The Sky Warden and the Sun

by Sean Williams

  It was at this time, when he was feeling the beginnings of independence and self-confidence, that his voice broke.

  “Squeak, squeak.”

  “Shut up!”

  “What’s that, little mouse? I can’t hear you.”

  “I said, shut up!” He’d thought his voice breaking would be a cause for relief, since it meant that his talent for the Change wasn’t going to evaporate after all, but in fact it had proved to be nothing of the sort. “I can’t help it.”

  His vocal chords betrayed him again on the last word, prompting another wave of laughter from Skender.

  “Be quiet, both of you!” called Shilly from the balcony. “I’m trying to study.”

  Sal threw Skender a dirty look and followed it up with a pillow. The boy ducked, and the pillow hit the wall, startling the yellow lizard that had taken up permanent residence in the corner. It scuttled for cover under the bed while Skender scrabbled for something more solid to throw back. His hand fell on Sal’s pack.

  “Don’t touch that.” Sal was across the room before Skender’s fingers could close. He pulled the pack reassuringly close to his chest, feeling the heavy weight of the globe in his arms.

  “Why? What’s in it?” Skender teased, dancing around him like a restless puppy. “Love letters from a little mouse’s girlfriend? Or a lock of Bethe’s hair?”

  Sal gritted his teeth. He should never have told Skender that he enjoyed doing his chores with the student overseer. The teasing had been merciless ever since.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s none of your business.”

  Skender flopped back on the bed and rested his head on one hand. “Which one is it? You can’t have it both ways.”

  Sal sighed. Skender had a way of getting what he wanted, either by resourcefulness or sheer persistence. The chances were it would be easier to just tell him, now that his interest was piqued. It didn’t come easy, though. He had kept the globe secret even from Shilly. How could he justify revealing it to a complete stranger?

  He glanced at where she sat in the balcony of the room they still shared, reading by the light of the evening sun. How she ignored the yawning gulf on her right he didn’t know, but she seemed unperturbed by it. Their chores were over, and they all were supposed to be studying.

  He was, however, certain she was paying close attention to what went on between him and Skender. Even if she never joined in on the teasing about Bethe—a fact for which he was distinctly grateful, since Skender was more than enough to deal with at one time—she wouldn’t want to miss out on anything. She certainly wouldn’t want to miss out on what he was increasingly sure he was about to do. He had to do it, he thought, to repay some of the trust Skender had shown him. And maybe to get a reaction from her, too…

  He took a deep breath and reached into his pack.

  “This is a secret, Skender, so you have to promise not to tell anyone about it.”

  “I promise,” said the boy, sitting up with eyes wide.

  “Our first teacher gave this to me before we left Fundelry.” He heard a faint creak as Shilly shifted in her chair. “He didn’t tell me how to use it, but he said it might come in handy, one day. I’ve been carrying it around ever since.” He put the leather-wrapped bundle in his lap and began to unfold it.

  Skender’s eyes opened even wider when he saw what it contained. “It’s a light-sink!” he exclaimed.

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  “Or a light-keeper.” The boy inched closer so he could get a better look. “Different types have specific names—the Orb of Ardanoi, for instance—but they all do pretty much the same thing. Where did you say you got it from?”

  Sal described Lodo and Fundelry in more detail. Skender listened with interest. The fact that it had come from—and presumably been made in—a small town as deep as you could get in the Strand fascinated him as it had fascinated his father.

  “Amazing,” Skender said, clearly wanting to touch the globe for himself, but, strangely enough, not bold enough to ask outright. “Only trained Stone Mages can make light-sinks, you know, and even then only under exactly the right circumstances. I can’t imagine how this Lodo of yours managed it so far on the wrong side of the Divide.”

  “What makes them so hard to make?” asked Sal. “I mean, there are hundreds of glowing stones all over this place. Isn’t this just something like that?”

