Othniel led them out into the night, down a gentle slope into the enormous stone bowl at the heart of the city. Shilly looked around as best she could. The deepening night was full of soft noises, as though a large group of people awaited them at the heart of the bowl, in the centre of the yellow glow. She sensed the enormous wall surrounding the bowl receding behind her, leaving her feeling stranded under the infinite sky. A dozen stars had emerged from the blue-black dome, hinting at constellations. More appeared as she watched. Some of them…
She stopped in her tracks and almost tripped up Tait. A longer look told her that her eyes weren’t deceiving her. Some of the stars weren’t in the sky at all, but hanging in the tangled mess that had once been a mighty city. She swung Tait with her as she turned on the spot, looking all around.
“Are you all right?” he asked, trying his best to avoid bumping her leg, but not entirely succeeding.
“They’re not stars,” she said. “They’re something else.”
“What?” His brow crinkled deeply. “What stars?”
“Those.” She pointed with her free arm. “That one there, and that one there, and that one…” She stopped and did a quick count. Of course, she thought: there were nine of them.
“What are they?”
“No one knows.” The buzzing voice of the man’kin came from startlingly close on her right.
She turned to see that Aron had stopped to look as well. His eyes were wide and childlike with wonder. The granite bust twisted around to stare at her in a way she found unnerving.
“What do you mean, no one knows?”
“Just that.”
“Couldn’t someone just climb up there in daylight and look?”
“Certainly, but they would find nothing, just as nothing has been found on previous attempts.” The man’kin looked smug. “Besides, the lights are in a different place every full moon. And looking during a full moon is dangerous.”
“Why?”
“Try and you’ll find out.”
“Are there golems up there?”
“Is there a problem, Tait?” asked Warden Behenna, striding out of the darkness toward them, scowling deeply.
“Sorry,” said Tait. “We just stopped to look.”
“We’re not here to sightsee.”
“I know. Sorry.” The warden stalked off ahead, and Tait urged Shilly along faster. Aron, Sal’s cousin, maintained a slow, steady pace at their side, his face completely expressionless again. Every now and then he glanced at her as though making sure she was still there.
“Don’t you ever talk?” she asked him.
“No,” said the man’kin. “He doesn’t.”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“Well enough, but this is the only way you’ll get an answer.” She felt the man’kin’s stony gaze still on her, but she refused to acknowledge it by returning it. “His silence is endearing. I’ve had many steeds, but few so compliant.”
“Is that why you put up with her?”
“With Radi? No. I owe a debt to her family that has yet to be discharged. Until then, I am bound, within certain limitations, to do her will.”
“And in exchange you get Aron.” She could appreciate that the young man was well suited to the task, but it still didn’t seem fair. She could see muscles straining in his neck and shoulders with every step. “Why don’t you have one of your own carry you?”
“Never!” The man’kin hissed like a snake. “’Kin never carries ’kin. Don’t you know anything, child?”
The vehemence in its voice stung her. Her first instinct was to snap back an angry retort, but she didn’t want to argue with it, if it could help her find Lodo. “If I don’t, it’s only because no one tells me anything.”
That seemed to calm it down. “Well, perhaps you’re safer that way. You shouldn’t believe everything you’re told.”
“I’ve been told to be careful of man’kin, as a matter of fact.”
“You will find that someone much closer to you than I is doing the lying.”
“Someone close to me? Do you mean Sal?”
It said nothing.
She looked at Tait, who shrugged. “Do these things ever speak in a straight line?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What did it say?”
Before she could answer, the rest of the party slowed them to a halt where Othniel waited.
Their guide raised a hand to indicate east. The sky in that direction was growing lighter as the moon rose behind the city wall.
“It is about to begin,” Othniel said. “Please, sit.”
Shilly’s adjusting eyes took a moment to register a series of low, stone benches just ahead of them, facing the heart of the bowl. They stretched into the distance like the seating of an enormous stadium, and most of them were full. Tait guided her to one that had been kept free for them, and she collapsed gratefully into it, noticing as she did so that the ground beneath the benches appeared to have been recently wet. Aron chose a position nearby and unburdened himself of the man’kin, which he made sure was facing the right direction. Skender skidded up to Shilly and leaned in close.
“Are you ready?” he whispered.
“As ready as I’ll ever be, given that I didn’t ask to be here.”
“Well, I’m on your side. Remember that. We made too good a team to break it up now.” With a brief squeeze of her shoulder, he slipped away to join his parents, sitting together two rows down.
Shom Behenna stood behind Tait, a picture of barely restrained energy. Radi Mierlo sat on her own not far away. When they were all in place, Othniel nodded in satisfaction.
“I’ll let them know you’re here,” he said, and vanished into the darkness.
Shilly waited impatiently for the moon to rise. They were much closer to the yellow heart of the bowl than they had been before, but still she could see surprisingly little apart from a number of slender pillars looming over the light. There was something about that yellow glow that bothered her: it didn’t seem to cast any actual illumination, so everything around her looked like it was embedded in amber. It reminded her of the glow Lodo’s light-sink had first made when she, Sal and Skender had brought it to life in the Keep. The pale silver haze to the east, heralding the full moon, was the only note of ice in an ambience that was otherwise just a little too warm.
