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

by Sean Williams

  No, he thought. She wouldn’t do that. But he was still alone in the room with his grandmother and the steward, when he most needed help.

  Radi Mierlo leaned close. “I’m giving you this time to think, Sayed Graaff,” she said, using the surname his real father, Highson Sparre, and his mother had chosen after their marriage. His hackles rose on hearing it. “What you do now will decide the course of not just your life but the lives of all those around you. The selfish path may be the easiest for you, but that doesn’t make it right. Remember that, and think hard.”

  The selfish path? he wanted to say. Travelling for thousands of kilometres with nothing certain waiting at the end of it — that’s supposed to be easy? Giving up at any point in the journey would have been far simpler. It would also have been wrong.

  It was still wrong. He could feel it, deep inside him, just as the surname “Graaff” felt wrong. His parents had chosen that name to commemorate their union, and that union had turned out to be hollow. He was Sayed Hrvati, the son of the man he had always believed to be his father. That’s how he thought of himself, and that’s what the golem had called him among the towers.

  And then there was the Syndic. No matter what anyone said, his great-aunt didn’t mean him well. She had imprisoned his mother so that she died of a broken heart. Why would Radi Mierlo even consider dealing with the woman who had done that to her daughter?

  But he said nothing. His grandmother studied him closely for a long minute before releasing him from her gaze. The silk of her robes sighed as she left the room, then the steward’s hand was on his shoulder and he let himself be guided away.

  The dormitory to which he and the other young men in the party had been assigned was on the top floor at the front of the building. It was a long room with a sloping ceiling containing three double bunks and lit by a single gas lamp on the interior wall. There was one small window; through it came the sounds of traffic and a slight breeze. He examined it, looking for a way to get out, but it was barred. Below, there was only a steep drop to the ground.

  The room was empty and unwelcoming. Although the steward didn’t lock the door behind him, he was under no illusions that he was not a prisoner. He would never get down the stairs and out the front door without being seen. All he could do was wait to see what happened to him next. Choosing the bed furthest from the door, he sat down and did just that.

  Time passed slowly. His stomach rumbled, as much from nerves as from lack of food. He tried not to think about the scene in the sitting room but he was unable to let it go. So much had happened in the last hour that defied explanation. How had Behenna beaten him to his grandmother? Why was she listening to the warden? Why would she want to go back to the Strand? Was everything she had said to him about family and forgiveness the truth?

  He dug into his pack until he found the clasp that had once belonged to his mother. Silver, with threads woven into a hemispherical design that Lodo had said represented the Earth, it was tarnished black in places, but structurally whole, clearly very fine work to have survived ten years at the bottom of his father’s pack. He held it tightly in both hands and wondered what his parents would have done in his shoes. Would they have stood up to Radi Mierlo? They must have done, he supposed, when they declared their love for each other, in defiance of her marriage to Highson Sparre. Their union had been forbidden, Lodo had said, because it would have hindered the Mierlos’ rise through the Strand’s social ranks. Was that, then, what this was all about? Social standing?

  His head hurt and his eyes ached with the effort of not crying. He was determined to deal with this in an adult way, in a way his parents would have been proud of. But his thoughts were confused. He kept coming back to seeing Behenna in the doorway and feeling the world fall out from underneath him.

  And there was something else nagging at him: a memory of a dream ... he had seen his grandmother’s face before. In the cell at Fundelry, he had dreamed of three women. One was Shilly; the Syndic had been another. The third was his grandmother, Radi Mierlo. He had not known what she looked like then, but her identity was obvious now that he did know. The thought that all three of them might turn out to mean him ill rose up inside him, but he thrust it down as hard as he could. Surely not Shilly, after all they had been through together.

  On leaving Fundelry, his grandmother had appeared in another dream, the one in which he had seen Shom Behenna and Tait. She had been talking to a statue — a man’kin, he assumed — although that particular dream image had yet to be realised.

  So much of that dream had already come true: the Sky Warden following him; the globe Lodo had given him burning brightly in the darkness (although he sensed that this image was in a different darkness, a different time to the Keep); the city half-buried in the sand, inhabited by ghosts; Lodo, crippled and hollow, maybe a golem; his grandmother, crouching jealously, waiting to pounce. There were other images: Kemp and a golden tower; a tunnel leading down into the ground with corpses swinging on either side; the man’kin. He didn’t know when or if they would ever come to pass. Among them, nothing suggested a happy ending to his situation.

  The door clicked open, and he sat bolt upright. So lost in his thoughts had he been that he hadn’t worked out what to say if his grandmother tried to convince him to talk to Behenna again.

  It was the mage. Van Haasteren shut the door carefully behind him and came to where Sal sat on the bed.

  “I’m sorry, Sal,” the mage said, his usually looming presence seeming diminished, his face even longer than usual. He sat down next to Sal and reached into his robes. His hand emerged containing food wrapped in a serviette. Giving it to Sal, he said again, “I’m sorry. I swear I had no knowledge of this. Neither does Jarmila, I’m sure, although she will hear about it soon if the Synod is involved.”

