The Sky Warden and the Sun

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The Sky Warden and the Sun Page 39

by Sean Williams


  Sal had acted, too. He felt as though he’d crossed a boundary when he had forced Warden Behenna to break his vows—or earlier, when he had defied the Synod by refusing to speak before them. The question was, would he get what he wanted as a result? Unlike the baker, he suspected that his story was far from over.

  They stopped that night in a gully protected by a wall of dead tree trunks. Sal didn’t leave the wagon except to bathe and relieve himself. He was too conscious of eyes watching him everywhere he went. Even under the cover of the wagon, he couldn’t avoid that. He kept his head down and didn’t meet anyone’s gaze.

  “Does it hurt?”

  He looked up to see Shilly crutching toward his spot at the rear of the wagon, holding a plate of stew in her one free hand. They had barely spoken to each other since the Synod’s decision. Her habit of hanging around the Mierlo camp during the day had made him wary, along with the incidents surrounding the Synod, and before. Back in Fundelry, he had wondered if she was only befriending him to get access to his power. He had convinced himself that it wasn’t the case—but she had certainly jumped quickly enough at Behenna’s offer to find her a teacher in the Strand, and he was sure Tait would be happy enough to let her use him. Maybe he had decided too quickly.

  But here she was now, asking him a question. He glanced down to where he’d been fiddling with the charm around his wrist, then back up at her.

  “No,” he said.

  “Good.” She handed him the plate. “This could be the last red meat we’ll see for a while. You should eat it.”

  “Thanks,” he said. The stew did smell delicious. “What about you?”

  “Is there room here for two?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good. The company out there is lousy.”

  She hobbled off and returned a moment later with another bowl. He wasn’t sure yet how he felt about that, but he didn’t let her new mobility fool him. Although she might be down to one crutch, the pain lines around her eyes were permanently etched. She winced when she propped herself next to him on the wagon’s edge.

  They ate in silence, which was fine by him. He hadn’t told her the entire truth. The bracelet Behenna had wound around his left wrist hurt when he thought about it, and it was hard not to do that. Fashioned from knotted black leather and tied very tight, it was a constant reminder that he had lost his freedom. It was also proof that Lodo’s theories were right: the Change came from one source, and all Stone Mages and Sky Wardens could use it, if they would only let themselves. Their teachings were simply two different methods of controlling it—and controlling the people who used it.

  Behenna, now that he had broken his vows, had had no difficulty fashioning the charm even though he was as far from the sea as it was possible to get. Mentally, however, he suffered the worst indignities of an outcast. None of the Stone Mages on their journey back to Ulum had spoken a word to him, and Sal could tell that the thought of what awaited him at home weighed heavily upon him. The ex-Sky Warden watched the world moodily from the buggy’s driving seat, answering Tait’s questions in monosyllables.

  “They’ve got you now, boy,” Behenna had said to Sal via the Change, not long out of the Nine Stars. “They’ve got you, and they’re never going to let you go.”

  Sal could still hear the thick edge in the man’s mental voice. It wasn’t gloating at all, but bitterness. Behenna had been talking about himself too, Sal suspected, although he didn’t quite understand what that meant. Since then, Behenna had said nothing to Sal at all, mentally or out loud. Even while affixing the bracelet, he had worked in complete silence. It was his grandmother’s acid-faced secretary who had explained what it would do: that it was designed to incapacitate him if he tried to sneak away or remove it. There would be no more tricks with the buggy this time, she had said. He wouldn’t even get ten metres if he tried.

  Sal hadn’t tested it yet, but vowed to once he had worked up the courage. Whatever the bracelet would do to him, it was bound to be nasty. The way Behenna looked at him said so more clearly than words.

  “Do you think Tom or Kemp will be there when we arrive?”

  Shilly’s question startled him out of his thoughts, and he was glad for it. Just thinking about removing the bracelet made it tighten, sending rhythmic pinpricks of pain up his arm.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It depends if the wardens forgave them for letting us get away.”

