THE
BLOOD DEBT
The Second Book of the Cataclysm
by Sean Williams
"The Void Beneath is a horrible place. A ringing emptiness infuses it, an endless hum that scrubs the soul clean. Imprinted on this eternal drone are the minds of the lost, clinging to their memories like life rafts. Despairing and desperate, the Lost Minds smother new arrivals with pleas to hear their stories--for if they are forgotten, they inevitably die.
"Among the Lost Minds is one they call the Oldest. The Oldest One bade me listen to his story, and I did. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. If it is true, then even the most outlandish tales in the Book of Towers are based soundly on fact. If it is not true, then we are as much in the dark about our past as we ever were. Even now, years later, I am still unsure which of these two possibilities is the more terrible."
Skender Van Haasteren X
"The
Warden"
"On
the matter of the ghosts, we find that their presence comprises no direct
threat to the citizens of the
"Therefore,
on the matter of Shilly of Gooron, we find her guilty of necromancy and
recommend that she be punished accordingly.
She may live freely in the Strand provided she does not attempt to
practise or teach the Change, or re-enter the
Judgment of the Sky Warden
Conclave in Extraordinary Session,
Year Eight of the Alcaide Dragan Braham
The young man looked out to sea.
As far as days went, this one was almost perfect. The sky hung overhead in a marvellous blue dome, marbled with clouds. The sea sighed with easy, patient rhythms. An effervescent breeze blew directly into his lungs from the grey expanses of the ocean.
He should have been content. But he wasn't. His skin tingled from more than just the salty spray. He turned away from the view and sought the source of his unease. To an unobservant eye, the beach might have appeared a picture of tranquillity. But he knew better. The pounding of the surf brought a slow but never ending torrent of ground-up bones from the depths. He would have been sunburned hours earlier, but for the charms daubed on his shoulders and back. The smell of rotting fish and seaweed came strongly on the breeze.
A seagull cawed in the distance, and he looked up sharply, feeling eyes on him.
I'm
not here, he projected. He imagine d the beach as it would look from
the air, a ribbon of cream-coloured land separating the blue from the brown,
with him alone along its length: shoulder length dark hair waving in the wind,
an oval face with unremarkable features--apart from his eyes,
which were many shades of blue mottled with white flecks. His mother's eyes; and his father's hands,
weathered and calloused from plenty of hard work.
The seagull cawed again. Sky Wardens sometimes used seagulls as spies
along the
Gently, so as not to raise more interest than he might already have, he painted himself out of the picture.
Just
a fisher. Not Sal Hrvati. He's elsewhere.
Wheeling and diving, the seagull resumed its hunt for lunch.
Sal was hungry too, but that wasn't the source of his discontent.
Something's wrong, somewhere, he thought. I've been feeling it for days--and I'm not the only one, I'm sure. But what does it have to do with me? Now?
He closed his eyes and let the world rush into him. He forgot the seagull and the wind and the heat on his temples and sea's stealthy creep. He exhaled, then inhaled deeply. A vibrant buzz passed through his bones. The Change was powerful and raw on the beach. He could feel it in everything around him, as wilful and nebulous as air. Sometimes he would sit for hours and let his thoughts drift beyond the ephemera of everyday life. In the ebbing and flowing of the Change, he felt vitality and vigour that was equally beautiful in life and in death.
But not any more. There was a tear, somewhere--a tripping of
the cadences of the
Sal glanced to his left, at a grave marker on the edge of the beach line. The weatherworn post was inscribed with charms and encrusted with salt. What would you tell me, Lodo? Am I imagining things, or beginning to see clearly at last?
He returned his attention to the sun and the sand and the sky. The wind danced fitfully around his legs, as though sweeping the way clean for a storm, but he could smell no rain, no thunder. The stone pendant around his neck, a weather charm called yadeh-tash, was silent.
Then it struck him--at once both physically and mentally. He cried out at a fierce stab of pain between his shoulder blades, and spun to look behind him. The beach was empty apart from him and the birds, but his eyes saw beyond them, through the rough fringe of scrub and into the gracefully towering folds of sand dunes that marched effortlessly inland. In the long moments he had been gawping at faraway fractures, he had completely overlooked something nearer and infinitely more precious. Close to home, someone had tripped a trap.
"Carah." He called the name as loudly as he dared. "Carah!"
His toes clenched in the sand and he began
to run.
#
Carah!
The sound of her heart-name propelled Shilly out of a deep sleep she didn't remember entering. She had been dreaming of an outline of a face, or something very much like a face, although it seemed to have too many eyes and maybe an extra mouth. It belonged to something buried under the sand, something that was trying very hard to surface. It had frightened her, and she had tried to sweep the impression it made from the sand with her hands. But sweeping the grains away only brought it to the surface faster than ever...
