—when it was gone. The attack vanished as abruptly as it had formed. The line between him and the warden had been cut from the other end. Behenna’s mind was absent from his, leaving nothing but a faint aftertaste of annoyance in its wake.
Annoyed at whom? Sal wondered. Sal or himself? There was no way of telling, now that the line was broken.
He waited for a good ten minutes before starting the buggy and driving on. The long-distance conversation had exhausted him, left him feeling hollow and weak. One thing Lodo had taught him all too well was the inherent danger of sending even a part of himself to another, across any sort of distance. All that separated minds of every kind—talented or not—was the Void Beneath. Stretching across that emptiness took effort and attracted risk. He wondered, briefly, if part of him had been lost when Behenna had broken the link between them, but decided that if it had been, it wasn’t much he would miss. The fading echoes of the shout, perhaps; maybe a gasp of surprise. Not even a fully formed word.
He waited. No tap-tap. Behenna knew where Sal was headed, and had decided to leave well enough alone. It was only a matter of time, now, before the caravan caught up. The trap had been sprung, Sal thought, but found himself wondering: on whom?
Dawn brought light to the still damp world, revealing just how much it had changed overnight. Instead of a vast, stony plain, Sal saw nothing but orange sand everywhere. The horizon appeared to be nearer, since the sand lay in dunes, some of them many metres high, but the lack of anything other than sand made the eye slip and skid in a way that was worse than flat infinity. A single rock would be enough, Sal thought, to give him something to look at.
The road was all that existed for him, stretching forward and behind in a perfectly straight line. Water still lay pooled in places. The sun would quickly evaporate what didn’t soak into the sand, but until then the desert was a different place. Everything smelled fresh and sweet, with a strange pungency that Sal couldn’t identify. Long-dormant seeds would already be stirring below the surface, revived by the water and warmed by the sun. Within days, if the Mage Van Haasteren was to be believed, the desert would be transformed again; life would return for a week or more, until the last drop burned away and this cycle ended. It might be months or even years before another storm visited the desert—but the times between rainfalls didn’t matter. The life in the sand followed its own seasons, far removed from the ordinary procession. Winter and summer were irrelevant in a land like this.
He realised with surprise that he could feel the life all around him, itching at the back of his mind. It wasn’t like the Change. It reminded him of the way he could feel Shilly when she was near, but more spread out, infusing the whole land. The storm had stirred the desert from its long slumber and he was there to witness its awakening. As a result he didn’t feel alone as he drove. The sensation that he was, briefly, part of the desert’s cycle of rebirth buoyed him along.
There was no fighting his exhaustion, though. The ancient paved road was treacherous. Apart from the water, the storm had deposited sand in small drifts, requiring him to concentrate in case the wheels slipped. Sal didn’t know how long it would take the caravan to catch up, but camels were better suited to this sort of terrain and they wouldn’t rest with Behenna urging them on. He didn’t want to sleep for fear of waking in captivity again. He wanted to arrive at the Nine Stars free, even if he didn’t leave that way.
The sun rose ahead of him, drying his clothes on him. When he stopped to stretch, his limbs felt as stiff as the fabric. He wondered what Shilly was doing, whether she knew what was going on or had missed the implications of what he had done. He imagined Behenna fuming at the loss of the buggy, being forced to travel with the other passengers. Sal wondered if he had done enough to undermine the warden’s determination. Then it was back onto the road for another long stint driving endlessly onward. It was too late for doubts…
Sal didn’t see the turn until it was almost upon him. The road swung right without warning and his eyes, half-dazzled by the sun, had been lulled into complacency by the unchanging terrain. Spinning the wheel as hard as he could, he wrenched the buggy wildly into the turn, skidding on the sandy road surface and almost losing control. The back of the buggy slid for a split second and he spun the wheel the other way. It skidded again, then righted itself, heading due south along the new section of road.
