Sal nodded. Instead of looking annoyed at having to make the trip, he seemed intensely relieved that the moment of decision was over. He was committed, now, to whatever it was he had in mind to do.
“That concludes the proceedings for today,” said the Mage Erentaite, sitting down. “This matter will conclude only when the Judges’ decision is made. Until then, the law of the Interior will regard it as being open. No other negotiations will be honoured. I’ll see you all again in five days.”
She lowered her blind gaze to the table before her, and the hooded guides motioned that they should follow them out of the room. Behenna bowed and did as he was told. The elderly mage didn’t acknowledge the gesture. Sal followed, propelled by his grandmother.
Shilly didn’t move. Is that it? She wanted to shout. We came all the way across this stinking town just for this?
The Mage Van Haasteren came up behind Shilly and put his hand firmly on her shoulder, as though to reassure her that everything would be all right.
She was surprised by the gesture, but not half as surprised as she was when the voice of Mage Erentaite spoke directly into her head.
“You are angry,” said the elderly mage, her mental voice soft but insistent. “I don’t blame you.”
Shilly stifled a gasp, realising that Van Haasteren was allowing the frail-looking woman’s words to flow through him to her. The corners of her eyes twinkled with the Change; it felt like tears.
“I’m sick of all this travelling,” she said, assuming she could reply the same way. “We only just got here. Why do we have to go all this way so soon? Why can’t the Judges decide here? Why do we have to go anywhere at all?”
“That’s not the way it’s done. Not in the Interior, or in the Strand. Behenna has forced our hand. If it was up to me, I would let you rest.” The mage’s head tilted forward, as though she was about to fall asleep. “Since what happens to you is not up to me, all I can do is say that I’m sorry. One day, perhaps, you will be glad that this matter was resolved this way, rather than another.”
“Big deal.” Shilly didn’t know if Van Haasteren could hear or not. She hoped he could. Her sense of betrayal was very great—greater than it had been when she had found out about Sal’s lies. “I don’t care about one day. I care about now. I came to you for help, and some help you’ve been. All you care about is Sal.”
“That’s not true. I would do more if I could. Believe me.” The elderly woman’s voice radiated warmth and sincerity, and quite against her will, Shilly felt it melt some of her anger and frustration. “Endure, Shilly. Don’t forget that I’ll be there at the Nine Stars, watching over you both.”
That thought reassured her, even though she couldn’t have said why. “Are you coming with us?”
“No. I have my own means of getting there.” Van Haasteren’s grip tightened on her shoulder, and Shilly let herself be propelled toward the door. The old woman didn’t move. “Travel well. And don’t be afraid to follow your heart. It’s a journey we all must take, if only once in our lives.”
On that note, the link between them was severed, and Shilly pulled herself out of Mage Van Haasteren’s grasp. She didn’t know what the elderly mage had meant by her closing comments, but she could feel the weariness in them, the debilitating fatigue of great age. Her anger ebbed even further.
“She’s so old,” she said to the mage beside her, “and it’s such a long trip. Will she make it?”
The Mage Van Haasteren seemed much taller in the smoky air of the Grand Minster, and his face was even more remote than usual. “She will do whatever she can,” he said, “but I share your concern. To lose her would be a terrible blow to us all.”
Shilly looked up at him, annoyed that he had taken her concern a completely different way than she had intended it. She didn’t care about him and the Stone Mages. All she was worried about was that a frail, well-meaning old woman wouldn’t die over something so stupid as Behenna’s petition to send her back to the Strand.
By the time they reached the bus, her old melancholy returned. The Mage Van Haasteren didn’t care what she needed, and neither did Sal. They were just looking after themselves, like Radi Mierlo. None of them really cared what happened to her. She was just dead wood.
So when Tait waited until everyone else had boarded to take her crutches and help her up the steps, one hand under her arm and another at her back, she couldn’t help the warm feeling in her stomach that carried her through the rest of the journey back to Gourlay house, where they immediately began to prepare for the much larger journey ahead. Familiar, good-looking Tait was nothing but friendly to her when everyone else made her feel like a burden. He didn’t make demands of her, or threaten her with talent. He was pleasantly ordinary—the opposite of Sal in almost every way.
