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

by Sean Williams

  Then, almost too suddenly, everything was still. The Way was closed. The golem was gone. Whatever the ice-creature had been, it appeared to be nowhere around. There was just the golden glow of the Change, filling the air like treacle.

  “You did it,” she yelled, hobbling to where Sal lay on the ground, half-buried beneath Kemp and Skender. “You brought them back!”

  She fell down next to him and clutched his tunic. She wanted to hug him, but she was conscious of Tom and Aron close at hand, seeing to the others. She didn’t want them to see how deep her relief ran—that her concern had not been so much for Kemp and Skender, but for Sal. If he had hurt himself trying to rescue them—

  She realised then that something wasn’t right. Sal wasn’t responding at all. He was limp under her touch, and so were the others. The part of her that knew when he was nearby, the part of her that had always been connected to him from the moment of their first meeting—that part of her was hollow.

  “No,” she breathed, unwilling to accept what her inner sense was telling her. “Sal? Sal!”

  As she lifted his head to look into his eyes, she saw that they were empty. His body had returned, but he was elsewhere.

  “No!”

  The echoes of her cry rang through the chamber of the Tower in fleeting, futile defiance, and then faded away to nothing.

  Part Three: Drowning

  Chapter 14. The Oldest War

  When the storm broke, it came almost as a relief. Lightning, thunder, wind, rain: the tune was a familiar one, but no less powerful for that. The earth shivered under the onslaught. The air stretched to breaking point. Between the two, fire and water coexisted for a brief and all too cataclysmic time.

  In the middle of it all, one figure stood tall. Unbowed by the clash of the elements, he waited out the storm with the patience of mountains. Just as heavy was the mood that hung around him. The storm would not beat him down, but his thoughts might.

  He had brought the storm. It was his doing. He had summoned it from the deep reserves of the world, and he could not turn it back.

  It might not hurt him—but who knew what might fall in its path? Or who? There was nothing he could do but wait it out and see what remained in its wake.

  That there would be flowers for the dead was no consolation at all.

  Skender jerked awake from the dream knowing it wasn’t his. It was, though, as vivid as if he had dreamed it. He could still hear the thrumming of the rain around him, as though each drop was beating an immense drum. The rumble of the thunder echoed in the distance, blending with the moaning of the wind to form a strange melange of sound—not thunder or wind or rain, but something else. A deep, all-pervasive hum.

  It was a hum he recognised. He had heard it all his life, without consciously noting it. The only time he had noted it was when he, Sal and Shilly had been trying to connect the Way to the heart of the Golden Tower and they had missed at their first attempt. Just for a second, he had felt the sound underlying the world of his waking senses—the hum of the Void Beneath.

  Skender panicked. He didn’t know much about the Void. No one did, or so he gathered from the texts he had glimpsed. What he did know terrified him. It wasn’t a place so much as a non-place: people disappeared into it and were never seen again. It wasn’t a source so much as a sink: the end of the road. Some people—like the warden who had officiated at Radi Mierlo’s funeral—thought the Void Beneath was where people went when they died.

  So am I dead? he wondered. Is that what happened to me?

  The last thing he remembered—

  —Kemp’s hand clutching his wrist and dragging him along so fast he thought his shoulder was about to be wrenched out of its socket, the electric stink of the ice-beast still strong in his nostrils, a glimpse of Sal lunging for them through the shrinking exit—

  —was imprinted on his mind, as though somewhere it was still happening. But all sense of his body was gone. He was formless, vague, lost.

  And the dream still tugged at him. The figure in the storm wasn’t Sal, but the dream carried the flavour of his friend’s mind. Sal had to be in the Void with him, then, trapped as he was in the terrible grey nothingness. Was Kemp there too? He searched for any sign of the albino, but didn’t know him well enough to find a trace of him. Or else he wasn’t there, and it was just Sal and Skender, adrift. Or else Skender was just kidding himself, and he was totally alone in the Void, with nothing but someone else’s nightmare for company.

  Hello?

  He had no voice, and no feeling of the Change within him, but he still had thoughts. He could pretend he was talking to someone else. If the effort went no further than the inside of his nonexistent skull, it wouldn’t hurt.

  Hello? Can anyone hear me?

  There was no answer. Not even an echo. There was just the hum, rising and falling around him in powerful waves. He felt like a feather in the face of the storm of Sal’s dreams, buffeted and tossed by forces beyond his comprehension. And there was, strangely, some calm in that thought: if he had no control of what was happening to him, if there truly was no way to defy the Void, then acceptance of his fate would be a relief. He could stop fighting it. He could let go. He could forget.

  You must never forget, here, said a voice out of the Void.

  He would have jumped, had he still possessed a body.

  Wh-who said that?

  I no longer have a name, came the reply. The voice might once have belonged to a woman, but the Void leached it of its uniqueness. It was the essence of a voice, a threadbare carrier for the words. I am the one who fought the world-eater.

  The what?

  The world-eater. It never had a proper name, as I did. It came out of the Divide and devoured a city. I cast it into the Void, but it dragged me after it. Its pattern has long since dissipated. My story and I remain.

