“That’s it!” Skender’s voice brought him back to reality. The boy’s expression was invisible, just bones, but Sal heard the grimace of effort in his voice. “Got it, Sal? Push now, while Shilly has it.”
Sal clutched at every shred of his willpower and focused on the pattern, guided by his two friends. The invisible muscles of the Change flexed, then flexed again. The bright point at the heart of the globe resisted. He gritted his teeth and tried again.
It was like willing the sun to set. He pushed a third time, but still nothing happened. He felt as though something was sucking him dry, taking all the strength he had before he could use it. But what would do that? It couldn’t be the globe itself; Lodo wouldn’t have given him something dangerous. It had to be something outside—or someone.
Then the resistance unwound and instantly the pressure eased. At the same time, the globe responded to the pattern that Skender and Shilly had given him to impose upon it. A shadow passed over him as the spinning image assumed a new pattern. The glare flickered and began to die. Immense relief rushed through him. He must’ve just managed to get it right, when he really needed to.
He dared to open his eyes and he saw the light fading, retreating back into the globe like water down a drain, returning to normal as it did so. The faces of his friends returned.
Blinding afterimages danced across his vision for a disconcertingly long time. When they were gone, the globe was back to its initial, warm-yellow state, and all three of them were staring at it. Shilly’s expression was one of shock.
Sal flexed one more time, and the globe went out. He felt drained, weak. There was a moment’s silence during which their hands stayed linked. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Sal could see stars shining through the window. A cold, refreshing wind played across his sweat-drenched skin. He felt like the baker in Belilanca Brokate’s story, freshly back from the land of the dead. Exactly what had just happened, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he had imagined the light boiling through flesh. Maybe he had imagined, too, the sense of being drained, or hollowed out from the inside.
Worried that he had over-exerted himself, he said nothing. He didn’t want them thinking that he was weak. As no harm had been done, there seemed no point alarming them.
Shilly was the first to move. Her hand slid damply from Sal’s. He heard her get up and reach for her crutches.
“Well,” said Skender, likewise letting go. “That was interesting.”
Light of a gentler kind entered the room. Shilly had brought a glow stone from the corridor and put it on the end of her bed. By its light, her eyes were glowing.
Sal’s gaze strayed to the open window.
“Do you think—” He swallowed back a squeak. “Do you think anyone saw it?”
Skender followed his gaze, then shook his head. “Maybe,” he said, without his usual flippancy. “I can’t hear anything, so even if they did it hasn’t caused any alarm. We aren’t the only ones likely to experiment around here. You get used to odd things going bang in the middle of the night.”
A sense of accomplishment rose in Sal and drowned out the fear that they might get into trouble, or that he had pushed himself too hard. They had done what they set out to do. They had brought the light-sink to life. That was something to be proud of, he told himself, even if it hadn’t given him exactly what he had expected.
“We did it,” he said.
“We did, indeed,” said Skender, staring at him.
“I wonder what else we can do? With your knowledge, Shilly’s understanding, my—”
“We can sleep,” said Shilly. She seemed very tall as she stood over them, her shadow cast onto the ceiling by the gentle light of the glow stone below her. Her expression was unreadable. “It’s late and I’m tired. It’s all very well for you, Skender. Yougot years on us. And you, Sal: you come with talent to spare. But me, the only advantage I’ve got is the ability to work hard, and I’ll bet we won’t be allowed to work as a team when it comes to exams. So if you don’t mind…”
She turned away to tug back the covers of her bed, and Skender pulled a mock-terrified face.
“Okay, Shilly,” he said. “I understand.” He climbed to his feet. “Goodnight, squeaker. See you in the morning.”
“‘Ni—oh, hell. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight to you too, Shilly.”
“Take this with you.” She handed him the glow stone, and he took it out into the hallway with surprising obedience.
They got ready for bed by starlight. Shilly said nothing, and seemed to fall asleep straight away. Sal lay awake, looking out at the stars. The feeling of the globe coming to life stayed with him, tingling in his bones. He felt as though he had exercised vigorously: completely exhausted yet strangely invigorated at the same time. He wondered how Shilly could sleep if she felt anything remotely the same. She was wrong about herself, he knew that much. She could do more than just work hard. She understood Blind better than either of them. She instantly grasped things that even Skender failed to understand. He suspected that her comprehension of the deeper workings of the Change was greater than his would ever be. The Mage Erentaite had said that he and Shilly complemented each other almost perfectly, and that simply wouldn’t be true if she had nothing to offer.
His invisible muscles twitched, like wings waiting to unfurl and propel him upward, into a waiting sky.
When he finally fell asleep, it was to the sound of soft crying from the bed next to his, but he was too deep in his own imagination to hear.