He braked when he saw what lay ahead through the vast dunes, feeling a shock of recognition go through him—albeit one followed by a contrasting sense of strangeness. A mighty sandstone escarpment lay directly across his path, barely a kilometre away. There was a wide, mouth-like arch at its base that reminded him of the entrance to Ulum, but the scale was completely different. This archway was much bigger—and so was the city that loomed above it.
Where the escarpment was so substantial it looked like a mountain, the city was in a state of greatly advanced decay, almost a ghost of itself. Its towers were jagged and incomplete, many of them just girder frameworks held up by their neighbours, which were themselves crumbling away. No glass glinted in the sun; there was none of the cold beauty of the city in the salt lake. This city had been stripped by time back to its skeleton, and remained trembling on the edge of complete ruin like a vast and terrible monument to mortality.
Sal couldn’t tell if the natural wall of rock hid the base of the city, or was its base. But if the escarpment formed the top of a buried giant’s head, he thought, then the city was the giant’s crown. A crown of iron thorns. The image grew increasingly powerful as he pressed his foot down on the accelerator and drove nearer.
It took a surprisingly long time. He didn’t truly grasp the scale of the escarpment until he was in its maw, feeling like a bug braving a grain silo. The archway yawned over him like the mouth of a god.
As he drove into its shadow, the words of the golem returned to him: Know this, Sayed Hrvati: there are three places to which creatures such as I are drawn. This one is in decay; the second is north of here, beyond my influence; the third lies far to the south.
If this was the second place, Sal thought, maybe he had made a mistake coming there on his own. Even if it was beyond that particular golem’s influence, others still might live there. He and Shilly hadn’t escaped the first one so much as been allowed to leave. It wasn’t safe to assume that he would be so lucky another time.
He kept driving. The tunnel mouth shrank behind him until it almost looked small. Just as he reached to switch on the buggy’s headlights, a gate rumbled open ahead of him, dispelling the gloom. Light blinded him for a second, and he braked until he could see properly. The road led through the gate—a fraction of the size of the tunnel wall, but easily five metres across—and into the heart of the city.
Or so he had expected. He was surprised to find himself on the edge of a wide, stone bowl, easily a kilometre across. It looked like a giant crater, ringed by the jagged remains of the towers. The image of the city as the crown on a giant’s head turned out to be perfectly apt, for it was completely hollow. The city was shaped in a ring, with the giant circular space in the middle.
He stopped the buggy before he went too far and looked around him. Sand had pooled where the walls met the floor of the bowl, but the rain of the previous night had disturbed the drifts, spreading them down and inward in large, feathery shapes. At the centre of the bowl was a cluster of structures that looked as though they had been added later. Sal couldn’t quite make them out. Heat haze obscured the details. They looked like pillars of granite, or the trunks of branchless grey trees.
A ripple of light at the base of the pillars suggested that the bowl was partly full of water. The recent rains were obviously collected there, perhaps to be siphoned off into subterranean reservoirs rather than left to evaporate. Water would be precious, so deep in the desert.
Another thought struck him, then. The bowl and the city surrounding it appeared to be completely uninhabited—but someone must have opened the gate for him. The small of his back itched.
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“Hello?” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Is anyone there?”
A faint echo returned. A breeze swept through the bowl as though in reply. Apart from that, for a good thirty seconds, there was no other movement.
Then, from behind him, the gate mechanism clanked and began to shut. He turned in alarm—there was no way out of the bowl apart from that gate—and saw a skinny young woman standing in front of the wall.
“Hello, Sal.” Her cheekbones were prominent and her brown hair looked unwashed. She seemed to have come out of nowhere. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. We weren’t expecting you so soon.”
An inflection in her voice reminded him of someone. There was a weird feeling in the air, as though things were moving that he couldn’t see.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“Yes. I am the Mage Erentaite.”
“What? That’s—”
She raised a hand. “This will seem impossible to you, Sal, but I assure you that it is so. I am too old to undertake the journey here myself, in person, so I use this body as a temporary vessel instead. It is my thoughts alone that travel.”
