* * * *

 

Born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, #1 New York Times-bestselling author Sean Williams has been described as ‘the premier Australian speculative fiction writer of the age’ and dubbed the ‘King of Chameleons’ for the diversity of his output. He writes for young readers and adults, and is best-known internationally for his award-winning space opera series, such as Astropolis, Evergence and Geodesica, and his work for the Star Wars franchise. 2004’s The Crooked Letter was the first fantasy novel to win both the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards in history. 2002’s The Storm Weaver & the Sand was recommended by Locus alongside novels by Neil Gaiman and Isabel Allende. In 2009, The Changeling and The Dust Devils were nominated for three Aurealis Awards between them. Sean lives in Adelaide with his wife and family, and is still dreaming of new stories to tell about the magical land around him.

 

* * * *

 

The Spark (A Romance in Four Acts):

A Tale of the Change

 

Sean Williams

 

 

ADITI SABATINO

 

The young man lay cool and unresponsive on Adi’s bed. She had undressed and washed him, and in the process thoroughly examined his body for any sign of injury. She knew him now much better than she ever had, but not in a way that satisfied her.

 

His eyes were open and they did not see her. She lay next to him in the hot room, wearing only her underclothes, and he made no move to touch her.

 

‘What do I do now, Ros?’

 

He gave no sign of hearing.

 

‘Tell me what happened and I’ll do whatever it takes to fix it.’

 

His expression didn’t change, not even when she rattled him by the shoulders like a vat of settled ale.

 

‘You’re supposed to be my husband, not a corpse!’

 

Roslin of Geheb lay quietly beneath her, lungs steadily breathing and heart steadily beating.

 

Adi bent forward and wept onto his hairless chest.

 

* * * *

 

A day earlier, she had checked into the Lost Dolphin Hostel under the name Hakamu, an alias they had used on their last journey together. As a boy, Ros had bested both the Bee Witch and the Golem of Omus, and had saved her life no less than twice along the way. Adi had saved him too, that last time, and stories of their deeds had spread like locusts across the land. Everyone knew Aditi Sabatino and Roslin of Geheb, or thought they did. For some years it had bothered her that people told tales by firelight that amplified or decreased her role, or ignored her entirely to focus on the farmboy-made-good. Then she had learned that it was fine for business, and discovered that she wasn’t above using the weight of storytelling to drive a harder bargain.

 

On this occasion, she didn’t avail herself of that opportunity. She happily took the hostel’s going rate and hid her Clan markings behind a veil. She had come to finish a story that no one but she and Ros knew anything about.

 

Despite this resolve, her hands shook as she unfolded her pack on her bed. The precious brassy charm lay within, nestled carefully among wadded clothes and her toiletries, worn smooth by years of careful examination — dented too by being occasionally hurled into a wall — but it still functioned. At one end was fixed a crystal that glowed red when she pointed it at the south-east corner of the room.

 

She shuttered the windows and tested it again. The sunlight reflecting down crystal chimneys to the underground thoroughfares of Ulum was not a patch on standing under the naked sky, but her eyes had become used to it, making subtle gradations of shade in the crystal difficult to tell. Swinging the rod from side to side in the gloom, she confirmed her first impressions. South-east it was.

 

Caught between impatience and dread, her empty stomach festering, Adi waited until nightfall before putting the promises she had made to the test.

 

* * * *

 

The charm was a limited thing. Its crystal glowed only when it was pointed in the direction of Roslin of Geheb. That simple trick had sustained her for five years of separation. Many, many times in the years they had been apart had she taken comfort from it. No matter how far away he was, the charm would seek him out and tell her where he lay. South, north, east, west — on lonely nights, he could have been on the far side of the world or just outside the walls of her wagon.

 

She never once opened a window to test the latter hope. Until his apprenticeship was complete, she knew it was bound to be dashed.

 

One hour after sunset, when the halls of Ulum were as dark as they were going to get, she dressed and placed the veil across her features once again. Tightly clutching the charm in both hands, she left the room and headed into the warrens outside. Still south-east, the crystal said. Ulum was cramped and crowded, a city squeezed into caves that were forever too small, no matter how much the civil miners dug. At the highest points of the underground city, curving towers reached for the ranks of luminescent algae that dotted the night ‘sky’ like stars. Elsewhere, winding roads fought with buildings for space, and people squeezed in where they could.

 

Even after nightfall the city was busy. Traders mixed freely with locals once the markets were closed. Accents varied, as did clothes and skin colour. Adi’s skin was darker than most to the north, her hair and eyes with it. With her Clan markings covered, she could have passed for an emissary from the Strand — perhaps even a Sky Warden, had she the tore to match.

 

The charm led her deep into a maze of lanes and teetering buildings. For seven days, according to the charm, Ros hadn’t moved. She didn’t expect him to move now. It was a sign, she told herself, a sign from him. It had to be. He had never before stayed so long in one spot, and the charm had never pointed her so surely to a city like Ulum — a natural meeting place if ever there was one.

 

Her nostrils breathed with easy familiarity the comingled scents of perfume, spice and camel shit. It wasn’t lack of air, then, that made her feel light-headed. Roslin of Geheb was in the city somewhere. She wouldn’t sleep until she found him.

 

* * * *

 

The charm led her truly, but the ways of Ulum were ever crooked. Straight lines, like the flagstones underfoot, had long been worn into curves or cracked entirely. When she wanted to go left, every road tended right. Crowds of people and flocks of animals frequently blocked her path. It took her half the night to travel a mile.

 

Tired and on edge, she arrived at a tiny, hexagonal courtyard that was lit by reddish glowstones and greened only by weeds growing through the cobbles. The charm pointed to one of two doors on the far side. Plunging through the doorway, she collided heavily with someone emerging from within.

 

The charm went flying. She clutched at it, caught it just as it made contact with hard stone. Something tinked within its metal casing. A cold feeling rushed through her at the knife-sharp thought: broken.

 

She spat a word she only used when negotiations took a particularly atrocious turn. The man she had run into didn’t stop. He was moving too quickly, already disappearing out of the courtyard. She flung another harsh word at his back, and let him go.

 

With faint hope, she raised the charm and pointed it south-east.

 

The crystal was dark.

 

Sickness rose up in her, physical and existential. There was only one course left to her: through the door, with momentum regained; trusting in the charm’s last flicker just as she trusted Ros to be there, waiting for her.

 

The building was a doss-house, cramped and stinking. Every door was open, every screen pulled aside. People came and went freely, muttering and cursing in the fashion of the broken-minded. She stumbled through their filth and refuse, thinking that this wasn’t the life Ros had set out to find. What had gone so badly wrong? Or was it possible that the charm had been malfunctioning all along, and he was no closer than he had ever been?

 

Then through the darkness of her thoughts she saw him — a pale shape sprawled partially-clothed across a filthy narrow mattress. Dark, lank locks hung in lazy spirals across his brow. Half-open eyes cast deep shadows across his cheeks. His lips were slack. He was older, larger, manlier — but it was him.

 

Him . Truly, truly him.

 

She ran to him and cupped his head in her hands, lifted it as she would a child’s. The weight of it surprised her, as did the tears that came on seeing him. They dripped unchecked onto his face and she called his name in relief.

 

He neither moved nor spoke. His eyes saw right through her, if they saw anything at all. He didn’t register her presence, no matter how she implored him, then shook him, then slapped his face lightly, hoping that would bring him back to himself.

 

‘Won’t do no good, miz,’ said a wild-bearded man from outside the room. ‘He been like this a full week.’

 

At first, she had no response. A small crowd had gathered, watching her with wide-eyed curiosity. She suddenly saw herself as they did, and wondered at the determination that filled her.

 

This wasn’t how the story was supposed to go, but that didn’t mean it was over. It was only beginning.

 

Her tears vanished. Her spine straightened. She put Ros’s head down gently but firmly. Whatever had done this to him — a golem, perhaps, or a charm backfired — she would fix it.

 

‘You’ll help me,’ she told wild-beard and his friends. ‘I’ll pay you to carry him.’

 

Shrugging, sceptical, but convinced by her coin, the city’s under-dwellers were as compliant as she needed them to be, and no more.

 

* * * *

 

The manager of the Lost Dolphin had seen stranger things, no doubt. His right eyebrow might have risen a fraction on seeing the strange procession coming up his steps, but it was soon restored to its proper location. Once Ros was installed in Adi’s room and the grubby entourage despatched, he provided all that courtesy and custom demanded. The staff entered only when asked to bring tubs of warm water and clean towels, and food that only Adi ate. Ros drank drops of water at a time, when she tipped his head back and forced him to. She spoke to him, telling him how they had come to be together again, then asking him how he had arrived in Ulum. He hadn’t necessarily been injured in the city, she thought. He might have been brought here by persons unknown, rescued from the desert, perhaps, in which he would have quickly died. If such a benefactor existed, Adi wished she could track them down and press the questions that burned inside her on them.

 

Ros said nothing.

 

‘You’re supposed to be my husband, not a corpse!’

 

Ros said nothing.

 

* * * *

 

She wept because she had to. Powerful emotions were like sparkling wine: a vessel could contain them only so long before shattering under rising pressure. If she shattered, that would do neither of them any good.

 

The moment she regained control, she washed her face and dressed, moving swiftly but calmly. She rolled Ros onto his side and covered his nakedness with a sheet. A maid appeared at the door the moment she rang. Adi paid her to watch him while she was gone. She doubted he would be going anywhere.

 

Back out into the city she went. Dawn light was beginning to filter down the chimneys, pouring a brighter shine on the dirty streets. Adi’s hopes of a quick solution had evaporated during that long night, but she hadn’t given up yet. A physician was the next step, the best the city could provide at short notice. She had money in the form of coins and credit, the latter backed by the wealth and reputation of Clan Sabatino.

 

The third physician she called upon was willing to leave his bed and return with her to the hostel. Doctor Rishard, a hale-looking fellow of middling years with a crest of greying hair that stood up like a galah’s no matter how he tried to plaster it down, walked with long, sweeping strides, and to keep up Adi had to take two steps for every one of his. She responded positively to his haste, though, feeling as though he was giving her strength just by taking her plea seriously.

 

‘And you say he has been like this for how long?’

 

‘Seven days, I suspect. Perhaps longer.’

 

The physician nodded and went back to lifting Ros’s eyelids and poking at his flesh. He employed crystals, hammers, and needles, all without response. He passed a sample of Ros’s breath across a mirror and tested the consistency of several bodily fluids. Ros had soiled himself during Adi’s absence, and the maid’s half-hearted attempt to clean the mess proved to be a blessing in disguise.

 

Last of all, Doctor Rishard took a small bell out of his bag and rang it softly next to each of Ros’s ears. The tone warbled oddly, as though it was being sounded underwater.

 

He nodded.

 

‘What is it? Can you tell me what’s wrong with him?’

 

The physician bundled all his instruments back into the bag. ‘He was a Change-worker. That much I can tell you.’

 

She felt her ears growing pink. ‘How does that make a difference?’

 

‘It means I can’t treat him. I can only guess what might have put him in this state.’

 

She nodded, even as disappointment filled her. ‘Go on, then. Guess.’

 

‘It’s not a physical thing like a drug or a disease, but Stone Mages talk of it. They call it the Void Beneath. It eats minds. Dissolves them.’

 

‘How?’

 

He shook his head. ‘There, I’m of no use to you. The Void doesn’t appear in any of my textbooks. You’ll need another Change-worker if you want an answer.’

 

She did. Thanking Doctor Rishard, she paid him and sent him back home.

 

* * * *

 

A Change-worker. She was on quicksand now, and she knew it. This was Ros’s world, not hers. If he had got himself into trouble that way, she might not be able to get him out of it.

 

She briefly considered calling his teacher for help. Master Pukje was a strange being, though, part-dragon and entirely capricious. It was his demand that Ros be trained in the ways of the Change that had led to their long separation. Any help he offered would be coloured by that history. She soon decided to do what she could on her own before following that path.

 

Her first step was not the obvious one. The Stone Mages who ruled the Interior would recognise Ros immediately, and she wasn’t ready yet to cast off her cloak of anonymity. Adi was sure they weren’t the only Change-workers in the city. Illusionists, charm-makers, and seers all gravitated to the light of respectability, even if they were themselves denied a place within the brazier. With the markets open more than an hour already, she would have no trouble finding someone to talk to about her problem. The quality of the answer was the only variable.