  “‘Something like,’ yes, but the difference is crucial. What makes light-sinks really tricky is not that they store light or emit it, because doing either of those is easy; it’s doing both of them that’s hard. You’ve got to tell them to stop storing and start emitting, and that’s not easy. Fixed matter like glass and stone doesn’t want to change. You have to force it—and force it gently, or it’ll break. You have to seduce it.”

  “You know how to do that, then?” asked Shilly sceptically, moving from the chair on the balcony and coming into the room.

  “Only in theory. I’ve read about it and I’ve heard Dad talk to the more advanced students about it.”

  “I’ll bet he was the one who said ‘seduce’,” she said.

  “It was. So what? If he used it, it must be the right word.”

  “You’ve never tried to use one?” asked Sal.

  “No, but only because I’ve never had access to a globe like this. Making them is a whole other matter entirely.” Sal held the globe gently up to the window so it caught the last rays of the sun and Skender’s gaze followed it. “It’s beautiful, Sal. You’re very lucky.”

  Shilly’s lips tightened.

  “Wha—” Sal started, but stopped as the word came out as a squawk. Skender chortled.

  “What do you think?” he asked, handing it to Shilly. “Skender seems to think he knows how to make it work. Is it worth a go?”

  She took the globe as though he had offered her a very fragile, enormously precious jewel.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Then no. It’s not that I don’t believe you, Skender—”

  “Not just Skender,” Sal said. “All of us. Together.”

  The word caught her attention. She thought about it. “No,” she said again. “We still might break it.”

  “I’d be curious to try anyway,” said Sal. Still fresh in his mind was his dream of a bright light shining when everything else around was dark. “Lodo said I might need it one day. It’s not going to be much use to me if I don’t know how to make it work.”

  “But it’s too valuable,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Exactly!” Skender exclaimed. “Who knows how old it is? Who knows how much light is stored inside it? Look how grey it is. I think that correlates to how charged it is, in which case—”

  “It might even be dangerous,” she finished for him. “To us, I mean.”

  “Nonsense. What could happen?”

  “It could blow up, that’s what.”

  “I’ve never heard of globes exploding under any circumstances.”

  “We saw a bunch go off in Fundelry,” said Sal, remembering all too well the sudden violence and the showers of glass dust that had rained down after each one. “Shilly’s got a point. We could really be hurt.”

  “Aw, you’re nothing but a pair of spoilsports.” Skender flopped back onto the bed with a sulky expression. “I thought you were here to learn.”

  “We are,” said Shilly, “but—”

  “So learn! Look, extending yourself beyond the syllabus is the only way to excel, right? And don’t tell me you’ve never taken a chance before, Shilly. You struck me as a troublemaker the moment I first saw you, for all that you’re on your best behaviour now. Why the act? Who are you trying to impress? Me? I’m not my father, you know.”

  She pulled back from him, and Sal could tell that Skender’s words had stung.

  “All right, then,” she said, measuring every word. “Let’s try—but carefully. We stop if it looks like we don’t know what we’re doing.”
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br />   “Okay.” Skender nodded happily. “If we screw this up, anything could happen.”

  “Not just anything. You can be certain that I’ll kill you, for starters.”

  Shilly made herself more comfortable on the floor, stretching her leg out to one side. The pain of her injury didn’t seem to bother her as much, since their visit to see the Mage Erentaite. Sal and Skender sat down in front of her with the globe in the space between them. The last rays of the sun were draining from the sky behind her; her dark skin was dissolving into the gloom.

  “Do we need light for this?” Sal asked.

  “If this works, we’ll have as much light as we could possibly want.” Skender reached out and took his right hand. They formed a triangle on the floor of the room with the globe between them. A sense of flow that was difficult to pin down swept through them. Sal felt his skin tingle all over, and could see his two friends quite clearly, despite the darkness.

  “So, how do we do it?” Shilly asked.

  “Well…” Skender paused. “Hmm. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I know in theory—”

  “So you said. You made it sound easy a minute ago.”

