The Sky Warden & the Sun (Books of the Change) Read online

  “This is from the yukuri vine,” he said when he returned, holding up a number of small, greenish fruit. He opened one and removed some of the pulp within. “I chose this spot because I recognised its leaves. Close your eyes.”

  She did so warily, lifting her hat when he asked, and letting him rub the moist flesh across her eyelids and forehead. It felt cool against her skin, although it had a bitter smell. His touch was soft.

  “This’ll make you feel better.”

  It did. Within a few minutes, her headache had ebbed to the point where it only nagged rather than dominated. She didn’t move, letting the seat take her weight while Sal clattered about with their stuff, unfurling the sleeping bag they shared if it was cold at night and preparing the tarp to cover the buggy. He had decided to make the rest stop more permanent without consulting her, and she was more grateful than she could say for that. She knew she should be helping him, but she had no energy; she seemed to weigh as much as one of the giants whose backs they traversed every day. Tears pricked at her closed eyes: she was a dead weight, but he never complained.

  She said nothing, either. Every time she opened her mouth, she was afraid of what might come out. She didn’t want to blame him for the mess they were in for he had as little control over it as she did. If she was caught up with him, that was just bad luck; it could have happened to anyone. And wishing that she had never met him was like wishing the sun wouldn’t rise in the east. She couldn’t change anything about it now, unable as she was to drive, and having nowhere near enough money to pay someone else for passage to the Interior. She could only float with the current and see where it took her.

  Floating: that was what she was doing. For the first time in her life, control of her immediate fate had been turned over to someone else, and it didn’t sit well with her. She knew Sal would rather she talked to him about it, but she wasn’t ready for that and didn’t know when she would be. When Sal stopped running, perhaps then she would talk. Running was, she knew, his preferred means of avoiding anything too difficult to deal with, the same in principle to her silence. If they could meet halfway, perhaps then they would make the distance together.

  The next day, they dared human contact to buy fuel for the buggy, and food, using the small amount of change they had between them. She went through the motions while Sal stayed out of sight in the buggy. If the landowners had been told to keep an eye out for anyone on the run from the Sky Wardens, they showed no sign of it. They accepted the fake name she offered, took her money, filled the buggy’s tanks with alcohol, and let them go.

  “We can’t afford to relax yet,” Sal said that night, as they took shelter in yet another dry creek bed. Being close to a major town, they didn’t draw attention to themselves by travelling with lights on during the darkness. “I can still feel her looking.”

  Shilly nodded, having nothing to add. He was right: they couldn’t relax yet. According to her map, they weren’t even a quarter of the way to where she wanted to be. The only way she could think of possibly surviving the journey was to forget about the past — and even the present. Their destination was all that mattered, no matter how far away it seemed or what she had to put up with on the way. It would be worth it, she told herself. It had to be.

  Northwest of Kittle they found one end of an old railway line that wound up through the hills. The terrain ahead was rugged. Long since stripped of its valuable metals, Sal hoped that the Old Line, as the ancient railway was called, would be a passable track. His father had never travelled that route, but had talked of it once, when they wound their way along the usual road between the Broken Lands and the more gentle plains of the Strand. That route, the Yelverton Track, was relatively wide and safe, but well used because of it and an obvious place for the Sky Wardens to lie in wait for them.

  “We have two choices,” he told Shilly at the base of the Old Line. “We take the buggy and hope for the best, or we leave the buggy behind and make our way on foot. What do you think?”

  She seemed to consider the options, but didn’t offer an opinion beyond shrugging.

  “If we walk,” he went on, “obviously it’ll take longer, but it will be safer. That’s assuming we can find a path if the Old Line peters out, or can make our own. It’s tough in there and I can’t guarantee anything.”

  He didn’t bother to explain why they needed to head in that direction in the first place. There were only two safe places to cross the Divide; that was clear from the map before him. The pass they were heading for, to the west, was the least travelled.

  “I think we should take the buggy,” he concluded. “There’ll be a long way to go when we reach the far side. The Divide is still 600 kilometres away. Without the buggy it’ll take months to reach the Interior. It’s worth the risk now to save time later. Do you agree?”

  She frowned, her expression saying more clearly than words: Why are you asking me this? It’s clear you’ve already made up your mind.

  “We can talk about it, if you want,” he said. “Maybe I’ve missed something.”

  She shook her head and adjusted her hat so the shadow covered her eyes. With one hand she pointed irritably forward, to the Old Line.

  He waited a moment to give her a chance to speak, but that was clearly all he was going to get. It was the closest he had come all day to provoking a genuine reaction out of her, so he didn’t mind so much. And he had her tacit approval to proceed. It would have to be enough.

  They discovered that the Old Line consisted of a rutted, gravely surface. Erosion by rain and wind made it uneven and treacherous. He proceeded slowly and carefully, even along straight sections. Sometimes the missing railway sloped upward into the hills, or it snaked around slabs of rock larger than houses and through earth that had been laid down millions of years before. The scenery, when he had time to look at it, was magnificent in a bleak, time worn way.