Understanding dawned. He had wondered how the Stone Mages could warrant such a long journey to and from the Nine Stars every month, and now he knew how they managed it. They sent their minds instead of their bodies.
But was it so simple? What happened, for instance, to the people who were in the bodies they took over? Did they swap places with the mages, or were they dislocated for a brief time, stuck nowhere at all in the Void Beneath.
A chill went through him. Creatures such as I, the golem had said. Sal had assumed it had meant other golems, but it might not have been talking about that at all.
“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” the Mage Erentaite said through another woman’s lips. “Apart from that, you look just as I imagined you.”
Of course, he thought. In her real body, she’s blind. He licked his lips and forced himself to speak. “I’m sorry. It’s just I’ve never heard of anything like this before. It’s…” He faltered, lacking the right word. Horrible? Frightening?
“Necessary,” said the mage. “The mountain won’t come to us, so we must go to the mountain. No harm is done to any of the vessels in the process. In fact, they are looked after rather better than they would be without us; they would have starved to death years ago without our care. The empty-minded are easy prey for those who hunt the weak, and it is our duty to ensure that they are protected. This way, we solve two problems with one action.”
“So…” He struggled to get his head around it. “They’re like this anyway? You didn’t force your way in?”
“No, Sal. We would never do that. To force our way in when not wanted, or to stay any longer than was necessary, would be abominable.”
He agreed wholeheartedly with that. There was nothing to stop a blind, old mage like Jarmila Erentaite from permanently taking over a young woman in order to live her remaining years fit and healthy instead of infirm and weak. It didn’t matter that the woman’s body would have been empty when the mage moved in; it wasn’t hers. What if the young woman’s mind ever tried to come back? She would have nowhere to go. She really would be lost, then.
He knew very little about what made a person who they were and where they went when their body was empty, but he couldn’t believe that the body before him would function if its mind wasn’t alive somewhere.
“What was her name?” he asked the mage, thinking: If she can’t answer, I’ll know this is wrong.
“Yeran,” she said, without hesitation.
“And what happens to your body when your mind is—here?”
“It sleeps under the watchful eye of my assistant. If anything should go wrong at her end, I would be summoned immediately.”
“Do all the Stone Mages do this?”
“Only the ones who are on the Synod, and then not everyone. All are required to travel in person at least once a year, and most usually choose the time of the solstices. Even I must do this. If I am unfit to take the journey, then I am unfit to be on the Synod. Does that seem reasonable to you?”
“I—I guess so.” The answers to his questions didn’t entirely satisfy him, proving that the matter wasn’t so easy to resolve.
“Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
She smiled as he floundered for a moment. Who was he to question the ways of the Stone Mages? The decision the Synod would make should be most on his mind, not how they made it. But could he respect the decision of people who had anything at all in common with golems? He didn’t know.
“When does it start?”
“At sunset tonight.” The eyes of the mage’s vessel were clear and blue, lighter than his grandmother’s and his own. He couldn’t quite bring himself to call her “Yeran”, for that person was no longer there, but he still baulked at thinking of her as entirely Jarmila Erentaite. Sal wondered what it felt like to see again through such young eyes, even if it was only once a month.
She took his arm and directed his attention into the heart of the bowl. “We will gather here to decide the issues of the Interior until the sun rises and sets them into stone. There are many things to discuss. Your matter will not be the first, but it will not be the last, either. You’ll need to rest in order to be ready. Even though you won’t be talking, you will still find it exhausting. That I guarantee you.”
He nodded, knowing it to be true. His entire body ached from the night’s drive and the confrontation with Behenna. It was only his mind that resisted sleep.
“What about the Judges?” he asked, curious about those who would ultimately decide his fate. “Do they travel here like you?”