She sat up with a jerk, waking by degrees. Sal had called her, and he had sounded panicked. It had been a long time since the last false alarm. Although they knew theoretically that they could be found at any time, it wasn't possible to live in a state of perpetual dread. Their jitters in the early days had settled down to a constant, low-level vigilance. Hiding was second nature to them now.
She didn't dare take the chance that he was jumping at shadows. Struggling free of the skins she used as a blanket, she swept the lingering veils of sleep from her. The underground workshop, their home, was warm but not stuffy, ventilated by a chimney leading up through sand to a cave far above. Kidney-shaped and high-ceilinged, it had been fashioned decades earlier by a renegade Stone Mage who had come to Fundelry in search of new ways to master the Change. Instead of peace and quiet, he had found Shilly, a girl with a knack for the Change but no talent herself, who he had taken as an apprentice and to whom, on his death, he had left all his possessions. The workshop contained the trinkets he had made or accrued down the years. Some she understood perfectly, grasping their purpose the moment she studied them, even though she didn't have the spark that would make them work. Others remained a mystery despite many hours of contemplation.
A flawed metal mirror caught her in its depths as she shrugged into the cotton dress she had worn the previous day. Her dark hair stood in total disarray, bleached at the tips by sunlight. The same light had burned her skin deep brown, darkening what nature had given her still further. A series of thin white scars marred the skin of her right leg, like a reef poking through wavetops. The mirror had been dropped and now hung warped up its left side, giving her a compressed, foreshortened aspect, as though she was walking into an invisible barrier. She didn't linger.
Grabbing a pole as long as she was tall with a wicked hook at the end, she hurried through the tunnel leading from the workshop's main room to its antechamber. There, in a cave barely large enough for her to stand upright, she poked the hook into the sandy soil and twisted. Half of the pole vanished into the wall, as though tugged by hands on the far side. She hung onto her end and firmly twisted the rod again. The charm had come with the workshop, one of those she hadn't quite fathomed, but she understood its operation well. Something clicked under her hands, and she raised her eyes to look into the dull, sandy wall.
A faint echo of the dunes outside the entrance to the workshop came to her, as misty as a dream. She didn't see the shape of the dunes so much as the form of them: the lines they made against each other, against the spindly grass that grew in their shadows, against the blurred horizon. She swept her attention along those lines, looking for any recent change. Birds appeared as swooping vortices, dimples in the sky; crabs were asterisks leaving complicated ellipses in their wakes; humans stood out like giant, dead trees on a fallow field.
There. She focused on a new feature of the dunes. A line of footprints marred the smoothly changing symmetry. Past them, just touching the low hills beyond the sand, were several parallel tracks that looked hauntingly familiar. Made by wheels, she realized. No hoof-prints, horse or camel. Self-propelled.
A chill went through her. The view flickered. While the reservoir in the pole lasted, she followed the footprints into the dunes, seeking the person who had made them. Her gaze skidded over a discontinuity and lost the trail. She backtracked, and skidded again. The person making the tracks was hiding from her sight.
She had just enough time left to see Sal hurrying from the beach. His trail was hidden too, subtle and barely visible but as familiar to her as the dunes themselves. He was angling around the interloper, coming at them from behind.
Be careful! she thought, even though she knew he couldn't hear her.
The pole gave out, the store of the Change within it consumed by the wall's charm. She was left on the wrong side of the exit, anxious and blind. What to do? She couldn't just sit in the workshop like a rabbit in its hole, waiting for the trap to spring.
She had seen enough, though. The interloper had been moving through the dunes from a point right at its edge. That put him or her, most probably, out of line of sight of the entrance. If she was quick, then, she might just get through without being spotted.
She took a deep breath and withdrew the pole. It slid freely from the sand, unhindered by the arcane mechanism it operated. Turning to another section of empty wall, she drew a figure eight in the soft soil. With a sigh and a shower of sand, the wall collapsed, leaving a meter-wide hole in its wake. On the far side of the hole was the back of a bush. Beyond that, sunlight and the dunes.
Shilly hurried through the hole, bringing the pole with her. The white sand glared bright in the daylight. The smell of salt and spear-grass was sharp in her nostrils. She squinted to check around her before running away from the exit, erasing her footprints with her free hand as she went. She ducked out of sight at one end of a wide dune-valley just as a flash of blue fabric appeared at the other.
A Sky
Warden? she thought. So far
from the
Shilly forced herself to confront the awful truth that she and Sal might have done something to give themselves away.