 

This quest took her considerably longer than had her search for a physician. Carefully worded enquiries and bribes led her slowly up the ranks from tricksters and fakers to the genuinely talented. Along the way she received advice she had no intention of following: ensuring that the foot of Ros’s bed faced exactly north; daubing his skin with a salve made from wolf spider venom; chanting a series of nonsense words over him at every dawn and dusk; tattooing complex symbols at key points on his body, so the grace of the Goddess would be drawn to him, and restore him to himself. The procedures were offered with all appearance of sincerity, but she doubted even the practitioners believed in them. She was no more a Change-worker than a physician; nothing she did would make any difference, beyond finding the right person.

 

She came at last to a stately home in a relatively quiet corner of the city. Cubical and blunt, the house even sported trees at each corner — spindly, sick-looking things but trees nonetheless. They were the first of any size that Adi had seen in Ulum. It struck her as strange that a Change-worker should live in such opulent surrounds, but that wasn’t the mystery she had come to solve.

 

She knocked on the door and asked for Samson Mierlo. The house boy led her to a book-filled study and invited her to sit. She waited patiently, feeling very little by now but fatigue and desperation. Elsewhere in the house, doors opened and shut, and floorboards creaked. A woman coughed, long and throatily. On a plinth in the corner of the study, the bust of a high-templed man turned its head to regard her more closely.

 

She stared calmly back at it. Man’kin bothered some people, who saw in them nothing but falsity, a parody of life, but she was untroubled. They had their uses.

 

‘Now, Lady Hakamu,’ said a voice from the doorway behind her, ‘what is this grave matter of which you speak?’

 

She stood and shook the hand of the man she hoped would bring Ros back to her. Samson Mierlo had been described as something of a maverick, courting controversy and condemnation from the establishment he criticised, but he looked like nothing so much as a lawyer. Instead of robes he wore a grim, grey suit. His eyes were cool and grey, but weren’t without warmth.

 

Once again Adi explained the situation. This time, however, she went into greater detail. Mierlo was the city’s foremost expert in the Void Beneath. From him she hoped to gain a greater understanding of Ros’s condition, at least.

 

He waved for her to resume her seat, but didn’t rest himself. Pacing the room as she talked, he nodded and uttered short phrases that conveyed no actually meaning but encouraged her to continue.

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘Indeed.’

 

‘How so?’

 

‘Quite.’

 

The man’kin’s granite eyes tracked Mierlo smoothly as he walked and listened.

 

‘Naturally.’

 

‘Well.’

 

‘Hmmm.’

 

Only when she had finished did he take the seat opposite her and fold his long-fingered hands into a steeple.

 

‘The physician you consulted would have been no help at all, Lady Hakamu. This is quite beyond his understanding. Be thankful for his honesty, though; a less scrupulous surgeon might have insisted on treating your friend regardless, and done him more harm than good. Nothing in the world of medicine can help him now.’

 

‘Can you help him?’

 

‘No. But I can tell you this: your friend is where he is because of something he did, not something that was done to him. To use the Change one must reach into oneself. Reach too deeply and the Void awaits. I’ve seen many promising young talents overbalance and fall, out of pride, perhaps, or fear of failure. Either way, there’s no coming back. The Void Beneath devours all who enter it. How, exactly, we don’t know; it is a mystery we may never solve. But please don’t take hope from that admission. Every case history points in one direction. Your friend’s body may be perfectly sound, but his mind is gone.’

 

Adi stared at Samson Mierlo, certain he was telling her the truth as he understood it. It was, however, an understanding that she couldn’t accept.

 

‘There must be something —’

 

‘The Void Beneath is not a place, Lady Hakamu, that you can enter,’ he said, brusquely cutting her off. ‘It is not a foe that you can challenge. It is nothing — a nothing that takes everything in a person and grinds them back to nothing in turn. Such is the foundation of the world; there are no certainties but this one.’

 

Her right hand crushed her left. She was unable to speak.

 

‘I’ll leave you now,’ he said, standing. ‘I’m very sorry for your friend, and for you, since you care for him so deeply. When you are able, Ugo will show you out.’

 

She nodded, wanting to offer her thanks but unable to trust her clenched throat to issue anything remotely like a word.

 

His crisp footsteps led from the study, deep into the echoing house.

 

‘You will go to Madam Van Haasteren.’

 

Adi’s head jerked up. The voice wasn’t Samson Mierlo’s, and she had heard no one else enter the room.

 

The man’kin was looking at her.

 

‘Magda Van Haasteren,’ it repeated. ‘The seer.’

 

She stood too abruptly. ‘What?’ she asked through a wave of dizziness. ‘Are you talking to me?’

 

‘You will go to her.’

 

It froze as the house boy appeared in the doorway.

 

‘Did it just speak?’ he said incredulously, crossing to the plinth and staring hard into the stony eyes. ‘Did it say something to you?’

 

She shook her head, unsure why the man’kin wanted to keep its animation a secret hut deciding that she was willing to go along with it in exchange for its help. ‘I didn’t hear anything. Did you?’

 

‘I could’ve sworn ...’ The boy shook his shaved head as he guided her to the front door. ‘That old thing’s been in the family forever. If it ever woke up, the mistress would have a fit.’

 

‘It’s probably for the best, then, that it doesn’t.’

 

‘I guess.’

 

Adi could tell that the house boy had already put the mystery from his mind. She had no intention of doing the same.

 

* * * *

 

Magda Van Haasteren. The name meant nothing to her, but it was known in the city’s underbelly. Within an hour Adi had an address, and even a word or two of warning. For a mere seer, Van Haasteren had a surprisingly dark reputation. The rumours were light on details, though, and quite possibly inspired by envy. It was often the way with the genuinely talented, Adi thought, that they should be downplayed and reviled. Were Samson Mierlo correct in his opinion, it would take all the talent in the world to find Ros and bring him back.

 

Before returning to the dark side of the city, Adi returned to the Lost Dolphin to check on the man whose mind she was trying to save. He hadn’t moved beyond breathing or drinking the water dripped into his mouth by the maid. She was bored, Adi could tell, but she would have no respite. The manager assured Adi that the maid would attend Ros faithfully throughout the night, if necessary.

 

Adi stood for a moment, staring at the covered form of the man she had promised to take as a husband, so long ago. What had happened to that dream? The charm was in her bag, broken like him. How could either of them have been so careless ?

 

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t taken risks down the years. She was human, and forgave herself for being so. There had been other young men she’d had feelings for, and even one she had given herself to as a lover — in the desert port town of Lower Light, with complete anonymity. If she was to be anything in life, bride or otherwise, she would do so in the full light of the knowledge available to her.

 

A promise was a promise, though. A deal was a deal. That was a philosophy trading Clans took seriously. Her life had been built on it.

 

Your friend is where he is because of something he did, Samson Mierlo had told her.

 

If Ros ever spoke again, she would ask him what had been so important that he had risked throwing away their life together. She doubted, in the weary heat of the moment, that any answer would be sufficient.

 

* * * *

 

Back through the constricted streets, back into the filth. Adi was retracing her steps in a very real way, for Van Haasteren’s closet-sized stall was only a handful of blocks from the doss-house where she had found Ros. Where the charm had been broken. At that place, in that moment, everything had gone wrong.

 

An unwarranted thought occurred to her then: that if she had arrived one minute earlier, events would have unfolded in a very different way. The charm would have led her truly, and Ros would have greeted her with open arms. Was it so unlikely? The man she had collided with — he had been fleeing the scene as she approached. Could he have had something to do with Ros’s condition? Could he, in fact, have been the one responsible for it?

 

She struggled to remember his face. At most she had glimpsed him, for her attention had been almost entirely on the falling charm. Long hair pulled severely back from lean features, crisscrossed with thin lines that weren’t tattoos but might have been scars ...

 

She forced him from her mind. Lichen stars were coming out above as the chimneys fell dark. She hadn’t slept at all since arriving in Ulum the previous day, and it came to her then that she wasn’t thinking as clearly as she ought to. She needed her wits about her when dealing with Magda Van Haasteren — for fear of deception, or further disappointment.

 

* * * *

 

‘Come in quickly,’ the seer said when she rapped at the stall’s flimsy portal. ‘There is a chill in the air that gives me the bone-ache.’

 

Adi did as she was told. There was no sign above the door, but it matched the description she had received, as did the seer’s disposition. The air was no chillier than normal; the fans that stirred the cavern’s otherwise stagnant air turned with their usual velocity.

 

Madam Van Haasteren was a shapeless, slouched woman in a faded blue smock. Her face was heavily lined, with a down-turned mouth, and eyes that glittered in the light of a single, squat candle. One large-knuckled hand rested on a three-legged table to her side; she clutched a stinking cheroot in the other. Her voice was full of oil and gravel, like gears that had broken years ago, but ground on regardless, without respite.

 

Adi offered the woman her fake name, and it was accepted with a knowing stare.

 

‘You’re looking for someone,’ the seer said. ‘Such is the state of all who come to me — at their wits ends and desperate, more often than not.’

 

‘I’m no different, to tell the truth. If you can help me, I’ll pay you well.’

 

The seer waved at a second stool, more rickety than the first, and instructed her to sit. ‘Give me your hand, girl, and mind your tongue. I don’t do this for money.’

 

Adi felt five years old, and fought a sudden, surprising urge to weep. Her mother had died when she was a young girl, and her father had followed ten years later. For a time she had despaired of the attentions of her well-meaning aunts, but now she missed them, and her mother, and everything that family represented. She had left all that behind to come in search of Ros. And gained nothing.

 

Leathery old fingers clasped Adi’s left hand and pulled it close. Sharp eyes inspected back and front, and her fingernails too. They were bitten to the quick.

 

The seer grimaced. ‘Does he have a name?’

 

‘Sovan,’ she said, still unwilling to reveal their identities if the seer hadn’t already guessed them.

 

‘Tell me about him.’

 

‘He’s lost,’ Adi began, ‘fallen into the Void Beneath —’

 

‘Not that. Why do you want him back? If he’s gone, why not let him be gone and move on? Is there something special about him that you can’t find in any other man?’

 

Adi gaped, feeling slightly scandalised. Something special about Ros? Of course there was! She wouldn’t have come this far if there wasn’t.

 

‘Put it in words, girl. If you can’t define it, maybe it’s not there at all.’

 

She tried. Her voice shook as she talked of their first meeting. Ros had run away from home and her family had given him temporary shelter on the road. Adi had been promised to a boy from another Clan, and she had convinced Ros to take her with him when he left. She had trusted him more in that moment than anyone else, for reasons that she now found hard to capture.

 

The seer seemed to understand well enough. ‘You’re talking about the spark,’ she said, nodding gravely. ‘When two people meet who are ... not destined or connected, but complementary — yes, that’s the word I’m looking for — when that happens, you get the spark. You feel it with your whole body and in all your thoughts. It’s like a little bit of lightning, and it too can start a fire.’

 

Adi stared at the old woman, amazed as much by the passion that suddenly filled her voice as by the aptness of her words.

 

‘There’s more to the story,’ Adi said, thinking of monsters and death and the nightmares she still had, sometimes, ‘but none of that matters now.’

 

‘No, it doesn’t. That’s why I don’t need to know where you think he’s gone. What’s important is that he’s not here, or that he doesn’t recognise you, or both. That’s where it begins, but it doesn’t end there. You want him to know you, to be here for you, and you’re afraid that you can’t make that happen. Maybe he’s forgotten who you are. Maybe he doesn’t want to come to you. You can’t read his mind, and he won’t talk to you, so the uncertainty eats at you, eats at your faith in him. That leads to the questions. Did you do the right thing by letting him go? Would things be better or worse now if you had not? What will you do if you can’t get him back? Who changed — him or you? And the most important question of all: do you even want him back any more?’

 

Adi felt as though the seer had reached into her chest and clutched her heart in a tight grip. She could only stare at the gnarled hands still holding hers, and hope chat those sharp eyes didn’t see any deeper.

 

‘Answer my question, girl.’

 

‘Which one?’

 

‘Do you want him back?’

 

Adi thought of the doubt she had entertained on the way to the seer’s stall. Could anything Ros said now undo the damage that had been done to the faith she had in him? She saw in her mind his lifeless and impotent form. He had once been so strong. Was it his strength that had given her love for him such vitality? Could she love him now in weakness? Was that a weakness of her own, to even ask that question?

