“Are you sure they weren’t talking about you?”
“Pretty sure. It makes a good story, anyway.” He turned to Sal and winked. Sal found himself warming to the boy’s precociousness, although he could see how it rubbed Shilly the wrong way.
“Where have you come from?” asked one of the younger students, pushing forward.
“What are your names?” asked another.
“I want to know what’s going on here,” said a deep voice from behind them which startled everyone into silence. Sal turned to see a very tall man with black hair and heavily lined skin standing in the entrance to another tunnel. His nose was a proud triangle in profile and the bones of his face stood out like a mask. He wore rich red robes lined with gold thread.
“Applicants, father,” said Skender, nervously.
Sal looked at the man with amazement. This was Skender Van Haasteren, the man they had travelled all the way across the Strand to meet. Shilly went instantly rigid beside him, as though she couldn’t believe that they’d actually found him.
“Where from?” asked the man, paying them no attention at all. His voice conveyed both authority and a faint air of irritation.
“The West Gate,” answered his son.
“You brought them?”
“Yes, father.”
“What were you doing there?”
Sal could see the way the conversation was going. Before Skender could get himself into more trouble, Sal stepped forward.
“We came to talk to you, Mage Van Haasteren.”
The man’s attention instantly shifted. Sal had just enough time to notice Skender exhale gratefully before Skender Van Haasteren’s dark eyes were on him.
“Did you, now?”
“Yes, sir. I hope that wasn’t presumptuous of us. If it is, we apologise. We’ve come a long way, you see, and we don’t know the customs here.”
“Yes,” he said. “That much is obvious. You’re from the borderlands, judging by your accent. And you —” He turned to Shilly. “You might be from further south.”
“Fundelry,” she said, her voice as stiff as her posture, “in Gooron.”
The name of the region provoked a reaction: a slight flicker of puzzlement behind the man’s deep frown.
“I am the Mage Van Haasteren,” he said, looking back at Sal, “as you guessed, and these are my students.” He indicated the small group behind him. “What do you want with me?”
Put so baldly, the question seemed impossible to answer. There was no single, simple answer. Shilly wants you to finish her training. She wants to you to teach her all the things Lodo left out. Sal was busy trying to decide what he wanted when Shilly opened her mouth.
“I thought you’d be older,” she blurted out.
The dark eyes turned to her again. “What?” he snapped. “Why would you think that?”
“Because you were Lodo’s teacher when he was younger, and he looked older than you. A lot older.” She looked up at him with an awed expression and didn’t seem to notice that she was beginning to babble. “I know the sea air ages you, and he wasn’t one for appearances, but it still doesn’t seem right. Your son is younger than Sal, which means you could be younger than Sal’s dad. You’re not that young — but I’m older than Sal and Lodo was old enough to be my grandfather. How could you be his teacher when you’re obviously younger than him? Unless you’ve found a way to stay young as you get older, it just doesn’t work out.” She stopped suddenly, as though her brain had caught up with what her mouth was saying. “That’s all,” she added, looking like she might be sick any moment.
Again that strange flicker of puzzlement. “Lodo, you say? I never knew a Lodo.”
“His old use-name was Payat Misseri,” put in Sal.
“Him I do remember.” A darker emotion fell down behind Mage Van Haasteren’s eyes like shutters over a window. “Yes. I see now. We will talk in private. Bethe.” He waved the student overseer forward. “Is the audience chamber clean?”
“I aired it yesterday,” she said. “Would you like me to bring some water?”
“That would be good of you. These two look like they could use it. Thank you.”
The Mage Van Haasteren nodded with unexpected gentility, and Bethe hurried off to see to his instructions. Then the mage raised his arms to usher Sal and Shilly forward, into the stone tunnel from which he had emerged.
“Please, come with me.”
Shilly glanced once at Sal — her eyes were wide and frightened, as though she thought she had ruined her chances by talking like a fool — then she was ahead of him, crutching down a long corridor cut into the heart of the stone.
“Not you, Skender,” the mage said to his son, who moved automatically to follow them. “You have this afternoon’s lessons to make up. I’ll see you tonight to review your progress.”
“But — but —” Sal could hear Skender protesting fruitlessly as the mage moved ahead to lead them deeper into the cliff wall. The redhead called Raf laughed at his obvious distress, then their voices fell behind them.
“This way,” said the mage, urging them on.
The tunnel led only a short distance before doglegging, then doglegging again. It was barely high enough for the mage, and the ceiling was rough, but he was obviously well used to its irregularities, stooping to avoid the odd bump and skirting occasional cracks in the floor with familiar ease.
The walls weren’t like the tunnels of Ulum; they looked as though they had been hacked out by hand, centuries ago, and worn smooth by the touch of fingers and robes as they passed. The only light came from stones in the walls, glowing as the mage approached then fading when he had passed.
Sal noted a handful of exits from the tunnel that all led off to the left. Although Sal’s grasp on his bearings was uncertain, he received the impression that they weren’t travelling deeper into the cliff face, but parallel to it. In that case, he reasoned, the passages they passed would lead even deeper into the mountain. The Keep was as much inside the cliff as attached to it.