She held her breath and hoped Sal would stay out of sight. The last time Sky Wardens had come to the dunes, her life had been turned upside-down. Pain shot along her right leg, from hip to ankle, and with a worried look she reached down to rub at it.
#
Unnatural silence had fallen over the dunes. Sal's hearing seemed muffled as he hurried to catch up with the person who had triggered the early warning charm on the dunes' northeastern perimeter. Just as thick fog could dampen sound, so too could sufficient skill deaden the Change.
That thought sobered him. The chances were that this person was better trained than him; not someone from Fundelry, then, or a wandering weather-worker, foraging for driftwood. For all the natural talents he possessed, subtlety was not one of them. He couldn't just rush in and hope for the best.
He inched around the outstretched limb of a dune and caught his first glimpse of the person he pursued.
A thin young man with black, curly hair and ebony skin strode confidently towards the workshop entrance. He wore the bright blue robes of a Sky Warden. A crystal torc hung around his neck--a sign of rank, Sal remembered. Over his right shoulder drooped a black bag shaped like a teardrop. Its contents swayed heavily from side to side.
Whoever he was, he crossed the sand with long-legged strides, making no obvious attempt to conceal himself.
The bush camouflaging the entrance to the workshop stood out against the wall of sand behind it, a suddenly pathetic hiding place, even though it had served Lodo well for many years. Sal had felt the entrance open and Shilly scurry for freedom, so he was spared the worry of her being trapped inside. But that wasn't the limit of his concerns. If the Warden found their home and reported it to the Syndic, they would be forced to run again. And he wasn't ready to leave the one placed he had felt at home--not yet.
Sal reached out through the Change, fighting the interference radiating from the trespasser, and touched the second line of defence. The buried traps stirred, awaiting his command. They had grown in the years since he had placed them in a series of concentric semicircles around the entrance to the workshop. They throbbed with readiness, swollen and angry like bees ready to defend their nest.
The Warden stopped in his tracks and looked around.
Sal ducked out of sight and slithered to a new position. The Warden turned his head from side to side, as though seeking the source of a faint sound. His expression, when Sal got his first good look at it, was one of intense concentration.
Sal went to duck again, but froze. There was something familiar about that face, those long features and dark eyes. He had seen them before. Or had he? He'd met only a few Wardens during his ill-fated stint at the Novitiate, five years ago, and none at all since. Would he remember any of them from that far back, even if his liberty depended on it?
The Warden straightened upon one last inspection of the dune valley. He swung the pack off his shoulder and put it on the sand by his feet. By accident or not, he had stopped just before the concealing bush.
The Warden raised his empty hands and turned in a full circle.
"Come out, Sal and Shilly," he called, speaking slowly and loudly. "I know you're here."
Sal rolled over and flattened himself hard against the sand, staring desperately up into the sky. Sky Wardens didn't need their hands free to cast charms any more than he did. The Warden's gesture of peace was purely symbolic and therefore meaningless. But symbols had power. So Lodo had tried to teach him years ago, and Shilly had reinforced the lesson many times since.
Silence choked the air over the dunes. The wind had died completely; not even the seagulls dared brave the sudden stillness.
Sal didn't know what to do.
"Who are you?" came Shilly's voice from the other side of the Warden. "What do you want?"
Sal peered back over the dune, alarmed by the thought that Shilly had put herself in danger. He reached out for the buried traps again as the Warden turned to address the point Shilly's voice had come from. It wasn't too late. She was far enough away not to be hurt.
"What's the matter?" the Warden asked, his words echoing from the walls of sand. "Don't you know who I am?"
"I know what you are. That's enough."
"No, it's not." The Warden made no move, except to sag a little. "I dreamed last night that you and I were riding a ship of bone up the side of a mountain, into a cave of ice. Something dark and ancient lived there, under the ice, and it knew we were coming. It had slept for an eternity, but was waking now, and it was hungry. We had to stop it, you and I, before it ate the world."
Sal listened, hooked by the same odd sense of familiarity he had felt on seeing the man's face. The Warden's voice had changed while talking about the dream; it was higher pitched, and had a faintly child-like rhythm. Sal had heard someone talk like that before, under very different circumstances.
For the first time, Sal noted how dusty his robe was. His boots were scuffed and worn.
The name, when it came to him, was as unbelievable as it was a relief.
"Tom?" Sal stood up on the dune-top. "Is that really you?"
The Warden turned away from Shilly's hiding place to look at him. Now that Sal knew the truth, he could see the resemblance. Gone were the awkward ears and lack of height. Gone were youthful uncertainties and baby fat. In its place was a lean, almost ravenous sense of concentration that hit Sal like a physical force as Tom's gaze fixed on him.
