The Sky Warden and the Sun

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by Sean Williams


  “Shilly, are you okay?” the journeyman asked, wiping her wet hair out of her face. “We didn’t see you, honestly. Van Haasteren almost knocked you right off your feet!”

  Of course it would be him, Shilly thought through the pain and embarrassment. “W-what’s happening?” she gasped, struggling to sit up against the hands holding her down. “Is it Sal? Has he gone?”

  “Well, he’s not here,” said the Sky Warden with a snarl, climbing into the wagon with Skender right behind him. The mage’s son looked like a drowned rat.

  “He’s done a runner!” the boy said, his eyes bright with excitement. “He must have summoned the storm to cover his tracks. I should have known he wasn’t going to take this lying down.”

  “You know something about this?” Behenna asked him, his expression one of too-intense calm. Outside, the storm raged like a living thing. The wagon shuddered from the force of it. It was inconceivable that Sal could have brought such a force into the world. “Did he tell you where he might go?”

  “No, but anywhere apart from here would suit him, I imagine.” The boy cocked his ear at the ceiling. “Listen. I think the rain’s easing. Sal told me he had some sort of fixative—a blood and pearl mix he brought with him from the Strand. My guess is hesomehow rigged the buggy as the focus of the storm. It’s following him wherever he goes, and will keep on doing so until it blows out. Unless he sets it free, of course, in which case it’ll just go wherever it wills. There’s no way of knowing what he’s doing. Isn’t this brilliant, Shilly?”

  “Be quiet,” said the warden, his voice low and dangerous, “unless you have something useful to say.”

  Skender glared at the Sky Warden. “I’m a damned sight more useful than you are, here. You’d better start being nice to us, if you want us to help you find him.”

  “He does not want to be found by you,” said the man’kin, its voice cutting through the rain and wind.

  Shilly glanced at the stone bust, and caught Skender doing the same. Tait and Behenna, however, didn’t react.

  “I’m sorry,” said the warden, annoyance giving away to weariness and frustration, or at least a good imitation thereof. “I don’t mean to be rude. Will you look for me? I’m worried about him, you see. The storm—”

  “No need to go on,” said Skender, frowning. Shilly could almost hear his thoughts racing, even if she couldn’t understand them. “You want us to look? That’s fine. We want to find him too. He has to be at the Nine Stars tomorrow whether he wants to be there or not. Dad’s looking for him right now.”

  “He does not want to be found by you,” the man’kin repeated firmly. “That is not his intention.”

  Not his intention, Shilly echoed to herself, frowning. Of course he didn’t intend to be found, she thought. No one who ran away wanted to be caught. Why did the man’kin think that worth saying?

  Skender opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked at Shilly with intense curiosity. Something was going on that she didn’t quite understand.

  Skender tried again. “It’ll be tricky, though,” he said. “The storm is huge, and all the energy it’s kicked up will hide him pretty effectively. I reckon we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, with so few of us looking.”

  “He can’t get away,” Behenna said. “He must be located.”

  “We can only do as much as we can do,” said the boy, unfazed by the determination in the warden’s gaze. “You can’t ask for more than that.”

  Skender glanced at the man’kin and gave a very slight nod. It didn’t repeat its assertion, although Shilly half-expected it to. Skender had said nothing different, so why didn’t the man’kin protest yet again?

  Then it hit her. Mawson hadn’t said that Sal didn’t want to be found. It had said: He does not want to be found by you.

  Shilly leaned back into her seat as Skender slipped out of the wagon, presumably to talk to his father. Behenna would think he was going to pass on the word, to look for Sal, but she knew better. He would actually be telling them not to try too hard.

  Tait put a hand on her shoulder as though to comfort her. The truth was that she no longer felt the pain. All she could think of was Sal driving off in the centre of a storm with all the minds of the Stone Mages looking for him, hoping that someone would realise what he was hoping to do in time.