  “Do you remember when we left, though? Tom didn’t come with us, but he did say—”

  “Later. I do remember.”

  “If he dreamed it, like he dreamed the earthquake and Tait coming back, that probably means he at least will be there.” The way she spoke left it unclear whether she thought it was a good thing or not.

  Sal recalled something else Tom had told him. It had been outside School in Fundelry, just before Shilly had first suggested they be friends. “He told me that he thought I’d go to the Haunted City, one day.”

  “Did he?” She sniffed. “It’s a shame he didn’t tell us anything useful—like the details of how you’d get there. He could’ve saved us an awful amount of bother.”

  He looked at her, then looked away. Here he was again: thinking ahead. It was becoming a bad habit. He was caught between the past and the future like a bug between two fingers.

  There was an awkward silence. Sal’s stew was finished, and he put the bowl to one side. Shilly was still eating hers, and he watched her out of the corner of his eye. Her hair was getting long and straggly. The bleached sections were spreading too, thanks to the harsh Interior sun. The warm brown of her skin hid some of her gauntness, but not all of it. She looked exhausted thanks to large bags under her eyes. What, he wondered, had happened to the girl he had met in Fundelry, full of energy and always ready with a sharp comment? Where had she gone?

  He had happened to her, he supposed. He had dragged her from one side of the country to the other, and now back again. No wonder she was looking tired. No wonder she had wanted to go home.

  She looked up and he realised that he was staring at her.

  “What?”

  “Shilly, I’m—”

  “No.” She shook her head firmly. “Don’t say it, Sal.”

  “Say what?”

  “What you’re about to say.” She put down her food. “That you’re sorry.”

  “How do you know that’s what I was going to say?”

  “It’s obvious. How could you not be after all that’s happened to us?”

  “So why not say it and get it over with?”

  “Because there’s no point.” Her expression was intense. “I want to say it, too. We’ve both done things we regret. I let Behenna use my hunger for the Change and my loneliness against you. But saying the words won’t fix anything. What it really says is, It’s my fault, and that’s not the way it is with us. It’s not our fault, really. It just happened. ‘No blame.’”

  “Whose fault is it, then?”

  “Maybe it’s no one’s—or no one person’s, anyway. Your mother is partly to blame, and so is your real father. And so is the man who you thought was your father, and your grandmother, and the Syndic—”

  “I get it.”

  “And so is Lodo and the Mage Van Haasteren and the Alcaide and Warden Behenna. They’re all mixed up in it with us. Hell, half of them probably blame us for most of it, so it doesn’t seem fair that we should agree with them.”

  No, it didn’t. He had no doubts that she was right on that point. And he remembered how he had felt in the Broken Lands when she had tried to thank him, and he wouldn’t let her. This wasn’t so different, perhaps. “What do we do, then?”

  “We get on with making it better. That’s all we can do.”

  “How?”

  She shrugged in the fading light. “I’ve been talking to Mawson. He’s been telling me things, in his own way. Did you know that he’s been sworn to help your family in any way he can? It’s like a curse for him, but he honours it anyway. His kin
d, he says, are bound by their words more tightly than we are, hence the way they talk. Curses and promises are prisons, he says, but riddles set you free.”

  Sal had glimpsed the bust and recognised it from his dream, but had never spoken to it himself. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Well, it was him who suggested I patch things up with you. You’re part of the family he’s supposed to protect, right? And he thinks I’m good for you. Maybe vice versa, too, but he’s even more cagey than usual about that. He thinks we’re going to have our work cut out for us, so we might as well start getting used to working together again, despite what we did to hurt each other the first time. If he’s right, that does make a kind of sense.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” she said. Her expression was hard to read, though, and neither of them said anything for a long moment. He was glad she was there. Perhaps, he thought, Monca wasn’t as irrelevant to the baker as he had initially assumed.

  The stars came out one by one in the dome of the sky above them. They hadn’t been at the Keep long enough to learn about the Invisible Stars Skender had taunted them with on their arrival—if they even existed. Sal preferred the ones he could see with his ordinary eyes. The world around him was more than enough for one person to deal with without adding whole unseen layers on top of it.

