The Sky Warden and the Sun

by Sean Williams

  She glanced in the direction Sal had indicated before and saw on the horizon a smudge that could have been a town. Yor, she presumed, whatever that was.

  The rest of the way was in shadow, but she had the measure of it now: walk forward ten paces and wait for Sal to catch up; think of how good it would be to feel solid earth underfoot; don’t look down to where that same earth waited, far, far below; savour the moment of stillness as long as it lasted, and be glad that she wasn’t in the buggy with Sal, who wouldn’t get to rest at all until he joined her on the far side. He could afford neither to stop nor to go too quickly. The buggy crawled along in slow motion, as if in a dream that would never end.

  Yet the edge of the ravine grew clearer with every press forward. The bridge terminated in a road no different to the one they had left. Dusty, unsafe, abandoned—it looked like paradise the more she thought about it. Once there, the hurdle would be crossed, they could keep moving on.

  Forty metres to go. Thirty. Twenty.

  It happened just before the last rest stop, with only eleven metres left. She had barely taken her ninth step when she heard a new noise from behind her over the burbling of the buggy’s engine: a groan, or a creak. It was not as dramatic as a crack, but still of concern. She turned immediately and opened her mouth to shout a question at Sal, to ask if he had heard it too, when it came again, louder, and the plank beneath her twanged like a plucked string.

  Sal clearly felt or heard that. His eyes grew wide and the buggy jerked forward with a snarl as instinctive panic drove the accelerator downward. It stopped after a metre or two, and for a split second Shilly thought that that was it, that the crisis was over and their slow progress would continue. But then she realised that the engine was still snarling, and its front wheels were slipping.

  Something clattered far below. She didn’t look down; she didn’t need to. If part of the bridge had fallen away and the buggy was teetering on the lip of a precipice, it would look exactly like this.

  The buggy tipped backward slightly. Sal glanced behind him, then looked firmly forward again and put his foot down. The engine roared to no avail.

  Shilly ran forward, toward him, reaching. “Give me your hand!”

  “No! I can do it!”

  You can’t! she wanted to scream. He couldn’t see what she could. Behind the front mudguards, the wheels had already lifted off the surface of the planks. He would have no traction, front or back, no matter how hard he accelerated. There was nothing he could do to arrest the buggy’s slide backward. And down.

  Except…If he wouldn’t jump and there wasn’t time to explain, there was only one thing she could do. She leapt into the air and brought both feet down hard on its front bumper bar. Her extra weight brought the spinning wheels into contact with the planks and the buggy lurched forward. Taken by surprise, Sal struggled with the steering wheel and Shilly sprawled helplessly across the bonnet. The rear wheels screeched and the buggy slewed wildly across the bridge, crossing the remaining distance in a little more than a second—but not in a straight line. First it jumped off the planks and scraped against the left safety rail with a shower of sparks. Then it fishtailed to the right side. One metre from the edge the buggy impacted with the right rail hard enough to pivot it entirely around, so that when it finally came to rest, on the solid, red earth, it was facing the way it had come, toward the bridge that had so narrowly let them pass.

  The engine died and everything was silent. But ringing in Shilly’s ears was the crack she had heard when the buggy struck the right-side rail with her strewn across its bonnet. For a second, she entertained the hope that it was the buggy that was broken, not her—but then the pain hit, and she screamed.

  Chapter 2

  The Broken

  Sal saw stars when the buggy juddered to a halt on the road. His mind was a mess of impressions: the terrible sensation of sliding backward into the hole in the bridge, followed by the wild rush forward, out of control, when Shilly tipped the buggy so its front wheels could get a grip. He had bruised his chest on the steering wheel when they had struck one of the guard rails, and he dreaded to think how much damage had been done in the impact. If they had cracked the radiator, or the sump…

  Shilly’s cry instantly cleared his head. She was hunched over on the hot bonnet of the buggy, trying to sit up. He got out to help, but she slipped off and fell onto the ground before he could reach her, and she screamed again.