“Theatrics,” Behenna muttered, almost too softly for her to hear. She didn’t know how the Sky Warden Conclave made its decisions, but doubted it aspired to anything less mysterious than the Stone Mage Synod.
When the first sliver of moon poked up over the city wall, a sigh went up around them as though the world itself had inhaled. Then a voice spoke.
“Welcome.”
Shilly felt the word in her mind, not her ears, coming to her through the background potential surrounding her. Who was speaking, she didn’t know; the voice had no accent and could have belonged to an old man or a young woman. It could even have belonged to a man’kin. Without seeing its source, she simply couldn’t tell.
“Welcome, all, to this the Cold Moon Synod—the last of many for some, the first of many for others. As always, we have new members to welcome and old to mourn, and I’ll move onto them in a moment. We have observers and petitioners from all parts. Their turn will come too. We have decisions to make and put into action. All things in their time, friends. For now, be welcomed and welcoming to those around you. We are here, we are the Synod, and we are united, burning with the desire to take the word of the world and write it into stone. We have many voices, yet we speak with one.”
A murmur rose up around her and Shilly peered into the yellow-tinged haze. The more the moon rose above the wall, the more detail she could make out. She was surrounded by a great crowd of people, some of them in the full red robes of the Stone Mages, others in more simple attire, like Othniel. Al faced inward, except when asked to “be welcomed and welcoming”, at which time they turned to their neighbours and renewed acquaintances in various wa
ys.
Everyone seemed to know each other well. The Mage Van Haasteren and Skender’s mother, Abi, exchanged warm greetings with several nearby people. Nobody spoke to anyone else in her party, however. Shilly felt invisible for all the attention they paid her, until a tap on her shoulder made her jump.
She swivelled in the seat, knowing who it was before looking. “Sal?”
“Here.” He held both of her crutches in one hand. She took them silently. His face was drawn and his eyes held an imploring edge. She opened her mouth to thank him, but Tait beat her to it.
“Try thinking about someone else instead of yourself, next time,” he said, taking the crutches from Shilly’s hand and putting them between her and him on the bench.
Sal glanced at Tait, then at Shilly, and the hurt in his eyes grew strong.
Oh, hell, she thought. Is he jealous?
“Sal, listen—”
He turned to walk away from her and came face to face with Behenna. Both wore mixed expressions of determination and—strangely, she thought—confusion. They stared at each other for a timeless split second, then Sal was past, weaving through the crowd.
“We’ll be seeing you afterward,” shouted Tait after him, every inflection ringing with challenge.
“Shut up, Tait,” muttered Behenna, turning his attention back into the heart of the bowl.
Tait winked at Shilly and did as he was told.
On the inside, she groaned at Sal and Tait’s behaviour. What have I done to deserve these two idiots? That was all she needed, after everything else. She wanted to go after Sal, but he had disappeared among the pale faces.
The moon crept slowly into the sky as the voice launched into a summary of the night’s agenda. If she had expected arcane pronouncements and cryptic ceremonies, she would have been disappointed. The truth was that she hadn’t known what to expect. She had thought it would be more inspiring, though, as she sat through endless lists of names she didn’t know.
Her own appeared in the middle of it:
“—the matter of Sal Hrvati and Shilly of Gooron as brought to us by Sky Warden Shom Behenna in Special Petition number forty-eight—”
Then it was back to the endless list of names. She wondered how they were going to fit it all in. Shifting restlessly in her seat, she cast her gaze around her and tried to find something interesting to look at. The crowd was universally focused inward, except for the odd pocket of restlessness. Other petitioners, she assumed. Among them had to be Sal, although she couldn’t see him anywhere. Despite the growing clarity cast by the moon’s silver orb, the interior of the bowl was still difficult to discern. The tall, looming objects reminded her of obelisks that had been stretched upward and twisted slightly in the process, so none of them stood quite true. There were a dozen or so of them in a very rough ring around the centre, in which stood several smaller, blockier constructions. She half saw people in the very centre and something tall and white moving among them. Maybe, she thought, she wasn’t supposed to see very well. This was secret Interior business, after all, and there was a Sky Warden present. Her view could have been obscured along with his.
Finally, the list was done and the petitions themselves began. Instead of one voice speaking, there were several, and the discussions sometimes became quite animated. The hope that these might be entertaining soon faded. The topics were unfamiliar to her, and she rarely had time to work one out before it was over and the next had begun. Sometimes people moved forward from the crowd to address the Synod as a whole—one of them a man with dark skin, like hers—but, again, she didn’t know anything about the issues so she couldn’t follow the arguments. As far as she could tell, it was mostly about property settlements, mining rights, joint ventures and so on.
The Stone Mages didn’t seem to find the process boring, though. They stood or sat through the whole thing with a patient intensity Shilly envied. The whole process felt increasingly unreal to her, until she almost believed that it was just a game, an act. It wasn’t happening. They wouldn’t really send her back because this was all make-believe. They were just going through the motions to unsettle her, or to lead Warden Behenna on. They would make their decision regardless of what happened here. Her presence was just a formality—or, worse, an irrelevance.