  And she was left behind. Was this to be her family, then—Behenna and Tait and Mawson and Radi Mierlo? If she spoke up, it certainly would be, even if they brought Sal back. She was far from certain that that was what she wanted. But was staying silent the same thing as supporting Sal’s actions? Did being indecisive mean that she had to let someone else make her decisions for her?

  Mawson watched her closely as she warred within herself over whether to say anything or not. How had the man’kin known? Had it just guessed from what people said around him? Everyday wisdom told her that what Sal was hoping for simply wasn’t possible, but Lodo’s own history had shown her that it was very possible indeed, and had given her some idea of what the consequences might be. The man’kin must have been aware of that too—and, like her, knew that it would probably work. Human nature told her that much.

  She felt a small stab of pity, deep inside her—but ultimately she said nothing. She wasn’t the only one who knew the risks.

  The rain had indeed eased slightly, but it kept coming down heavily as, across the wagon from her, the Sky Warden Shom Behenna closed his eyes in concentration.

  Chapter 16

  Dangerous Seduction

  Like everyone on the great desert in the north of the Interior, Sal knew of only two directions to run: west and slightly south would take him back to Ulum, while east and north led to the end of the road, where the Nine Stars and the Synod of Stone Mages awaited him. Beyond, there was only desert. As far as he knew, there was no other alternative, and the maps in the buggy’s toolbox told the same story.

  So it came as a surprise to him, an hour after leaving the camp, to encounter a crossroad.

  He stopped the buggy and got out, braving the fury of the storm to take a closer look. The wind was deafening and threatened to knock him off balance. In his hour’s travel, the ground beneath him had become sandier and less stony. It was hard to tell through all the rain, but the landscape was definitely beginning to undulate around him, as though the road was cutting through dunes rather than skimming across an endless plain. Both road surfaces were made from cracked, black bitumen across which the water ran like a multitude of snakes.

  There were no markers to tell him where the new road led. He didn’t know what might lie to the northwest of that point, since all the maps he had seen ended just north of the Nine Stars. Maybe it led to the jungles inhabited by the yellow-skinned people that Lebesh the cab driver had told him and Shilly about. He felt safe assuming that the road to the east ultimately ended up at the Divide, most probably at Tintenbar, the second of the two crossings that joined the Interior and the Strand. If he was trying to escape that way, a right turn would have been advisable.

  He wasn’t, but the thought of turning worried at him as he walked back to the buggy and kept driving northeast, toward the Nine Stars. Running to his fate rather than from it might confuse his pursuers for a while—it might even give him a slight margin of control that he had lacked thus far—but he was still running to it. The closer he came to his destination, the more ominously he felt the weight of his possible future pressing down on him.

  Back to the Strand. Back to his great-aunt and the Alcaide. Back to the man who claimed him as a son: Highson Sparre, his mother’s jilted husband. Back to face the consequences of his parents’ defiant love.

  He didn’t want to go back. That much was certain. But he didn’t want to run any more, either. Although going through life like a stone skimming over water had its appeal, he knew now that he needed to learn how to control the Change if he was ever going to live with it. The only way he could learn was to settle down somewhere, and he would never be able to do that with his relative
s baying at his heels. He had to find an alternative. There simply had to be another way—and if hurrying to apparent doom was the means to make it happen, he thought, so be it.

  Come on, Behenna. You can’t know where I’m going yet. Don’t let me get away that easily!

  He gunned the buggy on through the rain. The storm was drifting south now that he had set it free. For a while he had travelled at its heart, marvelling at the raw power he had coaxed out of the desert atmosphere. It had been like driving in the centre of a hurricane, surrounded by lightning and a continuous wall of thunder. More than just water was carried by the wind: uprooted plants whipped out of the darkness then were snatched away again. He stung in a dozen places where more substantial objects had struck him. A couple of times the wind had been so severe that it threatened to make even driving impossible, snatching at the buggy’s frame and rocking it violently, lifting one or more wheels from the ground. Had Sal himself not been firmly strapped in, just as the rear tray was firmly secured under the tarp, he could well have been snatched right out of the seat and tossed into the sky.

