The Sky Warden & the Sun (Books of the Change)

by Sean Williams

  “Tests like the Scourge of Aneshti, you mean?” asked Sal, remembering the awful test Lodo had put him through.

  The boy looked startled. “What do you know about that?”

  Shilly shook her head in annoyance. “Look, we can’t stand around here talking all day. It’s hot and we have somewhere to go. Will you show us the way to your father or not?”

  “Sure. He’s up there.” Skender nodded along the road, between the two statues.

  “In the Keep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” She turned and began to hobble up the road.

  Skender watched her retreating back for a moment, as though warring with himself, then said to Sal: “You’d better go with her, if you’re coming in together.”

  Together, thought Sal. Yes. That was the point. “What about you?”

  “I’ll wait for a second.”

  “Why?”

  “To see what happens. Be on your toes.”

  The boy’s tone was ominous. Sal sensed that they were being tested again. Even if it was just Skender’s childish game of one-upmanship, he couldn’t let Shilly walk alone between the statues and into possible danger.

  He caught up with her and slowed to match her pace. They walked side by side under the shadow of the nearest statue, the dusty surface of the road crunching beneath their feet. Two more steps took them into the space between the two statues, and a silence fell about them. Sal waited for the ground to open up beneath their feet or for a mighty stone sword to come crashing down before them, barring their way.

  Nothing happened. They walked between the statues and emerged on the other side.

  They kept walking. The sound of scampering footsteps came from behind them.

  “That’s it?” Skender shouted. “That’s it?”

  Sal turned. Skender was addressing the statues from a point on the road between them. One of them was bent almost double at its waist, so that it looked like an ungainly puppet, albeit one over five times as large as the boy it addressed:

  “We have better things to do with our time.”

  “Like what, huh?” Skender kicked dust in frustration. “The first newcomers in months. And they asked for my dad by name. You could at least have given me a little fun!”

  The statue didn’t reply to that. With silent, impossible grace, it straightened and turned its attention back to the tunnel entrance.

  Skender waved his hands above his head, blew a raspberry, then gave up trying to regain its attention. He glanced at his small audience, shrugged, and ambled amiably over to them.

  “Dumb as posts,” he said.

  “What are they?” asked Sal.

  “They guard the way. They make sure only suitable people get through, and like Dad they can get quite cranky. I’ve seen them actually throw people back into the tunnel for being too insistent. Not to hurt them, mind, but to make sure they get the idea.”

  Before Sal could ask what made him and Shilly “suitable” — and which particular outcome Skender had been hoping for — Shilly broke in.

  “So they’re guards. I guessed that much. But you haven’t told us what they are. How do they talk and move like that?”

  “They’re man’kin, of course. That’s what they do.” He looked from Sal to Shilly in confusion. “You don’t have them where you’re from?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  “Oh. They must have given you a bit of a fright, then. Sorry.” He smiled innocently — but with relief, it seemed to Sal, as though their encounter with the guards hadn’t been totally unsatisfying. He had still managed to come out of it demonstrating his superiority. “Come on, and I’ll take you to meet dad.”

  Skender headed up the road. Shilly hesitated, a pained expression on her face, then followed. Sal delayed longest of all.

  Man’kin? He had heard the name before. Lodo had mentioned it, back in Fundelry. Their exact nature escaped him: were they made objects or natural phenomena that happened to look like statues? They were ignoring him now — the pressure of their stony gaze had passed the moment he and Shilly stepped out from under them — and perhaps they would ignore him forever. But they stood between him and Ulum. Would they let him through if he decided to leave the Keep?

  The tunnel mouth gaped invitingly behind the guardians. Sal presumed that it was similar, in principle, to the entrance to Lodo’s workshop, which had opened onto the dunes near Fundelry and, although it led only a few metres underground, somehow managed to transport people the hundred or so kilometres inland to where the workshop actually resided. He wondered if the Change required to make it work took effect at the entrance and exit, or somewhere along the tunnel, or across the whole structure one bit at a time.

  The man’kin and the tunnel were just two of many perplexing things he had encountered in only a few weeks. The Change was opening a whole new world before him, and he had no idea where to begin exploring now that he was here. The stone guardians had let him pass. That had to be a good thing. He was about to meet someone fully trained in the Change who might tell him what to do next. He needed the advice, that was for certain. He needed something, even if it was only a new direction in which to travel.

  Turning his back on the long road behind him, he hurried after Skender and Shilly.

  The road ahead wasn’t easy.

  “I suggest you save your breath for walking, not talking,” Skender said, interrupting a snappy inquiry from Shilly. “We’re about two thousand kilometres northeast of Ulum and about three times higher up. Don’t be fooled by the heat during the day. The air is thin up here.”

  Shilly looked as though she thought Skender was making excuses to avoid answering questions they might ask, but Sal remembered his lightness of breath in the tunnel, and the sensation of dizziness upon facing the statues. He was breathing more heavily, although he hadn’t consciously noted it. And although the sun was hot, the thin air didn’t retain the heat. Every breeze brought with it a hint of ice.