  Nightfall — their seventh since leaving Fundelry — brought an end to the day’s sightseeing and to the first leg of their journey on the Old Line. The way was dangerous enough by daylight, when the frequent cracks and rockfalls could be clearly seen and negotiated. During the dark it would be suicidal to continue on. They camped in the lee of an overhanging cliff, the same red-brown colour as dried blood, under which the Old Line passed. In its shadows Sal noted an effect his father had once spoken of, but which he had never before felt: under the cliff face the background potential faded to zero, and he lost all sense of the world around him. It was as though the Change had been sucked out of him and drawn into the ground, where it dissipated and vanished. The feeling was unnerving, but not one that threatened any harm.

  Figuring that he would be as safe here as he was in a Ruin, he didn’t mind camping for the night. They even risked a fire and boiled a measure of their precious water for their first cooked meal in a week. Sal had been collecting fruit and edible leaves everywhere they stopped. He added these to a number of small grubs he had dug out from under a tree that morning and created what his father had named a ‘desert stew’. Shilly’s skin went a shade lighter when she saw him put in the grubs, but she ate her half without complaint. She couldn’t complain, he supposed, if she wouldn’t talk.

  The night was cold. Shilly slept under the tarp while he sat up to watch the stars. Humming an old tune to himself, enjoying this time of relative privacy, he went through the contents of his pack by feel until he found his way to the clasp wrapped in soft leather near the bottom; it had belonged to his mother and, Lodo said, symbolised the Earth. But that wasn’t what he was looking for. Deeper still lay the heavy, grey globe that the old man had given him on his last night in Fundelry. It was like one of the powerful globes Lodo had used to store light during the day and then illuminate Fundelry at night, but this one was smaller and denser, more mysterious still. Lodo had said on giving it to him, I think you will need a little light in the future, wherever you go, and had bade him to keep it secret from Shil
ly. Sal had done so, although his conscience nagged at him.

  He drew it out into the starlight and cradled it in his lap. It was as heavy as he remembered and cool to the touch. No light reflected off it. He pressed his palms against its smooth surface and enclosed it in his fingers. Shutting his eyes, he sought any sign of recognition within it, the slightest hint that it knew what it was for and could tell him how to use it. But there was nothing. His thoughts vanished into the globe like rain down a well. Part of him thought that that might be a result of the Change-deadening place they occupied, but a greater part suspected otherwise. He would have to learn how to reveal the globe’s secrets, just as he had had to learn to use other Change-endowed artefacts. The Change wasn’t something he could use intuitively, no matter how much innate talent he had. It was a skill acquired through hours of practice. And it was a responsibility, Shilly had said.

  With that thought in his head, he put the globe back into his pack, rested his back against the wheel of the buggy and slept.

  He dreamed that the globe was burning brightly, just as it had in his dream shortly after leaving Fundelry. Again he saw the bully, Kemp, in the golden tower, the ghostly city buried in sand, a tunnel mouth guarded by two swinging corpses, an old woman who looked something like himself, and a talking statue. Lodo was in the dream, and so was Tait, a journeyman like Sal’s father had once been.

  Tait, whose brother Tom had befriended Sal in Fundelry, was leading a Sky Warden in blue robes across a desert. The first time he had had the dream, the identity of this man eluded him. Now it came to him: it was Shom Behenna, the new Selector of the Fundelry region. More powerful than his predecessor, Amele Centofanti, he had taken over her position when she had failed to detect Sal.

  It wasn’t until after they woke the next morning and inched their way from beneath the shadow of the rock that Sal guessed what the man was doing in his dreams.

  As soon as they left the Change-numbing bubble of safety and entered the background potential, Sal felt the Syndic’s eye abroad — again scouring the Strand for any sign of him.

  He evaded her with greater ease than before. Her mind was distant, diffused across the very large space she had to search. But beneath her grasping lay that of another mind, one subtler than hers, and nearer. He felt it as a gentle tap-tap against his defences rather than a full-scale assault. Just as an ant might find access where a human hand might not, this mind sought to insinuate itself without him noticing. It prodded at him for a while, and then went away. It returned later on, as though to check that he was still there. He knew it was Shom Behenna as surely as he knew that one misstep would send him tumbling off the Old Line to his death in the valley below.

  Tap-tap.

  Sal went cold at the feel of this new, more sophisticated pursuer. Had Behenna found him? Did he know where Sal and Shilly were, and where they were headed? Sal fervently hoped not. He was uncertain just how much information could be conveyed by that gentle tap-tap. Perhaps Behenna could tell nothing more than that Sal was still alive, and maybe roughly where he was. The latter didn’t please him; he had, after all, hoped to slip out of the Strand completely unnoticed. But if Behenna did know, where were the gulls, descending out of the sky to confirm the location? Where were the Sky Wardens to drag them back to the Haunted City?

  He didn’t tell Shilly. They had enough to worry about, with the Old Line to negotiate and the Broken Lands ahead. And it didn’t change anything. They were still running. They simply had a better idea, now, of who they were running from.