 

Her breath came in gulps. She barely noticed that she was crying.

 

‘Yes,’ Adi managed. ‘Yes, I do want him back.’

 

‘That’s a brave answer,’ said the seer, ‘after all that see-sawing. The cloth you’re cut from is strong as well as fine. Remember that, when you need to — because although I can help you, the cost will be high.’

 

Adi found herself released from the old woman’s tight grip, and she sat back, blinking. The single candle flame, which seemed to have become much brighter in recent minutes, dimmed now, casting thick shadows across the dingy cubicle. Someone in a hovel nearby was shouting, but she couldn’t make out the words.

 

Adi wiped the tears from her cheeks and breathed deeply of the smoky air.

 

‘How much?’

 

‘I’m not talking about money, girl.’

 

The seer gestured with her right hand at a wall hanging that might once have been quality work. Ill-served in its lifetime by smoke and neglect, it barely warranted a second glance, but for the significance it had now been given. Faded thread picked out the figure of a Stone Mage in full armour, his iron plates painted ochre with ceremonial rust. The figure stirred slightly, as though someone had moved behind him.

 

‘The understanding you seek lies through that curtain.’

 

Adi stood, and shivered, feeling the chill the seer had complained of earlier.

 

‘All right,’ she said, telling herself to see it through. She had faced worse fears and survived. ‘Thank you.’

 

The old woman shook her head. She had slouched down even further on her stool, so she sat splay-legged, like a man, and stared despondently at the muddy ember of her cheroot. ‘No need, Adi. No need.’

 

Adi was halfway through the curtain before she realised that the old woman had used her real name. By then, it was entirely too late to turn back.

 

* * * *

 

ROSLIN OF GEHEB

 

The young woman ducked into an alleyway. Ros shouted at her to wait, and when she did not do so he set off in immediate pursuit. He had caught only a glimpse of her, but he was certain this time that it was her, the woman he sought. There was no mistaking that long, thick hair, bound up in whirls and streams — or her rich, dark skin, against which the colourful fabric of her dress stood out so vividly — or the confidence in her walk and the almost capricious glance she cast over her shoulder as she vanished from sight.

 

By the time he reached the corner, the alleyway was empty. He ran ten steps along it, checking doors and fences as he went. They were secure. A clutch of women appeared from the nearest intersection, and he hurried to them, studying their faces carefully in turn. All of them were strangers. The side roads were clear too.

 

He turned in circles at the crossroad, unsure which way to go. That was the fourth time he had lost her in an hour. He was running out of both options and patience. Everything she asked him to do he had done, so why was she still playing games? What did she want from him?

 

‘Don’t do this, Adi,’ he called to the winding streets and the indifferent crowds. ‘I came for you like I promised. Show yourself, please!’

 

A flock of sparrows danced under Ulum’s buttressed ceilings, casting shadows from the light-chimneys that came and went, came and went.

 

With fists tightly clenched, Ros lowered his head and returned to the doss-house alone.

 

* * * *

 

He had been in Ulum a week, asking around after Clan Sabatino at Adi’s usual haunts, guided by his memories of her letters and little else. Civilisation seemed a strange thing to him now. Five years with Master Pukje had left him accustomed to empty spaces, rigid routines, and arcane forces. The ebb and flow of ordinary people confounded him. Sometimes he felt that they spoke an entirely different language, one he might never be able to understand.

 

He did learn that Adi’s Clan was on its way back from a long, north-western haul, and, to his regret, that Adi’s father had died a year ago. Ulick Sabatino had been a bluff, honourable man, who had placed his faith in Ros under extraordinary circumstances. That Ros had saved his daughter’s life hadn’t hurt, of course, but it took more than that to earn a permanent place at the Clan’s table. Marriage was the only sure-fire way, and even then it could be withdrawn.

 

That Adi supposedly wasn’t in Ulum surprised Ros, for his gut told him she was close. His gut had led him to the city from the depths of the desert, and he trusted it still. Persistence would prove the attempt worthwhile, he was sure. The veil of strangeness surrounding him would part before him, and reveal the one he sought.

 

He only hoped success would come soon, for his material means were limited. In the desert, he could survive for years unaided, but here he needed money, or a job, or some other means to support himself. The trials of a mad dragon were not recognised in the city as a valid qualification for anything — and besides, Ros was reluctant to reveal his true name. The power of his reputation had almost entrapped him once before. That wasn’t a road he wanted to follow again.

 

* * * *

 

For several days he did nothing but walk the streets, trusting not only his instincts but the paths he carved out through the city over the course of time — ornate, sprawling charms for the finding of lost things, the binding of hearts, the uncovering of secrets. He left cryptic messages employing aliases they had assumed in their youth, requesting rendezvous, return messages, or signs ranging from the subtle to the overt. He visited and revisited each location, but never once did Adi leave a response. His messages went unread, or at least unanswered.

 

He searched the face of every woman he passed, hoping for a flicker of familiarity.

 

He searched his own face in his shaving mirror, wondering what she would think of him when they met. There was no denying that he had changed. Sometimes, catching his reflection in a window or a doorway, he barely recognised the man he had become. But was he more or less handsome ? Would she think the cost of his training too high?

 

‘Staring’ll make you no prettier,’ mocked the wild-bearded man who inhabited the cot across from him. And if the mirror cracks, you’ll be worse off still.’

 

Ros ignored the cackling half-wit and resumed his search.

 

* * * *

 

On the sixth day, he received a note. It was delivered to the doss-house during one of his extended searches and left upon his bedroll to await his return. He unfolded the stiff paper with eager fingers and scanned the single line it contained. A place and a time. No more.

 

She had neither addressed it to him nor signed it, but he was sure it was from Adi. Holding the paper to his nose, he imagined that he could detect a faint residue of her scent upon it. His heart beat a little faster at the knowledge that they were one step closer to reunion.

 

The rendezvous was scheduled for dawn the next morning. Ros barely slept that night, imagining how his life would change. The stories told about him ended with the defeat of the Scarecrow five years earlier. For him, the real story was about to begin.

 

* * * *

 

He arrived one quarter of an hour early, and waited exactly where the note had specified. Even at that early hour, the market was busy, and he craned his neck to catch a glimpse as she approached. As the appointed time neared, he could barely keep still. His jostling and pacing attracted the attention of more than one trader, but he rebuffed their sales pitches with steadfast cheer.

 

The hour came and went, and Adi did not appear. Ros told himself to be patient, and waited another quarter-hour, then a half.

 

A full hour after the time specified in the note, he left, a pale approximation of the man he had been earlier that morning.

 

There was another note on his bedroll, equally brief. The second meeting was on the far side of the city with bare minutes to spare. Ros didn’t question the need for haste. Adi must have been delayed, surely, and all explanations would be rendered unnecessary by her presence. Barely stopping to draw breath, he sprinted along the dusty thoroughfares and carriageways, dodging and weaving when crowds failed to part before him.

 

He arrived almost punctually, breathing heavily and casting about for her in the halls of the city library. It was cool and quiet within. Too quiet: his urgent calling and searching were not welcome. Undaunted he peered into every nook and cranny and through every door, pushing books aside when faces were obscured. He left only when certain that the chambers were empty of the one he sought. He had missed her.

 

Furious at his ill fortune, he hurried back to the doss-house in case another note had arrived.

 

It had, but this time he did not immediately open it. He held it gently in his hand. Like a dead moth, it could be crushed in an instant, and for a dozen breaths he was tempted. This insubstantial yet weighty thing could lead him on another fruitless quest. Without proof that it was from Adi, he would be unwise to hurry anywhere.

 

With new circumspection, Ros opened the letter. It contained the same as before, only this time there was even less opportunity to make the rendezvous.

 

No, he told himself. He was not at anyone’s beck and call. This test of loyalty, if such it was, would be answered by a test of his own.

 

Folding the note into halves and slipping it back onto his bedroll, he exited the doss-house and made as if to follow the route required.

 

When he was certain he wasn’t being shadowed, he doubled-back and procured a vantage-point atop the building adjacent to the doss-house, from which location he could clearly see the entrance. There he would wait until the next note arrived. When it did, he would follow it back to the source.

 

* * * *

 

Night fell, and with it his spirits. Master Pukje’s final test — surviving the same, at any rate — had left Ros feeling prepared for anything. There had been no graduation ceremony, just the assumption of knowledge, of responsibility, of adulthood. He was his own man now, or ought to be.

 

Not that he hadn’t already experienced a large measure of doubt on his way to the city. He had little experience with women, having met barely a dozen since his apprenticeship began and known none of them intimately. He couldn’t guess what might be going through Adi’s mind, just as he wasn’t entirely sure what was going through his own.

 

He didn’t want to think that she was behind this strange sequence of events. After all, hadn’t she encouraged him to come to her the moment his apprenticeship was finished? Why would she take advantage of his gullibility like this? He was sure now that it couldn’t be her. It flew in the face of the memories he had treasured for so long.

 

Numerous people passed through the six-sided courtyard off which the doss-house lay. None of them were Adi; none of them came bearing notes or displaying any signs of conspiracy against him. As the night deepened, he began to feel foolish and upbraided himself for his paranoia. Master Pukje would have harsh words to offer if he ever learned of this. And so would Adi. She tolerated neither untimeliness nor inconvenience, and he had offered her nothing but both, so far. He looked forward to the day when they could laugh about this together, as they might many other anecdotes from their long betrothal.

 

His back was getting sore and the steady stream of passers-by had slowed, if not ceased entirely. He dropped with light feet into the courtyard and went into the doss-house. Too tired to bathe, he unrolled his bed and flicked out a bug or two that had made a home there during the day. There was no fourth note, of course.

 

On the way back from the primitive toilet, he stopped in mid-step, every imaginable sense alert. A certainty that Adi was nearby coursed through him. Without hesitating, he ran to the entrance of the doss-house and peered carefully outside. For all his theories concerning anonymous culprits, part of him remained alert for games of any kind on her part, and he wasn’t about to drive her off by pouncing too soon.

 

There was a woman in the courtyard, hurrying his way. She wasn’t Adi; no Sabatino would dress that way. His eyes were instead drawn into the shadows. Through the Change he detected several rats and one alert cat, but no humans. If she was there, she was artfully concealed.

 

And so she was. Her skin was black against black, but the whites of her eyes stood out — one of them, anyway, around the edge of a ragged brick wall. Their stares locked for an instant, and in that instant he saw her pull back, realising that she had been spotted. The eye winked out, and he set off in pursuit.

 

Later he would remember the wild fever of those hopeful moments as he shouldered past anyone in his way, calling Adi’s name and imploring her to reveal herself. He glimpsed her many times, stepping out into darkness from under streetlamps, through archways, down alleyways that would inevitably turn out to be empty when he arrived. How she did it, he didn’t know, but his darkest, most convoluted fears were confirmed. It was her, and she wasn’t as he remembered.

 

All night he chased her, across all quarters of the city.

 

‘Don’t do this, Adi,’ he called. ‘I came for you like I promised. Show yourself, please!’

 

She offered him nothing in reply.

 

* * * *

 

It came to him eventually that he wasn’t thinking clearly. He was chasing phantoms and they weren’t leading him anywhere. He needed to be calm and find another solution. Adi was somewhere in the city. He could find her if he tried.

 

He returned to the doss-house only to discover that his property had been stolen. That didn’t improve his mood. The wild-bearded man and his foolish collaborators professed no knowledge of the theft, but Ros could see more than the usual fogginess to their eyes. Sold for ale, he presumed. Everything he owned was drunk and gone.

 

There was no point railing against it. Stalking back out into the streets, he found the closest thing to a quiet corner in Ulum and scrawled complex charms about it, cocooning it and himself in silence. He closed his eyes and sought the vital heart of himself, as his master had taught him to do. That was all he had left. Every other certainty had evaporated.

 

In that tiny island of calm, he viewed his emotions with something approaching objectivity, and was even able to shed them for a moment. Anger, fear, embarrassment, and loss were the least of his problems now. He was the victim of an elaborate prank, and the first step to rising above it was to regard it from the outside.

 

Almost immediately he realised something that should have been obvious all along. Adi’s prank relied on talents Adi herself didn’t possess. Not that she wasn’t talented in her own ways; Ros was sanguine about the fact that she was certainly smarter than he was, and cunning with it. But she lacked any kind of predilection for the Change, and to his knowledge had never pursued an understanding of it. How, then, could she be cloaking her presence so effectively and running him in such ever-widening circles?