The teenager Sal had last seen as a boy didn't smile. "Who else would I be?" he asked, appearing genuinely puzzled.
A surge of relief carried Sal down the side of the dune. "It's been such a long time," he said. "I didn't recognize you."
"You look the same."
"Thanks, I think." Tom's equine features took on a younger cast as Sal neared him. Under the dirt, he had pimples. Sal held out his hand. Tom's grip was uncertain, fleeting.
"What in the
Tom looked over his shoulder as Shilly came out of hiding. She didn't look as relieved as Sal. Favouring her weak right leg, she leaned on Lodo's old pole in lieu of a staff.
Tom turned back to Sal. "It's your father," he said.
The heat of the day vanished at those three soft words. "What about him?"
"He needs your help."
"He sent you here to find us?"
"No." Tom shook his head emphatically. "I came here of my own accord. No one knows."
Shilly looked from Sal to Tom when she joined them.
"A cave of ice, huh?" she said. "That's not a prophetic dream; it's the sort of nonsense normal people have."
Tom opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. Sal could practically hear his mind working. Brilliant in the ways of the Change, Tom struggled when it came to everyday life.
"It will happen," he said. "That's the way it works. I thought you'd remember, after the golem and Lodo and--"
"Easy," she said, a look of sadness clouding her features. "I remember. I just don't understand how it could ever be possible. I haven't seen ice my entire life, let alone a cave of ice. The nearest mountains are half the world away, and I'm in no hurry to get there. As for hungry things wanting to eat you and me..." She put her hand on his shoulder. "Be assured that this is one fate I'll try my level best to avoid."
Tom didn't argue, although her answer obviously didn't reassure him.
"Why don't you come inside?" asked Sal, indicating the bush and the entrance to the workshop behind it. The deadness over the dunes had faded; the wind had returned. "You look like you could get out of the sun for a while."
"Yes," added Shilly. "I'll get you some water, make you some tea."
Tom nodded.
"Tell me first," he asked Sal, his dark eyes very serious. "What would you have done if I hadn't been me?"
Sal looked at the ground around them, wondering how much Tom had sensed of the traps. Woven in a thin layer just under the surface of the sand was a pattern of interlinked charms designed by Shilly and willed into potency by Sal. The charms--resembling insects with circular bodies and crosses for heads--caught light filtering through the grains above them, and held it there, growing increasingly powerful with every day that passed. At a word, Sal could release the stored energy in the light-traps and send it flooding back out into the world. He didn't know how much energy, exactly, there was in the traps. Definitely more than enough to kick up a dense sandstorm, allowing Shilly and him to escape under cover. Possibly enough to blow a person standing on the light-traps to pieces. There was only one way to find out.
"Don't worry about us," he said. "We know how to look after ourselves."
Tom's dark eyes took him in with one long glance. This was one thing he clearly understood.
Shilly tugged him forward, her sun-bleached hair dancing. Tom allowed himself to be led up the slope of the dune, first picking up the heavy bag and draping it back over his shoulder, then dragging his leather sandals through the sand.
"Come on down," said Shilly, waving their old friend ahead of her along the secret passage into the dunes. "Tell us everything you know."
"That could take days," he said. "I've been dreaming a lot lately, and not just about you. I think Skender might be in trouble, wherever he is."
Shilly glanced over her shoulder at Sal. He rolled his eyes. Nothing had changed
"What we need to know, then. Let me get you a drink, and then you can get started."
Sal came last, ignoring the sensation of being watched as he closed the door behind him. The birds on the dunes were the last things he had to worry about now.
"The
Miner"
"It is clear that the ground subsided after the Cataclysm but before the making of the Divide, so the city endured not one but two separate and unrelated catastrophes. The first lowered the city into a depression several kilometres around, with sloping sides and a roughly flat bottom. The second split the depression and therefore the city into two sections of unequal size. The inhabitants of the larger portion took shelter behind a sturdy wall designed to keep the inhabitants of the Divide at bay. Some speculate that the creators of the wall were the same as the creators of the Divide, suggesting that the riving of the city was accidental, and that triage on a massive scale was both called for and delivered."
Laure Historical Survey
Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth was stuck. It wasn't the first time he had been that situation. His home, the Keep, an ancient cliff-face refuge deep in the heart of the Interior, was riddled with secret passages and unnoticed cracks, most of which he had explored during his childhood. Only on becoming a teenager had he realized the screaming obvious: that such illicit expeditions were a form of escape that would never lead anywhere. All they did was annoy his father.