  “I want to rescue Lodo,” Shilly said with a ring of determination to her voice. “To do that, I have to go to the Haunted City. And as I’ll probably need your help to do it, it would be wrong to lie about my motivations at the beginning. I’ve decided that Lodo told you not to tell me about the globe because that would only make me more determined to get it working. But no matter how determined I am, I still need you to help me do anything with the Change. I can’t trust anyone else.”

  “How do you know you can trust me?” Sal asked.

  “Maybe we should trade,” she suggested, her eyes catching the light of the quarter moon in the darkness. “Really help each other, this time, instead of just pretend we’re working together. Is there anything you want to do that I can help you with?”

  Confront my problems, he thought, in a flash of insight. If neither running from them nor into their embrace didn’t work, then maybe confronting them head-on might.

  He wasn’t ready to make that sort of a decision yet, or such a commitment, but it seemed as if someone might have guessed Shilly’s desire well in advance.

  Lodo’s heart-name is Athim, the Mage Van Haasteren had said. Remember it, and use it well. It seemed certain to him that they would need that name to bring him back from the Void.

  Even without it, Sal didn’t doubt that Shilly would succeed. She, like her leg, had been put under pressure during their journey. Unlike her leg, which had snapped and might never heal, she was stronger than ever. Not all bones heal the same way, he thought, remembering the story of the baker yet again.

  “It’s a shame we don’t have Skender here,” he said. “He knows more than both of us put together, even if he doesn’t understand it.”

  “Yes—and it’s interesting you should mention him,” said Shilly. “Mawson keeps talking about our ‘third’, the person we need in order to do what we have to do. I don’t know who that is, though. Mawson sees the past, present and future all at once, so it’s sometimes hard to tell what he’s talking about. He must be referring to someone we haven’t met yet, since Skender isn’t coming with us.”

  “Has he told you what’s going to happen to us?”

  “Maybe.” She looked uncertain. “If he has, I haven’t understood it. He used to make me angry because I thought he was trying to confuse me, but it’s not that. We just think differently, that’s all. We confuse each other.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  She laughed and reached across him to take his plate. Her smell, of rosemary and sweat, filled his nostrils. “Don’t think I’m going to do this for you every night,” she said. “And I expect breakfast. You get up before me.”

  “I take it you’re moving in?”

  “If there’s room.” Hopping off the wagon and onto her one good leg, she peered at the shadowy recesses behind him. The wagon didn’t contain much more than a large chest buried under rugs Brokate hoped would find a home in the Haunted City.

  “I think there might be,” he said.

  “Good. Even if there weren’t, it’d be better than bunking in a supply wagon.”

  “Is that where you’ve been sleeping?”

  “Of course. Where did you think I’d been? With Tait and Behenna?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Perhaps, in the darkness, he saw her smile.

  Neither of them heard, in the dead of the desert night, a muffled sound from the chest at the front of the wagon. Sal rolled over, in the grip of an ominous dream, but he didn’t wake. Even if he had, he would have assumed the noise came from Shilly, wound in a tight ball by his feet and breathing evenly, or from the outside where, somewhere on the ground she preferred as a bed, Brokate snored with patient regularity. He probably wouldn’t have recognised the sound for what it was.

  The glow stone seemed blindingly bright in the confines of the chest, but in fact it provided barely a glimmer, just enough to read by. The book passed the time, however little of it there was left. There was enough food and water in the chest to last another day.

  The reader thought:

  This is crazy! I wonder if dad’s deciphered the note yet?

  And:

  But if I’d stayed I would’ve gone crazy, so it works out even.

  And:

  I wonder if they’ll turn back when they find me?

  Another page turned, rustling very faintly in the stillness.

  In a nearby wagon, Mawson’s marble eyes saw the past, present and future as one, and he never slept.

  Continued in The Storm Weaver & the Sand.

 

 

 


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