“Sorry.”
“Her sacrifice wasn’t wasted. I found the escape tunnel that Aforis had started digging through the rubble.”
Unar’s frowning face appeared beside Aforis’s. She was really there. Somehow. Unlike the others, she still looked the same. Unlike the others, she hadn’t mysteriously grown younger. She grouched as if they all still stood in the boughs of Canopy.
“Maybe the death god here,” she said, rolling her eyes at Atwith, “hasn’t been able to rid us of the winged one, but he managed to snare a goat. I’ve taken the risk of putting it on a fire to cook, even though I still can’t believe we’re eating it. Even kings don’t eat goats in Canopy. Can you eat, Leaper?”
“Maybe.”
“Speaking pains you?” She shouldered closer to him, drawing a sidelong, irked look from Aforis.
“Yes.”
“If you can keep him alive for now with nonmagical doctoring,” Aforis murmured, “you can heal him when we get back to the forest.”
Unar’s abrupt laughter was full of more derision than Leaper had ever thought the Godfinder would direct at Aforis. She was normally unfailingly polite to him.
“Oh, yes? Once we reach the forest? How do you propose we do that? Atwith estimated that he covered a thousand times a thousand paces. Even if we were all fit to travel—and don’t tell me you can carry another grown man on a stretcher all that way—it would take us fifty days or more, and the winged one would spot us in a heartbeat. There’s nowhere to hide on that plateau, besides in the lakes themselves, and we can’t breathe water.”
“Then we must find a way back through the lantern.”
Through the lantern. That must be the way they came. But how, when its light is out?
Aforis responded wryly to Leaper’s quirked eyebrow. “I emerged through your linked lantern while it remained in your carrysack. While you were lying on top of it, in fact. Luckily the seams of the sack came apart instead of strangling me. Unar arrived subsequently. She showed up a day or so after Atwith and his Bodyguard were deposited unceremoniously into the cavern by the winged.”
“I’ve never seen so many birds bearing messages,” Unar said wryly. “Canopy was in an uproar. The death god, missing in the middle of a cloud-dark night! They came for me at once. Who better to find Atwith than the Godfinder? What with Aforis missing, too, and a broken lantern that he seemed to have repaired sitting in the middle of my table, even Leaper would have had the brains to open a pane and poke around inside it. Can’t say I was impressed to land on my backside in a pitch-black tunnel with an angry monster at the other end.”
There was no magic to activate the lantern at my end, but the other lantern stayed behind, bathed in Airak’s power.
But it was in Eshland.
No. Aforis must have brought it from Eshland to the Godfinder’s table. To Airakland.
The lantern had allowed his friends from Canopy to come to him, but even if they managed to activate this dead and battered twin, it wouldn’t let them back through with Leaper accompanying them. No more than Leaper had been allowed in close proximity to Canopy when travelling in the company of the winged.
Gathering his courage, he tried to tell them.
“The curse,” he said thickly. His teeth clicked together like hammer and chisel on the “s,” sending shooting pains through his head. “It won’t work. Ulellin’s curse.”
“It’s not the curse,” Unar said sharply. “Listen. Five months ago, Ousos came back from Floor without you, saying Airakland was under threat. Airak bought an early monsoon from the child Ehkis with every tribute in his Temple plus all the sand and glass in Airakland. And Aforis tried to find out from his master, despite all these distractions, whether you’d survived.”
“Airak would say only that you were bent on disobeying him again,” Aforis said. “So I took some of Unar’s flowerfowl and went to see Atwith.”
“A Skywatcher in the death god’s Temple!” Atwith interrupted, grinning. “I remember that. I told—Atwith told a Skywatcher that Airak’s Servant Leapael was still alive.”
“I looked for clues about where you might have gone,” Aforis told Leaper. “I found your clandestine abode in Eshland. Your lantern was there, one of the pair you’d made for filching purposes. The lantern rested, malfunctioning, shooting lightning out everywhere, inside the broken halves of a ring of bone more massive than any Old God’s bone I’d ever seen. I wondered who you’d stolen the bone from and how you could possibly have known where to find it. When I touched it, I saw terrible things. Visions of the forest’s end.”
