The Stone Mage & the Sea (Books of the Change Book 1) Page 7

  So what? Sal wanted to ask, but he bit his lip. She was just doing her job and didn’t deserve his disinterest--or his morbid fascination, either. He couldn’t help imagining the Selectors rounding up children into nets with silver cattle-prods to feed the monstrous appetites of Alcaide Braham and Syndic Zanshin.

  “Is it true, Mrs Milka,” called a voice from the back, “that Stone Mages cut the heads off their kings when they’ve finished with them?”

  The classroom fell silent. The teacher’s eyes flickered to Sal, then away again. “What makes you ask that?”

  “It’s what my dad says.” A poorly stifled snicker came from someone else at the back--and only then did Sal recognize the voice. He had been ignoring Kemp, too. “When their kings are too old or sick or gone mad, they cut off their heads and feed them to the dogs.”

  “Well,” said Mrs Milka, “I hate to disagree with your father, but I don’t think he’s got it quite right on this count. First of all, the Interior doesn’t have kings any more than we do. They’re ruled by an Advisory Synod, made up of the most important Stone Mages in their land, which takes advice from the very best of their merchants, teachers, warriors, doctors and the like. Once every full moon they meet in a place called the Nine Stars to make or change the laws. They have a select group of Judges for casting final decisions on all matters, and officers who make sure that sentences are carried out. Although they do behead people who have committed particularly bad crimes, they never kill the rulers who fail them--just like us. There are better ways.”

  Sal kept carefully still, neither speaking up nor looking around.

  “But my dad--”

  “Your father and I were in School together, Kemp,” Mrs Milka said firmly, “and I don’t recall the Interior being his strong subject.” She looked around the room. “If there are no other questions, I’ll move along.” She paused briefly, then went on. “As I was saying before, not all Sky Wardens come from towns like Fundelry. Indeed, most of them belong to three major families, or Lines, called Air, Water and Cloud. Newcomers to the Conclave may not initially belong to one of these Lines, but it’s common for them to ally themselves with one. These alliances can be very strong, and are sometimes sealed by marriage. When a marriage happens between Lines, the resultant partnership belongs to the third line--so if a Cloud marries an Air, the couple and any children they might have belong to Water. This prevents aristocracies from forming, and spreads power evenly throughout the Conclave.

  “The Interior has a similar system,” she added, “but with Earth, Sun and Fire Clans. Is that right, Sal?”

  “I guess,” he said, knowing as little about the Interior as the Strand, except for what he’d picked up along the way.

  “Now, although there is no present enmity between the Strand and the Interior, there has been in the past.” She turned to the blackboard and began to write dates and names. “In the fourth century …”

  Sal’s attention was already wandering when a spitball hit the back of his neck with stinging force. Ignoring another faint titter of laughter, Sal gritted his teeth and wiped it away, feeling his ears grow hot. He couldn’t retaliate if he wanted to stay out of trouble. All he could do was hope to get through the day in one piece. After a while they would give him up as a lost cause and ignore him. Hopefully.

  Then, perhaps, he could get on with finding out why he was here. That was his biggest problem. He had to find a way to get Lodo to speak to his father properly. The sooner he did that, the sooner they could move on. He didn’t want to be stuck in Fundelry forever. The thought of that was too horrible to contemplate.

  It wasn’t Fundelry itself, though, making him feel that way. Although not much of a town, it was far from the worst he had seen. He had simply become used to a nomadic, ever-changing lifestyle. In a lifetime of travel, he had rarely seen any single town more than once, and never stayed anywhere longer than three months. He had watched his father work as a jeweler, a weaver, a manual laborer, a cook, an ironmonger, an alpaca herder, a fruit-picker, and even a gravedigger. He had seen many of the things he would otherwise only have been told about, like mountains, rivers, deserts, and now, perhaps, even the sea. He had met countless hundreds of different people, from the dark skins of Fundelry to people with coloring exactly like his on the edge of the Interior, and he had heard rumors of others much further away.

  He suspected that he was more realistically educated, as a result, than Mrs Milka, whose cheerful zeal couldn’t make up for the fact that she lived in a small town on the edge of nowhere. What she said certainly seemed too good to be true. In Sal’s travels he had heard rumors of conflicts, slaves, torture, horrible crimes, some of them in the distant past, some more recent, all denied by the governments on both sides. He didn’t doubt that some of the stories were true--they couldn’t all be false--and it was ironic that some of Kemp’s distrust of people from the Interior was probably justified. No doubt there were others like Kemp on the far side of the borderlands who felt the same way about people from the Strand, with as much justification.

  Sal had no desire to be like Kemp, stuck in a little box of a world, no matter where that part of the world was. He wanted to get moving again, and if that meant nudging things along a bit then he would do it. How, though, was the question. He didn’t want to nag any more than he already had, and putting his father and Lodo face to face hadn’t helped at all. There had to be another way to break the impasse.

  Unfortunately, the only other one he had thought of to date had led to a dead end.