Perhaps, she surprised herself by deciding, she should look forward at least in part to going to the Nine Stars—and be glad that Vita, the girl in Gourlay House who had thought Tait handsome, wouldn’t be coming with them.
Chapter 14
The Desert Craft
The Mierlos are your blood, the sign read, and we are yours. Sal stared at the words. They were carved in letters taller than a person out of the rock wall in front of him. The line to his left said: No person can change that. The letters continued all around him.
Sal hunted for a way over the wall, but it was too high. There was no break anywhere along its length. He felt despair, then. They had everything covered. There was no way out.
It is written in the stone that is the symbol of our Clan.
Then he remembered the Change. Yes: he could blast his way through the wall! That was the simplest way to escape. When the wall came down, he would be free again.
So he concentrated, gathering all his potential into a ball of light that he raised in one hand and held behind his head, poised and ready to fly.
The Earth itself is witness to the bond between us.
He struck at the word bond. The wall exploded into dozens of large fragments. The force of the blast knocked him flat. With a noise like an avalanche, rubble poured down, burying him.
It had worked too well, he thought as everything went dark. Or else it hadn’t worked at all…
He woke to the gentle chugging of an engine and the insistent rock-and-bounce of travel across rough terrain. For a moment he was confused, and thought he was lying in the back of the buggy with his father at the wheel, driving through the borderlands to the next town on the map. The air was warm; his nostrils were full of burnt, desert air.
But he could hear camels, too, and there were spices as well as sand on the wind. He was wearing robes rather than his usual cotton pants and top. His head rested against wood instead of metal, and there was an ache in his chest. He had lost something important. He had been dreaming about it. Or had he? That really was a buggy he could hear grumbling in the near distance…
I won’t think about that, he told himself. I won’t. There’s no point.
He sat up with a groan and rubbed his head. His bed was on the back of a wagon comprising part of the Black Jade Caravan, led by a bald, wiry man with triangular tattoos on his lips, like teeth, who Radi Mierlo had contracted to get them all to the Nine Stars. His name was Zevan—just Zevan—and he usually spoke in a mixture of normal speech and trader tongues in bursts too fast to follow. He and his riders kept to themselves, concentrating on covering the vast distance to the Nine Stars with as little disturbance to their passengers as possible. For the most part, Sal and the rest might as well have not been there. They were just cargo.
That was fine with Sal. It gave him time to think. He reached for a water bottle and took a deep drink. Beside him, snoring gently, Skender lay in a tightly wound knot. Through the fabric wagon top, the sun was riding up the sky toward noon on the third day of their journey. The landscape around them was completely flat, all the way to the horizon on every side, and consisted of little more than rocks and red-brown dirt. The road the caravan was following cut across
the stony desert in a perfectly straight line, heading northeast. They were travelling at a brisk, running pace, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake that took hours to settle.
It was hard to believe that just three days ago they had farewelled the other students of the Keep and started their long journey. It was even harder to believe that in just over another three he might be heading back to the Strand.
Not if I can help it, he thought.
He crawled forward through the wagon, to the front. There he found the Mage Van Haasteren meditating behind an open leather-bound book full of repeating geometric designs—aids for visualisation, he guessed, or new charms the mage was catching up on. The big man would have filled the small space even without the boxes of supplies and luggage stacked around him, and Sal felt nervous about disturbing him. Pushing through the forward flap, he found himself next to the driver, exposed to the sun. It was no cooler there, but at least the air was fresh.
Grabbing a hat from under the seat, he made himself as unobtrusively comfortable as possible. The sun was bright and hot, and had burned the drivers’ normally pale skins to brown. The drivers of Zevan’s caravan used a secret mixture of charms and tattoos to protect themselves from the ravages of the desert. Unprotected skin blistered within hours, and Sal wasn’t about to test the efficacy of his mother’s ward on sunburn.