The one time he had genuinely escaped, he had ended up on the other side of the Divide, fighting golems and worse. It had come as quite a shock that the outside world he had always dreamed of might actually be dangerous. He had gone home with a feeling of relief, his youthful rebellion out of the way nice and early. Time to settle in and do some nice, safe work.
And now here he was, back out in the world and finding himself caught in a crack he would once have slithered through with ease, distressingly deep underground.
I'm too big for this, he told himself as he reached for a handhold just out of reach. Obviously. He was bent back on himself like a hairpin. If he could only obtain some sort of leverage, he could easily wriggle around the bend, but his fingers were flailing about like a newborn's and his feet kicked uselessly at air. He flexed his entire body, hoping to shake things up, but succeeded only in banging his knees and scraping his spine even more. He tried twisting in a spiral and brought his skull into sharp contact with stone. He saw stars.
For the first time in years, he truly feared for his life.
"Help!" he yelled, even though he knew it would be futile. He was deeper than few in Laure ever went. Thinking him mad and possibly dangerous, the guides whose experience he had tapped had all warned him about the dangers of going down into the caves. Not one of them had offered to help. But he had had to try. His mother was down here somewhere, and she needed rescuing.
Hands gripped his ankles.
He yelped in fright and kicked out. His foot struck something soft.
"Hey!" came a muffled voice along the hairpin, past the plug of his twisted body. "I'm trying to help you, you idiot!"
"Sorry." He forced himself to relax and let the hands clutch him again. Whoever they belonged to tugged hard, using their bodyweight to pull at legs. Skender yelped again as he shifted suddenly in the bend, losing still more skin to the rough, dry stone. His spine complained and his face was rammed hard against rock. For a moment he thought he might lose his nose.
"Ow! Be careful."
"You want to stay down here forever?"
"No, but--"
"Then stop whining!"
The weight at his ankles pulled dislodged him from the crack. He tried to grab the walls to slow himself down, but he had been taken by surprise, and so had the person pulling his legs. He shot to freedom in a rush and they tumbled together to the floor of the cave. One flailing elbow caught his rescuer solidly in the abdomen. He heard a sudden exhalation of air, then pained wheezing.
"Bloody--hell."
"I'm sorry. It was an accident." He struggled away and to where his pack had fallen on his glowstone. Bringing up the light in one hand, he turned it on the person who had popped him from his early grave like a cork from a bottle.
He saw a young woman around his age, with black hair and almond eyes. Her skin was neither white nor brown, but something in between, like most people in Laure. A dirty bootprint stood out on the front of her chest.
"That's--gratitude--for you," she said, casting him a dark look. Wheezing, she climbed painfully to her feet and dusted herself off. She wore a faded black leather uniform that had seen better days. Patched and piecemeal, it had obviously belonged to many other people before she had acquired it. Tight fitting, with padding around the shoulders, elbows and knees, it had two dull purple lines crossing at the front in a large X. The motif was repeated on the upper arms, in miniature.
"I said it was an accident," he repeated, although his mind was already moving on to the next problem. "Hey, I remember your face. You were in the crowd when I arrived, and at the coffee stall--and at the hostel." Facts clicked belatedly into place. "You've been following me!"
"You don't sound very glad about it," she said, glaring at him and picking up a short, fat tube from the rough ground. Tapped once hard against her thigh, it emitted a beam of weak blue light that she shone into his eyes. "If I hadn't come along, you'd be another squeal closer to dying down here."
"But--" There was no denying his gratitude at being rescued, but he couldn't leave it at that. "Who are you?"
"My name is
Understanding dawned. "So that's what you're doing down here. This is where you work. You weren't following me at all; you just heard me yelling."
She laughed. "You're an idiot, Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth."
"Huh?"
"You have no idea how Laure works. That's why I'm following you. Someone's got to keep folks like you out of trouble."
Stung by her tone, he turned away to pick check his robes for rips. Vivid afterimages cast by her lightstick danced across his vision. "Look, thanks for helping me, but if you're not going to tell me anything useful, don't bother sticking around. I can find my own way back up."
She didn't say anything. He felt her staring at him, and turned to find her examining him quite seriously, all trace of mockery gone.
"You're a strange one," she said. "It's not just your pale skin. I watched you taking directions in the hostel last night. The place was full of people. Once the word got around that a Stone Mage with money was looking for information about the caves, every guide and scrounger in town came running."
"I'm not a Stone Mage," Skender protested. "I haven't graduated yet."
"So? If you dress like one, people will naturally assume. I followed them out of curiosity, and there you were, listening to everything everyone was saying, taking it all in. You never asked twice; you never drew any maps. People thought you were having them on. Some of them started giving you bogus directions, trying to catch you lying, but they never did. If what they told you was inconsistent, you caught them out. It was as if you knew the way already."