  After working with his father the previous afternoon, and dreaming all night of being chased by people hidden behind masks made of feathers, he had awoken early determined to get the day off to a positive start. Before School--which his father insisted he attend--he had gone to look for Lodo’s underground lair. If Lodo wouldn’t come to his father, maybe he could bring his father to Lodo. But even in the light of day, locating the entrance had proved to be impossible. All the dunes looked the same, and any footprints had been washed away by the storm.

  He had stood for a long while on a large dune that seemed to be in about the right spot, looking for any sign at all. The bushes at its base hid nothing but sand and the odd shell. Shielding his hands against the sunlight, he had looked despairingly about him. Dunes marched off inland for a distressing distance before slowly merging with scrub. The coast stretched west to east like a winding ribbon; he could see two towns, one in each direction, blurred by distance. From his vantage point, he could see more of the sea to the south than he had at any previous time. It seemed to fill up half the world, gray and massive, yet flatter than any land he had ever seen. It looked completely unnatural to him.

  The now-familiar feeling of being watched crept over him. When he looked around nervously, there was no one to be seen. No Kemp or his cronies. No Shilly or Lodo. And no strange-looking boys waving bells, either. He was alone.

  Then a slight noise drew his attention to a seagull standing behind a patch of sea grass. They stared at each other for a second.

  “I don’t have any food,” Sal said, feeling slightly stupid. The bird kept looking at him as though it understood what he was saying perfectly well and didn’t believe a word of it. Its feathers ruffled in a gust of wind. The deep black eyes didn’t blink. They made him uneasy.

  “Garn!” He waved his arms and made shooing motions at the bird. It skittered sideways a step or two, cawed noisily, and finally flew away, its wings slapping into the distance.

  Giving up on his quest, Sal had returned to the town proper and gone to School, where his worst fears of the day before had been realized.

  Finally it was lunchtime. A bell rang to indicate midday, and Sal looked up to notice the bilby-faced boy looking at him. Both of them glanced hastily away.

  Sal slipped out of the classroom as soon as he had the chance. He was unsure for a moment where to go, whether to retreat to the hostel or
brave the square. As he stood outside the Senior School building, the weathervane on top of it caught his attention. It was distinctive, as Von’s directions had suggested, despite its silver being tarnished almost black. Only its eye retained any gleam, winking down at him like a jewel. It was pointing east in defiance of the wind.

  “It doesn’t move,” said a voice beside him. “Some say it’s pointing at the Haunted City, but I think it’s just stuck.”

  Sal realized that he was dumbly staring upward. “What?”

  “The weathervane.”

  He looked down into the bilby-faced boy’s large eyes. They were studying him closely. For a moment, Sal thought the boy might say that he’d seen Sal in the storm the previous night, but he didn’t. Sal wondered if he should thank him anyway.

  “You must have traveled a long way,” said the boy.

  “Yes. I have.”

  “As far as the Haunted City?”

  “Maybe as far all up, but no, I’ve never been there.”

  “You’ll go there one day.”

  “I don’t think so.” Sal felt uncomfortable; the boy seemed friendly enough, but he carried a hidden intensity around with him. Sal had noted that no one else in the class had spoken to him when leaving. “Dad wouldn’t want me to.”

  “Why not?”

  Sal was about to change the subject by asking about the bell-ringing the night before, when Mrs Milka came up behind them.

  “Are you bothering Sal, Tom?” The teacher put one hand on each of their shoulders, even though she was barely taller than either of them. “I see you’ve met our star student,” she told Sal proudly. “Tom will be Selected this year like his brother before him, if I’m any judge.”

  Sal looked at the boy in surprise. The boy--Tom--didn’t seem any older than ten, and Mrs Milka had said that the Sky Wardens rarely chose anyone younger than twelve. Sal tried to imagine him robed in blue and wielding the Change like the giants in his dreams, but couldn’t.

  “It just goes to show what hard work can do,” the teacher beamed.

  Tom’s eyes had clouded over. With a wordless shrug, he pulled out of her grasp and hurried off down the street.

  Mrs Milka looked after him, her expression turning from pride to puzzlement. “He’s an odd one,” she confessed. “Rarely talks, even to his parents, and he doesn’t have any friends. He did come and talk to you, though, didn’t he?”

  She looked hopefully at Sal, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. The look in Tom’s eyes had almost been one of pleading. If Mrs Milka had seen it too, though, she was obviously as mystified as he about what the boy was pleading for. If she couldn’t work it out, Sal didn’t know what good he would be.

  He made his excuses and went to find somewhere to sit.

  He took a spot on a bench out in the open, where Kemp and his cronies couldn’t sneak up on him. He wasn’t hungry yet, being accustomed to meals only at the beginning and end of each day, and all the talk of Sky Wardens had unsettled him. No one made any move to sit with him. He thought idly about making an effort to find someone to talk to, but decided he was probably better off alone, anyway. Making friends and living on the road weren’t terribly compatible pursuits.

  Being alone proved more difficult than expected, however. One of the younger kids--a girl no more than three years old--wasn’t as discriminating as her older school mates. She took a shine to him for no obvious reason. When he sat down, she was there looking up at him with a curious expression on her face.

  “Hello!” she said.