“You should have left it alone,” Unar said.
“I loaded the bone pieces and the lantern into a barrow and set off for Airakland. As when inside the house, the lantern was badly affected by the bones’ proximity. I thought all the lightning might set the barrow on fire.” Aforis sighed. “The Shining One should have been my best option, in the face of my god’s recalcitrance, yet I was suspicious of the circumstances of Ousos’s return.”
“Did she leave you there to die?” Unar demanded of Leaper. “Blink once for—”
Leaper blinked once, emphatically.
“As I conveyed the lantern in the direction of the Godfinder’s residence,” Aforis said, “it blazed up so brightly that I stopped to lift it out of the barrow, to try and temper it with the god’s power. Another, even larger Old God’s bone erupted out of it, but before it could flatten me, the other bones rose up to meet it and they annihilated one another in a shower of crimson sparks. The sparks settled into my skin wherever it was exposed. My hands and face. My neck and feet. Within minutes, their red glow faded, but I could still feel them, like bee stings.”
God’s bones. Annihilated. Who knew they could cancel one another out?
The Rememberers did. Dusksight and Dawnsight. No wonder they kept the two temples far away from one another.
“I feel them now,” Aforis went on. He dry-washed his face with his hands, and when he lowered them, Leaper saw the strangeness of the missing scar and black regrowth all over again. “They’re doing this to me. Making me age backwards.”
Two sclerotic ring bones. One seeing forwards in time and one seeing back, but the backwards-seeing one was the larger. The stronger. The more complete. That’s the one holding sway over Aforis now, taking him back.
“You can’t be sure that’s what’s happening,” Unar argued. She waved a hand at Atwith. “It could be something more similar to his situation. He ages according to the work he does, or so he said. That’s why he looks younger than Aoun. Plagues, starvation, and battle give him grey hairs. But in the ten years since Imeris made peace with Understorey, there have been far fewer premature deaths for him to preside over.”
“I’m sure,” Aforis said quietly. “My memories are being affected. I’m growing younger, slowly but surely. Approximately ninety days before I found the lantern, I received a wound that led to a scar on my face. Approximately ninety days after I found it, I woke up and the scar was gone. One day younger for every day that I should be growing older. That much is evident.”
“Cheer up, then, old fellow,” Atwith said lightly. “If it’s true, you’ve got more monsoons left in you than any other mortal you know.”
“With a good many of them as an infant,” Aforis answered, turning to fix Atwith with a glare. “From the sounds of it, that’s not an experience you’ve ever dealt with.”
“I remember this body’s childhood very clearly.” Atwith licked his teeth. “Right now I do, anyway. As soon as I go back, I’ll probably lose it again. You’re right, Skywatcher. Atwith takes only adult bodies, freshly dead. He has no period of vulnerability, as the other deities do. He has no use”—his gaze flicked to Unar—“for a Godfinder.”
Looks like he’ll be needing a new Bodyguard, though, Leaper didn’t quip.
“You give the impression that you’ve no true desire to attempt a return,” Aforis said.
“I don’t desire it,” Atwith said, shruggi
ng again. “Not at all. Yet my conscience insists that I try. All human lives that begin in the shade of the forest, whether on a boat floating beneath it or up high in its wooden arms, are bound together in one brilliant, tangled ball. When you told the winged one that I was the only one who could cut Leaper’s life thread, you weren’t far from the truth. Nobody in Canopy is dying right now, in my absence. Though I imagine some are in considerable pain. And some babies are being born soulless. I imagine Audblayin is cursing me for that shortage. If she aged the way that I do, she’d be tearing out handfuls of white hair.”
“If she aged the way that I do,” Aforis echoed sadly, “she’d have an eternal youth. Will I go to her, instead of to you, once my last hours are spent, I wonder?”
