Skybreaker

by Gwyneth Jones, Ann Halam

Genres: YA Fantasy

Synopsis

In the final book of the DAYMAKER trilogy, Zanne's journey takes her further than ever before.

The Thirteen Guardians of Inland have a mission for Zanne, following her adventures seeking the Daymaker. She is to go to Magia, the nation across the sea, to act as a governess to Magia's young king. Accompanied by her friend Holne, Zanne is sent further from home than she has ever travelled, to a land entirely unfamiliar to her.

Why is Magia so different? And what are its intentions towards Inland?

The final book in the DAYMAKER triology, by award-winning author Gwyneth Jones writing as Ann Halam, is perfect for fans of Ursula K Le Guin's EARTHSEA books and THE SHANNARA CHRONICLES.

Release date: July 12, 1990

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

The wind was not strong, but it never let up. It blew from the sunset, pushing the small sailing ship ever deeper into a grey emptiness that closed in on every side. On land, the clammy greyness would have been a normal heavy mist of Leafall, the moon after the end of summer. Out here it seemed as if the whole world had disappeared forever.

Two figures stood near the bows of the little fishing smack, both of them shrouded in heavy woollen cloaks: one russet and one grey. The smaller figure, whose cloak was grey and noticeably shabby and travel stained, was a young woman about twenty years old: still a flores, by Inland reckoning; just on the brink of adulthood. When she pushed back the fold of her hood, to stop cold beading moisture from dripping into her eyes, she revealed a broad, almost homely face surrounded by wiry yellow curls, and naturally pale skin tanned ruddy brown. Her challenging and brilliant eyes, which were clear grey, were her best feature: but at the moment their expression was not happy.

Her companion was a tall, slender flores with dark hair and eyes the peaty brown colour of a mountain stream. At first glance it could be seen that he was a year or two younger than the woman, who already had a weather worn and hardy look. On closer inspection there was nothing childish, no boyish carelessness in the look of this young man. His companion’s eyes were serious for the moment. In the young man’s face there was a shadow that seemed to have taken root for life.

They both turned away from gloomy contemplation of the fog at the same moment, looked at each other and sighed.

“When I was a little girl,” said Zanne, the young woman with the yellow hair, “I thought the world began in the woods above our Mill at Garth, and ended at Mosden market. I’d heard of other places of course … and I believed in them more or less. But at the back of my mind I felt as if the world between our village mill and the tradestown was huge enough for anyone: even after I started going to magic school. When you begin to use magic on your own everything changes … I remember the first time I pushed myself into a high lift. I got the shock of my life when I looked down and saw the wastelands spread out all around the little patch of countryside I lived in.” She grinned. “And now of course I’ve been everywhere and seen everything! That’s my trade. But I’ve never seen anything I liked as little as this. Even in the wastelands, the outland as we used to call it in Garth, you find ghosts and relics of the past. This is just nothing. It’s like a world made of dishwater!”

She grimaced at the flat grey ocean: flat as it looked the surface still rose and fell in a way that was most uncomfortable for the stomach.

“And I hate the way everything keeps bouncing up and down!”

She laughed, trying to lift their mood to the level of ordinary, traveller’s grumbling. But the mere mention of Zanne’s ‘trade’ brought back the gloom.

For all of its existence, Inland had been haunted by unhappy relics of the age of the machines, or ‘makers’ as Inlanders called them. The sick and weary survival of a few Great Makers, the powerhouses that used to fuel the old rule of force, was a constant drain on Inland’s vital energies. Those who were talented in the new way of power feared the old Makers so much that they dared not meddle with them: magic used in terror and hatred would only spread destruction, and weaken Inland even more.

Zanne was different. She had a strange talent, unknown in any other magic maker yet born. Zanne could reach through the forms and see that the makers were also part of the natural world—as natural in their inner essence as the crops and fields and beasts and weather of Inland; now kept fertile and (more or less) docile by magic alone. She loved and understood the Makers, and so (by a sad irony) it was her work to seek them out, to give them good death. It was on such a mission that she and Holne, the flores beside her, were embarked. But this time the monster was not hidden in one of Inland’s wastelands. It had been detected in another country—an unknown, incalculable land.

A gust of wind rattled through the ropes and canvas overhead, flicking cold water into their faces and stirring the mist without breaking it. Holne rubbed at a sheen of fish scales that had transferred itself from the rail to his cloak. He was a fastidious person, and the smell that pervaded everything on board depressed him more than any dangers ahead.