Chapter 11
Dead Wood
Life in the terraced cliff-city had changed little for generations, judging by the paths worn in stone steps. The cycle of cold nights and burning days seemed unchanging, too, and Shilly imagined that students had been going through the same motions as she for hundreds of years, constantly putting on and taking off layers of clothes, depending on the time of day. The extremes of temperature were taking their toll on the old stone walls, however. She could see where brickwork had been repaired or the cliff itself had collapsed. One whole wing of the city had been swept clean away in an avalanche two hundred years earlier, Raf told her, and she believed him. But for the students whose duty it was to maintain the ancient structure, it might have fallen completely away long ago.
She was beginning to feel that way herself, after just one week. Stretched in one direction, pressured in another—her first few days in the Keep had almost been enough to make her snap, after everything that had brought her there. The security she had hoped for was painfully absent, leaving her feeling over-extended, dangerously off-balance.
She refused to let it get to her. Instead of snapping, she devoted herself to her studies with a determination so great that she almost managed to convince herself that she was enjoying them. And in truth the lessons on theory were fascinating. They took everything she had learned from Lodo and raised it to new levels. Almost immediately she began to understand just how much more there was to learn. She was a child who had been locked in a cupboard all her life, able to see the outside only through a keyhole. A key had been inserted into that lock, blocking her sight for a moment; then the key had turned, the door had opened, and now she had the entire world before her, vast and mysterious.
The trouble was, she couldn’t explore it on her own. Because she had no innate talent, she was forced to rely on others just as she relied on the crutches to walk. Nothing brought that fact home harder than the practical lessons, where they learned the basics of lifting, forming, binding, shaping. While the others did what came naturally, she could only watch and imagine what it was like. If she did have the opportunity to try for herself, using the talent of one of the other students, she was conscious of the fact that she was holding someone else back by doing so. What she took, they missed. And she had already taken enough from Sal. After the night experimenting with the light-sink, guilt nagged at her every time he offered.
The suspicion that, given talent or an unlimited source, she could be better than
any of them, made her fate harder to accept. Her skill at drawing, which Lodo had fostered and Wyath had encouraged, served her in very good stead, assisting her when it came to visualising and experimenting with known patterns. Raf noticed her ability almost immediately, and even Mage Van Haasteren commented on it. If just half his students had half her intelligence, he said privately after one lesson, the Keep would have the highest graduation rate of any school in the Interior. She became more angry about it the more she thought about it. The talented ones like Sal had it so easy. They didn’t appreciate how lucky they were.
Worst of all was the fact that they had an expression for people like her. She overheard it a couple of times, when they thought she wasn’t listening. They called people without the Change dead wood. They spoke about dead wood in derogatory tones and laughed at the things dead wood couldn’t do. Shilly was dead wood. She knew it, and they certainly knew it, and it didn’t seem to matter that she was in the Keep, anyway, determined to prove them all wrong. The reminders of what she was were constant.
She was in the Keep, yes. There were mountains visible from her window and there was snow on them. She was being taught the Change; she had made it to the end of her journey. But it wasn’t anything like she had expected. She was being taught the things she longed to learn, but everything else was wrong. The Mage Van Haasteren was hardly to be seen around the Keep. Senior students took all their lessons, and they thought she was dead wood. They knew as little about Lodo’s past as she did.
Only the Mage Erentaite’s words, whispered to her at the end of her healing session with the old woman, kept her going.
“Endure.” The old woman’s depthless sight had filled the world. “Be the stone wall that stands against the storm. Be strong and resilient. You will find your place.”
She tried to be the wall the elderly mage wanted her to be, to remember that she was supposedly part of a one-of-a-kind pairing. It was hard when the storm came from inside her—when the feelings that threatened to snap her in two wouldn’t let her rest, even at night. Resenting Sal for having the Change solved nothing, she told herself, and wanting to hurt him solved even less. It shouldn’t matter that he was fitting so effortlessly into the place she so desperately wanted to be hers, or that he had lied to her about Behenna and kept the light-sink to himself. That was old news. She shouldn’t let it get to her.
But it did. It left her feeling isolated from him, and ignored by him, her supposed partner in whatever it was that made everyone think that she and Sal were special. And she was frightened by the ease with which she could hurt him, if she wanted to. It was clear he hadn’t noticed what she had done during the light-sink experiment—or almost done, she told herself. It hadn’t even felt like her doing it, more as if she had been outside her body watching someone else. Sal probably thought it was nothing more than the effort of making the globe shine, and it would be better if he continued to think that, she decided. She hadn’t quite snapped, after all. It would never happen again. No one needed to know.
The night before the Mage Erentaite was due to return, she was sitting in her usual spot on the balcony with a blanket draped over her shoulders, reading as the sun set. There were books on hundreds of subjects in the Keep’s library. As well as learning about the Change, she was attempting to fill in some of the blanks she had uncovered on arriving in Ulum. She read about vast paper mills, tanneries and iron refineries; a complicated bureaucracy consisting of clerks trained to expedite the many tasks required to keep the giant cities working; an equally complicated system of checks and balances designed to ensure the cities traded as equals, with communication between them encouraged by messengers and Stone Mages. The decisions of the Synod filtered down through Interior society in much the same way those of the Sky Wardens’ Conclave spread from the Haunted City. When the Synod gathered at the Nine Stars every month, it did so both to provide broad guidelines and to judge specific cases in which an injustice might have occurred.