  The road to the Keep led around a bend and up the side of the cliff in a series of stepped doglegs. Shilly’s progress was slow but determined. The only concession she made to her injury was to let Sal carry her pack. He was happy to do that; there was no way she could have done it on her own, and it held him back to her pace. Still, after half an hour under the burning sun, with the thin air eating into his stamina and no sign of an end to the road in sight, he was beginning to regret making the offer.

  “Is the Keep much further?” Shilly gasped.

  “Why?” Skender shot back. “Is this too much for you?”

  “No.” Sal could see the pain in the lines around her eyes, but he knew she would never admit to it in front of their guide.

  “Well, it’s too much for me,” Sal said, dropping both packs and sitting heavily on one of them. Shilly considered her options for a moment, then sat on the other. Sal couldn’t tell whose breathing was more laboured, his or hers.

  “You go on ahead,” he said to Skender. “Wait for us at the top. We’ll catch up eventually.”

  “I’ll give you five minutes,” the boy said, with a tone of extreme reluctance. But he was sweating too, and dropped to the road surface with an air of relief he probably didn’t realise was so transparent.

  “Is this the only way in?” Sal asked, ignoring the opportunity to score a point and thinking of students climbing and descending the path every day instead.

  “No. There are several others. They don’t all lead to Ulum, of course. The way you came is the only one the public knows about.”

  “Why the secrecy?”

  “If everyone knew about the Ways, everyone would want one. And we certainly don’t need people dropping in to snoop around.”

  “What about students? How do they come in?”

  “New students come in the same way as you. That’s why the guards are there
: to sort out the diamonds from the quartz. Roughly speaking.”

  “I assumed they’d be brought here by Selectors. It seems a bit pointless Testing people twice.”

  “We don’t do things the Strand way. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it? I can tell by your accent. We don’t have Selectors here, we have Guides. Their job is to encourage kids who think they might have potential to come here, or to one of the other schools, where they can be properly examined. The Test is in the stages of the journey itself; it either makes them or breaks them. Stopping for a rest halfway up the hill isn’t usually a good sign, but under the circumstances it could be forgiven.”

  “Who made you our examiner?” asked Shilly.

  Skender’s eyes twinkled. “No one,” he said. “Your sense of timing was impeccable. I had a feeling someone was coming up the Way, and I came down to see who it was. I was just about to give up when you appeared. The look on your cabby’s face was worth the wait. Normal people never know what to expect at the end of the Way. To them it’s just a road few people take, and even fewer return along.”

  Shilly’s face had frozen at the phrase normal people. “What would’ve happened if the guards hadn’t let us through? We’d have been stranded!”

  “They wouldn’t have let your cabby go. They pretty much make their decision before you get between them, you see, although you can never tell for sure. I wasn’t sure what they’d do in your case, since only one of you has the knack.”

  Shilly opened her mouth.

  “Perhaps we should get moving again,” said Sal quickly. “If we’ve got as far again still to go —”

  “We haven’t,” the boy said. “It’s just around the corner.”

  “Oh, great,” said Shilly. “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

  “You’d made up your mind to stop, regardless of what I said.” Skender smiled. “Would you have believed me if I had told you?”

  “I’m not sure I believe you now,” she said. He laughed and held out a hand to help her to her feet. She pulled so hard on it he winced.

  Sal shouldered the packs and groaned at the weight on his aching muscles. The sun was well on the way toward the horizon behind them, burning with less force than before. He was hungry, and the constant sniping between Shilly and Skender was getting on his nerves. He forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, telling himself to be grateful he had the full use of both legs.

  Skender led the way as before, with a return to his normal energy level. He skipped ahead then waited for them to catch up, swinging his arms and kicking stones over the edge of the path. When they caught up to him, he was off again. Sal couldn’t imagine where his vigour came from.

  Sal had never known many kids Skender’s age; the last he had met was Tom, Tait’s brother, and the two boys couldn’t have been more different. Withdrawn and tightly focused, Tom had been obsessively determined to be Selected as soon as possible in order to join his brother in the Haunted City. He had been crushed when his brother was stationed in Fundelry just as his dream came true. Successful applicants never turned down Selection, according to the Alcaide, so Tom’s wish to change his mind and remain home with his brother had been ignored. Tait had followed that disappointment by mocking Tom for wanting to stay in Fundelry, then by betraying his trust. Without Tom’s help, Sal and Shilly would never have found the buggy and would have been caught. They owed him as much as they owed Lodo, in a way. Sal couldn’t imagine Skender doing anything quite so noble, unless it was to show off.

  There was another difference between Tom and Skender that wasn’t obvious: beyond occasional prophetic dreams, Tom didn’t have the Change yet, whereas Skender most definitely did. Generally, the talent blossomed at puberty. Either Skender’s natural ability was so pronounced as to make it stand out even in someone so young, or else Sal’s own talent had matured to the point where he could sense its potential, not just its presence. The latter was certainly possible, he thought. He had done things that barely weeks ago he couldn’t have dreamed of: heard Behenna’s thought from hundreds of kilometres away, healed Shilly’s torn arteries, and spoken to a golem. Being able to instantly recognise someone else with the Change didn’t seem unreasonable.

