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.Shilly shifted into a more comfortable position beside him, her dark skin soaking up the sunlight.At some point in the dawn light she had doodled in the dirt a fair representation of Kail and Marmion arguing nose to nose; Marmion’s wispy hair became a prideful comb-over and Kail’s nose possessed a menacing angle Sal had never noticed before.Tom was obeying orders with single-minded determination, but Shilly was clearly bored, and Sal had quickly grown tired of staying alert.He was relying more on the Change than his material senses to tell him if something was approaching.Flies stirred, bothering him only when they crawled across his mouth.What they fed on so close to the Divide he didn’t know — or want to know — but as long as they didn’t bite him, he could tolerate their presence.They appeared to be the only living thing for dozens of kilometres, although Sal knew that wasn’t true.Even the deepest desert was full of life; sometimes dormant, like seeds waiting to blossom into flowers after monsoonal rain, but often as active as anywhere else.Hunters hunted; prey fled; scavengers prowled the grey areas in between.The Change flowed through them all.The Change told him what he needed to know.He felt the same as he had on the beach, only three days earlier.Something was on its way.The earth shuddered at its step, and the air recoiled from its skin.What it was, he didn’t know, but there was no avoiding it — or the person accompanying it.A nagging sense of familiarity touched him.He raised himself up onto his elbows and peered through the slit in the hide.Low brown clouds billowed to the northeast.A lone squiggle danced on the horizon; he couldn’t decide if it was a dead tree warped by heat haze or someone walking towards them across the desolate landscape.The feeling of imminence grew stronger.He reached out to touch Shilly, and she shivered wordlessly.She felt it too, through him.It didn’t feel like Highson as Sal remembered him, but time had passed and the strange Change-eating effects of the Homunculus could have interfered with his signature.There was no one else who knew Sal for hundreds of kilometres.It had to be him.The anticipation became acute; he felt as though a twisting cord was about to snap inside him.He tensed, ready to spring in any direction, and didn’t take his eyes off the landscape.A bird wheeled high above the stony ground, circling gracefully in the rippling air.It caught his gaze and held it.He wished he could soar over the earth like that.It would, he thought, certainly make looking for the Homunculus that much easier.When the bird suddenly twisted in mid-air and dropped like a stone, he realised his mistake.It wasn’t a bird, and it wasn’t his father he had been sensing.With a cry of alarm, he leapt to his feet and burst out from cover.* * * *The Seer‘All life is composed of three basic elements —flesh, mind and the Change — balanced tovarying degrees and in varying ways.Humansconsist of minds that live in bodies of flesh;golems are minds composed of the Change.We use the Change to alter the world; golems andother creatures use vessels of flesh to becomepart of the world, to wreak their havoc andmayhem upon us.’MASTER WARDEN RISA ATILDE:NOTES TOWARD A UNIFIED CURRICULUMHe’d had better days, Skender thought.The previous night, after a landing he preferred not to remember, and a shot of araq that was even worse, he and Chu had quickly parted.There had, however, been the tiniest of hesitations at the hostel as she left.He had frozen solid while saying goodnight, thinking that she might be waiting for him to kiss her.And part of him had wanted to.The exhilaration of flying together was still thrilling through him, even in his exhausted state.His heart pounded.But he had never kissed anyone before and didn’t know what to do.What if he had misjudged the moment? What if she wanted nothing more from him than a chance to get her licence back? What if she thought he was nothing but a geeky kid?The moment was gone as soon as it came.She wished him sweet dreams, inscrutable as ever, and he had kicked himself all the way upstairs to his room.Over the araq, Chu had extracted a promise that he would meet her at the launch tower half an hour before dawn.Urtagh the landlord pounding on Skender’s door at the appointed hour showed him just how much faith she had in his promises.But that was fair enough, he thought, as he’d been dreaming of the Keep’s winding corridors at the time, and probably would have slept all day given the chance.He had leapt into his clothes and run to the tower, pausing only to wash his face and clean his teeth.His hair simply wouldn’t flatten, no matter how he tried.She had been waiting on the second platform with the wing extended, looking exactly as he had last seen her, minus the bags under her eyes.The last vestiges of sleep fell from him.‘Do you ever wash that uniform?’‘Are you ever on time?’Her crotchetiness made him wonder if he’d imagined her hesitation the previous night.‘I presume you have the licence.’‘Of course.’ She waved the tattered-looking envelope.‘Let’s get it on you and into the air.’She had showed him how to apply the charm, letting the black skin-like sheath slide against chest and throat.It did the rest of the work, melting onto him like chocolate into hot milk.Again he experienced a strange blindness as the licence interfered with his normal sight.Then his eyes had cleared and the wind had returned.It was strange, he thought.When taking off the licence the previous evening, it had come as a relief to see the world properly again, and overnight he had almost forgotten what it was like to see the city and its atmosphere as intertwined things, one wrapped around the other.As soon as the charm took root, however, the new sense it provided felt as natural as breathing.He was a creature of the air again.They had strapped each other in and moved stiffly to the edge of the platform.Skender’s muscles ached from the previous night’s exhaustion, and the thought of more exercise wasn’t a pleasant one, but his mother was out there somewhere, lost in the Divide, and he had to find her.They launched in unison out into the crisp dawn light, accompanied by a yadachi’s wailing exhortation for rain.The winds of the morning were turbulent and fresh.His cheeks instantly numbed in the cold, but the growing strength of the sunlight soon thawed them.Together, with his eyes and her skill, they negotiated the towers of the city and swooped over the Wall into the giant canyon.It was very different during the day.Skender couldn’t decide if the vastness of the Divide increased or decreased with the ability to see it, and if he was more scared or less.It was difficult to grasp the size of it.Hanging over its jumbled middle, either side was blurry and indistinct.‘Where do you want to start looking?’ Chu asked him, all business.Skender hadn’t truly appreciated just how big a task he was taking on.He could discern nothing in the ravaged landscape to indicate where his mother might have gone.‘The Aad,’ he said, clutching at the only clue he had.‘You said there were tunnels under the other half of the city.Let’s try there first [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]