 

There were two possible answers: one, that it wasn’t her at all; and two, that she had hired someone to do the work for her.

 

The first possibility was attractive because it absolved her of all responsibility, but offered no hint as to the identity of his antagonist. He decided to pursue the second possibility simply because it gave him something to do, and offered a small chance of success. Finding Adi’s Change-worker-for-hire might prove easier than finding her, if only because Ros might approach the prank sideways rather than head-on.

 

Although his direction was now clear, he stayed within his bubble of silence a while longer, to double-check his thoughts, in case he had missed something else equally obvious, and to establish an appropriate emotional balance. The decision to be with Adi had been an easy one five years earlier. To dishonour it now would be cowardice of the highest order. He would see it through if he was allowed to, and he would do his best to keep hope alive.

 

* * * *

 

In theory, the Stone Mages had the city stitched up. Every child with the slightest whiff of the Change about them was sent off to be trained and ultimately inducted into the country’s elite, from which few ever emerged into independent practice. Ros’s utter unencumbrance was frowned upon and, in some quarters considered actually dangerous to society at large.

 

Master Pukje had been quick to instil in Ros the understanding of the true purpose of theory, which was simply to be tested, and so he went with confidence into the city once more, sure that he would find an exception before long.

 

And so he did. First one, then another — both Change-workers known for shoddy work, but at least acting independently of the country’s masters. They were jealous types, reluctant to let a potential customer fall into a competitor’s orbit, but Ros had mastered more techniques for extracting the truth than they had ever forgotten. Not effortlessly, but at least painlessly, he learned what he needed to and moved on.

 

The black market for Change-working grew in extent the more he picked at it, like a loose thread pulled from an expensive rug. With keener eyes than he had had before, he saw charms that bore no relation to any grammatical system he had studied. He found dealers in potions using ingredients unknown to anyone but their discoverers. He studied significant tattoos in books whose reason he could not tell from madness. All of it was wonderful and strange, and utterly incapable of catching him in any kind of web. The prankster, whoever he or she was, had attained a higher degree of mastery than these crazed dabblers.

 

From one he learned a name that he mentally filed away for later pursuit. The name was repeated two interviews later, as a person Ros should contact should he wish to procure the expertise he required. The person thus identified was not a Change-worker herself, but a business-woman from the quieter side of town. Her customers resided outside the populous caverns, so she did not advertise locally. Word inevitably spread, though, and Ros was keen to follow it. Through this woman Adi might have hired someone from outside the city, and therefore someone more difficult to trace.

 

Twice Ros caught glimpses of Adi in the crowds of the marketplace. Once he saw a jewel she had worn hanging around the neck of another woman. Ros ignored all such instances of recognition for fear of being entangled again. He had to focus on the trail he had found for himself and not be led aside, no matter where it led him.

 

* * * *

 

‘Explain to me again, young man,’ said Jenfi Mierlo, ‘exactly what kind of charm you think this might be.’

 

Ros did his best, although their surroundings discomfited him to an extreme. He felt utterly out of place among such finery. There were books and relics from ancient times, and works of art so delicately formed that light itself seemed gentle with them. Everything about him — his shabbiness, his demeanour, his smell — was alien to this world. There was no denying it, and little that could be done about it.

 

The hard, keen gaze of a man’kin on a plinth didn’t help much, either.

 

‘What do you think, Mawson?’ the mistress of the house asked it when Ros had finished. ‘Does this sound like the work of anyone we know?’

 

The man’kin didn’t reply, but she nodded as though it had.

 

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think so either. In fact — in fact —’

 

She broke into a series of deep, hacking coughs that turned her glassy skin purple and bent her almost double.

 

Jenfi Mierlo was a woman old enough to be Ros’s grandmother, but as slender as a teenager. She wore a silk gown, dyed black and white in geometric patters, from which her wrists and throat emerged like fragile stalks. Her hair was steel-grey, and her eyes deep-set. The line of her jaw stood out like a knife, almost as sharp as her fingernails.

 

Ros half-rose to offer her assistance, but she waved him away. The house-boy rushed into the room with a glass of water, which she accepted with gratitude and sipped from as the fit subsided.

 

‘Please pardon me,’ she said, returning to something approaching a healthy colour. ‘The trials of age are as vexatious as the trials of youth. I was about to announce that your predicament, this glamour or spell or whatever you wish to call it, seems more like hallucination to me than conspiracy — for after all, where is the evidence? You can’t produce a single note you said you received. And as for either mechanism or motive, both remain obscure to me. But it is foolish ever to write off the inventiveness of people, particularly where torture is involved. And you do seem tortured, young man, if you don’t mind me saying so. Would that be a fair observation?’

 

Ros allowed that it was.

 

‘Tell me more about the woman you suspect to be the mastermind.’ Jenfi Mierlo folded her wrists in her lap and leaned forward. ‘I am unfamiliar with your Lady Hakamu.’

 

‘I cannot,’ he said, unwilling to reveal anything that might identify either of them. ‘She is unknown to me, except by name.’

 

‘It seems odd to me that she would thrust her illusory form upon you yet remain herself in the shadows. Are you sure there could be no other agent at work here?’

 

The phrasing of her observation —’in the shadows’ — reminded Ros of the moment he had first seen Adi’s face. There had indeed been another woman present at the time. It wasn’t inconceivable that she had triggered the charm then, although he remembered no such thing. He could barely recall her at all. Had she said something as he hurried past her? Had he bumped into her, perhaps?

 

‘I’m as sure as I can be,’ he said.

 

‘And you feel that you have done nothing to earn such a plight?’

 

‘That is the case, yes.’

 

‘You don’t surprise me there,’ Jenfi Mierlo said. ‘Young men rarely do.’ She leaned back. ‘I fear that I have little help to offer — except for the prospect of employment. You’re new to the city, clearly, and in need of friends. I could make an introduction or two, if you liked.’

 

There was a predatory cast to her face. Ros had seen such before, on traders who recognised a bargain and sought to claim it before its true price became known. Clearly his imposture as a victim of a Change-worker, rather than a practitioner himself, was thinner than he had hoped.

 

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep that thought in mind.’

 

‘You’ll do better than that,’ she said, rising suddenly from her chair. ‘Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.’

 

He stood, wishing now that he had never come. Instead of rescue, he had found himself swept out to deeper water still. One of the many reasons for studying under Master Pukje had been to defer the attention of sharks who, like Jenfi Mierlo, were drawn to his talent. Many times in his childhood he had been exploited, unknowingly and cruelly, and he would not suffer such again.

 

‘You will go to Madam Van Haasteren.’

 

He glanced around in surprise. The man’kin had spoken.

 

‘I know that name,’ he said. ‘Magda Van Haasteren, the seer?’

 

‘You will go to her.’

 

‘Why?’ He frowned. ‘Can she tell me where Adi is?’

 

The man’kin didn’t answer.

 

At the sound of Jenfi Mierlo’s heels clicking in the hallway outside, Ros turned. She was holding a trinket that was part charm, part business card, which she pressed upon him with irresistible insistence.

 

Desperate to return to the subject he had come to pursue, Ros indicated the man’kin and said, ‘Is your friend here always so reticent?’

 

‘Mawson? He hasn’t spoken in a hundred years. If he ever does, the roof will probably fall in.’

 

She burst into another coughing fit, and Ros took the opportunity to leave her presence. The man’kin’s advice had taken on a new significance in the context of its usual silence, and he wanted to avoid another sales pitch. The trinket he kept, though. It was harmless. Apart from the clothes he wore, it was also his sole material possession.

 

* * * *

 

Night had fallen. Ros had almost lost count of how many he had been in the city now. Eight, he decided. He wouldn’t spend this one chasing phantoms. He would take the man’kin at its word and pursue the mystery to its conclusion.

 

* * * *

 

Even from the outside, Magda Van Haasteren’s stall reeked of smoke and the murkier applications of power. The Change was neither good nor bad; like air, though, it could be befouled. He hesitated before knocking on the door, irrationally convinced that nothing good would come of it. His senses were muddled. Adi could have been standing right next to him and he wouldn’t have known.

 

To its conclusion, he reminded himself, knocking firmly upon the portal.

 

‘Finally made up your mind, did you?’ came the croaky voice from within. ‘Come in before you change it again, and shut the door fast behind you.’

 

Ros kept his first impressions from showing as best he could. The place was crowded, dirty, and worn, and the seer herself fared little better in his assessment. But for the aura of potency swirling around her like a cape — thick and dark, as reptilian as a snake — he would have walked out in an instant.

 

‘You’re chasing someone,’ she said, heavy-lidded eyes sweeping down and then up his frame. ‘What’s the matter? Has your face frightened her away?’

 

That same face betrayed him while he considered how best to answer. Blushing furiously, except for the white of his scars, he could only think of the wild-bearded man mocking him in the doss-house. It was true that there was nothing to be done about his appearance. He could only try to put his fears behind him and trust that Adi would see beyond the mask, to what lay beneath.

 

‘Neither of us is going to win any beauty pageants,’ he said, not about to have that fear reinforced by a creature like this.

 

‘Indeed we’re not.’ She waved imperiously. ‘You’re crooking my neck, making me look up at you. Sit, sit, and tell me about your elusive girlfriend.’

 

‘What do you need to know?’

 

‘How much can you tell me?’ Her eyes slitted fractionally. ‘No, really — how much?’

 

Ros gave the matter the attention it deserved. How much did he know about Adi any more? It had been five years since he had last seen her. And even then, had he known her well? They had been kids, really, in exceptional straits. It had been easy to let the stories dictate how the rest of their lives were supposed to go. Should he be so surprised that their poorly-laid plans had gone awry?

 

‘I thought so,’ the seer said as the silence dragged on. ‘Yet there was something about her, something that transcends knowledge, requiring no words or explanations. Wasn’t there?’

 

‘Yes,’ he said, the answer tugged out of him almost against his will. ‘I thought — I thought it would be easy. All we had to do was grow up and become — become whoever we needed to be. And then we could be together. Why hasn’t it worked like that? I know it was wrong to think she’d drop everything for me, but I’ve come back for her as I promised, and now she —’

 

He stopped, unable to speak past the lump that had grown in his throat.

 

‘Perhaps she’s testing you,’ the seer said. The candle that burned on the table at her side filled the deep lines of her face with shadow. ‘Not just you, but the legacy of your first meeting. Has the spark you originally felt survived the passage of time? Sometimes it may not, and they fare badly who try to draw on a power that isn’t there. You know that much; you’ve felt the Void at your feet; you know what awaits us all, in the end. The death of love is no different, and the fear of it drives people to strange exploits.

 

‘You feel that you must prove yourself,’ she went on, ‘yet in that very attempt you trap yourself anew. Why is the burden of proof solely upon you? It’s like being an apprentice with a master who never speaks. You can only guess at the lesson and bear the punishment when you get it wrong. And what about her? Is she not also required to do as you do, to demonstrate her faithfulness and determination as well?’

 

‘Yes,’ he said, springing to his feet and circling the tiny room. ‘I’m not just tested — I’m trapped!’

 

‘And what are you going to do about it?’

 

‘I’m doing it, aren’t I?’

 

‘Don’t round on me, boy. If I solve this puzzle for you, doesn’t that make me more worthy of your girlfriend’s hand than you?’

 

‘Well, damn it, what?’

 

The seer smiled. ‘Tell me what it’s worth to know.’

 

He sagged, emptying of anger as suddenly as a water-bladder stabbed with a knife.

 

‘I have nothing of value to give you,’ he said in the candle’s flickering light.

 

‘That’s not true,’ the seer told him. ‘Not true at all, Roslin of Geheb.’

 

He stared at her, wondering how long she had known. The whole time, perhaps. ‘What do you want?’

 

Her smile widened. ‘I’m trying to ask you the same question.’

 

‘I want Adi,’ he said. ‘That’s all. I have no family, friends or future without her. That’s the truth of it, so —’

 

‘So the choice is easy. Go through the curtain. You’ll find the answer you seek on the other side.’

 

He glanced at the dirty wall-hanging with disquiet. The squat armoured figure, picked out in tatty thread, stared back at him with eyes as cold as a man’kin’s. A woman’s gasping sobs came from beyond the cubicle’s thin walls. The air was thick with grief, and power, and warning, too. No ordinary doorway lay beyond the curtain. Yet where else did he have to go? The trail ended here.