Like the caravan leader, the driver of their wagon had made no moves to befriend his passengers, so Sal felt no need to try in return. He was content to sit in silence as the desert plain rolled slowly by. The sky was a powerful white-blue, unbroken anywhere by cloud.
The road didn’t deviate even slightly, ahead or behind. As far as he knew, it pointed as straight as an arrow at the Nine Stars. Putting all thoughts of his destination out of his mind, he concentrated on the Cellaton Mandala, as Lodo had taught him to do, and imagined himself to be invisible. An advanced student learns how to visualise them as spheres, Lodo had said, completely enclosing themselves. Sal tried to do just that.
Time passed in an unmarked blur. The wagon rocked beneath him; the buggy chugged softly behind them. Every now and again, a camel would call out to its fellows, but apart from that the day was still and silent, as though the sun had evaporated all the life from the world. There were no engines, no caravan, no sense of Shilly aching in his chest, no…
“Kalish,” said the driver suddenly, pointing.
Sal blinked out of his trance. “Favi Kalish?” he asked, thinking of the caravan leader Lutz had colluded with at the Divide. “Here?”
“No.” The driver, a dirty, cotton-swaddled man with two missing teeth at the front of his mouth pointed again. “Kalish.”
Sal followed the man’s finger to where a bird wheeled in the porcelain sky, so far away it was barely a dot. In whatever dialect the driver was speaking, “kalish” obviously meant “bird.” It was the only one he recalled seeing since entering the stony plains.
“I wonder what it’s eating,” Sal said. His voice had settled down during the days since Ulum. He liked the sound of it but was still surprised at the stranger’s voice coming out of his own mouth.
“Ouce.” The driver, grinning, made a scampering gesture with one hand: rodents or possibly lizards. Sal repeated the word, although it was an odd time to give him a language lesson.
The driver’s face sobered. “Sun,” he said, pointing this time directly above them. “Takes.” Then he pointed at Sal.
“The sun takes me?” Sal guessed. “Takes me where?”
The driver made a fist out of his hand, then pulled it in close to his chest.
“Oh, takes. It takes from me.” That earned him a pat and a wink. “Or of me.”
The driver returned his attention to the road, satisfied that he had delivered his message. Sal wondered how it had been intended. As a warning, perhaps—but if so, what was he supposed to do about it? Avoid the sun for fear of it stealing his talent away? He couldn’t stay under cover all day. Maybe it was just at noon he had to be careful, or of meditating too long. It seemed crazy to him, either way.
But he had lost track of himself for a while, there. He was surprised to see just how much of the day had passed. It was now late afternoon, and his stomach rumbled to tell him that he’d missed lunchtime. Once the caravan was underway in the morning, it didn’t stop until evening, but there were supplies to get them through the day in the back. He would get them later.
Chastened, he watched the bird spiralling gracefully through the air as they slowly drew abreast of it, then past it. He was wondering how it would find a place to nest—let alone a mate—when Skender stuck his head through the wagon flap.
“Here you are,” said the boy, squinting blearily at the day. “Are we there yet?”
Sal didn’t take the question seriously. They were making good time, as far as he could tell, having left the relatively fertile soils of the Long Sleep Plains behind them on the second day. They had almost reached the halfway point. There, at a small town called Three Wells, they would stop briefly to water the camels and re-supply, then head on into the wilderness.
And there, he reminded himself, he would have to put his plan into effect. Unless he changed his mind or thought of another solution…
“Dreamt I was a fish and a shark ate me,” the boy went on, either not noticing or not caring that Sal was more interested in thinking than talking. “Except, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what a shark actually looks like. Do they have arms?”
“I don’t think so.” Sal knew only a little more than Skender about the sea and the creatures that lived in it.
“Maybe it wasn’t a shark, then. Anyway, whatever it was, it ate me, gulped me down whole, and I found a golem living in its stomach. It was annoyed to see me. ‘I don’t eat meat,’ it said. It pulled a lever and the shark vomited me up. Then I was standing on a ledge in a city made entirely of brass, and I was polishing a wall with a cloth. Dad stuck his head out of a window and said—”
“To keep it down, I imagine,” said the real mage Van Haasteren from inside the tent. “People are trying to concentrate.”