  When he saw the blood, his stomach seemed to plummet to the bottom of the ravine.

  “Shilly!” He instantly went to her, not needing to ask where she was hurt. Her right leg lay folded beneath her in an impossible way, broken in many places when crushed between the buggy and the guardrail. Her face was a sickly yellow, and getting paler by the second. She clutched at him and pulled him closer.

  “No blame,” she hissed through clenched teeth, her eyes not really seeing him. “No—”

  Then she was unconscious and limp in his arms, arterial blood splashing thickly over his knees and onto the road. The stink of it nearly made him gag, but he suppressed it along with the panic boiling upward in his chest. He had to think clearly. People died from injuries like this.

  The most immediate problems were the bleeding and the major break in her thigh. What little herbal lore he knew would be of no use to him. There were few plants around, for a start, and none of the right type to promote clotting. Instead, he tried to wipe away the blood as best he could, but it kept flowing from the wound. He put his fingers around the tear in her thigh, holding the skin tight against the thick splinter of bone sticking out of her. That lessened the steady pulsing, giving him time to think.

  His first thought was to make a splint out of the wreckage of the bridge and tie it on with strips torn from the tarpaulin. Her unconsciousness was a blessing because it would be easier for him to straighten the leg, provided she didn’t remain unconscious for too long. The longer she bled the deeper into shock she would go, so the sooner he got started the better.

  The moment he released his grip on the wound to go and get the things he needed, the pulsing started again. The puddle of blood had already spread all around them; he was drenched from the waist down and up to his elbows. If she had any blood left in her, which seemed incredible, he knew she couldn’t afford to lose much more.

  The situation couldn’t possibly have been worse. He couldn’t move for fear of killing her, but he couldn’t save her unless he moved. Meanwhile, the sense of her that nagged at him when they were close was ebbing. All he could do was crouch by her as she slowly faded away.

  Anger and frustration welled in his chest. Shilly had saved his life. He refused to watch her die.

  His one remaining hope lay within. Reaching deep inside himself, he sought the source of the Change. There had to be something it could do to help her. If he couldn’t use it to save a life, what was it good for?

  He imagined a hole inside him, a tunnel leading not down or left or backward, but in an entirely new direction, one he coundn’t describe. He stretched his mind along it, probing. Deeper. Something stirred, but it was formless, useless. He tried harder, reached deeper, but still nothing happened.

  “Help me!” he screamed. Only echoes answered his call. The Change eluded him. “Help me save her!”

  Think, he told himself. There has to be a way!

  The answer came to him from an unexpected quarter: not from the Change, but from a voice that spoke through the Change, directly into his mind.

  “Shape,” it said.

  Sal stiffened. Lodo had spoken to him this way once, during his brief training. He had the feeling of grey clouds parting—the same grey as the terrible Void Beneath—just long enough for a word to sneak through, a single word from another mind a great distance away. Then the grey crashed back in to seal the breach. He didn’t recognise the mental voice.

  Another word came: “Will.”

  Understanding was like a firework going off. The Change wasn’t a servant; it had n
o intelligence of its own. Shouting at it wasn’t going to tell it what to do, no matter how much he wanted it to. He had to explain.

  The words came again from the distant mind—“Shape will”—but he had the concept, now. Shilly had explained it to him in the Ruin near Fundelry, when he had tried to make light blossom from a stone. He had to picture in his mind what he wanted done before it would happen in reality.

  What needed to be done most of all? The arteries had to be sealed, and that meant first moving the bone. He closed his eyes and used the information coming from his fingertips to imagine the inside of Shilly’s shattered thigh. The femur had cracked there; one splinter went up, another down; the end poking through the wound led to her hip and would have to be retracted before the others could join it. The big veins, surging feebly now against his grip, could reconnect if he pushed them this way…

  At the first movement of bone and tissue beneath his fingers, he almost let go in fright. Opening his eyes, he caught a faint orange aura dancing across Shilly’s flesh—but it was gone as soon as he saw it. The bone stopped moving at the same time, and he closed his eyes to regain his concentration.