  “Well, it’s not, okay? The patterns are very complicated.”

  “Tell us how to visualise them,” said Sal. “And we’ll all try at the same time.”

  “No, there’s a better way,” Shilly said. “We’re linked, right? You show us through the link, just like we did playing Blind, and we’ll look at it together. It can’t be that difficult.”

  “Something that most mages struggle to master? Sure. Not difficult at all.” Despite Skender’s scepticism, Sal felt his hand tighten in readiness. “I’ll show you what I know.”

  Through the link, a complicated image surfaced. It appeared in Sal’s mind like a thought of his own, although it came with a flavour that he knew belonged to Skender. The image was difficult to fathom, consisting of an uncountable array of spheres dancing around and, sometimes, through each other. The spheres were transparent and solid, but weren’t glassy. Their centres were connected by thin, black lines that whipped around like the antennae of an army of agitated ants.

  Sal tried, but he couldn’t follow it.

  “Are you getting this, Shilly?” asked Skender. “You picture the balls, and you imagine them moving—”

  “Shh,” she said. Sal could feel her concentrating so much that she was reluctant to interrupt herself. “I’m thinking.”

  As she thought, something happened to the image. The balls began to form a pattern. It wasn’t a fixed pattern, or one that repeated with any regularity, but Sal could sense that there was reason to the dance, unlike before.

  Shilly sat back slightly, as though seeking a different perspective. “Does that look any better to you?”

  It looked to Sal as though all the myriad winds on a gusty day had suddenly got together to form a willy-willy, sweeping across a plain. The transition felt natural, not forced. Watching it, Sal could see how she manipulated the image, applying pressure to the illusion to make the balls slow down or speed up. A nudge in one spot changed their behaviour completely; a simple push sent a new order cascading through the pattern.

  “Indeed it does,” said Skender. “I’ve never made it look so good.” He sounded impressed. “That’s a really high-level adjustment.”

  Barely had he said it when the pattern dissolved into chaos again. Shilly harumphed in annoyance.

  “Where did you say you learned to do this?” she asked Skender.

  “I saw the pattern in a book.”

  “And you just happened to remember it?”

  Skender didn’t answer. Shilly concentrated furiously, and the pattern reformed. Skender let it wobble for a moment before suggesting a slight adjustment based on another text he had read. Shilly applied it and the pattern stabilised immediately. They watched it dance in their mind’s eye for several minutes until Shilly was certain she had it more or less under control.

  “So what now?” Sal’s voice squeaked again, but this time no one commented.

  “I suppose we try it,” said Skender.

  “That was the whole point,” Shilly commented.

  “But what if someone senses us?” It was Sal’s turn to be nervous. “Lodo could always tell when we’d been mucking around with the Change.”

  “Not here,” said Skender. “This place is a Ruin. It’s full of background potential. You’d have to really let something go before—well, you know what I mean. We’ll be okay.”

  “If this thing does blow up,” said Shilly, “getting caught will be the last thing on our minds.”

  “True.” Sal nodded and tried to ease the nervousness nibbling at his gut. “Let’s go, then. Slowly at first. We don’t want to take it too far all at once…”

  He stiffened as the will of the others slid through him, like something slippery yet sharp crawling up the inside of each of his arms and down his backbone. A deep hum arose out of nowhere, throbbing silently in the air as though the earth itself was vibrating. Unlike the first time his talent had brought light from a stone—in a cave under another Ruin, at Shilly’s instigation—he didn’t feel a sudden blossoming of energy from all around him. He could feel the Change gathering within him and concentrating itself into a single point just above floor level in front of him, where the globe rested.

  “That’s it,” breathed Shilly. “Hold the pattern and let it move, like it’s alive.”

  The image in his mind swirled around the point between them, fiercely energetic yet focused at the same time. For every element that spun away, as though about to tear itself free, another fell back to the centre with even more momentum than before. It was almost like watching an explosion in reverse. He put every iota of his energy into encouraging the implosion to collapse, figuring that that was what it needed.