 

Ros stood straighter and found a clarity of thought that had eluded him earlier. Whatever awaited him, he would face it head-on. Golems and witches hadn’t bested him in the past, and neither had dragons and machines from the dawn of history. He might lack money or prospects, but what need had he of them? Maser Pukje had taught him to be strong and sure on his own. If this was a test of more than his faith in Adi, he would pass that as well.

 

Filling his chest with smoky air and ignoring the old woman’s potent stare, he stepped forward, through the curtain, into darkness.

 

* * * *

 

THE THRALL

 

Adi’s outstretched hands found a brick wall ahead of her. She stopped walking and felt to either side. The wall was curved, and would form a circle roughly four yards across if it met itself behind her. There was no light at all, and therefore no quick way to check. The air was entirely too close and warm. Claustrophobia struck her like a fist to the gut, and she turned to find way back to the door through which she had come.

 

The sound of an indrawn breath brought her up short. She wasn’t alone.

 

‘Who’s there?’

 

The sounds of the city vanished the moment Ros walked through the curtain, leaving him wondering if he had been struck deaf. At the sound of a woman’s tremulous inquiry, he knew that was not so. He also recognised her voice.

 

‘Adi?’

 

‘What’s going on? Where am I?’

 

‘Hold on.’ He reached out with his senses and found the wall. Grateful for something concrete to deal with, he chose one brick at random, pressed the palm of his hand against it, and flexed his will.

 

Adi blinked as pinkish light flared into life. It brightened and whitened as the man who had cast it removed his hand from the source.

 

‘You!’ she gasped, recognising his scarred face immediately. It was the man she’d collided with the night the charm had been broken. He was the last person she had expected to see. Magda Van Haasteren had promised her understanding. What did he have to do with anything?

 

Ros was no less surprised. The woman spoke with Adi’s voice but looked like the stranger he’d seen in the courtyard by the doss-house. So much for finding answers.

 

‘How is this possible?’

 

‘You tell me,’ she said through tight lips. ‘You got me into this.’

 

‘Me? No,’ he protested. ‘It wasn’t either of us. It was —’

 

Ros looked behind him, and for the first time they realised that the door they had come through was invisible. Worse than that, as a quick patting down and thumping of the wall soon revealed, the door was no longer there at all.

 

‘A Way,’ he said, remembering everything he had learned about such space-bending passages from Master Pukje. ‘The curtain must have hidden it. And now it’s closed.’

 

‘We’re trapped?’

 

‘We certainly appear to be.’

 

Adi looked up, then down. They were caught in a chimney or well that vanished into shadow at either extremity. A heavy metal grill was all that kept them from falling.

 

Heights and tight spaces, she thought grimly to herself. What next? Crabblers? Ghosts?

 

She caught her fellow prisoner staring at her oddly. He turned quickly away.

 

‘I think,’ Ros said, suppressing the impulse to bring his hand up to his face, ‘I think I can get us out of here. A Way leaves a dimple behind, even when it’s closed. It’s like a flaw in glass, and if I can find it —’

 

‘You’re babbling. What’s wrong with you?’

 

‘Nothing. Just hold on for a moment —’

 

‘No, you wait.’ She clutched his arm and pulled him around. ‘How do you know my name? What kind of trick is this?’

 

‘Trick? If anyone’s tricking anyone, it’s you.’

 

‘Oh, please. You can’t possibly expect me to fall for that one.’

 

He wrenched himself from her grip and backed away. For a moment they just glared angrily at each other. Then his face softened.

 

‘Take off your veil,’ he said.

 

‘No.’

 

‘I already know your name, so what difference does it make?’

 

‘What difference does it make?’

 

‘I want to see your face.’

 

‘Get back to finding that door,’ she said, ‘or by the time I’m finished with you you’ll have no face at all.’

 

He winced at that, but this time didn’t turn away.

 

‘Adi, look at me properly. I’m not hiding anything from you. You can see my face perfectly well. The scars are new, but the rest is all me. Just me. Don’t you recognise anything?’

 

He moved around the well so the light caught his features better. She edged away, unable to tear her gaze from them.

 

‘I’m Ros.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘And you’re Adi.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

With numb fingers, she pulled the veil aside.

 

He physically sagged with relief. Behind the Clan Markings, it was definitely her. Tired and paler than he’d ever seen her before, but her all the same. Adi the girl had become Adi the woman, and he hadn’t known her — just as she hadn’t known him. The familiarity they had felt in their minds had betrayed their senses, leading them badly astray.

 

‘But if you’re you,’ she said, ‘then who ...?’

 

She recoiled with a hand over her mouth, remembering the flaccid form she’d left wrapped in her sheet at the hostel.

 

‘What is it?’

 

He reached for her, but she wasn’t ready to be touched yet.

 

With shaking voice she explained about the comatose version of him she’d struggled with the last day and a half. He responded with a short account of his own trials.

 

‘Someone’s been toying with us,’ she said, revulsion becoming anger, and fast. ‘I’ll have that someone’s hide when you get us free of here. And you —’ She poked him hard in the upper arm, right where his nerve was. ‘You really thought I’d put you through a dance like that? How could you?’

 

Ros could find no good answer to her question. He returned to the task of finding the Way in the hope that it would cover his confusion. ‘I’d been looking for so long. I was getting frustrated.’

 

‘Well, that makes two of us. It’s crazy to think we were so close and never knew.’

 

‘Maddening. And it did drive me a little mad. I was helped, remember? We must have been, both of us. I can’t believe you mistook that imposter for me.’

 

Her features darkened. He hadn’t seen Adi blush for five years. It was distracting him from the task at hand.

 

‘Well,’ she said, glancing away, then back again. ‘I guess this is what Magda Van Haasteren meant by sending us here.’

 

‘I guess so.’

 

She touched his shoulder and was amazed at the muscle she felt there. ‘It really is you.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘And I guess I’ll get used to having you around again.’

 

‘I hope so.’

 

Her fingers moved up to his cheek. ‘Will you tell me what happened to you?’

 

The Way was entirely forgotten now. ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ he said, cupping her hand in his and stepping closer.

 

* * * *

 

It happened so fast there was nothing either could do. To Ros it seemed as though a ring of blue flame blossomed beneath their feet and rushed upwards past them with the speed of a dragon at full stretch. To Adi’s eyes, it was a fiery dust devil, spinning with furious energy, that was born at the invisible bottom of the chimney and whipped up around them, tangling their hair and clothes as it swept up to the heights above.

 

That it was difficult, afterwards, to place their impressions in accord, was the least of their problems.

 

The force of the thing’s passage blew them to opposite sides of the well-like space. Ros’s ears blocked, as they had some times when Master Pukje ascended with unexpected swiftness. Adi felt a rush of vertigo, and relied on the wall at her back to keep her balance. Above them, the apparition writhed and spun, growing smaller with distance until it vanished entirely. The silence it left in its wake was almost supernatural in its intensity.

 

For a second, neither spoke. Something had changed, something difficult to define but impossible to deny. It was clear that the flame or dust devil hadn’t been a random happenstance. There had been purpose behind it.

 

The clanking of metal broke the silence. The grille beneath them jerked downward an inch. Adi gasped and clutched the wall even more tightly than before. Ros looked around with wide eyes. What new trial was this?

 

A second racket came, as of rusty gears turning. The grille dropped again, then froze at a canted angle. It was clear now that it was turning, rotating — and that if it continued the two of them would be tipped to their deaths in the depths of the well.

 

A third time it turned, further than before. Adi dropped to her knees and put her fingers through the rusted metal slats. Could she hold on as it went? What exactly would that achieve? Better to fall quickly, perhaps, than to remain suspended in terror until the strength in her arms gave out.

 

Despair rose up in her. It was impossible to conceive that just moments ago she had been happy.

 

Hadn’t she?

 

Ros loomed over her, scarred and strange. He who had seemed so familiar now looked alien and wild. His hair stood out about his head. The air prickled, making her feel as though another apparition was about to burst around them.

 

Instead it was the world itself that tore. She screamed as the grille seemed to lurch beneath her and she was suddenly weightless, falling.

 

* * * *

 

With an explosion of brick dust and mortar, the Way opened in a place far from Magda Van Haasteren’s stinking hole. Out of it burst Ros first, then Adi, tugged by his arm on her wrist. Filthy, shocked, and grateful to be alive, they staggered away from the gaping rent in the wall behind them. The boom of their arrival echoed and re-echoed through the halls of the city, and this portentous announcement did not go unnoticed.

 

Ros blinked his eyes clear and took in his surroundings. It was dark, but not so dark they couldn’t see. They appeared to have emerged into one of the city’s industrial quarters, near a tannery by the smell of it. Numerous vehicles rumbled along a major thoroughfare not one block away.

 

He craned his head back to inspect the rising cloud of dust silhouetted against the living lights in the ceiling. The Way had closed the moment they’d passed through it, but the after-effects were still spreading.

 

‘We should move,’ he said, ‘in case anything follows.’

 

Adi coughed and spat. She had staggered off to find her own bearings, slowly recovering from the suddenness of their escape but still feeling a nag of worry. If anything, the nag was growing stronger, not weaker. She felt as though she had forgotten something important. The more she reached for it, the further it pulled away.

 

‘It took what it wanted,’ she said, understanding that much with certainty. ‘That’s why we were going to be dumped. It didn’t need us any more.’

 

He nodded and put both hands to his temples. The exertion of opening the Way had left him dazed. He would recover, but until then his thoughts moved like slugs. ‘So much for what lay behind the damned curtain. Do you think she knew this was going to happen?’

 

‘How couldn’t she? It was a set-up, and we walked right into it.’ Adi was tired, more tired than she had ever been. ‘We’re idiots.’

 

He had no humour in him, but attempted a joke anyway. ‘A perfect match.’

 

She stared at him as though he had said something utterly incomprehensible.

 

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, alarmed by a sudden, new intensity to her.

 

‘Quite the opposite, I think.’ She shook her head and looked away. ‘Ros, it’s gone.’

 

‘What’s gone.’

 

‘The spark. I don’t feel it any more. When I think of you ...’ Her eyes returned to his. ‘I feel ... nothing.’

 

He took a step backwards, rocked as though from a physical blow. Her words pained him, stung even through the dense fog in his mind, but reaching into himself he found exactly the same yawning absence. What had been so strong and clear just moments before was now missing entirely. It had evaporated.

 

‘That thing,’ she said with dismay on her face. ‘It took it.’

 

Ros shook his head, reaching through coldness like a drowning man at a rope.

 

‘Let’s not jump to any conclusions,’ he said.

 

‘What other conclusion could there be?’

 

‘I don’t know. But we can’t just give up.’

 

‘Do you think we can fix this?’

 

Tears painted dark streaks through the white dust in her face.

 

He had no answer for her.

 

‘I’ll see if I can flag someone down,’ she said, heading at hast for the thoroughfare. ‘If we’re quick, if we come to her in time, maybe we can get it back.’

 

* * * *

 

The cab was cramped but fast. Fuelled by a mixture of alcohol and the Change, the growl of its engine only added to the pounding in Ros’s head. The pain paled in comparison, however, to the feeling that his heart seemed to have died in his chest.

 

They endured the journey in silence. Although they were crammed together on the back seat, they felt as distant from each other as they had at any point during the previous five years. Adi’s thoughts returned constantly to that moment when hope had turned to horror. How could neither of them have seen it coming?

 

She was conscious, also, of the cab driver glancing at them in the mirror. It was well within reason that he should be curious about the dust-covered pair who had hailed him with such urgency, but it was more than that. Only midway through the journey did she realise that she had forgotten to replace her veil. The driver had clearly noted her Clan markings and, if not already certain as to the identity of his passengers, was at least speculating wildly.

 

The only way to stop him talking was to keep him close by.

 

‘Wait here,’ she said when they pulled up outside Magda Van Haasteren’s dive. ‘We’ll need you afterwards.’

 

The value of the coin she gave him was out of all proportion with the request. He understood immediately. ‘Of course, miss,’ he said. ‘I’ll not go anywhere.’