Leaper had briefly contemplated Aforis’s death before, and yet dying an old man was different to dying of a strange and inexplicable reverse-aging magic curse.
Well, Leaper knew what it was like to be cursed.
Would Aforis, too, rage against the gods before the end?
Airak is not kind, Aforis had murmured to Leaper, the day that the overeager boy had failed his first test at the Temple, but his reach is high and far and wide. And simple. Lightning is there, or it isn’t. Things are connected, or they aren’t. Nothing complicated like new life, or the wild, or children.
Nothing like love.
All the students had been given broken obsidian blades to mend. Glassmaking and glassworking were the primary industries of the Temple. Even the most feebly gifted of the freshly recruited adepts had made their black blades whole, but Leaper had failed, that day and on many subsequent days.
Before Unar and Aforis had gotten together to decide his future, in Audblayinland Leaper had felt the birth goddess’s presence, light as spidersilk around him. The strands were invisible, but he could smell them, like seeds and sun-warmed leaves. He’d sensed that they could be touched, tugged, and tangled in dormant lives to draw them into the light.
In contrast, Airak had felt like ice in his teeth and black sand in his eyes. Like invincible, unbending metal bars reaching high into the sky, only not quite there, requiring a ferocity of thought to make them real. And then the first time he’d tried, the bars had resisted being placed where he wanted them, throwing him backwards across the room. He’d returned to life with his head bruised from the impact and his floating ribs bruised by Aforis’s efforts at revival, his hair standing on end and the other students smirking.
It wasn’t until he’d contrived to get his hands on Tyran’s Talon that the smirks had faded. In the meantime, Leaper had needed to impress his master with other, more manipulative and insidious talents. He turned his hand to mimicry and deceit in order to be allowed to stay.
If I’d hidden myself in the ti chest a second time, might I have overheard Aforis and Unar regretting what they did to me? Experimenting on me? Grafting me to a different deity?
But I begged for it. Leaper remembered that much. I begged to be allowed to learn the magic that called lightning. Baby magic? Bean magic? I never wanted that.
“I’m sorry,” Leaper said clumsily to Aforis. “My bones. My lantern. I killed you. Just like I killed Ilik.”
Aforis and Unar glanced at one another.
“Like you killed Ilik?” Aforis repeated. “Ilik isn’t dead, Leaper. She didn’t want you told, because she feared you’d do something rash, but she’s alive. Safe. At least, she was when I left her.”
THIRTY
LEAPER’S HEART rate tripled.
Wind roared in his ears. He was trying to breathe in and out at the same time; he was choking; bile rose in the back of his throat despite the thought that vomiting would be the end of him, and so much worse than drowning in water.
Alive? Safe? He didn’t dare believe them, for fear of being crushed again.
“The scar on Aforis’s cheek came from forcing his way through to the farm,” Unar said, frowning, putting a hand under Leaper’s neck to support it. “Aforis was so preoccupied with the danger Ilik was in that he forgot I’d made those branches my armed sentries. It was his idea to bring her to me. Leaper, you need to relax. Ilik is at my flowerfowl farm.” Her tone turned wry. “Let’s hope she doesn’t touch the lantern, or she could end up stuck here with the rest of us.” Then her attention snapped back to Leaper. “I also left her safe, but bloodied and exhausted. I still had the cradle Anahah and Imeris used for their child, and now it’s full again. Queen Ilik gave birth to a son on the last day of summer.”
The last day of summer?
Leaper stared at the slanted, slate-roofed houses, seeing through their rickety balconies and broken pots. While he’d clung to Hunger’s black scales with his climbing spines, Ilik had been giving birth. To their son.
Leaper recalled the king’s words on the day they’d both thought Ilik had fallen.
I’ve always known that Ilik and I would have no children, Icacis had said. The wind goddess prophesied that when I died without direct descendants, blood of a slave would take my throne.
The words of Ulellin’s curse, on the day Leaper had called lightning to slay Orin’s beast in the leafy Temple, came back to him with a jolt of double vision and terrible clarity.