  “Hi.” He wasn’t used to kids at all, let alone ones so young. What was he supposed to say to her? “My name is Sal. What’s yours?”

  Instead of replying, she giggled and ran away.

  That fixed that, he supposed. He scanned the square. Kemp was lazing on a bench in the shade, mindful of his pale skin, with a crony or two in attendance. Shilly was squatting on her haunches just like she had been when they’d first met. She seemed to be drawing. He was curious to know what her subject was this time, but when she caught him looking he turned away.

  The young girl came back. “Hello!”

  He wondered if that was all she could say. “Hello again. Are you going to tell me your name this time?”

  She hid her mouth behind a hand but couldn’t suppress a giggle. Then she turned and ran away again.

  He’d become a game, he realized. It could have been worse.

  He went back to watching Shilly. Her hands moved in swift, sure ways--poking here, scribbling there, erasing everything with a palm swept from side to side a minute later. She appeared to be doodling, drawing overlapping shapes that didn’t mean anything. He noticed that nobody talked to her either, and wondered if her isolation was self-imposed. On the few occasions they had met she had acted like she knew everything and he knew nothing. While he would never argue that she did indeed know more about Lodo, Fundelry and the Change, he was sure there were things she didn’t know: like how it felt to drive at speed on tarmac, or to see the desert fringes at sunset, or to fix an internal combustion engine. She shouldn’t be so--

  “Hello!”

  He started. “Oh, it’s you again. What do you want now?”

  “Present.” The little girl held out a flower.

  “For me?”

  She smiled wider, and nodded. The flower seemed to shimmer in her hand, as though it was made of gossamer. He’d never seen anything like it.

  He reached out to take it, and a bright blue spark arced between their fingertips.

  She laughed in delight.

  He jumped. It didn’t hurt him, but it did surprise him. And on the heels of that surprise came another. The flower disappeared into thin air with a golden sparkle and a faint “pop”.

  The girl shrugged and said, “Gone,” in a resigned tone of voice, as though such things happened every day.

  He clutched the bench beneath him for stability. The girl toddled off to find something else to do.

  He watched her go, stunned.

  “That’s Elina,” said a voice.

  He looked up. It was Shilly, standing with the sun behind her head. Her hair seemed to glow around its edges.

  “She’s a source of wild Change, rather than a natural talent. It’s just as likely to burn out before she turns four, Lodo says, but in the meantime she’s a great source of entertainment for herself, and those who can see.” Shilly looked at him closely. “You did see it, didn’t you?”

  “The flower? Yes.” He shook himself. “Was it something like Lodo’s false face?”

  “On a very basic level, yes. An illusion is nothing special.”

  “Can you do it?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Not very well, but I’m learning.”

  Looking around her, she went on: “I was thinking of going for a walk along the beach. Do you want to come?”

  He shuddered. “No.”

  “Oh, okay. If it’s like that …” She turned and started walking away.

  “No, wait. That’s not what I meant.” He slid awkwardly along the seat, cursing the misunderstanding. Ignoring each other had been easier. “I don’t want to go to the beach. Let’s just sit here for a while instead.”

  She regarded him curiously for a moment, then came back. “Okay. I’m surprised, though. I’d have thought you couldn’t get enough of the beach, being from the borderlands.”

  “It’s not that simple.” His father had always warned him away from water, scaring him with stories of drowning from a very early age. But there was more than just mortal fear to it. His father’s attitude was part of it too--there was something about the sea that bothered him, and Sal knew it had to be more than just the smell of fish. It made Sal uncertain and nervous about going near the sea, in case he found out something he didn’t want to know.

  To change the subject he asked her
the first question that popped into his head. “What are you doing at School? I thought Lodo taught you. Or are you following me again?” he asked, the idea occurring to him with vindictive relish.

  She laughed. “Oh, it’s nothing like that. I come to School three days a week, whichever three I want. Sometimes I’ll skip the first day and stay home to do chores. Anything is better than listening to Mistress Em drone on. But when I need a break from the old boy, I turn up. He can be a bit dreary too, at times. Sometimes I think they’d be perfect for each other.”

  He smiled at the thought. “Is that why you picked today? To get away from Lodo?”

  “Not really. To be honest, I figured you could use help with Kemp.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “I’m sure you can, in your own way.”

  He bristled. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Disappearing may be easier than fitting in, for you, but it’s not going to work here. Kemp has already singled you out. You need to retaliate, not retreat.”

  “Like that’s going to be easy.” He remembered the strength of Kemp’s big, pale hands and the humiliation he had felt lying in the dirt.

  “And like I said, I figured you could use the help.”

  He fought an instinctive response to kick back. Shilly had an uncanny knack at getting a rise out of him. “Why?”

  “Because we’re both outsiders and we should stick together. I’ve copped a lot of flak from whitehead myself, and it isn’t fun. This way we can spread it around a little.”

  “But why help me at all? You could just let me cop the lot and give yourself a rest.”

  “You’re not going to be here forever, remember? It wouldn’t really solve anything for me. Is that what you’d do in my shoes?”

  He considered it. “No. It wouldn’t be very nice.”

  “Exactly, my friend.”