“I just wish—” he began.

At that moment Bartey Fisher, their captain, came strolling around the corner of the deckhouse, swaying easily to the boat’s motion. She was a short square woman, with a constant broad grin that had worn deep grooves like fishhooks in her leathery cheeks. She wore thick canvas breeches and a long greasy knitted jersey that reached almost to her knees. She and her aged uncle, her two silent sons and her whiplash-thin sarcastic daughter usually ran this dirty but sturdy old vessel as a fishing smack. But Bartey’s covener, the leader and guide in magic of the east coast fishing community, had recommended her as the best captain for Zanne and Holne’s voyage. Regrettably, like all members of the east coast meeting, the Bartey Fishers found landlover Inlanders’ fear of the sea highly amusing. The captain and crew seemed to spend a good deal of their time hanging around waiting for Zanne or Holne to fall over, or to turn green and rush for the side.

The smack was called the Sandy Bottom, a name which struck both Zanne and Holne as ridiculous. The captain’s daughter said it was a very lucky name for any boat to have, that was steered by her ma.

“How’re you today, my young woman and great boy?”

She winked at Holne. “Found those sea legs yet? Never mind, we’ll be in sight of land sometime this hour. We’ll lay you off to the foreigners by noon, and me and the Sandy Bottom’ll get back to our proper trade.”

Bartey’s leathery grin became sanctimonious. “Oh, it’s a terrible thing for honest Inland Fishers to have to mix up with these foreign folk. They eat babies, you know. That’s where they get their magic. And they can change into birds, and all sorts of unnatural things. I wouldn’t have anything to do with Magians myself, if my covener and meeting hadn’t specially asked it.”

This was rather far from the truth. The crew of the Sandy Bottom were famous among even Fisher families for their smuggling adventures. It was because of their matchless knowledge of the shoals and creeks of the foreign coastline that they’d been asked to carry Holne and Zanne across the sea. But though most members of Bartey’s community had at some point tasted Magian liquor or tried out strange Magian goods, smuggling wasn’t talked about in decent company. A sly twinkle in Bartey’s eye showed how little she expected to be believed, so that even Zanne, who had very literal ideas about honesty, couldn’t take offence.

Still she frowned. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, about the Magians, Bartey. It’s not right and it’s not fair. They’re just ordinary, magical people; the same as we are.”

Bartey rolled her eyes at Holne. “Oh, my covener and meeting, she is a serious one, your friend. I don’t mean any harm young Zanne.”

Then she gave Zanne a hard, grave look that surprised her. “Aye, Zanne of Garth. I know they’re people like us, and I know their trouble is ours in the end. We’re all living in the one world, under the Covenant. But a person’s magic can accept that a course of action is necessary, and that person can still not like to see two young lives put out so far from our land, and maybe lost.”

She was embarrassed then, scratched her head with one horny hand and leaned energetically over the rail as if she was going to leap overboard.

“What’re you gawping over here for anyway? You dropped something? You won’t see landfall this way, it’s off the other bow. My covener, I should’ve thought even a farmer could feel the smell of it coming by now.”

Zanne suppressed a scowl. She was getting rather tired of this constant teasing. But Holne could always keep his temper. He grinned easily.

“We were looking for the end of the world.”

All Inlanders knew that the world they lived in was held together by magic. The whole fabric of reality was maintained, in the end, by nothing more than the web of the needs of the people who lived in it, and their cooperation with each other. This disturbing secret was usually well hidden beneath the normal, solid appearance of things: but the emptiness of the sea was a frightening reminder of the truth, to those who weren’t hardened by familiarity.

“The end of the world!” Bartey chuckled, never tired of the old seafarers’ joke. “Well, don’t you worry Holne. Wherever the Sandy Bottom goes, there goes me and my lass, and the boys and nuncle. We won’t stop wanting a sea to sail on, and wind and sun and stars too, so don’t you fret.”

Bartey laughed loudly at her own wit: and even Zanne managed a patient smile. The Fisher was a good hearted person and she’d been kind to them, despite her rather limited sense of humour.

“Well, well, I must be getting on. Got to remind uncle he’s to cook three extra for dinner again. Poor old noddle, he’d forget his head if it wasn’t sewed on.”

“Two extra,” said Zanne.