  Once he had it, the bone retracted smoothly into the wound. Shilly stirred as her leg straightened of its own accord. The jagged splinters lined up and the severed ends of the arteries met.

  Sal had the wound completely closed beneath his hands by then, despite the slipperiness of her skin and the strength draining from his fingers, but the blood was still flowing freely. Putting the ends of the arteries together wasn’t enough. He would have to fuse them.

  He was seeing stars again by this point. He dug deeper and willed the ends shut. A brief flower of energy blossomed beneath his palms, inside Shilly’s leg, then he was drained, empty. Dizziness rushed through him, and he couldn’t stop himself falling down into the grey void that had waited for him all his life.

  (And all he heard for an endless instant was the hum that lay behind everything: every thought, every word, every meaning, and every life. It was deep and resonant, and drew him into it like the water had drawn him down into the ocean in Fundelry when he had fallen off the jetty—but this time there was no one there to call him back.)

  Tap-tap.

  Sal stirred. “Huh?”

  Tap-tap.

  Cold air and a feeling of space rushed over him, as though he was lying near a great emptiness that threatened to engulf him. He sat upright with a jerk. Everything was black, or seemed so at first. What had happened and where he was came to him in fragments: the Old Line, the ravine, the buggy, the bridge. Night had fallen and, apart from a band of stars far above him, the world was utterly dark. There was no moon. He had been unconscious for hours.

  “Shilly?” He reached out for her and found her arm beside him. It was warm and she had a pulse. Her breath came evenly out of the darkness. Reaching lower he found the wound on her thigh. Blood still trickled from it, and it would need to be sewn shut with the needle and thread in the buggy’s tool kit, but the bleeding was nothing like the mortal torrent that had poured out of it before. It hadn’t killed her. The Change had saved her. He had saved her. They had saved each other.

  He rose to his hands and knees and felt through the darkness for the buggy, wary of losing it and accidentally crawling over the edge of the ravine. When he found it, he collapsed into the driver’s seat and reached under it for the torch in its recharge clip. Yellow light spilled out of the end of it when he flicked the switch, illuminating the scene around him.

  Shilly lay on her back where she had fallen in a wash of dried blood. Her right leg needed splinting immediately. He didn’t have the strength to seal the breaks; the artery alone had drained him nearly dry.

  Out of the darkness, he seemed to hear Lodo’s voice, cautioning him: “Having the Change won’t give you access to boundless reserves of energy. All you have is as much as you are, and no more. Take too much, and you risk losing yourself. You’d become like a ghost, or the opposite of a ghost: a body without true life, a shell of yourself, a golem, as some call them. Many wardens and mages have fallen into this trap over the centuries and some still exist. They can be dangerous, for empty vessels may be filled with other things.”

  Sal wondered, as he prepared the material necessary for a splint, how close he had come to dipping too deeply—and he contemplated how much harder it was to heal than to harm. The destructive burst he had sent against the Alcaide and the Syndic in Fundelry hadn’t drained him anywhere near as much as shifting bone and fusing two ends of a severed artery.

  Tap-tap.

  He froze, realising only then what had woken him. The words that had come in response to his desperate plea for help came vividly to his mind. Now he knew from whom they had come, too. His urgency, his desperation when Shilly had been dying in front of him, must have been as obvious as a volcano to anyone looking. And there had been someone looking: Shom Behenna. Sal had exposed himself by using the Change out in the open. This, he knew, was how his parents had given themselves away when on the run from Highson Sparre. The Change stood out more clearly than a fire at night for those who could see, his father had said. He would have to be more careful in future, if it wasn’t already far too late.