The Nine Stars hadn’t appeared on the maps Sal’s father had kept in the buggy. When she finally found out where it was, she hadn’t believed it at first. The northern edge of most of the maps of the Interior ended at the Long Sleep Plains from where, Brokate had explained, much of the country’s grain and stock came. Beyond that, she learned, lay an unnamed desert. In the very heart of that desert was the Nine Stars. What sort of place it was, the map didn’t reveal, but the fact that the nearest town was easily five hundred kilometres away was remarkable enough. Only one road led from Ulum to the place where every major decision affecting the country was made.
It was a strange arrangement, Shilly thought, but no less strange than the many other things she had to assimilate before she would ever feel comfortable here. She was still having trouble with the food. They put spices in everything.
Sal was out cleaning with Bethe when Skender turned up early for his evening tutoring session. A psst from the empty void behind her made her jump.
She turned. “Don’t do that!” The boy had scaled the cliff face to reach them, and become stuck again.
“Give me a hand,” he said, reaching up for her. “I’m not sure I’m ever going to crack this. Maybe that’s why Dad put you here.”
She begrudgingly helped him over the edge and waited while he dusted himself off. “You’re looking for Sal, I presume.”
He looked once around the room, saw that Sal was absent, then flopped down on a bed.
“Mind if I wait?” he asked.
“What if I do? You’re here now.” She sat down in her chair and put the blanket back over her shoulder. Her knee ached in the cold evening air, but the rest of her enjoyed the rising chill.
Skender rolled restlessly onto his side. She thought for a moment about asking Skender why his father hadn’t liked Lodo. Old family gossip would probably fascinate him as much as the everyday type, she was sure. But he beat her to it.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“If you have to.”
“Why don’t you like me?”
The similarity to her own question stopped her in her tracks, for a moment, and she had to think carefully about what to say. It’s not you, perhaps; it’s what you have. It’s what you stand for, which I can never be part of. It’s for being everything that I want to be, and not realising how damned lucky you are…
“I’m tired,” she eventually said. “Let’s not get into this.”
“No, Shilly. I want to know.” His eyes glinted. “I know I’m just a kid, and I’m enough like you to be annoying, but there’s more to it than just getting on your nerves. What have I done or said to put you off?”
As much as she hated the implication that they were in any way similar, she admired his directness. She doubted she could have been so forthright.
“I’m just jealous,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Really?”
“Honest.”
He nodded. “I get that, you know. People think: Oh, he’s the son of the great Mage Van Haasteren; he must have it easy. Look at how much further ahead he is than us. Look at all the exciting things he gets to do that we haven’t learned yet. It must be easy when the person doing the grading is your father.” He shook his head. “Is that what you’re thinking?”
“No,” she said, and meant it. “If anything, I imagine it’s harder having your father here, with all that history behind you. All those expectations.”
“Exactly.” He looked somewhat relieved. “I can’t help being good at learning things, and neither could Dad. It’s a family trait, you see. We have the Change, yes, but not buckets of it. If we did, we’d be out in the real world, doing real things with the other Stone Mages. All we’re good for is to ask how things should be done.” He hesitated for a second, then went on. “Do you see what I’m saying? Knowing things is different to doing things. That’s the main reason why I’ve never mucked around with light-sinks before. Even if I could get my head around the pattern like you did, I don’t have the knack
to make it work. I could only do it with Sal or someone like him behind me.”
“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?”
She didn’t intend the question to come out with so much emotion behind it, but he winced. “No.”
“What, then?”
“Maybe I was just trying to make conversation.” He sat up straighter, abandoning all pretence of being comfortable. “Look, do you want to know my deep, dark secret—the reason why I find it so easy to learn things?”
“Not really.”
“I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s all to do with memory. I don’t forget anything. That’s what I inherited from my father, and he from his. That’s what makes my family such good teachers. Show us a textbook once and we have it for life, in our heads. Demonstrate a pattern, and we can reproduce it in an instant, any time. Even if we don’t understand it, we can trot it out on demand. And we never forget our students’ names. Perfect, eh?”
It was her turn to feel besieged by the outpouring of emotion. “What’s all this got to do with me?”
“Jealousy, of course,” he said. “I’m going to be a teacher one day, like my father, since I’m no good for anything else. I’m trapped here forever, condemned to reciting things I don’t really comprehend. But you—you’ve been to places I’ve never heard of. You’ve seen the sea; you’ve seen the Divide; you’ve seen the Broken Lands; you’ve seen the city in the salt lake, one of the three great cities mentioned in the Book of Towers! You’ve seen more in a month than I ever dreamed of seeing in a lifetime. If I could trade places with you, I’d do it right now. I just wanted you to know that.”
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