 

They left the cab and warily approached the portal through which they had both entered earlier that night. The magnitude of the charm that had enveloped them boggled Ros’s mind. Not only had their paths crossed, but they had also come to this very place practically on top of each other. How was it possible that they had not noticed, that Magda Van Haasteren had talked to both of them simultaneously, that he had not seen her? He was angry at himself for letting the broader illusions distract him while a deeper treachery unfolded. That was a lesson he would not forget in a hurry.

 

You feel it with your whole body and in all your thoughts, Adi was thinking as she stared at the door. It’s like a little bit of lightning, and it too can start a fire.

 

Ros too was remembering what the seer had told him about the spark. They fare badly who try to draw on a power that isn’t there.

 

The hovel was empty, but only recently so. That Magda Van Haasteren had fled in a hurry was left in no doubt by the cheroot still smoking in an overflowing ashtray, and the many possessions she had left behind. Even in the absence of candlelight they could make out the curtain still hanging on the wall before them.

 

Ros tore it down and threw it aside. A featureless wall stared back at them.

 

‘She heard us coming,’ Adi said.

 

Ros nodded. ‘We’ll never find her. She could be anywhere.’

 

‘So where to now?’

 

Separately, they reviewed the path that had brought them here. It couldn’t have been entirely illusion, unless the entire city had fallen victim to it. Furthermore, man’kin weren’t easily influenced ...

 

Ros pulled the business card from his pocket and held it up for Adi to see.

 

* * * *

 

Facing each other in the study two couples sat, one old, one new — if they were a couple at all — and on the floor between them rested the bust of the man’kin, Mawson.

 

‘You say he spoke?’ asked Jenfi Mierlo. ‘To both of you?’

 

‘Without question,’ Adi replied. ‘He told us both the same thing: to go to Magda Van Haasteren.’

 

‘You will go to Madam Van Haasteren,’ the bust obediently repeated, like a parrot.

 

‘You see?’

 

Jenfi Mierlo gaped first at Adi, then at Mawson. Then she started coughing, and Ros thought would never stop.

 

‘The trouble is,’ said Samson when his wife’s fit had subsided, ‘that Mawson didn’t in fact tell you to go anywhere. He simply said you were going to.’

 

‘I hardly see the difference,’ Adi retorted. ‘We wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t brought it up.’

 

‘And therein lies the problem with man’kin. They don’t experience time the same way we do. They see it all at once, so as far as he’s concerned: you will go, you have gone, and you are already there — all at once. The notion of intentionality is quite foreign to him. Sometimes, dear, I think it’d be better if they never spoke at all.’

 

‘Yes, yes,’ his wife said, tipping her birdlike frame to the right and then straightening again, ‘but we’re missing the point. Mawson isn’t the culprit. It’s that wretched Van Haasteren woman again.’

 

‘Again?’ Ros asked.

 

The elder couple exchanged a look. It was clear that neither wanted to be the one to explain.

 

‘If we’d known who you were —’

 

‘If you’d told us about Mawson —’

 

They cut each other off. Jenfi waved for her husband to continue.

 

‘I mean to say,’ he said, ‘that you fit her requirements perfectly. The pair of you, not as individuals. She of course knew your history. She had years to study you and to prepare the trap. First she lured you, Ros, to the city, thus ensuring that Adi would also come. Once you were both here, she redoubled her efforts. She took your feelings for each other and turned them around — and did so quite expertly, I must say. You were hopelessly entangled. There was no chance of seeing your way out of it.’

 

‘What he’s trying to say,’ said Jenfi, ‘is that she played on your worst fears: that you wouldn’t be recognised or respected for who you were. And of course you played along with those fears, albeit unwittingly: you were both hiding; you both had changed. All Van Haasteren had to do was set the ball rolling. You did the rest.’

 

‘But why?’ asked Adi.

 

‘Why would she want to do something like this?’ Ros echoed. ‘To us?’

 

‘You mentioned the spark,’ said Samson, taking his wife’s hand in his. ‘That was what she wanted, as you have deduced, and everything she did was designed to magnify its existence. You enjoyed it in your youth, and you might have reawakened it naturally simply by being reunited — but the fact that you didn’t even recognise each other the first time you crossed paths suggests otherwise. Your spark therefore had to be nurtured — by anxiety, by doubt — and by hope too, for without that the spark never catches.’

 

‘She primed you for that meeting behind the curtain,’ Jenfi concluded. ‘For the moment in which you truly recognised each other. That was what she wanted. Not just a spark, but first-class ignition.’

 

Ros and Adi remembered that moment well. What power their spark had had! Now it was harnessed by another, the value it might have had to them was irrelevant.

 

‘We would have warned you off,’ Jenfi repeated, ‘if only you’d told us.’

 

‘How could we have known?’ Adi rose suddenly to her feet. ‘You make it sound like it’s our fault. But it’s not.’

 

‘No one’s saying that. Are you?’ Ros asked the Mierlos.

 

Adi didn’t wait for an answer. With fast, angry paces, she walked from the room.

 

‘Wait here, Ros.’ Jenfi Mierlo hurried after her.

 

‘There’s something else,’ said Samson Mierlo in a grave voice, leaning forward to look Ros in the eye. ‘There’s something else you both need to know.’

 

* * * *

 

They received much the same addendum in much the same words, Ros in the study and Adi at the front of the Mierlo mansion, where Jenfi had caught her before getting into the cab

 

‘Magda Van Haasteren doesn’t work alone,’ the Mierlos told them. ‘She’s in partnership with something else, a creature that’s named in the bestiaries but barely described. No one knows what form such creatures take or where they come from. No one knows where she found this one or why she tamed it. All we know is what it does.

 

‘Van Haasteren is the procurer in the arrangement. She finds the lovers and lures them into her trap, pair by pair as you were lured. At the heart of the trap lies the creature, which thrives on the offerings she brings. They are a meal to it, you see. It has no hunger for flesh and blood, for it isn’t a material thing itself. Like eats like. This being has no physical presence, and has a hunger to match.

 

‘It eats the spark. That’s all. And that’s how we know what it is. Stone Mages have examined a rash of deaths in recent years — all pairs, all mysterious. Their bodies showed death by falling, but there were other signs, hints of a more sinister rupture before death came to them. We followed the investigation, for it touched on our own interests; we noted its conclusion. The Stone Mages can’t convict Magda Van Haasteren of anything, for she herself has done nothing wrong. The lovers came to her of their own free will; her pet does the rest; and she is canny enough to leave no evidence. Since predators are not disallowed in the city — for if they were, the markets would be forced to close forever — all we can do is warn people away, and hope that they’ll listen.

 

‘But lovers rarely do. They’re caught in their own world. That’s the great tragedy of it all — that the situation wouldn’t be possible without desire and dreams, those things that normally make us flourish. The dark side of the spark, if you will.

 

‘The bait in the trap was set by you yourselves.’

 

* * * *

 

‘Not all stories have the happy ending we desire,’ Samson said, putting an avuncular hand on Ros’s shoulder, ‘but that doesn’t make them bad stories.’

 

Jenfi told Adi: ‘It’s not entirely hopeless. The Mages can tell when a Way opens up outside the city, so they’ll know if Van Haasteren is still here, somewhere.’

 

Neither Ros nor Adi was soothed.

 

‘You said it has a name — the thing that ate our spark?’

 

Jenfi and Samson Mierlo told them, knowing the value of naming an enemy even when the fight has been lost.

 

‘It’s a trystophage,’ said Samson.

 

‘It’s an amavore,’ said Jenfi.

 

Both said, ‘Its common name is the Thrall.’

 

* * * *

 

‘What now?’ Ros asked as they took their leave of the Mierlos, no happier but at least better informed.

 

‘I don’t know.’ Adi’s exhaustion was total. ‘Your things are back at the hostel, if you still want them.’

 

He wasn’t sure, but said nonetheless: ‘Perhaps I can help you get rid of that doppelganger, while I’m there.’

 

To the Lost Dolphin they went, where they found the hostel in a state of restrained panic. The doppelganger had dissolved in a shower of fiery arcs an hour ago, startling the maid and setting fire to the bed. The fire had been extinguished before serious damage resulted, but the place remained in an uproar. To this was now added the revelation that Lady Hakamu might be none other than Aditi Sabatino, judging by her Clan markings — for Adi had forgotten once again to replace her veil — and if that were the case, then the long-haired, scarred stranger could only be her legendary betrothed, Roslin of Geheb.

 

The whispers as they surveyed the damaged room were impossible to ignore. Adi knew she wouldn’t be able to bribe the entire staff, as she hoped she had silenced the cab driver when they finally let him go.

 

‘Just give me one night,’ she begged the manager and the staff. ‘That’s all I ask. Then I’ll release you. Tell the world then, if you must.’

 

‘There’s nothing to tell, anyway,’ said Ros, misunderstanding the situation completely.

 

‘If you do it for us,’ Adi added more persuasively, ‘you will become part of the story. You’ll have given us sanctuary when we most needed it.’

 

The hostel’s manager, sensing an opportunity for free publicity, took the matter into his hands. He swore that the staff would be discreet, on penalty of his own job. Threats were issued to all in his presence and solemn oaths undertaken. Furthermore, he said, the hostel’s other guests would be moved elsewhere — the smell of smoke had given them the jitters anyway — and new arrivals would be carefully vetted before gaining access to the building.

 

‘Thank you,’ said Adi. Ros echoed the sentiment wholeheartedly.

 

And so the room was cleared.

 

* * * *

 

They checked their belongings without talking. It didn’t seem to Ros that any kind of words were possible between them now. The Thrall had taken them too. There was just emotion, raw and red, too painful to pick at.

 

Among Adi’s scattered effects, none of which appeared to have been burned, she found the broken charm. The wave of grief she felt then was so powerful that she lost all strength in her legs. She let herself fall into a chair and cradled the charm in her hands. What good had following it brought her? All those dreams, all those hopes, shattered like workings of the charm itself.

 

Ros walked past her, and the crystal flared bright red.

 

They both stared at it in surprise. Had it fixed itself somehow? Had it too been afflicted by Van Haasteren’s web of deceit?

 

More likely, they both realised, it had been working all along. When Ros had brushed past Adi by the doss-house, he had gone from being in front of her to behind her. If she’d turned and pointed the charm his way, it would have glowed as normal. But she didn’t. Instead she saw the doppelganger and thought she’d reached the end of her quest. She stopped looking.

 

The pain on Adi’s face was awful to behold. Ros assumed his looked much the same.

 

‘I guess I should leave,’ he said, hefting the pack he’d thought lost forever.

 

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not sending you back to that horrible place.’

 

The suite was far more comfortable than the doss-house, even with the scorch marks on the bed. Ros appreciated the offer.

 

‘I can sleep on the floor.’

 

‘No. You take the bed.’

 

Fresh linen had been left, but neither of them made a move towards it.

 

‘Are you sure?’

 

‘Positive. You need it more than me, and honestly, I could sleep anywhere.’

 

‘Well, all right.’

 

Ros replaced the sheets while Adi arranged cushions in one corner, diagonally opposite from the bed. They didn’t look at each other as they undressed. They didn’t talk, not even to say goodnight. The light was extinguished, and they lay for an eternity, listening to each other breathe.

 

* * * *

 

A shaking of the bed woke Ros from a nightmare in which his face and hands were being scarred anew. Adi crouched motionlessly beside him, barely visible in the darkness. Her eyes caught every faint trace of light in the room and sent them, refracted and concentrated, right at him.

 

‘I want to stop her,’ she said. ‘No one deserves to feel like this.’

 

‘I agree. We’ll do it tomorrow. Together.’

 

‘There’s no together any more, Ros. We can’t think like that.’

 

‘Then we’ll ask for help. Everyone’ll know we’re here by breakfast anyway, so let’s get the whole city looking for her. Use the stories to our advantage for a change.’

 

Adi didn’t confess that she’d already been doing that, when it suited her.

 

‘I want revenge, too,’ she said, lying down next to him.

 

Ros put his arm around her. They stayed that way as sleep claimed them again, and they didn’t wake until dawn.

 

* * * *

 

KEEPSAKE

 

Word spread like fire through tall grass. Where the rumour started wasn’t clear. The light-chimneys had barely delivered the distant sun’s first rays when its source was obscured behind a wall of friends-of-friends and cousins-in-the-know. Once the news hit the markets, it took on a life of its own. Roslin of Geheb and Aditi Sabatino — he who vanquished the Golem of Omus and she who walked the Weird — were in Ulum, and in trouble.