Her intense regard made him feel uncomfortable. "I don't know the way," he said, quite honestly. "I just have a good memory. A perfect one. Once I see or hear something, I never forget it."
"Really? And here I was thinking you remembered me because of my good looks."
The beginnings of a flush made his ears redden. "That's not what I meant--"
She laughed again. "You're such an easy target, stone-boy. Don't you ever get teased back home?"
He certainly did. He'd lived his entire life in a school full of older students. That his father was the headmaster didn't protect him from regular ribbing; in fact, it encouraged it. His defences were normally excellent.
But there was something about
"You were at the hostel," he said, "so you know why I'm here. My mother is missing."
"And you're looking for her down here." She nodded. "That was the part you weren't very clear on. Why down here? Why the caves of Laure?"
It was a long story, and the air in the cramped cave was already beginning to grow musty.
Skender indicated the crack behind him. "Looks like I'm not going to get much further this way. Why don't we go back up and I'll tell you then? Maybe you can help me work out what to do next."
Her teeth were white in the light of his glowstone. "I'd better not make a habit of doing that," she said. "You couldn't possibly afford my rates."
Remembering himself, he told her, "Rates? If I could afford hired help, I wouldn't be lost down here in the first place."
Her laugh was rich and echoed back at them from a hundred rock faces as they began their ascent into the daylight.
#
Some five weeks earlier, Abi Van Haasteren
had left on her latest expedition, departing the subterranean city of
"Dignity," he had once told Skender, his voice like the buzz of bees from a great distance, "is in short supply among the living."
"But you are alive," he'd responded. "Aren't you?"
"In a manner of speaking."
"Which manner?"
"The one that matters."
"Is this boy bothering you?" asked a voice from behind him. Skender felt a big hand come down heavily on his shoulder. "Move along, Skender. Mawson has important cogitating to do."
Skender turned and looked up into a broad,
pale face. Kemp was the largest person
he had ever met, and an albino with it, so he stood out in any crowd. A refugee from the
Skender didn't respond to the good-natured ribbing. "You'll keep an eye on everyone. Won't you?"
"An eye and an ear," Kemp assured him, grinning and moving off to help the baggage handlers. "Don't worry about it. We'll be back before you know it."
Skender had gone to see them off, the space-bending Way leading from the Keep to Ulum allowing him to cross hundreds of kilometres in a few paces. Why his mother didn't use such means to travel to her destinations was beyond him. The charm took its toll and wasn't entirely safe, but travelling across the Interior for weeks on end had the same disadvantages. He had tried both, and knew which he preferred.
"At least take the buggy," he pressed her as she checked the last of the provisions to be loaded. "You know Mawson prefers to travel that way."
"He's the least of my concerns," she said, lashing a crate into place with a deft knot. Her long, brown hair hung to her waist in beaded strands and swung with every movement. Lines of delicate, tattooed characters framed her face and arms--characters he had tried to read ever since his childhood, without success. She was striking and mysterious, even to Skender, her son. He had inherited her hair and skin colour and his father's memory, but the height of neither.
"What about Dad?" he pressed her. "Couldn't you at least have gone to say goodbye to him?"
"Couldn't he have come here?" She adjusted a camel's harness a little too abruptly. It snorted and eyeballed her warningly. She sighed and turned to Skender. "Your father doesn't approve."
"He never does, but that doesn't stop you two getting along."
"Not this time," she said. "He doesn't like where we're going, or why."
"Where is that, again?" He asked, trying to sound casual. "I don't believe I've heard."
She tilted her head to one side. "If you'd heard, you'd know. And that's why you haven't heard. I'm keeping this one close to my chest, in case someone else beats me to it." She patted the rust-red travelling robes above her heart. "Don't worry, my Skender. We'll be okay. And when we come back, we'll have found something wonderful. Just you wait and see."
She had hugged him tightly then, and he had hugged her back, even though her words did little to reassure him. The caravan had trundled with a rattle and clatter of wheels out of the staging area, with the dour ex-Sky Warden Shom Behenna bringing up the rear, his black skin a vivid contrast to those around him. His mother had waved at him as she mounted the ramp leading to the surface, then turned her eyes forward, to the long journey ahead.
Skender returned to the Keep and finished his assignments for that week, then climbed out of his bedroom window and scaled the cliff as high as he dared, without rope or harness to arrest a fall, relying solely on the strength of his arms and legs to hold him firm against the sun-warmed rock. He knew he was taking a risk--but why shouldn't he? If his mother was allowed to throw herself headlong into some unknown venture her father disapproved of, he didn't see why he was any different.