  Just when he thought something was about to give, the pattern deflated and the feeling of gathering energies ebbed. He looked around, startled.

  “What happened?”

  “Not enough grunt,” said Skender, his hand slippery with sweat. “You’ll have to push harder, Sal.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Shilly. “We’re not going to crack this by hammering at it. I have to help Sal push in the right spot while you help me keep my focus. We have to support each other in order to make it work.”

  Sal’s doubts grew stronger. “Maybe it’s too much.”

  “No,” Shilly said sternly. “We can do it. We will. All we have to do is concentrate.”

  Encouraged by her determination, Sal again put every effort into their second attempt. He felt Skender’s pattern swirling through their minds, and Shilly’s insight into its nature guided him along. When the pattern was in place, Sal dipped deep into himself—into the reserves of the Change which he pictured as the muscles of invisible limbs, stretching back into the darkness of his imagination—and willed the pattern to change along the lines the other two provided. He felt them willing with him, guiding him in the right direction.

  It happened so quickly he almost missed it. The swirling condensed into a tight, spinning lattice, then collapsed into a point at the heart of Lodo’s globe. It hung there for a split second, like a spark trembling on the verge of creating flame. Sal had just enough time to wonder if anything more was going to happen when the surface of the globe began to emit a warm, golden light. It wasn’t bright, at first; the light was similar to that cast by a campfire, but without the flickering. The glow revealed Shilly and Skender’s faces in the darkened room, gazing in wonderment at the globe, and Sal had no doubt his face showed the same expression.

  The light grew brighter and whiter. Sal distinctly saw Shilly’s pupils contract. There was no heat or sound, but he began to feel an energy rushing through the air, as though something new was building up momentum. Staring at the globe left a purple afterimage on his retina. Soon he could barely look at it, and it was getting brighter. There was still no sound, but he felt as though they were sitting at the centr
e of a gathering storm.

  Then something else happened. The light changed texture, became more fluid and more penetrating at the same time. He felt as though the light was cutting through him, stripping away his flesh to reveal the bones beneath. With a shock he realised that he actually could see the bones of his friends sitting beside him, as though their flesh had turned to glass. Their faces seemed to melt away and he saw their eye sockets, cheekbones and jaws standing out. He was reminded of the skulls he had seen in the Ruin the very first time he had consciously used his talent—and of the story of the baker, of the world’s bones and death.

  “Do you see it?” he asked.

  “It’s beautiful!” said Shilly. Her hand gripped his tightly.

  “How do we turn it off?”

  “Turn it off?” Skender’s skeletal face turned to confront him. His bony fingers clutched Sal’s. “Why would you want to do that?”

  Shilly’s hair had melted back to a bleached skull white. She was gazing around her rapturously. Clearly neither of them could see what he saw.

  “Why waste it?” he said anxiously. Their bones themselves were beginning to look faint. He didn’t want to know what happened when they vanished completely. “We don’t want to drain it, do we?”

  “Good point,” Skender conceded. “Okay. We turn it off by reversing the pattern.”

  “Like this?” An image from Shilly cut through the increasing disorientation of the glare.

  “No. It won’t just turn off on its own if we stop pushing it. You have to turn it around and put it into reverse.”

  Shilly struggled with the new pattern while Sal tried to maintain his composure. It was hard for Shilly to visualise while the light of a small sun was blasting between them. Twice she came close, and Sal felt a drain on him as Skender tested the pattern to see if it would work, but both times it fell apart and reverted to the original form. As his friends melted away, Sal tried to concentrate. Even when he closed his eyes, the ghostly images cast by the light were still visible. He could feel the light blossoming around him, as though he was a skull lying in the desert, experiencing a thousand years of bleaching sunlight in less than a minute. He was being burned away to dust, blasted into a stream of particles too small to see…