  Pondering where his innate ability might lead him kept his mind occupied while he walked. And so it was that he didn’t immediately notice when they arrived. He missed Skender’s proud announcement and almost walked into the boy, who had planted himself in their path with arms wide to symbolically embrace what lay ahead.

  “Home!”

  Home consisted of a Ruin the size of a small city carved out of the side of the cliff face. While “the Keep” had encouraged Sal to imagine a fort or castle, like something out of a story, the actual place was far from that.

  Terraces and steep stairways connected more than two hundred dwellings which clung to the cliff like barnacles or beehives, all carved or built from the same, yellow-white stone that comprised the cliffs themselves. Its age was obvious. Birds nested in its crumbling brick facades. Bushes reached at odd angles from cornices and collapsed balconies. Canopies swept like sails across absent ceilings and walls, stretched taut and anchored by hooks planted firmly in solid rock. Wind chimes sung softly from a thousand locations, sending up a delicate but atonal symphony that neither paused nor took shape. All in all, it looked as though someone had haphazardly stuck some rough houses onto the sheer cliff face and called it a town.

  Sal could feel the Change buzzing through it like wind across a wire.

  Shilly’s response was ambiguous in tone. “This is the Keep?”

  “Of course. Home, I said.”

  “You live here, not in town?”

  “I’m a student,” Skender said, puffing himself up proudly. “So yes, I do live here, with the others. Dad would rather I didn’t, but he can’t kick me out now. I got in fair and square, past the guards and everything.” He deflated slightly and added: “I’d probably be there anyway, to be honest. I don’t have anywhere else to go. Mother’s always out in the desert, looking for stuff to dig up.”

  Skender’s explanation was at odds with the appearance of the place. The cliff dwellings looked neither safe nor comfortable.

  “Down here.” Skender led them along the path toward the town. As they came closer, around the side of the mountain slope they had climbed, Sal could see ladders and stairways going up the side of the cliff, between and among the barnacle dwellings. Looking away from the town, out into a yawning space, he saw a discordant jumble of jagged mountains stretching into the distance — real mountains, this time, not the hills he was used to. Their sides were bare and their summits white with snow, which Shilly stared at, agog. Sal had never seen such beautiful, rugged emptiness.

  The mountain whose flanks they were skirting was one of the highest in the range. Perhaps that was why people lived in such an isolated location, he thought. It would be worth it for the view.

  Sal half-expected people to appear as they approached, but no one did. Every one of the scores of windows that he could see was empty; every doorway remained closed. As they drew closer, he realised that he couldn’t hear anything, either: no voices, no banging of tools, no animal calls. The only sign the place was inhabited came on the air: a faint tang of smoke hung across the path like a mist, invisible but evocative.

  “Sorry about the lack of reception,” said Skender, answering Sal’s unspoken question. “They’ll be in classes for a while yet. I snuck out after lunch and didn’t come back. Bethe — she’s the student overseer — doesn’t mind so much. It’s Dad I have to watch out for. Seeing I’m bringing in some new recruits, I should be able to get away with it.”

  The path terminated in a short wooden bridge over a deep chasm. On the far side hung a blackened silver bell in a niche cut out of the rock. Skender picked it up and shook it firmly, sending up a clatter that echoed off all the stone faces around them. Sal p
ut his fingers in his ears and Shilly winced as the racket went on and on. Finally, red in the face from his exertions, Skender returned the bell to its niche and settled back to wait for a response.

  When his ears had recovered, Sal noted the sound of footsteps growing louder through the still, thin air. It was impossible to tell where exactly from, though. He looked from door to door, half-expecting a crowd of people to emerge all around them at once and engulf them.

  When they did appear, it was almost an anti-climax. There was a wide tunnel entrance ten metres to their right and one level up. A dozen young men and women emerged from the tunnel and looked around. They were all dressed in burnt-red robes that hung loose around their arms and legs, revealing ordinary clothes beneath. One of them, a tall, thin boy with hair exactly the same colour as his robe, caught sight of Skender and his two companions standing by the bridge.

  “Hola!” he called, leading the way down a narrow flight of stairs. “It’s the little magpie with some bright young things from the West Gate. Have you been snooping again, Skender?”

  “Easy, Raf,” said a strong-looking, brown-haired woman at the back of the group. She had a double-triangle pattern tattooed on each of her cheeks and a brass ring in her left ear. She moved purposefully forward through the group to examine the newcomers.

  “They’re from the gate, Bethe.” Skender’s flush had returned at the comment from the redhead, and it didn’t fade as the woman moved closer. At nineteen or twenty years, she was obviously the student overseer Skender had mentioned earlier.

  Bethe looked at the boy before her, then at Sal and Shilly. “Welcome,” she said with a slight smile. “I hope Skender has been polite.”

  “They arrived in a cab,” the boy said before either of them could reply. “They asked for dad by name, and the guards let them through without even saying anything!”

  “Really?” she asked, turning her attention back to him.

  “Really. Bethe, it was amazing. The guards were unsure, at first, but then they didn’t care at all. ‘We have better things to do with our time,’ they said. Honest.”