The wind spoke to me of your path, Ulellin had said. I doom you, by my power, to wander far from home until your mate, your true love, your heart’s desire, grows to love another more than you. Only then will you be permitted to return.
Leaper blinked and was back with his friends in the mountain crevice.
He thought, The blood of a slave that will take King Icacis’s throne is my blood.
The one that Ilik loved more than Leaper was her newborn son.
“The curse is broken,” Leaper said, feeling as numb in mind as he was in body.
One day too late for Hunger to have carried me right back to Canopy.
Unar’s expression was sympathetic.
“I’m no Servant of Oxor,” she said, “but if Ilik didn’t fall instantly in love with that ugly looking baby, I’ll eat that weird blanket-shirt you’re wearing.”
A shadow fell over them.
Immediately, Leaper’s companions went into a flurry of motion.
Leaper’s instinct was to hunch his shoulders and crane his neck towards the slice of visible sky. Yet again his body failed to obey him. He had to wait for the swooping shape of the black-scaled winged one to appear in the place where his face was already aimed.
Hunger’s eyes, as she carved through the blue, were slitted. Her nostrils were wide, drawing in the scent of … what? Leaper himself? Then her wings beat down, and she rose, turning back on herself, head and neck vanishing behind the sinuously doubled-back body.
Aforis’s abrupt assault on their cooking fire with sandals and beating bearskin answered Leaper’s fleeting mental query: Was she drawn by the smell of the smoke? Within moments Leaper smelled only singed hair and leather, which in turn was quickly dispersed. Then Atwith popped up beside Unar holding a seared, spitted goat that oozed blood and clear juices, and those smells made Leaper’s mouth water so uncontrollably that he almost forgot about the fact they were being hunted by a vengeful immortal—or at least, an intelligent creature that was extremely long-lived.
While he was daydreaming of charred meat, Unar and Aforis were rolling Leaper in some kind of carpet, kicking dust up around him, fumbling with straps. He couldn’t really see the straps. Nor could he feel them tighten around his arms and legs. He could glimpse patterns, once colourful, now faded, in the weave.
Not a carpet. A tapestry. A hanging.
Unar and Aforis seized wooden poles he hadn’t realised were threaded through the rolled-up tapestry with him. They lifted, carrying him closer to one of the crevice walls, and his field of vision changed. He realised that the deep, house-lined crack in the rock was only one street of the abandoned city, and that the other end of the street finished in tumbled boulders with ice in their cracks, the timbers of more smashed watchtowers protruding from beneath them.
> “We can’t stay here,” Aforis whispered from the foot end of the stretcher. “Hunger’s coming back around. Follow me.”
“Where are we going?” Atwith whispered back, still awkwardly wielding the steaming, half-cooked goat.
“Back the way we came, down the deep fork in the tunnel. To a structure I believe is a place of worship in the heart of the city.”
“Where you found the tapestry.”
“Indeed. There aren’t any goats to snare, but there’s water. The flow from the original spring has ceased, as we feared, but the river resumes from a crack in the gates of a graveyard. You were right about the spring, after all. It simply sprang up again somewhere else.”
Leaper was looking at the sky one moment, the cracked plastered ceiling of one of the slate-roofed houses the next. Aforis, taking the lead, was taller than Unar, so that Leaper’s feet were raised higher than his head, his neck tilted back at an angle.
He saw a painted frieze of starry skies over snowy peaks, in the place where building met wide, arched tunnel through unornamented rock. Then the party was plunged into blackness, and his mind had time to go over all he had learned.
First, and most important, things first.
Ilik is alive.
Hope flooded him.
The curse is broken. I can go back.
He commenced a mental assessment of his body. Breathing was slightly easier than it had been. The punishing fire that followed any attempt at speech was less agonising.
I have a reason to go back.
“Why are we slowing down?” Unar asked, her voice booming in the close confines of the tunnel.
“There’s loose stone underfoot here,” Aforis answered. “Go carefully.”
Tides of the Titans Page 24