  Sal knew that he was telling the truth. Officious and distant the Mage Van Haasteren might be, but he didn’t seem the deceitful type. Sal accepted the offer of food gratefully, and picked at it while they talked.

  “You’re probably wondering why I don’t just take you away from here,” the mage said. “The truth is, I’m not strong enough to show any sign of weakness. Running will make us look guilty, and the last thing we should do is give Behenna any advantages. Especially if he’s bluffing.”

  “Do you think he might be?”

  “Not really. But if he is, we’ll be able to find out more quickly from here than at the Keep.”

  Sal nodded, although his mind ached from trying to follow the web of double-crosses around him.

  “If he’s not bluffing,” he asked, “will we really have to go to the Synod? Is it really up to them to send me back?”

  “We do, I’m afraid, and it is. We’ll still be seeing Jarmila tomorrow, as planned, but I suspect it will be to confirm what lies ahead. When the Synod convenes at the Nine Stars, we will have to be there or our side won’t be heard.”

  “Can we get there in time?” Sal had seen maps of the Interior. The place where the Synod convened was in the middle of a desert a great distance away. Six days didn’t seem a very long time in which to make such a journey.

  “We can,” said the mage, “with the right sort of transport. By tradition, there are no Ways connecting any of the Interior cities to the Nine Stars, so we must travel by road — and as much as I hate to admit it, Behenna does make sense when he suggests we travel together. Two small caravans are no match for one large one on this sort of journey. We might have to combine our resources to make the most of them.”

  “But —”

  “I know what you’re about to say. There’s no reason to worry. You’ll be safe. He may be as cunning as a snake, but he’s toothless. Don’t forget that. He’s thousands of kilometres away from the sea, and that’s where his power comes from. He won’t be able to hurt you.”

  That hasn’t stopped him from trying so far, Sal wanted to say, but he knew that would sound petu
lant. “Will that really stop him?” he asked instead, wanting reassurance on this score. “I mean, I can use the Change both here and in the Strand, so why can’t he?”

  “Your abilities are part of what it means to be a wild talent, Sal. You tap into what you find around you, regardless of its source, but the results of your efforts are blunt, unfocused. Everyone who learns to use the Change properly learns to refine not just the end results but also the places they originally come from. It’s like making a diamond, or manufacturing a blade: if you don’t start out with the very best source materials, the product will be flawed. And they are not interchangeable. If you made a blade out of diamond, it would shatter, and steel has none of the properties that make diamonds precious.

  “Sky Wardens are born exposed to the natural ambience of the Strand, which contains a mixture of background potential that is biased in the direction of wind and water. So they develop naturally to use that ambience. Training emphasises it. Ultimately, that is all they know. And it is the same with Stone Mages: we grow surrounded by, and are trained in, the ways of fire and earth. It becomes more than just our relative strengths. It becomes what we are.”

  “Doesn’t the Change all come from the same place?” Sal asked.

  “Ultimately, perhaps, but that is like saying that all life on the Earth comes from the Sun. It may be true, but it doesn’t mean that we can eat sunlight. We eat plants that convert the sun’s rays into fruit, or we eat animals that eat the plants. We are not equipped to tap directly into the Change. It is not natural.”

  “But what’s to stop someone from trying? The background potential is all around us, no matter where we’re from. If they really needed to —”

  “No Stone Mage or Sky Warden would do it, Sal, because it would destroy them.” The Stone Mage’s voice was firm. “As I said, our different uses of the Change are more than just matters of convenience; they define us. Stone Mages and Sky Wardens use different tools to manipulate the Change, and these tools change us in the process. The calluses on a mechanic’s hand are different to those of a musician, for instance, because the two crafts are fundamentally different. Likewise, were we to break the patterns of a lifetime, it would destroy the foundations of our training. The reflexes we spent our lives developing would be undermined and we wouldn’t have new ones to take their place. We could take nothing for granted any more: the source of our power and the ways we manipulate it are so delicately balanced that the slightest shift can render our efforts worthless. Even the way we fit into society would be ruined, for such a thing is impossible to hide. It would be like changing our skin colour or sex as opposed to simply taking a new nationality or name. For both Stone Mages and Sky Wardens, there is no other way than the ones we have learned.”

  Sal absorbed this. If it was true, then he was as safe from Behenna as he was from any other person. But there was one obvious exception — apart from him — to the rule Van Haasteren was trying to hammer home.

  “What about Lodo?” Sal said.

  The mage’s face instantly clouded. “What about him?”

  “He was born in the Strand but he trained as a Stone Mage.”

  “That’s true. Some people are like that. That’s why we Test all applicants, to see if they are developing askew and need to be relocated.”

  “But then he left to come back to the Strand, to the beach. He said...” Sal thought back to remember the old man’s precise words. The Change doesn’t sit well with most people, he had said, because they think it’s for big things. It’s a powerful gift and a terrible responsibility, and big things don’t mix well with little people. “‘I prefer the small magic,’” Sal repeated aloud, “‘the magic of the everyday, and I came to Fundelry because the beach has its own magic, a magic that is neither water nor earth, neither fire nor air, but a mixture of them all. Here, on the edge of one world, I have found a bridge between two.’”

