The Dragon Book (37 page)

Sean Williams is best known internationally for his award-winning space opera series and novels set in the Star Wars universe, many cowritten with Shane Dix. These include the Astropolis
,
Evergence
,
Orphans
,
and Geodesica series, and the #1
New York Times
bestselling computer-game tie-in
The Force Unleashed.
His stories have been gathered in several collections, including
New Adventures in Sci-Fi, Light Bodies Falling,
and
Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams.
He is also the author of ten linked fantasy novels inspired by the landscapes of his childhood: the dry, flat lands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family. These include the Books of the Change
(The Stone Mage & the Sea, The Sky Warden & the Sun,
and
The Storm Weaver & the Sand)
and the Books of the Cataclysm
(The Crooked Letter—
the first fantasy novel to win both the Aurealis and Ditmar awards
—The Blood Debt, The Hanging Mountains,
and
The Devoured Earth).
His most recent series in this world is The Broken Land
(The Changeling, The Dust Devils,
and
The Scarecrow),
to which this story is closely connected.

Here he takes us along on a dangerous quest with a warrior who must ultimately decide where his loyalties lie—and who finds that either choice may well be deadly.

Absence is to love what wind is to fire;
it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.

—R
OGER DE
R
ABUTIN

ON the twenty-third day of his quest, the young man detected crabbler spoor. Swinging the reins of his mechanical steed sharply to the left, he parked in the shade of the yellow canyon wall and lightly hopped to the ground. Dust puffed under his heels, leaving deep indentations in his wake. The marks he had spied weren’t footprints. They were long and thin, as though someone had scratched the ground with a bone needle. His were the only human signs that he had seen in over a week of westward travel.

He squatted as though to examine the trail but was in reality listening more closely than he was seeing. Above the unnamed wind that blew constantly along this section of the Divide, he heard a dry rattling, as of dice in a cup. Straightening, he looked up and to his right.

Four body-lengths above him, a giant, sand-coloured spider crouched on an outcrop of ancient rock, watching him with too-numerous, pebbly eyes. He froze, watching it right back. The crabbler wasn’t the biggest he had ever seen, but it was still wider across than his arms could reach. If it jumped, he would have only an instant to draw the knife at his side or to raise a flame through the Change. And if there were more of them …

A sharp tattoo came from the other side of the canyon. A second and third crabbler were splayed across the stone like scars on the world. The brisk clatter came from the mouth parts of a fourth that was so perfectly camouflaged against the stone that he could barely see it.

That crabbler spoke slowly, intending its words for his ears.

“We know you,” it said, “Roslin of Geheb.”

Moving slowly, Ros bent down and picked up a pair of flinty stones. Holding one in each hand, and feeling somewhat foolish, he clacked out a brief reply. Master Pukje had taught him the crabbler tongue in the early days of his apprenticeship, but he had had little reason to “speak” it before.

“I am he,” he told the crabblers. “What of it?”

“You took something from us.”

That was true. A long time ago, when he had been little more than a boy, he had rescued a girl called Adi from a crabbler coven one month’s travel from here. Word had obviously spread.

He raised himself to his full height.

Years of training and exercise had made him strong, since then, and broad with it. Dark hair hung in a thick pony-tail halfway down his back. Stray curls stirred as the Change woke at his command, making the steady breeze skittish.

“You will let me pass,” he said firmly through the stones.

“You cannot,” the crabbler told him. “The way ahead is blocked.”

“Then I will unblock it.”

“You cannot,” it said again. “Turn back now.”

“Is that a threat or a warning?”

“Take it how you will, Roslin of Geheb.”

Turning lightly on its eight legs, the crabbler crawled into a crack in the stone, closely followed by its two companions.

“Wait.” Ros regretted taking such a confrontational stance. Crabblers or not, these were the first living creatures he had seen on his quest. They knew the Divide much better than he did, and could help him, perhaps, if he talked fast.

The first crabbler he had seen was heading for a similar retreat in the wall behind him.

“I’m looking for something,” he said, clacking as quickly as he could. “A dragon, of sorts. Have you …?”

But the creature scuttled away without reply, leaving him standing alone, frowning, in the canyon’s still-restless breeze. The vanes of his strand beast flapped back and forth, gathering the energy of the wind and storing it in two rows of ceramic flasks around the machine’s wooden flank. Its one hundred and twelve tiny feet were poised in attitudes of readiness, waiting for him to climb aboard and continue his journey. Not the hardiest of steeds, it barely managed his weight plus that of the pack he carried, but it was at least as quick as a camel and much less vulnerable.

You cannot. Turn back now.

He didn’t entirely trust his translation of the crabbler language. It might have been trying to tell him
You cannot turn back now.