  The last stage of the Old Line was the worst. The northern face of the range was almost sheer, as though someone had torn the range in two and they were descending the walls into the rift valley. The missing middle was nowhere to be seen, however. Shilly imagined it being thrown into the Interior, on the other side of the Divide. Or maybe it had been swallowed up by the plain like an ocean might swallow a leaky boat.

  Whenever the buggy’s wheels slipped beneath them, all such speculation was instantly forgotten. Sal inched the buggy forward through such areas while she walked behind, carrying their packs. That way, if the buggy did fall, they might not lose everything. Sal was ever ready to jump free; they could walk the rest of the way if necessary.

  So she thought, anyway, until they came to the bridge.

  The great cataclysm that had torn the mighty range in two had sent fingers of destruction into the midst of the hills. The ravine below them was one such example. Its walls were sheer and angular; the creek far below, even when full, could not have carved it. To their left and right it stretched out for kilometres. The side they occupied offered no route down to the bottom; only on the far side had the ancient builders of the line found a way to descend to the plains. There would have been no benefit in building the bridge, otherwise.

  When built, she supposed, it had been a piece of engineering to be proud of: it spanned the gap in a smooth arch of around one hundred metres, with no supports, which had held up a perfectly flat length of track. Where the tracks had been were lengths of decaying concrete and rusted metal grates, forming a road of sorts wider than the buggy was long. Staring across the gap-toothed mesh the buggy would have to traverse, with the depths of the ravine below, Shilly had a sudden premonition that something was going to go wrong.

  Sal threw a rock out onto the bridge. It clattered noisily. The bridge didn’t suddenly crumble into dust, which was only a slight relief. They still didn’t know whether to turn around and go back.

  “There’s a safety rail,” he said, indicating the waist-high barrier on either side of the span. “That makes it stronger.”

  He walked twenty paces out onto the bridge and looked around. Shading his eyes, he looked along the ravine. Then he pointed into the far distance to Shilly’s right.

  “Yor!” he shouted to her. “That’s where we’re headed.”

  She couldn’t see it from where she was standing on the last metre of road and she didn’t really care at that moment. The bridge was just one more hurdle to get over on the way to Skender Van Haasteren. Sal lowered his hand and gingerly picked his way back to her.

  Where the rails had been were two strips of long, plank-like beams just wide enough for the buggy’s tyres. It was a close fit; the slightest deviation would threaten to slide the buggy onto the rusty grille. The grille was supported by metal bars every metre or so. If all four wheels slipped off the planks, she didn’t see how they could possibly get them back up. That was, of course, assuming that the planks would take the weight of the buggy in the first place ...

  Sal sat in the driver’s seat. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and Shilly waited, watching him. She thought he looked older than he had before, in Fundelry, although that could just have been the effect of the freckles spreading over his pale skin, and the dirt. If he didn’t look older, he definitely looked more serious.

  “You go first,” he said. “Take the packs. Go all the way across and wait for me there.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said, the first real sentence she had uttered for days.

  “It’s not stupid. There’s no need to risk both of us. If I fall, you can keep on going.”

  “If you fall, I’m as good as dead. I don’t know anything about this place. I’ll starve, or be bitten by something, or fall foul of the locals.” She felt a heavy resentment of her situation rising up inside her, but she fought through it to what really bothered her. “If you fall, I don’t want to stand over there and watch you die.”

  “I’m not going to fall —” Sal began.

  “So I won’t either. To make sure, I’ll walk ahead of you. If the bridge won’t take my weight, you’ll know to turn back.”

  For a moment he seemed about to argue. Then something like relief spread across his face, and he nodded. She turned away to get out of the buggy and put on her pack, hoping the fear she was feeling wasn’t so obvious.

 
Sal started the buggy’s engine and inched it forward until its front wheels were a metre back from the beginning of the bridge. Shilly took a deep breath and stepped onto the plank opposite the one Sal had walked along before, since she already knew the first one was safe. Even without looking around, she sensed the emptiness of the ravine enclose her as she put one step in front of the other, then another, then another. She tried not to look too far down, even though she had to make judgements about the integrity of the bridge. She just walked carefully, as she might across the beams of a rundown jetty. I will not fall, she told herself. It’s only a hundred paces across.

  The bridge creaked as the buggy moved slowly onto it. She felt the planks flex beneath her and refused to breathe any faster. She looked over her shoulder and saw Sal, white-faced, inching the buggy along. Its weight made rusty rivets pop and ancient metal groan; every metre or so it jerked slightly as if something small had given way beneath it.

  Perhaps, she thought, they should have taken some of their supplies over first. Without the extra fuel and water tanks, it would have been lighter, less of a strain; and they could have inspected the way properly first, too. But she hadn’t thought to suggest that, and it was too late now.

  Looking ahead was her job. Sal gave her a quick thumbs-up, and she turned her attention forward again, watching where she placed her feet and looking for any sign of weakness. The ancient builders had done their job well. She never felt desperately unsafe, even at the halfway point, when the wind sang past the soles of her feet and the sense of space around her was at its peak.

  She glanced in the direction Sal had indicated before and saw on the horizon a smudge that could have been a town. Yor, she presumed, whatever that was.