“Eh?” The captain looked puzzled. “Ah, did I say three? Funny thing, I keep doing that. Keep thinking there’s three of you on board. Well, it does no harm. There’s plenty, and we’ve all healthy appetites.”

Bartey strolled away. Zanne and Holne looked at each other curiously. But they had other things to think of besides the captain’s mistake, on this last morning before the adventure began. The air was a little warmer now. Zanne spread her cloak on the boards and they knelt facing each other, ready to begin the Link exercises, which they had practised faithfully each morning for the three days of the voyage. ‘The Link’ was the bond between body and mind. It was part of a covener’s training to develop this bond, through the strenuous and beautiful exercises that every magic student learned. Magic works by likeness: mind and body working as one, knowing each other, obedient to each other, are like magical talent and the world.

Zanne and Holne had worked well together, even under the inquisitive eyes of the Fishers. But this morning even for Zanne, to whom the Link was second nature, concentration was impossible.

“‘Two young lives lost.” She scowled in exasperation. “And people eating babies …What nonsense the Fishers talk!”

“I certainly hope so,” remarked Holne wryly.

“What were you going to say, Holne, before Bartey came? I wish—you said. I suppose you wish you’d never come?” She gave him a direct look. “It’s not too late you know. If you’ve changed your mind, you could sail back with Bartey. It might be for the best.”

Neither they themselves nor Bartey Fisher had any real idea of what might lie ahead. But there was a special danger for Holne, and the decision to seek it out had been his alone.

Magia …

In the chill, rocking world of mist, with the sea dew salt on her lips, Zanne remembered an Inland summer’s day, two months ago. Zanne had been in the apple orchard, at home at Townsend farm near the village of Garth in Mid-Inland. It was Midsummer. Above the farm’s well-tended yards the sheep downs rose, the cropped turf buzzing with grasshoppers. In the ruinstone meadows down the valley children roamed the golden stubble left after the hay, scratching and searching for scraps of treasure from the olden time: smooth pebbles of coloured glass or shards of pretty crockery—just as Zanne has hunted, as a child. She could hear their clear voices as she picked: the last of the golden Rose apples and the first of the early cropping Sunsets and Briars. As she worked at this soothing task, her hands dipping in and out of the cool leaves, her eyes judging the ripeness of each bright fruit, the pleasure that it gave her made some hard thinking easier. Zanne always loved to come back to the farm. Nothing ever rested her like this kind of work.

She was thinking about the trouble that had arisen in Magia. Though the people of Inland were divided from each other physically, by poor and dangerous roads and by the great wastelands, in magic they came together. In every town or country settlement there was a meeting house where people would gather, from the streets round about or from scattered farms, to decide the affairs of the Covenant. Generally the meetings were only concerned with how to satisfy one crop’s need for rainfall, along with another’s need to have the fine weather continue. But even this small local magic, shifting bits of the world and holding others, as Inlanders would say, could not be carried out in isolation. At the shifting centre of each separate community of individuals lay the meeting’s covener: a woman, usually—very occasionally a man—who had been born with magical talent and trained to use it. The covener was aware not only of the needs of her own community but of those around it. At the centre of all lay Hillen Mound, the school of magic on the northern moors; and from Hillen the Thirteen members of Hillen Coven watched over the whole web of meetings. From Hillen there came to each individual, through the channel of the covener’s talent, as much sense of the welfare of Inland as a whole as that person was willing to bear: and even some hint of the lost lands beyond.

In this way a rumour of trouble had filtered through the land. Some people, most perhaps, would still feel nothing—for ‘Magia’ was barely a name and their own concerns absorbed them. Others, more outward looking by nature, had noted the distant threat, and the word Magia had acquired for them a taint of vague unease.

Because of Zanne’s training, and her trade, her sense of the trouble was quite precise, though there were features that she didn’t understand. She was expecting daily, resignedly, a summons from Hillen.

Rare talents must be used, the old things that should be dead must be put to rest … Zanne accepted the task that she seemed to have been born for. It hadn’t always been so. When Zanne of Garth was a little girl she had dreamed with hopeless longing of the marvels of the lost past, but that was over. She had become convinced, through hard experience, that the great Makers couldn’t share the same world as Inland’s magic: when it came to a choice, she could not choose the unmaking of Inland. But it would always be hard and sad work for her to put the great Makers to death. And even Zanne, who loved adventures, was beginning to wonder how long this work would continue. Was she doomed to spend the rest of her life wandering the roads like some glorified rat catcher?