Five years earlier, he had stowed away on a
caravan similar to hers, one headed south for the
Ever since his return, he had had a keen appreciation of what his mother was risking every time she left him. He didn't want to lose her to the dangers of the world. He wished she could be more like his father, who seemed perfectly happy confined to the Keep, where he taught his charges in the way of the Change. Why wasn't his mother, like him, content to stay home?
Skender told himself that he worried too much. His mother was a supremely capable Senior Surveyor. She had a good team. He climbed back down to his room after the sun had set, feeling his way by moon- and starlight. The smell of roast potatoes drifted up from the kitchens and his stomach rumbled.
#
A month later, when word had come that Abi Van Haasteren and her party had been given up for dead by their caravan porters, he confronted his father and demanded that something be done to find her. He railed and ranted, expecting an argument in response. His father normally defended his mother's right to do as she willed. This time, however, all Skender received was worried agreement.
"I am concerned, yes," said the Mage Van Haasteren, sitting heavily into a chair and resting his head on one hand. His rich red robes, trimmed with gold thread, sighed with him. "Abi normally makes contact once a day when she's away. It takes a significant amount of strength to call so far, especially among the Ruins, but she does it to ease my mind. I haven't heard from her for two days, now."
Skender's father stared at him with a long, lined face and helpless eyes.
"Two days--and you didn't tell me?" Skender paced the room, needing a vent for the vague anxiety that had just transformed into very specific concern. "We should raise an alarm, send another party, do something!"
"You know the Surveyor's Code, Skender. I can't ask them to break it."
Skender did know the Code. He could even see the sense in it. Ruins were dangerous places, filled with power from ancient times. Some of that power was inimical to humanity. If someone met with disaster inside a Ruin, sending a rescue party might just see more people injured or killed. Such accidents were written off as bad luck, and such Ruins were never visited again.
But this was his mother...
"Tell me where she went," he demanded.
The Mage retreated. "No. If you don't already know--and I'm certain you asked--then I will not break her confidence."
"Tell me," he insisted, leaning over the table to confront his father nose to nose. "I'm not leaving this room until you do."
"And if I do tell you? What then?"
Skender was startled by the fear in his father's voice, but he didn't let that deter him. "You know what I'll do. And I know you want her back as badly as I do. So let's just get it over with. If we're both wrong and she turns up safe and sound tomorrow, I'll never let on."
The Mage had capitulated then, looking older than Skender had ever seen him. He was trapped too, pressured by law and custom and plain good sense to abandon his wife to her fate, yet hating the thought of it as much as Skender.
"A city called Laure."
"Where?"
"On the Divide."
His stomach clenched. "Don't tell me. She wouldn't be so stupid. Would she?"
His father neither nodded nor shook his head. "Your mother may be many things, Skender, but stupid isn't one of them. She claimed to know what she was doing. All I could do was believe her."
Skender couldn't credit what he was
hearing. Many dangerous things had
walked the Earth since the Cataclysm and the elder days of the Change. Most of them came from or had been herded
into the Divide, a vast crack across the landscape separating the underground
desert cities of the Interior from the coastal villages of the
He tore his mind from the image of his mother caught in such a trap and found himself standing in the middle of his father's chambers with his hands hanging limply from his side. He felt as though he had woken in the middle of sleepwalking.
His father's hand came down on his shoulder. He looked up into the Mage's face, for once not resentful of the fact that their heights weren't equal. It felt good to be towered over. He longed to be held, as though that alone would solve anything.
"You'll need these," his father said, pressing something cold and sharp-edged into his hand.
He looked down at a ring of keys. "The buggy?"
"I can't give you anything else. The Synod won't support a rescue mission; I've tried to make them, and they won't listen."
"But--"
"Go now. Forget about your homework. Some things are simply more important."
More important than homework? That the idea had ever occurred to his father, let alone issued from his mouth, impressed on Skender just how serious the situation was. He hurried to his room, threw everything he thought he might need into a satchel, and ran to where the buggy rested in its makeshift garage. It was fully fuelled and provisioned for a long journey. The smell of fresh oil was testimony the fact that it had recently been serviced.
As he swung himself into the seat and started the engine, he realized that his father had been thinking of going himself. Fear and responsibility had held him back.
"I'll bring her home," he whispered over the roaring of the motor. "Don't worry."
That promise kept him going for two thousand kilometres, across desert and ancient hills, to where Laure crouched like a child playing hide-and-seek in a corner of the Divide, with only the tips of its tarnished towers peeking into view.