He had no doubts on that score, but how had the crabblers guessed?

Tugging on the silver locket that hung from a leather thong around his neck, he kicked up three more small clouds of dust and leapt into the saddle. Jerking the reins—actually a wooden handle connected by two strips of leather to the machine’s complicated gear-box—he spurred the strand beast back into motion. Chuffing and hissing, his wooden steed lunged forward, and the echoes of its clockwork engine bounced back at him from the rugged canyon walls.

WESTWARD, ever westward. Although the Divide snaked north and south as it sliced through the red earth of the world, it unerringly returned to face the sunset. Ros had taken to camping so the sun’s direct light would strike him of a morning, lessening the feeling of oppression that came from travelling so long in the shadow of two parallel cliffs. The canyon floor was utterly lifeless, and his eyes had grown tired of seeing nothing but yellows and browns. Even the sky above looked washed out and faded.

Not long after his encounter with the crabblers, his attention was caught by a single cloud drifting on the forward horizon. It was perfectly white, tapering from a fat centre to nothingness at its extremities, and provided a welcome break from the monotony. Ten days earlier, he had passed the ruined city of Laure, where people his age flew to and from the Hanging Mountains, trading and exchanging information. He imagined what it would be like to swoop around the wispy fringes of the cloud in one of their flimsy-looking kites. He doubted the air up there was as still as it seemed.

He wondered what Adi would think of something so whimsical and dangerous.

“I hope this letter finds you well,” she had written shortly before he had set off on his quest. The formal tone disheartened him, made him feel that he did not know her. “I hope also that it finds you unchanged in your feelings, for I remain committed to the promise we made to each other five years ago. If this letter should find you certain in the knowledge of that, I would be pleased. Be assured that it will never be otherwise.

“Most of all, I hope that this letter just
finds
you. It’s been so long since I last had word, and I suppose it’s only natural to worry. I keep that strange little galah you sent as a pet, even though the charm must surely have faded by now. Maybe one day it’ll tell me something new—perhaps that you’ve received this letter and are on your way back to me now, with a glad heart.

“I can dream, can’t I?” That flash of her own voice, poking through the letter’s stilted reserve, offered him the barest reassurance that he wasn’t being addressed by a complete stranger. “Do what you have to do, Ros, then come find me in return. The charm I have enclosed will show you the way. Trust it as I have trusted our hearts all these years. Don’t be led astray now, when we are closer than ever.”

The letter had been folded tightly around the silver pendant he now wore about his neck. He could tell that it was hollow but not empty, and guessed that it contained a small piece of Adi’s skin, or perhaps a chip of tooth. The letter itself had been stained brown with her blood and bound up in several plaited strands of her black hair. Unwinding the hair carefully, he had retied it in a cuff around his left wrist.

The leather thong chafed his neck sometimes. From his worrying at the pendant, he supposed, at the weight of what it symbolised.

“Don’t forget your promise to me,” Master Pukje had warned him on learning of the contents of the letter. “I said I’d teach you only if in return you perform one task for me.”

“I won’t ever forget that,” Ros had said, inclining his head even though his master couldn’t see the gesture. They had been flying low past the shallow bowl of the Nine Stars, exercising the less-human of Master Pukje’s two forms. Ros had untied his hair and let the thick mane whip behind him in the wind, imagining that he was the one whose wings propelled them mightily through the air. “You remind me every day,” he had added.

“There’s an ocean of difference between remembering an agreement and honouring it.”

“I’ll honour it just as soon as you tell me what my task is.”

“I’ll tell you only when I’m absolutely certain you’re ready for it.”

How his master had finally concluded that he was ready, Ros didn’t know, but he was on the way now.

The pendant tugged insistently on its thong, urging him north, to where Adi was learning to manage her Clan’s caravan under her father’s tutelage. She had meant the gift to reach him, no matter what; that was why she had bound it with flesh, hair, and blood. When the time came, when his obligation to Master Pukje was fulfilled, her charm would lead him unerringly to her, whether he wanted to go or not.

There could be, as the crabblers said, no turning back.

DISTRACTED by both cloud and memories, he had long put the rest of the crabblers’ words out of his mind when he took a bend and saw exactly what they had meant.

A single, vast web stretched from one side of the Divide to the other, sparkling and gleaming where the sun struck it directly, barely visible at all where it did not. Ripples moved along silken strands, struck by the wind’s insubstantial fingers. It was too large to have been built by ordinary spiders and couldn’t have been the work of crabblers, either, since they produced no natural silk. Something else had built it, or grown it, or caused it to come into being, somehow, and he could proceed no further without breaking it.