She sat in the branches of an old Sunset tree, past its heavy cropping years and allowed to grow freely. Magic had held this tree at the height of a twelve-year-old child: magic had set it free. Magic, by slow and delicate shifting of the nature of things changed sour soil to fertile; lengthened the apple season til it lasted from New Summer to the first snow …

Zanne knew that her talent was considerable as well as unusual. At one time, before her elders understood how strange Zanne’s particular gift was, her teachers had hoped that she would join them at Hillen, the magic school and heart of magic, buried under its great mound. In the dark and silence that lives under the earth, and in every human heart, home of all beginnings and all dreams, Covenant magic had begun: and there its roots would always remain. Zanne loved darkness as much as any Inlander. She had lived in those silver-dappled corridors and shadowy halls for years as a schoolgirl. She would have been proud and willing to return there forever.

She would have been equally happy to become a country covener like her own mother here at Garth—blessing the new milk, healing small ills; killing the peoples’ meat animals so that their death should be covenanted and gentle. But there was no hope of either life for her, so far as Zanne could see. She was “Zanne the maker-killer”: everybody knew her story. Unfair as it might seem, to the average Inlander her magic would always be tainted by its contact with the hated past.

No, thought Zanne, on that summer day. It’s not unfair. They’re right to doubt me … Even now, here among the apple trees, part of her still yearned for something fearfully bright and far away: the time of long ago with its towers of light and its beautiful monsters of shining, singing metal …

What’s to become of me? she wondered, turning over a round and glowing Sunset apple in her hands. Will my life always be jagged and awkward, like a bit of something broken? Don’t I fit in anywhere?

She heard the latch lift and fall on the orchard gate. Two people came through the trees, one of them a spare, middle-aged woman with greying hair, dressed in grey leggings and a tunic of deep blue. With a glad exclamation Zanne jumped down from her perch.

“Holder Elima!”

The Holder of Inland, headmistress of the magic school, might be regarded as Hillen’s own covener, the woman who spoke for the Thirteen as the covener speaks for her meeting. But this was not the public role it might seem, and it was rare for the Holder to leave Hillen Mound. Elima, that awesome figure who had ruled Zanne’s childhood and at last become her dear friend, smiled a little grimly as she saw Zanne’s delighted expression change.

“Holder—oh, I am sorry to see you here.”

Elima laughed. “Zanne my child, will you never learn to be tactful? Yes, you’re quite right. It takes grave trouble to bring the Holder out of Hillen. However—”She glanced around at the laden trees and the summer flowers in the grass beneath them. “I will be tactful and truthful, and say trouble couldn’t have brought me to a lovelier place than Townsend orchard.”

“It’s about Magia, isn’t it.”

“Yes, Zanne. It is about Magia. Sit down, won’t you. We have things to discuss.”

Zanne looked to the other visitor, who was hanging back shyly. He was wrapped in a light cloak, the hood pulled over his face: which seemed odd, for though the sky was dapple grey and the air cool it wasn’t a chilly day by the standards of an Inland summer. But though Zanne could be blunt she knew (at least sometimes) when to keep her mouth shut. So she asked no questions and they sat down, all three, in the flowery grass, the boy in the cloak a little apart.

“Zanne,” said Elima. “Does the word ‘skybreaker’ mean anything to you?”

She watched the young woman’s face: it was always a pleasure to see her old pupil’s quick mind at work. Nothing was ever hidden there, everything was as clear as day. Elima saw the flash of elation, of wonder, and how quickly it was curbed.

“So that’s why I must go to Magia.”

“Yes, Zanne. We don’t know how, we don’t know by whom, but somewhere in that land across the sea the last dream is being dreamed again.”

Zanne had studied old records that most coveners feared to touch, and she knew a great deal about the dreams and madness of the lost past. To the Thirteen this thing that Elima called the ‘skybreaker’ was merely senseless: crazier even than the rest of the blind greed that had starved and poisoned the earth. But Zanne knew more. Her sense that there was something very strange about this new threat was confirmed.

“Oh, but—”

Elima recoiled a little from Zanne’s eagerness, and held up her hand. “No, Zanne. I give you the name, don’t expect me to discuss the problem further. To call up the past even in words is unsafe for the Thirteen. . . .