The five “arms” of the star stretched away from the podium, each ending in—

  Here her mind baulked at what she was seeing. It was bad enough that the star was easily too broad to fit into the Golden Tower—not to mention that she had just walked along an invisible tunnel to enter it—but what she saw inside defied everything she thought of as sense.

  At the end of each of the five arms of the star was a view of a ruined city. The towers were twisted as though viewed through a distorted window, or backward along a telescope. They seemed to be an enormous distance away, yet almost close enough to touch. There was so much Change in the air it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

  Shilly joined Sal, Skender, Tom and the golem on the podium.

  “Tell me what you see,” said the golem, peering sightlessly around it, an expression of frustration on Lodo’s ravaged features.

  “Towers,” said Sal. “Cities.”

  “Five of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know that one,” exclaimed Skender, pointing. “That’s the Nine Stars!”

  And it was. Through the distortion, she recognised the skeletal structures in a ring around the central bowl, like a crown on a buried giant’s head.

  “That one’s the Haunted City,” said Sal, indicating a city of glass. “And that’s the one in the Broken Lands.”

  The square, broken-windowed vista brought back Shilly’s feelings of isolation and powerlessness—and reminded her of the fear she had felt the first time they had met the golem in another man’s body.

  “What are those two?” she asked, indicating the remaining arms of the star. One contained a forest of rusting girders covered in vines, the other a jagged cityscape half-buried in ice. Towers rose out of frozen whiteness like tombstones. There was something threatening about the view; it put her in mind of sharp teeth.

  All of the cities had an air of menace, she realised, that fully matched her feelings on visiting three of them. They were dangerous places; bad things happened there.

  “Ice and rot,” said the golem, rubbing its hands together. “Is that what you see?”

  “Yes,” said Sal. “Are they illusions?”

  “No.”

  “The Book of Towers only mentions three ruined cities,” said Skender.

  “There is only one,” the golem replied, “but this is not the time for a history lesson. You are here, now, at the heart. You can escape.”

  “How?” asked Shilly.

  “The means lie before you.”

  “The cities?”

  “Of course the cities,” the golem snapped.

  “But how do we get there?” asked Sal.

  “You walk.”

  “But—”

  Sal stopped and stared up the arm of the star leading to the Haunted City. Shilly could guess what he was thinking; she was thinking the same thing. If the Golden Tower acted as a kind of Way, then these must be the exits.

  Skender hopped down off the podium and walked nervously along the arm nearest him, the one leading to the ice-bound city.

  “Be careful,” Shilly said automatically.

  Skender seemed to shrink as he walked down the narrowing tunnel, as though foreshortening with impossible distance. He walked less than ten paces before retreating.

  “Strange,” he said, his voice faint at first but getting stronger as he came closer. “It’s not like a Way. You feel yourself going somewhere. Somehow. It’s hard to describe.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Shilly. “There’s something wrong here.”

&nb
sp; “I feel it, too,” said Sal.

  “You feel nothing but your own ignorance,” snapped the golem. “Stop wasting time and do what you came here to do.”

  “What’s the big hurry?” Sal asked.

  “You set the deadline yourself. When dawn comes, the wardens will be alerted.”

  “That’s not a problem, now. Not if we can escape at any moment.” Sal turned to Tom, who was watching events with open-mouthed puzzlement. “Tom, have you dreamed any of this? Do you know what’s going to happen if we go down there?” He pointed at random toward the vine-wreathed city.

  Tom shook his head. “You don’t go down that one,” he said. “You go down that one there.”

  Shilly looked in the direction he indicated. The Nine Stars lay at the end of it.

  “Can we trust your dreams?” she asked Tom. “Mawson wasn’t sure what was going to happen.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking confused.

  “It makes sense even without the dreams,” said Sal. “There’s no point going to the Haunted City; we just came from there. And we know the Broken Lands are a dead end. Those two could be anywhere, anywhere at all.” He pointed at the icy landscape and the rainforest. “But we know there are people who will help us at the Nine Stars.”

  Shilly nodded. They had so little to go on, but at least it was something. “What then?” she pressed Tom. “What happens after we go there?”

  “One of us doesn’t come back,” said the boy.

  “Which one?”

  “Not you. You come back, no matter what happens. And you, Sal.”

  “Well,” she said dryly, “that’s a relief.”

  Sal stared hopelessly at the boy as though that hadn’t reassured him at all. You’re not the one who dies.

  Shilly wasn’t sure how Sal was feeling. Relieved to know that he would be safe, or afraid for one of his friends, who might not come back?

  Beware the Golden Tower.