  “He said that?” the mage asked, his expression darker than the shadows around them.

  “Yes. Maybe he found another way.”

  “Well, he was wrong, Sal. There is no other way.”

  Sal was nervous about speaking for a long moment. The mage’s mood was almost frightening. He didn’t want to exacerbate it by saying the wrong thing.

  It didn’t last, though. The mage took in a deep breath and slowly let it go.

  “You know,” he said, “my father would have chosen him over me — to run the Keep, I mean. That’s why he gave Lodo the Scourge. Did he ever tell you that?”

  Sal shook his head, surprised. “No, he didn’t. He told me your father had had high hopes for him, but that he had let him down, turned his back on him and everything he stood for. I wondered what he meant by that.” Sal understood, now, what his grandmother had meant when she had accused the mage of putting himself in Lodo’s shoes: she thought he was trying to prove himself by succeeding where the old man, his father’s favourite, had failed. And he understood why the absence of the Scourge bothered the mage so much. As a means of Testing students, it would have been a fundamental symbol of the school. Losing it would have both undermined the Keep’s reputation and created the opportunity for someone else to start a new one in competition.

  “We were friends once,” the mage said. “He told me his heart-name.”

  The sadness in the man’s eyes made Sal feel uncomfortable. “He said your father knew that he could never go back.”

  “Exactly. And that’s what I’m saying about Behenna. Once you cross the line, there’s no returning. You’re trapped in between, belonging to neither one nor the other. There is no in between, no matter what he said. If there’s one thing worse than being born a wild talent, it’s making one of yourself.”

  “Lodo tried to fit into the Haunted City but he said that he had threatened the establishment there. I got the impression that they kicked him out on the basis of some made-up charge. I suppose that was why.”

  “He was accused of necromancy,” said the mage. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Trying to revive the dead?”

  “Not only the dead, but the un-living as well. You know that you can only create illusions of animals and things, not people. People have a spark that the Change cannot reproduce. They said that Lodo tried to create such human illusions, regardless of this fact. I don’t know if it’s true, or, if it is, whether he succeeded. If he had succeeded, the illusions would have been as bad as golems, empty vessels looking for occupants, and where better to search for such occupants than the Void Beneath? They would have been abominable things to bring into the world.”

  Sal tried to reconcile such a practice with the old man, and found that he could not. It had to be untrue. “They lied about him, then,” he said. “They lied to get rid of him.”

  “I suspect so,” said the mage. “Here was this man who dared teach that their way was not omnipotent, that it could be undermined. The fact that it worked for him didn’t matter; he was a threat to them. Similarly, the fact that it worked only for him didn’t matter to Payat; he refused to acknowledge the danger that he was putting himself into. So they got rid of him, as you say. He was expelled from the city and forced to live in the wilds as little better than an outlaw. He should have known that there was no other way it could end. All that talent was wasted.” The bitterness in the mage’s voice surprised Sal. The mage’s jealousy of his old friend was mixed up with feelings of betrayal and regret as well. “That’s how it would be for Shom Behenna if he attempted to use his powers here, Sal. Even if it worked, which it wouldn’t, it would change him irrevocably, and his superiors would know when he returned. He would be marked as an outsider and outcast just like Lodo. Unlike Lodo, though, I don’t think this man has enough native wisdom to survive on his own, let alone find a new meaning to his life, as you say Lodo did. He is too ambitious, too hungry for the power he knows already exists. He has too much to lose. And he has obviously found oth
er ways to get what he wants.”

  Sal nodded. “My grandmother.”

  “It seems so. She was expelled from the Strand after the scandal your parents caused, and you are her best means of getting back. But I don’t know exactly what’s going through her mind. I could be misrepresenting her. She hasn’t survived the last ten years by being simple-minded, after all. I fear there are so many layers to her scheming that sometimes not even she knows the full truth of what’s going on.”

  “If only I hadn’t asked you to contact her,” Sal said. “If she hadn’t known I was here —”

  “She did know. Behenna went straight to her. He didn’t know exactly where you were going, but he knew about your mother’s family, and they are easy to track down. All he had to do was tell your grandmother the story, and between them they guessed the rest. They knew where you had crossed the Divide and where your caravan was headed. Anyone in Ulum would tell you to try the Keep, if you were looking for training, so they came to Ulum to see if they could get close. There was no business bringing them here: it was all for you. When I contacted them to see if they would like to meet you, everything fell into place for them.” The mage hung his head. “Again, Sal, I’m sorry. I don’t think my actions have changed events terribly much, but it has certainly made finding you easier for them. The only good thing is that it will soon be out of all of our hands. The Synod are the ones we’ll have to worry about.”

  The mage would have said more, but the door opened. Skender, Amahl and Raf entered the room, chatting animatedly among themselves. They stopped in the middle of the room when they saw their teacher sitting with Sal.

  “I was just leaving,” the mage said, squeezing Sal firmly on the shoulder and standing. “If you’ve finished eating, I suggest you all get some rest. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”

  “Yes, Dad.” Skender was more cautious than usual of his father. “Is everything all right?”