Still, the bench was real, and it became increasingly uncomfortable no matter how she squirmed. Eventually, she gave up and lay full-length upon it, rejecting Tait’s offer to use his pack as a pillow. The voices in her head and the slow rising of the moon—which seemed to be taking much longer than usual, as though time itself had slowed—together conspired to lull her to sleep. She welcomed it, preferring rest after the day’s journey to an impatient wait for her turn to come.
The last thing she saw was the sole Sky Warden in the crowd watching the proceedings with a silent, brooding intensity, as though daring the Synod to deny him what he desired.
When she awoke it was to a hand shaking her shoulder and a feeling that an enormous amount of time had passed. The night was cold and soundless. The moon was no longer before her, but above and slightly behind. A subtle breeze wound its way into her clothes, making her shiver.
She looked around her, still dazed but gradually regaining her senses. The hand stopped shaking her, satisfied that she was awake.
A face appeared before her, the Mage Van Haasteren. His long features looked even more serious than usual. For a moment she was reminded of Lodo, although she couldn’t work out why.
“It’s time,” he said.
She sat up with his help. The Synod was unmoving and silent. She could feel its attention on her and those around her as though she was at the centre of a frozen whirlpool. The light was no longer warm and yellow, but icily blue, chilling. The air smelt like the Broken Lands, raw and primal, full of potential.
Tait gave her the crutches. Grateful that she could walk with some dignity, she followed the members of the party through the Synod and to the heart of the bowl. Othniel led the way forward, closely followed by Warden Behenna and Radi Mierlo. Tait and Shilly came next, with the Mage Van Haasteren and Skender bringing up the rear. Aron, Mawson, and Skender’s mother, Abi, remained behind.
The subtle charm that had prevented her from seeing the centre of the bowl appeared to have lifted. As she approached, the ruins of the city rose around her like a multitude of skeletal limbs reaching for the sky. The nine stars hanging in their entangled fingers burned steadily, pinning her under their dispassionate stare. She felt the combined attention of all the Stone Mages upon her as Othniel guided them past one of the tall, twisted shapes—nothing more than granite, she noted; a giant stone splinter stuck into the ground—and beyond, to where the Judges waited.
There were nine of them, too, standing in a rough circle at the lowest point of the bowl. Three were male, five female. Four were old and dressed in black; four were young and clad only in pale shifts. The remaining judge was a man’kin: a tall, scowling, winged figure carved entirely out of marble, holding a downturned sword in both hands as though leaning on it. Its face was old and young, male and female, happy and sad all at the same time. Its expression, like the others, was stern. Two folded ice-white wings towered high above its head.
Sal was there, too, Shilly discovered when she tore her eyes off the statue. He was on the far side of the open space at the centre of the bowl, standing near a young woman with brown hair tied back in a plait. He looked very small and nervous.
Othniel led them to a point right at the heart of the bowl. Shilly felt the circle of Judges close in around her and the others, even though none came within three paces of them. Every word and every gesture was magnified, as though they were at the heart of the world. The attention of the Synod made the air feel thick and heavy.
She wanted to turn and run, but knew she couldn’t back out. It was far too late for that.
“Warden Behenna,” said the voice that had opened the Synod, “state your request as clearly and succinctly as possible.”
The
warden turned to face the man’kin—who, Shilly realised, was the one who had spoken—and took a deep breath.
“I request permission to return these two children—” He indicated Sal and Shilly. “—to their homes in the Strand.”
“That is all?”
“You asked for ‘clearly and succinctly’ didn’t you? Yes, that’s all.”
“Does anyone wish to testify against this request?”
The Mage Van Haasteren stepped forward. “I do.”
“For what reason?”
“Returning Sal and Shilly to the Strand would not be in their best interests.”
“Very well.” The winged man’kin shifted position, emitting a sound like stone grinding against stone. “We will begin the examination.”
“Thank you,” said Warden Behenna with a slight bow. “I am confident that—”
“Do not speak,” interrupted the man’kin sternly, “unless you are asked a direct question. You will be addressed in due course.”
Behenna’s skin grew a shade darker in the icy moonlight. In reluctant deference to the Judges’ wishes, he shut his mouth and backed one step away.
“This is not an easy decision,” said the young woman standing next to Sal to the gathering as a whole. “It is not one I would make, given the choice. Both children have recently lost their guardians; both came here of their own free will from the very depths of the Strand, and that is no small feat for anyone; both thought they had good reason to travel so far, fleeing what they perceived as a threat and hoping to find help here, from us. They have been through a lot and are yet to find their feet. Who are we to put Shilly and Sal through more?”
Shilly agreed wholeheartedly with the woman’s final words, even though it was hard to remember how it had felt at the beginning of her flight with Sal from Fundelry. It felt like years ago.
“That is what we are here to discuss, Mage Erentaite,” said a thin, white-bearded man on the far side of the ring of Judges. A shock of surprise went through Shilly. Mage Erentaite? The elderly woman had said that she would be there, watching over them, but how was this possible? “Tell us, child, why you came here.”
The Sky Warden and the Sun Page 36