 

Once released, the story accrued strange new details: that a monster walked the city streets, devouring children; that an explosion the previous night heralded an invasion from the depths of the earth; that the pair were impostors whose real selves had been disposed of days earlier. Among the elaborations and fabrications, however, lurked enough of the truth for the message to sink in. That which the famous lovers held most precious in the world had been stolen by a seer.

 

Every one of the city’s innocent seers — if such existed — closed shop for fear of reprisals against them personally or the profession as a whole. Some declared themselves to the authorities in advance of wrongful accusations. A description of the culprit in question circulated, passing from hand to hand and via the more exotic means available to those talented in the Change. Officially, the Stone Mages played no role in the seer-hunt; they could not until the ruling Synod had issued an order to that effect. Unofficially, a growing cadre assembled in the city’s Grand Minster in order to lend their weight to the search.

 

Hastily constructed charms scoured the underworld for clues, while ethereal images and messages wafted along the streets. Regular commerce ground to a halt. Of those with a choice, only the most churlish abstained from the city-wide effort. Some grumbled about the jammed thoroughfares or the delays in some services, but all pitched in somehow. Reports flooded in of suspicious-looking characters, most bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the missing woman. Boarded up spaces were exposed to daylight, some for the first time in decades. Panic spread through the city’s rodent and insect populations as previously safe haunts were overturned. Birds and lizards headed for roosts out of reach of human hands.

 

The day wore on. Crowds gathered in wait of news, hopeful too for a glimpse of the famous couple. Whispers spread of sightings as leads were followed and dismissed, one after the other. Opportunistic merchants set up stalls and manipulated rumours to direct crowds their way. As night approached, a carnival atmosphere set in, complete with music and impromptu dances. Families and neighbours set up camp on corners, sharing wine, beer and food, and any news that happened to pass through. Not all was merriment and joy, of course, for the reason for the holiday had not been forgotten by anyone. Fights broke out in places, among the poor-tempered and those who found the tension too much. The people of the city were waiting for an outcome, each in their own way. Ulum, as a whole, held its breath.

 

* * * *

 

From behind the curtained windows of their hostel room, Ros listened to the crowds moving through the city. They had barely left the building all day, relying on runners and other means to convey messages back and forth. Only twice, when particularly strong evidence had pointed to a near-certain location, had they gone out in pursuit of a resolution, and even then only by a back entrance, secure from the public eye. The hostel had hunkered down around them, the manager enjoying his role as their protector and confidant. Adi dreaded to think what the bill might tally to.

 

‘What if she’s gone?’

 

She looked up from double-checking the stack of information that had already been gathered. ‘Do you think it’s possible?’

 

He doubted it. The city had been physically sealed all day, as well as blocked against the Change. If she had made a dash for the outside the very moment her latest lovers had been kidnapped, maybe then she could have made it out in time. The still-smoking cheroot haunted that theory like a ghost; it wouldn’t be laid to rest, and made a mockery of the attempt.

 

‘She has to be here somewhere.’

 

A team of volunteer Stone Mages had gone over every inch of her abandoned stall. The Way Ros and Adi had followed was now firmly shut, and the room clear of any other exit. Van Haasteren must, therefore, have had another escape route secreted nearby. Neighbouring buildings had been searched from top to bottom, without success.

 

Adi pushed the stack aside. ‘What about why rather than where? That’s what I’m stuck on. What’s in it for her? She fed the Thrall, but she must’ve gained something in return.’

 

‘Not wealth, that’s for sure,’ he said.

 

‘Or fame.’

 

‘Look where they’ve got us.’

 

‘My point’s the same, though. She’s a criminal. Her motive has to be more than just cruelty.’

 

Adi remembered the passion with which the seer had spoken of the spark.

 

‘Maybe her own spark died,’ she said, posing an answer to her own question, ‘and she doesn’t want anyone else to be happy.’

 

Ros felt the thought coming long before it arrived. Something Adi had said had collided with a detail considered irrelevant, and together they prompted another question.

 

‘What about how?’

 

‘The Change,’ she said. ‘All that.’

 

‘But where did she learn it? Even rogue Change-workers have teachers, and I’ve never heard of anything like this.’

 

‘Maybe she invented it herself.’

 

‘Not from scratch. That’s impossible. She would’ve burned herself out, most likely, or at least attracted serious attention before now.’ He tapped his chin. ‘No, there had to be someone else. Someone who helped her at least part of the way.’

 

The thought was still coming. He gave it time while she watched him, wondering what was going on inside his head.

 

Suddenly he was heading for the door and scooping her up along the way. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I know exactly how to find her.’

 

* * * *

 

‘But we’ve already searched here,’ said Adi when the convoy they were leading pulled up at the seer’s hovel. ‘Over and over.’

 

‘Not well enough,’ he said, fairly bounding from the cab and approaching the entrance. Armoured Mages recognised him barely in time and waved him through a split-instant after he had passed.

 

Adi dragged herself after him, reluctant to return to that awful hole no matter how excited Ros appeared to be about it. He had kept the secret to himself the whole way, saying that he wanted to be sure. She told him not to worry about getting her hopes up, since they were as low as they could possibly go, but he had stayed silent, fairly vibrating with energy.

 

Before she could reach the door he emerged again, holding something heavy and shapeless in his arms.

 

‘Take one end,’ he said. ‘Turn it over.’

 

Together they unfurled the curtain through which they had walked to their spark’s doom. The threadbare Stone Mage stared up at the unnatural stars. By their light his indifference looked entirely calculated.

 

‘Lay it down, right here.’

 

Adi did so and took a wary step backwards.

 

‘Watch,’ Ros said.

 

This was the first time she had witnessed his new skills with the Change. His movements were economical and assured. There was no urgent fumbling, as there had been in his youth or when in the grip of the Thrall passion had ruled his head. Here he was cool and confident, utterly in command.

 

The world flexed around them.

 

Adi and the small crowd that had gathered watched to see what would happen next.

 

Ros stepped lightly onto the carpet and dropped out of sight into Magda Van Haasteren’s hidden Way.

 

* * * *

 

Immediately he stumbled, made clumsy by an awkward tangle of geometries. He had wanted his revelation to be dramatic. He had wanted Adi to be surprised. Too late he realised that they should have fixed the curtain vertically, as it had been originally placed, so he could simply walk through instead dropping out the wall on the other end of it.

 

He was the one caught off-balance. His right foot came down awkwardly, twisting his ankle. Pain shot up his calf and the leg gave way beneath him. He tumbled forward and landed heavily on his side.

 

‘Get ready to catch your girlfriend,’ growled a familiar voice.

 

Ros rolled onto his back with his hands upraised as Adi hurtled through the Way after him. Lighter and more sure on her feet, she merely staggered two steps and came to a halt, standing still before him with both soles firmly planted.

 

Behind her, the Way snapped shut with a whip-crack, silencing a growing clamour from the far side.

 

Ros gathered his strength to punch a hole back through.

 

‘Do it,’ said the seer, ‘and I’ll kill all three of us.’

 

Magda Van Haasteren was a shapeless mass sitting in the centre of the rough-hewn chamber, hunched over a candlestick holder as though for warmth. The candle was lit, casting a flickering yellow light across her walnut features. Adi helped Ros to his feet, watching the seer closely and taking the measure of the place in which she had sought refuge. It was far below the city’s deepest extent, that much Adi was sure of, with no physical entrances or exits, windows or exhausts. The air was clammy, hot and foul, and apart from the candle the only light came from tiny glowstones embedded in the ceiling like jewels. Water dripped in a far corner, and trickled elsewhere, leaving gleaming paths and stalactites in its wake.

 

The seer’s hidey-hole wasn’t a comfortable space by any human standards. The more Adi saw, the less certain she became that it was intended for human habitation at all. A series of makeshift shelves lined the chamber’s walls, and on those shelves were things that hurt the eye to look at.

 

‘Do that too,’ said the seer at some plot of Ros’s that Adi couldn’t sense, ‘and I’ll lock you down here forever. With me.’

 

Ros sagged backwards, favouring his right leg.

 

‘Are we trapped?’ Adi asked him, sotto voce.

 

‘No. I’m sure I can get us out.’

 

‘How sure?’

 

‘As sure as he can be, girl,’ the seer said with a cackle at their expense. ‘You’re asking the impossible and he’s failing to deliver it. Or he’s showing off and you’re not being a very good audience. I forget which.’

 

Adi’s fury rose. ‘We should leave you to rot.’

 

‘I’m rotten enough as is.’ The seer put the candlestick to one side and stood up with a grunt. Her shape didn’t appreciatively change. ‘As are we all, on the inside. See that one there?’ One twisted finger stabbed at the nearest shelf. ‘That’s all that remains of your spark.’

 

Ros stared at the thing she indicated, aware of Adi’s hand painfully gripping his arm. It, like the others filling the shelves, was black and twisted, seeming both thorned and half-melted at the same time. Some grass seeds had the same look, seen up close, but this held no vitality or beneficence. It was entirely malefic.

 

‘What did you do to it?’

 

‘I did nothing — and what was done would have been done anyway. You would’ve killed your spark without the Thrall’s intervention.’

 

‘Never,’ said Adi, sure that the aching void in her heart had once held something of great permanence

 

The seer hobbled to the shelf and picked up the hideous object. ‘The surety of youth is a brilliant thing. It takes a brighter fire still to burn it out. You’ll see soon enough that I did you a favour. I’ve seared your soul against the wound of disappointment; the deeper scars of loss and regret you’ll never know. You should thank me rather than rail against me.’

 

‘You would’ve killed us,’ said Ros, ‘like the others.’

 

‘Yes, but don’t you see that would have been a blessing too?’ The seer clutched the thing in her hands, not heeding how its wicked points cut her, or at least not minding. ‘Where there is life, there is hope — and hope makes us do terrible, terrible things.’

 

‘You’re done now,’ said Adi, repulsed by the mixture of self-pity and triumph displayed before her. ‘Ulum has had enough of your “blessings”.’

 

The seer uttered a sound that might have been a laugh. Blood dripped in heavy splashes to her feet. ‘So you plan to kill me. I thought you came to take back what you have lost. What if I told you that I could return it to you? Would you let me go, if I did?’

 

Ros knew she was lying. She had to be, for such a claim was preposterous. The spark had been eaten. All that remained was the waste, the excreta, of a being that thrived on the dreams of others.

 

Yet he was tempted. To recover what had been taken — to reclaim the future he had spent five years planning ...

 

‘And then what?’ said Adi. ‘We don’t have much in common, Ros and I. That’s why our story was so popular. We were the odd couple, the mismatch made good. Look at how we tested each other when you gave us the chance to. Look at the wedge we drove between ourselves. You didn’t create that wedge; it was already there. You just wielded what we would’ve wielded against each other, in time.’

 

The seer’s lips curled. ‘You’re not so dense after all. Congratulations.’

 

‘That’s what you’d have us believe, anyway.’ Adi had let go of Ros and was moving slowly to her left, widening the gap between them. ‘You spared us the lie of the spark and an agonised life when it’s gone. You tell yourself it’s a good thing because you wish someone had done it to you. You don’t have the courage to end your own pain, so you end the pain of others instead. You create it, and then you end it. You’re your own little industry, aren’t you?’

 

‘Stay back.’

 

The seer’s eyes danced between the two of them. She was beginning to feel hemmed in: Ros could see that much. He wanted to warn Adi to be careful, to be wary of pushing her too hard, but he was unwilling to interrupt the tide of words. True or not, Adi’s insights were having a profound effect on the seer.

 

‘Stay back, I said!’

 

‘Who did this to you?’ Adi pressed, feeling her fortunes turning at last. ‘Who did you lose?’

 

The seer’s face broke out into a snarl. With surprising strength, she hurled the wicked thing at Adi’s head. Adi raised her hands to ward it off, but the barbs dug deep. She fell backwards with a cry.

 

Ros was already reaching for the Change when the seer turned to him. They were surrounded by stone — stone wedded hard to the bedrock by virtue of its depth. He was surrounded by power. All he had to do was channel it.

 

So too the seer, and she had blood and territory on her side. Their wills locked in strange and deadly shapes in her secret hideaway. Light flared through all colours of the rainbow. Flashes of heat seared their skins. The floor beneath them buckled, and showers of dust and rock rained on them. The black shapes lining the walls exploded like ghastly black rockets, filling the air with soot.