  The owner of the voice spoke with pride. Skender couldn’t tell which she was most proud of: defeating the world-eater or surviving in the Void.

  He didn’t know what to say in response. There wasn’t much he could say. There were, however, a thousand questions.

  Am I dead?

  No, she said. Tell me how you came here.

  The memories were sharp, not difficult to recall at all. Kemp and I were trying to get out of the Golden Tower before the Way slammed shut. Sal and Shilly did their best to keep it open, but the golem distracted them, broke their concentration. Sal tried to get us out in time, but the Way closed. I guess it dragged him in with us, because I feel him here, somewhere. We have to find a way back. The fierceness of that statement surprised him, although his certainty did not. Can you tell me how?

  If I could, I wouldn’t be here.

  Has anyone ever escaped?

  Not that I remember, she said.

  So I’m stuck here forever?

  Not forever. Until you forget, and are in turn forgotten.

  I don’t understand.

  Humans are not meant to exist in the Void. We come here by accident or misadventure, like you, and we survive by will alone. There was a deep sense of sadness and urgency in the voice, even through the dehumanising effects of the Void. Some say that we exist as ripples in the great sea of the Void, and that its waves will overwhelm us unless we continually replenish those ripples. Others call us harmonics dancing among the peaks and troughs of the world’s longest note, always in danger of being drowned out. I think of us as echoes that refuse to fade, defying the silence though we grow ever fainter. However you describe us, the voice concluded, we are the lost minds.

  Skender had never heard of such things in all of his father’s literature. There are more of you?

  Yes. They will be here soon. We feel new arrivals as vibrations in the Void. We flock to hear your stories, and to tell you ours.

  I don’t have a story, Skender said.

  Yes, you have. You just told
it to me. You and your friends are the ones who were caught in the Way. This is your story, and you must tell it often, to prevent the memories dissolving. This is your only defence against the Void.

  Skender was about to protest that he’d never had a problem remembering anything in his life when he sensed a strange disturbance in the Void. There was a distortion in the ever-present hum, then a peculiar sense of inrushing, as though the Void had acquired a new density in the region immediately surrounding him. Not that there was any real sense of space. He was truly bodiless, with no anchors to define where he was or how he fitted in. His mind was simply used to thinking in terms of near and far, up and down, so it attempted to comprehend the incomprehensible any way it could.

  He felt as though a crowd of blind people had suddenly gathered around him and were all trying to touch him at once. With each touch came a voice. Each was muted by the Void, but there were subtle differentiations that enabled him to tell them apart.

  Who is he?

  Is he new?

  Perhaps he has returned. Does his story sound familiar?

  We haven’t heard his story yet.

  Then let him tell it. Tell us your story!

  Tell us who you are!

  Skender performed the mental equivalent of clearing his throat.

  M-my name, he stammered, is Galeus.

  A rustle of surprise greeted his announcement. It surprised him, too, for he had intended to say that his name was Skender. His heart-name had come out without him intending it to.

  He has a name! He must be very new.

  We don’t use names here, boy. They’re too easy to forget.

  We forget which belongs to whom.

  We miss them.

  Our stories are all we need.

  Yes. A ripple of affirmation swept through the cluster of lost minds. Tell us your story, Galeus, before you forget!

  Skender reiterated the brief synopsis he had given the one who fought the world-beast. His audience listened raptly; he could sense their combined attention focused on him as though he was standing under a searchlight. They hung on every word, and whispered excitedly among themselves when he had finished.

  A golem! Imagine that.

  And an ice-beast! Does anyone remember them?

  A chorus of no’s came back from the lost minds.

  What was it like? Was it cruel? Was it made of ice? Did you kill it?

  No, he said. I don’t know where it went. I didn’t see it in the Golden Tower before the Way collapsed.

  The Golden Tower, eh? That sounds important.

  Made of gold? Or just looks like it?

  Were you trying to steal it?

  Skender was beginning to realise that the lost minds were listening to his words without understanding them. If they had ever known what an ice-beast and the Golden Tower were, that knowledge had been eroded away by the incessant droning of the Void Beneath.

  But listening gave them an anchor to hang onto. For a little while longer, they were able to withstand the inevitable decay.

  He didn’t want to end up like them. That he knew for certain. If there was any way to get out of the Void, he would take it.

  My friends are unconscious, he said, remembering that the one who fought the world-beast had definitely used the plural, and becoming worried that they might already be slipping under the waves. Will they be all right?

  I don’t know. Not everyone wakes in the Void. If they’re in danger, there’s nothing you can do for them now.

  Nothing at all?

  The Oldest One will know.

  Yes, the Oldest One.

  We will take you to him so you can ask him.

  But first—

  A dozen voices finished the sentence.

  —you must hear our stories.

  His first instinct was to argue. He suspected that it would get him nowhere, however. There was an ill-defined desperation in the minds surrounding him. They didn’t want to die, and this was the only way they knew to prevent it. He had told them his story and they had listened. Who was he to renege on the deal?