  He hoped the caravan was enduring the downpour well enough. He didn’t want to hurt Zevan or the riders—or Shilly.

  But he couldn’t make the storm selective; he could only summon it and look after himself. That alone was inconceivable enough. The thought I did this? ran through his mind like a mantra. It was inconceivable that he had been responsible for it. I’m just a kid. What’s the weather doing listening to me?

  But it wasn’t the weather. It was the Change, ultimately, doing as he willed it. He had set it free for a moment, loosing the pent-up potential buried in the desert. The realisation of what lay at his fingertips sobered any brief fantasies he’d entertained in Fundelry of using the Change for fun. The wild talent was dangerous, Van Haasteren had said. Now he could really see why.

  Although his destination lay northeast, he kept his thoughts firmly on southeast, as though he had in fact taken the right-hand turn. He’d felt the minds of the Stone Mages pass over him earlier, but they hadn’t returned. They weren’t the ones he wanted to succeed. If they found him first, it would all have been for nothing.

  Come on, Sky Warden. Show me what you’re made of!

  The road was slippery, but thankfully almost perfectly straight. Had there been any other traffic, he doubted he would see it in time to stop. Slowly the rain eased. He began to feel surer of his command of the wheel. Within an hour the rain had almost completely abated. The nearly full moon peered through the northern fringes of the storm. Ragged clouds chased each other south, lagging behind the main body yet seeming eager to catch up. That was where all the action was. That was where, he presumed, most attention would be. Certainly, if he had been trying to escape, that would have been the place to do it, in the confusing mass of water and air, almost impenetrable to the Stone Mages, going anywhere but to the Nine Stars.

  He was getting tired. The road was treacherous even without rain to make visibility poor. Huge sheets of water barely distinguishable from the asphalt occasionally lay across his path. His hands and arms grew tired from constantly working to hold his course. The Cellaton Mandala slipped more and more frequently from his mind as his concentration flagged. He began to wonder if he hadn’t miscalculated, just as the tactics behind games like Blind and Advance sometimes eluded him.

  I haven’t got all night, you know!

  When he finally felt it, he jerked upright in the seat as though starting awake from a light sleep. He looked around automatically, gathering his senses. The night was crisp and cool in the wake of the storm. There was only him and the stars and the road rushing by and—

  tap

  —at the back of his mind, like a guilty memory he couldn’t shake loose.

  Was it him? Sal concentrated on the faint sensation, wary of responding but not wanting to lose it. He didn’t want to be too hard to find. His foot eased off on the accelerator and the buggy slowed to a halt in the middle of the road.

  tap

  It wasn’t Van Haasteren or Skender. He could tell that much. It wasn’t the other Stone Mages, either. Their minds had a different flavour. There was no one else it could be.

  tap-tap

  Yes. Shom Behenna had given in to temptation. He had dipped into the source of the Stone Mage’s power and used it for his own. He had broken the golden rule. Once you cross the line, the Mage Van Haasteren had said, there’s no returning. You’re trapped in between, belonging to neither one nor the other. He had betrayed himself exactly as Sal had hoped he would.

  Sal quashed a feeling of triumph. He had at best only won a small battle, not the war. He didn’t know how far Behenna had gone to find him, and whether that amount was enough to mark him forever.

  tap-tap

  In order to give the warden a little encouragement, Sal eased back on the Cellaton Mandala so there could be no doubt at Behenna’s end that Sal knew he had been found.

  The words came immediately, travelling from mind to mind in the same way Behenna had spoken to Sal by the bridge over the ravine.

  “Not so clever this time, Sal.” The warden was unable to hide the self-satisfaction in his thoughts. “You didn’t really think you could escape from me, did you?”

  Sal concentrated on replying. He had never before attempted such a communication without physically touching the other person. All he could do was imagine the trail of Behenna’s words to their source, using the visualisation technique Shilly had taught him in Fundelry, and hope that his reply would follow.

  “No. I didn’t think that.”