They reached a closed doorway. The mage opened it and waved them inside. Pale yellow lights came up in a circular chamber ten metres across with a relatively high ceiling carved in the semblance of flames. A low stone table stood in the centre of the room, with twelve chairs arranged around it. Each was made of a greyish metal, simply yet elegantly fashioned. On the walls were hangings woven from a rough thread dyed in ochre, yellow and black.
The mage offered them seats. Shilly accepted hers with a sigh.
“My armpits have blisters,” she said.
“You’ve travelled a long way,” the mage commented in return, taking the seat opposite theirs. It wasn’t a question.
“We came here to find you,” Shilly said, and Sal didn’t qualify her answer. “You taught Lodo. Or Payat Misseri, if that’s what you called him. I didn’t realise he had another name until Sal’s father used it.”
“Payat was a very old use-name. I’m not surprised he abandoned it.” The mage’s eyes were penetrating. “How well did you know him?”
“I was his apprentice from the age of five years.”
“And I was his apprentice too,” said Sal. “Briefly.”
“Did he tell you his heart-name?”
“No,” said Shilly, and Sal shook his head.
Mage Van Haasteren pinched the fingers of his right hand together and rested his forehead on them. Close up, Sal could see the resemblance between him and his son: when Skender grew up and lost his baby fat, he would have the same bony, angular face. Even if he didn’t develop the same towering stature or brooding presence, he would still be striking.
There was one odd note about the mage that Sal only belatedly noticed: he possessed a bare minimum of tattoos and piercings. He had one pink-gold stud in each ear, and a sun-shaped tattoo on the back of his left hand. Apart from that, he was pr
actically naked, compared to many of the people Sal had seen in the Interior. Given his status, and the fact that his father had once described such tattoos as rank-markings, Sal would have expected him to have more.
The mage sighed heavily, as though intensely weary, then looked up at them.
“‘Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned,’” he recited. “‘To the earth art thou not forever dead? To its honours, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? And a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?’”
His eyes were sad, focused on distant times and places, not the two people in front of them. For the first time, Sal thought, he did look almost old — much older, certainly, than Sal’s father.
“You’re talking about Lodo,” said Shilly. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.” The stern mage came back with a frown. “I apologise for assuming that Payat’s story has a bearing on why you are here. Perhaps I am wrong in that, if you don’t know why I’m not happy to hear his name spoken here, in this of all places.” He looked down at his hands, then up again. “You should start at the beginning and tell me everything that has brought you here. I will try not to jump to any conclusions. When you’ve finished, we will discuss what would be best to do next.”
“I want you to teach me,” said Shilly, her voice firm and determined.
“That decision lies at the end of the story,” said the mage, raising a hand. “Begin, one of you.”
Sal exchanged glances with Shilly. Her determination was a veneer, almost invisibly thin; one scratch and it would evaporate. He nodded to indicate that he would go first, and he supposed that that made sense: the story began with his parents, after all, and was continuing through him — although the thought of recounting it again made his stomach sink.
Only the realisation that he and Shilly would never have made it so far without simply starting in the first place encouraged him to open his mouth and begin the tale.
Chapter 9
A Parting of Ways
Two things came out of Sal’s story that Shilly had not known before. Both profoundly shook her.
The first emerged in a discussion of the events leading up to their last day in Fundelry, when Sal’s father had been imprisoned and Lodo had taken Sal to the cells on his nightly awakening of the town lights. She could tell that the story was making him unsettled because he was shifting in his seat and barely looking at her, but she didn’t realise the half of it. At the time, she was more concerned with observing the effect it had on the Mage Van Haasteren. The purpose of telling it was, after all, to convince him that he should finish their training in the Keep.
Later she would understand that Sal had warred with himself about revealing the secret, approaching the subject tangentially, then suddenly venting it as though relieved it was finally out.
“Lodo fixed a broken globe outside the cells where my father was kept,” he said. “It was cracked. On the way back to the workshop...” He paused to take a sip of water from the jug Bethe had brought, then said, “On the way back, Lodo gave me a globe to keep. He told me it would come in handy one day.”
“A globe?” asked Shilly and Mage Van Haasteren at exactly the same time, with a similar tone of disbelief.
“Only a small one. He made me promise to slip it in my pack when I got back to the workshop.”
“You never told me,” Shilly said, feeling blood rush to her face. Lodo had never let her touch the globes with more than a fingertip, let alone given her one to keep.
Sal’s eyes didn’t meet hers. “He didn’t think you’d understand. I told him it was worth too much, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He made me accept it, so I had to do as he wanted.” His gaze fixed almost desperately on the mage. “He talked about his teacher, then. He told me your name, and said that you would be very old, possibly even dead. That’s why it’s so surprising to see you looking so young.”
The mage shook his head, dismissing the point.
“The globe,” he said. “Do you have it with you now?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see it.”