“Not all, Sal. Some of them live here permanently, in their own bodies.” A slight hesitation caught his attention, but she didn’t elaborate. “Come on,” she said, her manner instantly more cheerful. “Let’s go for a drive around the edge on the way. It’ll be quicker—and I’ve always wanted to do this.”
The surface of the bowl was smooth and never steep. Sal drove the buggy cautiously at first, but the Mage Erentaite urged him to go faster. Soon they were speeding rapidly around the inside of the bowl as though it were a racing track, with the decaying tower-skeletons as an audience and the sound of the engine growling off the walls. The mage in her younger body stood up on the seat and revelled in the wind sweeping through her hair.
“Yes!” She looked down at Sal, her smile wide and joyful. “There’s always time for happiness, Sal, no matter the place or the circumstances. Remember that. Just a small amount of light can dispel the deepest darkness.”
He smiled back and urged the buggy faster still, taking it in sweeping turns back and forth across the bowl, great figure eights that swayed them from side to side and made Shilly’s crutches whip around on the tray. Only then did he realise that he had run off with them, and he instantly felt bad about it.
His attention was off driving long enough for gravity to override his steering. The buggy drifted naturally inward without him intending it to.
“No, don’t go into the centre,” said the mage, putting one of her vessel’s hands firmly on his shoulder. “Leave that for tonight. Go back to the edge.”
Her tone was no longer cheerful, almost warning, and he did exactly as she said, putting the relatively small collection of buildings and pillars, and the glistening pool of water half-drowning them, behind him. Closer to, the pillars hadn’t seemed so small. Among them, he received the impression of giant upraised wings, although what they could belong to he had no idea.
“There.” She pointed at a hole in the wall. It might have been the same tunnel through which he had entered. He had lost all orientation during the drive. “Drive right in. Slowly.”
He did so, unable to see where he was going for a moment.
“Over there.” She pointed. “Park under that overhang. The buggy will be safe there, I promise.” He did so, feeling her gaze on him all the way. “Y
ou understand that you’ll have to let Warden Behenna have it back when he arrives?”
He nodded, feeling a flush rise up his neck and into his cheeks. Erentaite hadn’t mentioned the theft before then. He had hoped it wouldn’t come up.
“Will it hurt my case?” he asked.
“That depends.” The buggy’s engine died and they were left in sudden, startling silence.
“Tell me why you ran here, Sal.”
“To surprise Warden Behenna,” he lied, hoping she didn’t already know the truth. He didn’t want the Synod to know that he had deliberately tried to ruin the career of another Change-worker. “To put him off guard. He thinks he’s won, and I hate that. I want him to know that he could still fail.”
She nodded. “And by running to us, you’re telling your grandmother that you feel safer with us than her. That you can trust us to be objective. You’re telling the Synod that, too.”
He hadn’t thought of that. “Do you think it’ll help?”
“No more than talking to us would have. The theft can be used as much for you as against you. It’s up to those speaking on your behalf to do it properly.” Her gaze held him fixed a moment longer. “Whatever you do, Sal, let those words prevail or fail as the Judges decide. This is a council of reason, not passion. The Judges will not be swayed by shows of force, and such certainly cannot injure them. Strike out and you will only hurt yourself.”
Sal nodded. The serious tone of her voice left him in no doubt as to what would happen if he let anger or frustration stir his wild talent.
“The Weavers—”
“Don’t say their name here!” Her eyes darted past him, deeper into the shadows. “Don’t even think of them.”
Alarmed, he shrank back in the seat. “Sorry. I didn’t know that I shouldn’t.”
“Don’t be sorry, Sal. Just be careful. They have eyes everywhere.” The Mage Erentaite startled him by slapping both hands on the thighs of her vessel body. “I’m the one who should be sorry, if anyone must. Neither Yeran nor you has been eating well lately. We both need food and rest.” She climbed out of the buggy. “Come with me and we’ll rustle up a meal, then it’s off to bed. The ceremony will go for a long time tonight.”
The Sky Warden and the Sun Page 34