“Only crazy people,” said Skender. “We’re on holidays!”
Some holiday, Sal thought. “The driver isn’t,” he said.
“Oh, sorry.” Abashed, Skender reversed back into the wagon and disappeared. Sal followed.
Inside, it was cramped and hotter than ever. After Sal had eaten, he and Skender played Double Blind while the mage flipped through pages in the book, glancing cursorily at some, pausing for long minutes to stare at others. The time passed more slowly than it had outside, even though Sal had the game to distract him. The rocking of the wagon, the creak of the wheels and the ever-present rumble of the buggy’s engine were the only reference points they had for the outside world.
Eventually a piercing whistle announced that Zevan was calling a halt. Skender broke the circle and rushed forward again to see what was going on. Sal followed at a more sedate pace and emerged to see the caravan looping around a collection of small, stone buildings, huddling for shelter in what looked like a crack in the earth. A long time ago, something had caused the otherwise perfectly flat landscape to buckle, resulting in a split that was tiny in the context of the hundreds of kilometres of emptiness around it but easily large enough to accommodate a small settlement. The disturbance must also have altered the flow of deep groundwater, for Sal could smell moisture in the air as clearly as if it had been smoke. Pockets of green plants—a welcome change after the ever-present browns and reds of the stony plain—took advantage of both the shade and the water and flourished in whatever fashion was available to them.
Clouds of dust wrapped around the caravan as it parked near the settlement. Camels snorted and, one by one, the wagons rattled to a halt. With one last grumble, the buggy also fell quiet. The ambience of the desert collapsed instantly upon them, soaking up the cries of drivers and passengers alike without echoes, brushing away the slight human intrusion with a gust of wind that might
be travelling unhindered from one side of the plain to the other.
Sal hopped down to stretch his legs, and noticed the other passengers doing the same. His grandmother climbed awkwardly from a wagon not far away, helped to the ground by one of her grandchildren, a well-built, white-haired young man called Aron who, thus far, had shown little interest in the family’s new addition from the south. He behaved more like an attendant than a grandson, and she showed no interest in making it otherwise.
Two Stone Mages Sal didn’t know emerged from another wagon. They and a combined staff of five were travelling to the Nine Stars for the Synod and had booked Zevan’s caravan through his grandmother. Sal gathered that the caravan leader made a reasonable living going backward and forward across the desert each month, being one of the few people who could endure the repetition without going slightly crazy.
Or maybe he was already crazy, Sal thought, watching the wiry man ducking and weaving between wagons, barking orders in his guttural mishmash of languages. Quite apart from the alarming, jagged tattoos on his lips, there was a whiteness to his eyes that most people didn’t have.
Sal walked between the wagons, wanting a closer look at Three Wells. Skender came too, kicking up a small cloud of dust under his fast-moving feet.
“Doesn’t it ever rain out here?”
“Rarely,” said his father, moving after them both in a more dignified fashion. His reddish robes blended almost perfectly into the background. “When it does, though, it’s quite spectacular. There is a pent-up energy to this land that, when released, can cause deluges. Afterward, the desert comes alive with flowers that sprout and bloom almost overnight. Everywhere you look, as far as the eye can see, is colour. They last as long as the water, then die, leaving seeds behind for the next storm to bring to life. I know it’s hard to imagine on a day like this, but it does happen.”
Sal kept quiet, wondering if the Stone Mage had seen it himself, or if he’d only read about it. Sal had experienced such monsoonal flourishes in the lesser deserts of the Strand—such as the storm that had swept away the road in the Broken Lands and killed the caravan leader called Diamond Fargher—but he knew nothing about the flowers. Fortunately, Skender was intrigued by the thought of so much rain in so much emptiness. It was a thought Sal wanted to pursue, later that evening.
The Sky Warden and the Sun Page 29