#
"So you followed her trail to where
the porters left her,"
Behind the general hubbub, Skender could hear the wailing of the city's ruling guild of red-robed weather-workers, the yadachi, as they exhorted with the wind to bring rain. They sat on thin, vertical poles high above street-level, where everyday concerns were distant. On certain days, when significant winds blew, giant pipes caught the superheated air and turned it into notes so low they were more felt than heard. That music was silent, for the moment. The only other melody he could detect in the city's babble was the mournful lay of a duduq, a double-reeded instrument that in skilled hands could make every note a lament.
"Then what?"
"She went into the Divide," he said, "at a natural pass called the Devil's Elbow which is protected against things trying to come up, not down. They camped at the top, and that's obviously where they argued about who was going to go and who wasn't. I found signs suggesting that the porters stayed for a while after she went down the pass. Maybe they genuinely waited for her to come back; maybe they waited barely as long as was decent. Either way, they left no tracks to suggest that they went after her, or that she came back that way later."
"Did you go down the pass?"
He shook his head. "Her trail was old, and I didn't know what I'd be walking into. I followed the top of the Divide instead, heading northeast along the Interior side." Even from the relative safety of the escarpment, he had felt on edge during that daylong journey. The far side of the Divide was kilometres away, and the yawning emptiness had tugged relentlessly at him. The buggy bounced over rough ground, following a faint track that hadn't been used for decades. Every bump seemed to twist the wheels toward the Divide. He gripped the steering wheel and concentrated on keeping his heading straight.
At the same time, he looked for any sign of his mother and her expedition on the parched valley floor, dozens of meters below. The earth was pitted and scarred down there, as though an ancient battle had churned the soil and split the bedrock in thousands of places. Dust devils and heat distortions danced in the air above gaping rents, as capricious as ghostly birds. Fleeting glints of light drew his eye to shadowy clefts, but disappeared before he could see what made them. He was reminded of descriptions of the Broken Lands, where the land lay in endless jumbles, terrain of all different sorts jutting into each other like a jigsaw puzzle dropped by a giant.
Between the rents were occasional sheets of startlingly smooth sand, white, grey and red. Some of them were hundreds of meters long, stretching like melted caramel along the centre of the Divide. On these sheets, he saw tracks that might have been made by a reckless Surveyor and her party. Nowhere else did he see a single sign of life.
Then he had seen Laure, the walled city, and her destination had become obvious.
"I don't know much about your
home," he said to
"We call it the Aad," said
Skender nodded. That matched the Book of Towers, too. "What the Book doesn't say about Laure is that it rests on a cave system. You can see the openings from further up the
Divide." The geography of Laure was
complex, belying the simplicity of the tale.
Laure was tucked into a triangular dogleg of the Divide like a rat
backed into a corner. The ground it
rested on had subsided in the distant past, most probably during the Cataclysm,
so that the remains of the original settlement now clung to its sloping
fringes. A
To the left and right of the Wall, dotting the sheer cliff faces, gaping holes led deep underground. "I think my mother was heading for them, or was forced to hide in them by something unexpected."
"They're not just caves," said
A shiver of dread mixed with excitement rushed through him. "I don't understand how you could be a miner and not have seen them. Isn't using the old tunnels and caves the obvious thing to do if you're digging underground?"
"Right." Again she smiled knowingly.
"You're not telling me something," he said her, pushing his empty cup aside and leaning over the table. "You know where my mother is, don't you?"
Brushing an errant strand of perfectly black hair from her eyes, she approached until they were less than a hand's span apart. "I think it's time we came to an arrangement, Skender Van Haasteren," she said in a conspiratorial whisper. "You say you don't have much money, but that's not a problem. We can still do business. Agree, and I'll tell you why me being a miner doesn't have anything to do with old tunnels and caves. I'll also tell why you're probably looking in the wrong place for your mother. Okay?"
Skender was automatically suspicious. He thought of all the material things he had brought with him: the buggy; his notes; a small amount of money; and an ornate metal clasp his mother had salvaged from a burial site excavated three years earlier, which he was too afraid to wear in the city in case it was stolen. There was nothing he would willingly part with.
On the other hand, he needed to know where his mother might be. And he found that he enjoyed the company of this strange young woman. He could live with the risk of being screwed over in order to keep her around a little longer.
He scratched his arm where his Blood Tithe had been taken on entry into the city. The small wound itched.
"What do you want?" he asked her.
"Something you take completely for granted," she said. "And if you do it right, it won't cost you a thing."
"What?"
"Freedom, Skender Van Haasteren." Her dark brown eyes were bottomless. "You're my ticket, and I'm not letting go of you until you've delivered."