Sal reached deep into his pack and produced a leather-wrapped bundle. Inside was a slightly flattened polished glass ball as large as a man’s fist. The globe’s weight was obvious when Sal handed it to the mage, who had to exert more effort than expected to stop it dropping to the table. Inert, it possessed a smoky grey colour as dense as a thunderstorm.
The mage hefted it in his hand, and examined it from all angles.
“Did he show you how to work it?”
“No.”
The mage turned to Shilly: “Have you ever seen this before? Did you see him make it?”
“No,” she said, fighting to keep her emotions out of her voice. Lodo gave Sal a globe! Why not her? Hadn’t she deserved one too? “I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life.”
“Neither have I. Not from the Strand, anyway. This was in Fundelry, you said?” he asked both of them. “By the sea?”
“Yes,” said Sal.
“Wasted,” said the mage, in a voice so bitter it almost startled Shilly out of her resentment. He put the globe down on the table in front of them and thought for a moment. Sal’s attention was on the globe, as though he was afraid the mage might take it away from him.
Van Haasteren nodded and said, “Continue.”
Sal picked up the story, haltingly detailing his father’s near escape from the Sky Wardens: how Lodo had argued that Sal wasn’t the child they were looking for and that they should let their prisoner go. Then Tait had betrayed them to the Alcaide and the Syndic, and Sal’s father had died. Not even Sal’s innate talent had enabled them to escape. Only an earthquake summoned by Lodo had set them free.
And as a result, Shilly thought to herself, Lodo might be a golem like the creature they had met among the towers: hollow of all thought; filled with something else, something malignant, while his mind hung trapped in the Void Beneath.
There hadn’t been time to go back to the workshop before fleeing Fundelry forever. All she had to remember Lodo by was the globe that Sal had.
She missed a chunk of the story, so wrapped in her thoughts was she. The mage asked her questions about the work Lodo had done in the village: small things mostly, such as repairing pots, heating water and keeping the town lit at night. But the mage was impressed by her description and, in some ways, more interested in Lodo than the two of them.
“The Scourge of Aneshti,” he said at one point. “It’s much like a whip, with —”
“We know it,” said Shilly.
“Do you have it? Did Payat give you that, too?”
“No. It’d still be in the workshop — unless the Alcaide or the Syndic managed to get in.”
“If that’s where it is, it will be safe.” The mage nodded, although he didn’t seem especially happy with the answer. “Such places seal themselves upon their owner’s death. The Ways that connect them through the Earth to the outside are very difficult to reopen — and doubly so for a Sky Warden.”
“So it’s all still there?” Shilly asked. “All of his stuff, just as it was?”
“Yes.”
The thought appealed to a very deep part of her. She had spent a lot of her life in those small, underground chambers, and she had learned things that she would never forget. There, Lodo had taught her the ways of the Change; there, they had lived for more than half the years she had been alive. The workshop would always be a part of her, in her mind. She would find a way back in, somehow, one day.
“What exactly did he teach you?” the mage asked her, and she did her best to explain. The Change was a powerful gift and a terrible responsibility. It came on its own terms, or it didn’t come at all, as in her case. But she had learned how to use other people’s talent; if she was touching someone like Lodo or Sal she could reach i
nto them, find the place in them that responded when they called it up, and bend it to her own will. But she couldn’t use it if they didn’t want her to, and she could only use as much as they had.
Within those limitations, she had been taught everything else she could learn. Not just visualisations, but an understanding of the balance implicit in the Change: if she altered the world in any way, there would always be a physical cost. The Change wasn’t a bottomless well of wishes she could use to get whatever she wanted. Even someone born with it could only ever work within the limitations of their bodies, just as with everything else. She had seen both Lodo and Sal drained from over-exertion of their gifts, so she knew well what that meant, even if she didn’t feel it herself.
The mage was fascinated by what she had been taught, but the sea also piqued his interest. She tried to explain, and failed completely. It was easy to grasp the concept of an ocean as a vast body of water under which the land lay hidden, but it was impossible to capture the complexity of it to someone who had never seen so much as a wide river: the waves, the tides, the sand, the shells, the sheer vitality of it all: it confounded the mage, who had only the concept to cling to in his dry, dusty land.
Soon enough, though, the story left Fundelry and rushed inland, and she found herself back in unfamiliar territory. She relived the awful, disorienting days early in their flight, when she had hardly spoken for fear of the emotions boiling inside her. She remembered Cleve’s Well and Stonehouse, buying food outside Kittle and calling herself Elina to hide who she was. Nothing had been real; she remembered it as though it was a dream, and mostly let Sal recount it to the mage, who listened carefully to every detail.
Then came the Old Line, and the ravine, and the treacherous bridge ... and her leg was broken all over again.
“Show me where it was injured,” the mage requested.
Shilly balanced awkwardly on her good leg while he unbound the other and examined her injury. She had been using fewer and looser bindings every day, but the breaks in her thighbone still felt painful and fragile. The purple remnants of her bruises were still tender to the touch. She only placed any weight on the leg by accident, and knew well how much pain that caused.
The Sky Warden & the Sun (Books of the Change) Page 18