 

Ros knew within seconds that he had the measure of her. It wasn’t in his mind to end it quickly, though. He needed to know the source of her knowledge. He had to be sure his guess was right.

 

And thus it turned out to be, for behind her wild improvisations and baroque peccadilloes he did recognise a philosophy, a method of teaching that was different from his own but at the same time familiar to him, as it would have been to any Change-worker raised in the Interior. A Stone Mage had taken her part of the road towards mastery — a Stone Mage much like the one depicted on the curtain.

 

The battle of wills had achieved its purpose. Ros bore down as Master Pukje had taught him, forcing his will upon her so that she could hurt no one else. His intention was not to kill her, but to bind her long enough for the authorities to take her captive. His desire for revenge only went that far.

 

Movement to one side caught both their attentions. Adi was up and moving, groggily but purposefully. Somehow, despite all the commotion, the candle was still burning. With one bleeding hand she reached for it.

 

Ros reeled back at a wild attack from the seer. Driven by surprise and panic, she rushed for Adi. From whence the sudden surge came, Ros didn’t know. It was all he could to slow the vicious outpour and prevent Adi from being riven in two.

 

For herself, Adi was aware of a terrible conflict waging over her, buffeting her from side to side, but she couldn’t let it get in the way of what she had to do. She had guessed the source of the seer’s tortured motivations. There was a hurt in Magda Van Haasteren’s past that matched Adi’s own, and she maintained it still, perversely nurturing it just as she nurtured the Thrall. The two, therefore, the pain and the Thrall, had to be connected by more than just metaphor. If one wasn’t literally the other, then perhaps they shared the same origin.

 

The Thrall had rushed at Ros and Adi like an ascending bubble of flame, sweeping their spark off with it. Adi didn’t understand what kind of creature it was, but she did understand the nature of human desires and needs. When Magda Van Haasteren had sensed that Ros and Adi had escaped, she had taken just one thing from her stinking hovel. That one thing was the candle, and she had been cradling it when Ros and Adi had found her.

 

Adi’s right hand was slick with her own blood. Thumb and forefinger hissed when she closed them tight about the flame. It squirmed and writhed, as slippery as a slug, and it burned her as badly as her dead spark’s barbs. Pain lanced up her arm and assailed her body and mind. She fought it with fury and maintained her grip. It felt good to reverse the flow of ill-fortune. The Thrall would die just as all of Adi’s childish hopes were now dead and gone forever.

 

The Thrall howled as the fire of its existence was slowly extinguished. Adi felt a lifetime of guilt and entrapment burn through her, and knew that she had guessed correctly. The source of the seer’s despair and power were one and the same. Had he betrayed the young woman he had been teaching? Had he used her love and thought to throw it away? Either way, the seer had taken her revenge on the man who had wronged her, forcing him to kill in order to live on as a captive, and to feed by taking that which he had taken from her.

 

The storm intensified in direct proportion to the fading of the flame. When the latter died, so did the other. All resistance collapsed, and Ros and Adi fell to the ground, stunned by the sudden silence, spent.

 

* * * *

 

Ros could barely crawl. The glowstones shone fitfully and the air remained thick with ash. He could hear Adi breathing — or did he simply imagine that he could? — and by painful effort was able to follow the sound to where she lay huddled on her side, cradling the dead spark tenderly with all of her body. He touched her hair, and she rolled over to face him, leaving the awful thing behind.

 

‘Is she dead?’ Adi asked.

 

‘I think so. By her own hand.’

 

She winced, but there was triumph in her eyes, too. ‘We managed it, then.’

 

‘We did. Together.’

 

They lay side by side for a long moment, holding hands tightly, unsure exactly what this meant for them.

 

‘I suppose we should go soon,’ he said, thinking with no great joy of the crowds that would be waiting for them.

 

‘I’m taking it with us,’ she said with iron in her voice.

 

He understood, and lacked the strength to argue.

 

* * * *

 

The closed cab that whisked Ros and Adi from the scene was the talk of the city’s night-owls, for its import was ambivalent, perhaps even ominous. While it was good news that the pair had survived, the fate of the treacherous seer and the great romance itself was not known. A new kind of anxiety gripped the darkened streets. Was seeing justice done better than seeing damage undone, or vice versa? If one couldn’t have both, who could possibly choose between them?

 

* * * *

 

The Mierlos guided them into the mansion, trusting in the cloak of night and a torturously complicated route to keep prying eyes at bay. Adi was shaking, and Ros felt as though every bone in his body might spontaneously shatter. A physician was on hand to tend their ailments, both physical and otherwise. Adi’s wounds were bathed and bandaged; Ros’s twisted ankle was bound. Both were given clean clothes and all the food they could stomach. No one asked about the ebon crystal that rested on Mawson’s former plinth in the study. That it was to be guarded and not touched was the only instruction issued, by both of the Mierlos’ guests.

 

Shortly before midnight a small gathering convened in the study. There a senior Stone Mage presented his conclusions on the matter of the Thrall and its patron, Magda Van Haasteren. Her body had been recovered from the underground redoubt. An autopsy had confirmed Ros’s intuitive diagnosis: her heart had literally burst from the application of her own will. Neither Ros nor Adi were to blame for her death, although if they had been they would surely have been exonerated.

 

Few doubted Adi’s interpretation of the creature’s origins, and several candidates were put forward to account for the man the Thrall had been. No one accused Adi of killing the Thrall too quickly, but it was apparent that the lack of an opportunity to test the hypothesis seemed a shame to some. Perhaps all such creatures had undergone the tragic birth and endured the grotesque symbiotic life as this one. Until another appeared, there was little way to tell.

 

A representative of the city’s administration officially apologised for the damage done by one of its residents, and expressed a sincere hope that the incident would not affect relations between Ulum and the trading Clans, who were, after all, the lifeblood of the Interior. Adi assured him that it would not, and went on to profess her profound gratitude to the people of the city for lending their aid when need had been greatest.

 

‘On that matter,’ Jenfi Mierlo began, but her husband nudged her silent.

 

There followed several other declarations, clarifications, and interrogations, all of which began to take on a slightly surreal nature until, finally, the hosts declared the convention over and ushered the officials to the door.

 

‘You’re welcome to rest here the night,’ said the mistress of the house when its halls were quiet once more, ‘but there’s something we want to tell you first.’

 

* * * *

 

‘Your spark was powerful, yes,’ said Samson Mierlo, pacing awkwardly about the sealed study. His tone was the same as it had been the day he had informed Adi that Ros was lost in the Void Beneath. He indicated the twisted, black thing: ‘There’s nothing to be done for it now, though. You have to move on.’

 

‘What are you suggesting?’ Adi asked, her face taut and pinched. Inside, despite the ministrations of all those who had tried to help, she felt the same.

 

‘I’m suggesting that we are not so different, Jenfi and I. That is, we are quite different from each other, but that’s what makes us the same as you two. We can serve as an example, if you need one.’

 

‘You must feel that all is lost,’ Jenfi said, turning violet with the effort of restraining her relentless croup. ‘But it isn’t. If a spark was all it took for love to survive — not just survive; thrive and grow — Samson and I would have parted years before now. Not one couple in the history of the world has ever been perfectly matched, and not one spark has lasted the length of a marriage. Sparks come and go — that’s the secret your twisted friend neglected to learn.’

 

‘You’re rather fortunate, after a fashion,’ said Samson.

 

Ros stared at him as he had stared at Magda Van Haasteren, who had suggested the same awful thing.

 

‘This is the worst it will ever be,’ Jenfi explained. ‘You’ve seen what happens when expectations aren’t met. Hopes dashed, dreams unfulfilled — and that was before the spark was taken.’ She waved a hand expressively. ‘How much better to move forward with eyes unclouded in search of a new spark, one you brought into being yourselves rather than one that owned you.’

 

‘Because you have all the raw materials,’ said Samson. ‘You have a history — as anyone can tell you — and now you have shared something else too. Several equally important things. A common enemy and unity of purpose; grief — and a keepsake to remind you of everything that happened here. Sparks have been born from significantly less than that, in my experience.’

 

‘But what if that’s not what we want?’ Adi interjected. ‘What if everything we now have in common —’ She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. ‘— the pain and the suffering, the memories, the exhaustion — what if that becomes self-perpetuating? What if we just want to leave it behind and go back into hiding again?’

 

Jenfi Mierlo folded her hands in her lap. Ros recognised the fiduciary gleam that returned to her eyes.

 

‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘that isn’t an option just yet.’

 

* * * *

 

Dawn crept down Ulum’s chimneys and cast the beginning of another day in a muted golden light. It had been a long night for all in the city, and an especially dark night for some. An atmosphere of apprehension had settled in like fog, making restless even the most stoic of dreamers. Rumours continued to fly, if more sluggishly than previously without fact to back them up. Roslin of Geheb and Aditi Sabatino had not been seen for hours. Some said that they were gone and would never visit the city again. Had all of Ulum’s help been for nothing? Would the markets ever re-open?

 

That morning’s crowds were simply waiting for answers. Wild-beard was among them, with a mazed look and a leer for any who caught his eye, along with the cab driver who had whisked Ros and Adi to safety after escaping the trap and the maid who had watched doppelganger-Ros decrepitate. They knew as little as anyone else. Those who did know were, for the moment, not talking.

 

* * * *

 

Ros dressed with a calm he would have though impossible just hours before. Adi helped him fold the fabric, which came in a style that had risen to prominence during his long apprenticeship. The terror of the everyday was for the moment deferred, thanks in no small part to her good example. The world of the Thrall and the seer — his world — had been no less challenging for her, and she had excelled in it.

 

They had spent the night at the Mierlos, who had, without any obvious dissemblance, explained that only one guest-room was available. Although they had chafed at the intimacy at first, later they been glad for the opportunity to talk through everything they had been told — for a telling-to is what it had certainly amounted to. And later still, with the advice of their benefactors still clear in their minds, they had stopped talking altogether, feeling as though they hadn’t any choice in the matter but not in an inordinately negative sense. The truth of it was that it had been a relief to let go of the expectation that they should choose. The head couldn’t stand in for the heart, when it came to such matters. The moment decided, if anything did, and in that moment all had been well, and something of a release for both of them.

 

When the folding and tying was done, they held each other tightly and cried for a while. There was nothing shameful or wretched in it. The time for that had passed. New challenges awaited them, deserving all their attention. They could still grieve, but at the same time they could also move on.

 

Ros looked uncomfortable in his finery. Adi wished he would relax into it, but supposed he would in time. He had been so powerful, so potent, in Van Haasteren’s subterranean cave, and she was prepared now to give him the benefit of the doubt. For herself, she had chosen something absurdly impractical from her own wardrobe, recovered from the Lost Dolphin before souvenir collectors could claim it. She was aware that a large part of her took comfort from the familiar routine of dressing and the novelty of preparing someone else’s dress, and although it wasn’t a habit she wanted to encourage, for now she would embrace the task.

 

‘True stories don’t have endings,’ said he in a contemplative tone. Mawson had broken his silence for the third time to deliver that gnomic fragment, which she supposed gave some insight into his stony motivations.

 

‘Indeed,’ she said, quoting in turn Jenfi Mierlo’s opinion on the importance of the people around them, not merely as customers who spent more when they were happy: ‘And love doesn’t thrive in isolation.’

 

Hand in hand, they went to pay their respects to the city.

 

* * * *

 

Afterword

 

‘The Spark’ sits midway along the timeline of the ten linked fantasy novels in my Change series — the Books of the Change, the Books of the Cataclysm, and most recently the Broken Land. Inspired by the landscapes of my childhood rather than European or indigenous Australian mythologies, I had no conception when I set out on this journey that the places I revisited would become such an enduring obsession. The people who occupied them, also.

 

My young protagonists Ros and Adi were left somewhat hanging at the end of the Broken Land trilogy, as had Sal and Shilly years before them, because the conclusion to their story lay beyond the purview of a series for young readers. I always intended to return, to see their knot tied, but the deeper I dove into their story the less, perversely, it became about them, or even about the landscape that originally inspired their world.

 

Yet in a very real way, ‘The Spark’ is the capping stone on the entire series. All the characters I’ve loved are present, in one form or another, and all the motifs too. Loss, the passage to adulthood, the nursing and healing of old wounds — for me, that’s always what these stories have been about.

 

And love, too, with which all can be endured.

 

— Sean Williams

 

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