  And if it was the only way they were going to help him, he supposed he had no choice.

  I am the one who broke into a Ruin and stole a precious machine, said the first of the lost minds. There was a trap I didn’t see. As I was leaving the Ruin with the machine in my hand, the trap caught me and brought me to the Void Beneath.

  I am the one who tried to move a river, said another. The flood had destroyed my family home and would destroy many others if it wasn’t diverted. It took too much effort. I overextended my talent. When I woke up, I was here.

  I am the one who brought a slave trader to justice, said the next. He had taken children from many families in the northern lands and sold them into a life of horror and torment. I was sent by my superiors to end his reign of terror. I did so, but not before his mage cast a charm over me that robbed my body of vitality. I ebbed away to nothing, and the Void took me.

  I am the one who danced, said yet another. I was the greatest dancer in my village, then the greatest dancer in my land. I danced for dignitaries and rulers, or just for the pleasure of it. The Change thrilled through me when I danced, and I became lost in it. I danced a week straight, once, and when I stopped dancing, I was still lost. I found myself here, and here I remain.

  Skender listened. The tales were told in flat, practised tones, as though the forgetting of names stripped all humanity away from the person. The stories had become little more than words, and Skender wondered how much they actually meant to the people who recited them—if they were actual memories, or just skeletons of memories. Despite this, an insidious mixture of despair and determination propped up every word. These stories were all they had. They clung to them like someone in a desert sucked a stone.

  He didn’t know what to feel as the stories kept coming, one after the other, all essentially the same: someone either dipped too deeply in the Change or was attacked by something through the Change. They all ended the same way: in the Void, slowly forgetting who they were and, but for the stories, what they had done to get there.

  Skender began to feel like an overloaded life raft, in danger of sinking. He had no idea how many lost minds there were. He could be there forever until he was completely swamped by the stories of the dead.

  Wait, he said. He had to halt the flow temporarily. A thought had occurred to him during the endless litany. I know of someone who might be here. He would have joined you recently. Could he be among you?

  Perhaps, said the one who fought the world-eater. What was his story?

  His story…Skender assembled everything he knew into as simple a narrative as possible. He is the one who summoned an earthquake to help my friend escape. He lived in a small town and taught another friend of mine the Change. He knew my father, the Mage Van Haasteren. Skender stopped. Names and relationships were irrelevant in the Void. He tried another tack. He believed that Sky Wardens and Stone Mages were the same, that the Change came from one place. They called him a necromancer and exiled him. He…Skender faltered again. That was about all he knew about Lodo, except that his body had been hijacked to commit a terrible crime.

  Is he here? he finished. Do you know him?

  He sensed movement in the minds gathered around him, as though a crowd of people were shuffling their feet.

  I do not recall anyone like that, said one.

  Nor I, said another.

  But he might have been here, said the one who fought the world-eater. If he has faded, we would not remember.

  He came here within the last couple of months, Skender protested, unable to believe that Lodo could have been forgotten so soon. The old man had left such an indelible impression in the real world, it was hard to imagine him disappearing without trace into the Void. Surely you couldn’t have forgotten already.


  The only things we remember, said the one who fought the world-eater, are our stories. We have nothing else.

  Skender could feel the eagerness of the crowd to resume the telling of their tales. What did it matter, he wondered, if he heard them out? Telling each other would do the trick well enough.

  Perhaps it was more than just the telling. Perhaps the hearing was important, too. Or it wasn’t so much the memory of the teller alone that mattered, but the memory of everyone else. In the Void, being forgotten might be as dangerous as forgetting.

  Okay, he said, but when you’re done, we go to the Oldest One. If my friends fade into the Void before then, I’ll forget everything you tell me. I’ll erase it all from my mind. It’ll be like you never existed to me, ever.

  An empty threat, but the lost minds weren’t to know.

  We will be quick, said the one who fought the world-eater. Do not fear, one of three who were caught in a Way. Time is plentiful in the Void Beneath.

  Skender would have shuddered, had he still had a body.

  My name is Skender, he said. No one answered.

  The Oldest One didn’t live so much somewhere else in the Void as somewhere deeper. When the litany of memories was over, Skender was finally allowed to concentrate on his quest to save his friends. He could still feel Sal nearby, dreaming of his storm. Kemp was more distant and vague, but recognisable now he knew to look. The patterns they made in the Void were distinct and didn’t seem to be fading. Sal’s, though, was definitely stronger than Kemp’s, and Skender didn’t trust senses he didn’t understand in a world that barely made sense at all.

  The one who fought the world-eater guided him. It was hard to say how they moved, exactly—and how a Void, which was supposed to be empty, could have anything approaching density or currents—but Skender could definitely feel the Void shifting around him, as though he was adrift in one of the amorphous clouds created during a game of Blind. Or the sea. He had only seen the ocean from the deck of Os and from Fairney’s cliff-edge classroom, but comparing the Void to the sea struck him as appropriate. As he was led deeper, he imagined that he was drifting in thick, salty currents.