  But he put it out of his mind for the moment. There were no words any more from the distant Sky Warden, and Shilly needed him to concentrate on her, not Behenna. Her battered leg was purple and swollen, and at risk of infection. If he could splint it and get her in the buggy, they could move on. Out of the hills there would be more ground cover, more medicinal plants. Even if he couldn’t find the right ones, there was always Yor, the next town on their journey. If he moved quickly enough, they might yet stay ahead of pursuit. The fact that he couldn’t feel the eye of the Syndic pressing down upon him gave him some small hope.

  When Shilly’s leg was bound, he carried her as gently as he could to the buggy and put her on the tray. The sweet, rosemary smell which was usually part of her was completely buried under the stench of blood. He rearranged their supplies to give her room and laid out the tarp to act as a makeshift cushion around her. The less he jarred her leg, the better.

  Only then did he get into the driver’s seat and try the ignition. The engine caught immediately. Letting go of the breath he had been holding he performed a careful three-point turn, then headed off down the Old Line and left the ravine far behind him.

  Bright light burned through Shilly’s eyelids.

  It can’t be, she thought. The last thing she remembered was the shadow of the ravine. I’m dreaming.

  She tried opening her eyes and was assaulted by sensations: light, stronger than before; the sound of the buggy rattling and roaring along a road of some kind; the taste of dust and blood in her mouth, and—

  She shouldn’t have tried to move. She remembered that much the next time she awoke. The pain in her leg was too big to contain. It overwhelmed her, thrust her back into the darkness. But the darkness held despair and nightmares of failure. We didn’t make it, did we?

  There was no answer. She couldn’t tell if she was speaking or not, but she reached outward anyway.

  Sal?

  Instantly, the buggy braked and pulled over. She heard the sound of scrabbling. A shadow fell across her face. Her eyelids were stuck together, and she forced them open with an effort.

  “Are you awake?” Sal asked. He was a blur looming over her, silhouetted against the bright, blue sky. She felt his hand on her forehead. “Can you hear me?”

  She nodded, although the effort made her fragile grip on consciousness waver. Her stomach churned as though she was about to be sick.

  He removed his hand. “I thought you were going to die.” His face conveyed an almost comical mix of hope and dismay. “Your leg—can you feel it?”

  She nodded again, and was sick, then. The nausea and the pain fought for control of her world until the darkness stepped in once more and claimed her for its own.

  The next time she awoke, everything was dark and
cool behind her closed eyelids. The smell of the road was gone, replaced by a pungent odour of herbs and ointments. She was lying on a bed, covered with a soft sheet. Her clothes were gone, and any embarrassment she might have felt was quashed by the sensation of being clean for the first time in days. Her hair was wet and cool against her scalp.

  Her thoughts were clear enough to deduce that she had been stripped and bathed while she was unconscious. By Sal? He couldn’t move her on his own, not with her leg…

  Her leg! She tried to feel it, but could not. It was numb. Gone? Panic subsided when her fingertips found her thigh and followed it as far as she could. There was bandage, a splint. They wouldn’t splint a stump, would they?

  She collapsed back onto the bed, groggy and exhausted, and full of smaller aches. Cool air wafted over her in gentle waves. Wherever she was, she was glad to be off the road. If only, she thought, she could stay there forever…

  After a while, she became aware of voices talking softly in a room nearby.

  “…good food, painkillers, antibiotics, fresh bandages. Most of all she needs time: time to rest, to heal, to get better.”

  The man’s speech was accented in a way she had heard sometimes in market traders, as though they were speaking a slightly different language. Then someone else spoke and, although she couldn’t make out the words, she recognised Sal’s voice. A trickle of relief ran through her.

  “That much is obvious,” said the accented voice in response to what Sal had said, “but even the strongest won’t recover overnight.”

  “We don’t have time,” Sal said, more loudly. “We have to get moving again, and soon.”

  “Well, I could supply you with what you will need, I suppose. It will be expensive.”

  “I don’t have any money left. You know that.”

  “I do know that, Tom, and I have already given you more than you could afford. I am a reasonable man. I will let you stay here longer in order to help Elina. But I am not a saint. If you leave, I will not be able to help you.”