  It worked. The warden heard and replied instantly. “Then what? You thought you could talk to them first, get them to change their minds? That’s not going to work, either. They don’t meet until the night after this one. Most of them won’t even be there until tomorrow, and we’ll have caught up by then. Youwasting your time.”

  “So are you,” Sal shot back.

  Behenna chuckled. “I admire your spirit; I really do. But you’re coming back with me whether you want to or not—even if I have to drag you back by the hair, every step of the way. You really don’t have any other options open to you.”

  The viciousness of the image surprised him. “Why not?” he asked, partly to give himself time to track the warden’s exact location, but also to learn the answer. Why did someone follow a single boy for thousands of kilometres across little more than desert and wasteland? “Why am I so important to you, Warden Behenna?”

  “Not you, Sal, but what you represent, what you can help me obtain. Bringing you back will make me, Sal. At the very least, it’ll guarantee that I’ll never have to do anything like this again—and that’s the point. Being a Selector is a minor honour, a desk job for bureaucrats and failures. I’m neither. I can do better. Fundelry was just one step up the ladder. What they give me when I come back with you will be more to my tastes.”

  “You’re risking everything just to get a promotion?”

  “I won’t fail, Sal. Don’t consider that a possibility. I will bring you back with me, and I will be rewarded. And if you think I don’t deserve it, ask yourself why there’s only me talking to you now. Where are the others, the dozens of other Sky Wardens the Syndic sent out after you? There aren’t any left: that’s the answer. There aren’t any because I’m the best, and I deserve recognition for it. If I’d been around when your parents eloped, they would never have got away with it. And neither will you.

  “You’ve had your time in the sun, Sal. Are you going to stop the buggy and turn around now or do we have to go through this ridiculous charade all night?”

  Sal didn’t answer immediately. Behenna’s arrogance woke an anger in him similar to that which he had felt for his grandmother. Radi Mierlo and the warden were perfectly matched, both more than happy to sacrifice someone else’s chance at happiness in order to further their own ends. Sal’s needs and feelings were irrelevant, except when they got in the way of their plans.

  But it was g
ood to know that, he told himself—to be certain of it. If they didn’t care what happened to him, why should he care about them in return?

  He had followed the thread of the man’s voice back to its source. Behenna was moving north and west, presumably following the road toward the Nine Stars with the rest of the caravan. Sal knew the crossroad wouldn’t fool him. He wouldn’t let go, because he was right. Sal was trapped.

  The warden’s mind was hard to read clearly, unlike the storm, but it was clear enough. Sal had wondered once why Sky Wardens hadn’t descended on him in Yor when he had accidentally given away his position. He knew now that Behenna had kept the slip to himself in order to maximise his gain. The Sky Warden’s ambition, determination and pride shone like the sun through clouds of uncertainty and desperation. It was his desperation that Sal hoped to exploit. How far, he wondered, could he push it?

  “You think you’re going to be a hero,” he said.

  “For doing my job. That’s all.”

  “You’re very confident of it. Are you sure they’ll even want you back, after this?”

  “Words are nothing, Sal, and neither is looking for someone. Minor charms requiring the bare minimum of potential. No one will ever know about them.”

  “No?” Sal closed his eyes and concentrated.

  Using every iota of his raw, wild talent, he shouted down the thread connecting his mind and the warden’s, putting all his anger and resentment into one wordless, primal roar.

  The warden responded as he had hoped, by putting up barriers to resist the mental flood. But he did more than that: he fought back. Sal felt Behenna’s resolve strengthen once the surprise ebbed. He was going to teach Sal a lesson. The defensive wall tightened, gathered itself around the warden’s mind, formed a sharp point and lunged.

  Sal felt the power of it, the rage that fuelled it, and didn’t know how to resist it. It knocked his attack aside as easily as a knife through rain. He had just enough time to be afraid, to think that maybe he should have thought more carefully about attacking a fully-fledged Sky Warden, to steel himself however ineffectually for the impact—

 

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