Surely she’d never voluntarily go back.
He went down the natural, glittering, crystalline staircase of a waterfall turned to stone.
But what if she’s found? She’ll have to leave the flowerfowl farm to find food. No, don’t think about that.
He climbed a series of hewn terraces where old roots and stumps suggested light had freely penetrated and crops had once been cultivated. It was some hours since he’d left the temple, and he wasn’t the slightest bit footsore.
Then the whole mountain shivered. Cracks opened under his feet.
Leaper froze midstride on a wide boulevard.
Hunger, he thought nervously. She has stamina. She flew back here from Canopy, a fifty-day journey for us, without touching the ground. But she never displayed the kind of strength that could crumble mountains.
The flagstones jittered again.
Water from the new spring runs along a different course. Perhaps parts of the mountain have been eroded. Weakened. Re-formed by the flow. Atwith—that is, the Ehkislander whose drowned corpse was pilfered by Atwith—might know.
Leaper waited to see if the cave ceiling would crash down on his head, but when all returned to stillness, he climbed through what he thought was a low doorway. It proved to be an outlet into the bottom of a cistern.
There, he set his torch aside again, this time to examine what had once been a four-pace-long wooden boat. It must once have floated on the water’s surface. Chains running through holes in the hull, hopelessly tangled now, connected levers, hollow glass spheres, pans, pins, the paws of carved cats, and the jaws of wooden goats, in something too complex for even Leaper’s mind to follow.
Eventually, on hunting further through the snarl, he found another small model of the city, as wide as his chest. This model had two spring-loaded arms attached to it, one bearing the golden ball of the sun, the other a scattering of greenish, tarnished silver stars.
The rim of the city had twelve rings of triangular markings along its circumference. On some rings, the markings were regular. On others, the markings bunched together at the near edge but were wide apart at the far edge, or vice versa.
Leaper huffed out a perplexed breath, saw fog in front of him, and realised his fingers on the metal rings were growing numb. He set the little city gingerly back down on the frigid stone floor of the cistern and retrieved his torch from its crevice, grateful for the warmth, alert now to the fact that he was inadequately clothed and must keep moving or return to the main fire.
Hunger, in her grief, rattled the mountain a third time, harder than ever.
She’s angry. Perhaps when she left the lair, her hatchling was only wounded, and now she’s discovered that it’s dead.
Leaper fought to keep his balance on the tilting floor. The pieces of the unknown mechanism rattled against one another.
The hollow glass spheres rolled to the ends of their chains, clashed, and cracked open.
I suppose I will return to the main fire. Even Aforis can’t have slept through that one.
But again, he gave the contents of the cistern a backwards, lingering glance.
Ilik, you should be here with me. Seeing this. If not for the winged one, we could live here. You could restore all these lost marvels. I know you could! Forget the secret house I made for us in Eshland. You could do what you love.
The obvious hit him between the eyes, stopping him in his tracks as brusquely as the tremors in the stone had stopped him.
All this time I’ve been wanting to take her from one cage to another. All I thought about was what I loved. What I needed. How I compared to her husband.
This is what she loves.
Leaper retraced his steps through the now daylit graveyard. He found Aforis awake, kneeling beside one of the exposed skulls, digging carefully to excavate a piece of silver-backed, clear glass mirror.
“Aforis,” he blurted out, “tell me again what Ilik looked like when you last saw her. Did she talk about the king? Did she suggest that she might go back to him? How did the two of you plan her escape to Unar’s flowerfowl farm?”
Aforis glanced up, his expression wry.
“One who walks in the grace of Airak regrets to say, Leapael, that he cannot remember.”
Before Aforis could look back down at the digging, Leaper stepped forward quickly and touched his mentor’s face where the scar had been.
“Maybe I can force the memory. You never forgot things in Canopy, before all this happened. You were like a human diary. Your scar. It was right there. Unar said it was from her guard vine.”
“Did she?” Aforis sighed. “If you say there was a scar, there must have been. I suppose that when it vanished, so did all my memories of its making.”
“But she said so only yesterday. You must have heard her say so. Right before you went to find Bria’s claw.”
“Bria’s claw?”
“Yes. The bone of the Old Gods. You risked your life smuggling it out from under the winged one.”
“Did I? I can’t remember that either.”
Leaper gave up.
He watched in distressed silence as Aforis finished unearthing the glass shard.
“It’s clearer than any glass I’ve seen,” the old man mused. “Made from a different sand to any of the sands we had available to us as Servants.”
“Scandalous,” Leaper said lightly. “I saw some glass spheres, each the size of my head, in a cistern back there. They were pretty good. But a better quality glass than that available at Airak’s Temple? Unheard of!”
“It’s not unheard of,” Aforis grumbled, polishing the piece with his thumb and holding it up to the light. “When I was young, my mother was employed as an arithmetic tutor in the House of Glass.”
Leaper wanted to go back inside the temple. He wanted to find Unar and Atwith, to make plans for their escape. To get out before all exits were blocked by rock slides, and before Aforis forgot who Leaper was and the four of them starved to death in the dark.
But he made himself ask,
“What’s the House of Glass?”
Aforis favoured him with the second smile of the day.
“It was a guild of merchant glassmakers from Airakland. The three prominent founding families were the Estenanens, Estorinens, and Estedidens.”
How prominent could they have been? I read the king of Airakland’s correspondence, and I’m sure they were never mentioned.
“But I’ve never heard of them.” Leaper stanched his fast-faltering brand in the dirt at his feet. The length of timber had burned through the night but now was down to a small, smouldering stub. Daylight was getting stronger, and the loss of the orange glow was no real loss.
“They were destroyed for producing finer glassware than the Temple of Airak,” Aforis said. “Without permission, the House completely hollowed one of the family floodgums so they could travel down to Floor to trade without risking attack by demons. The barrier kept out any Floorians who might have sought to follow them up the spiral stair to Canopy, but they were betrayed by their own growing reputation. Airak called lightning to the House of Glass and burned it to a black hollow. This glass reminds me of theirs. Formed, ground, and polished by human hands, not magic. Despite their impressive works, the people of Time have ended exactly the same way as the transgressors of the House of Glass.”
“There are palaces back there,” Leaper said, indicating the direction he’d come from. “Channels. Moving toys. Machines. Clocks. Did you see them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Such clever people can’t all have been killed in the battle between the Old Gods. Of those that survived, they can’t all have abandoned it for the forest. Some must have stayed.”
Something flickered in Aforis’s eyes.
“The winged one. I would suggest our resident demon, Hunger, has raised many litters here. She’s self-fertile and able to keep to the letter of her bargain with the Old Gods by sending all of her offspring back to the stars.”
; “How do you know that about her, Aforis?” You must have known it well before you left Canopy, or you would have forgotten.
“Airak has the skies watched, as you recall. Likely he’s not the only Canopian deity suspicious of the stars. The memories of our goddesses and gods are imperfect, but they remember many things of importance.”
“So you’re becoming godlike, not forgetful,” Leaper quipped, earning a third smile from Aforis.
“Before I was called to Airak’s service, I studied to be a teacher of history.” Aforis stood up. He dusted off his knees. “Some historians spoke of documents that our deities had searched out and destroyed. Some of these slates, scrolls, and woodcarvings dealt with chimeras or the origins of Canopy’s peoples. Others were detailed accounts of the life cycles of the winged. I don’t think Airak himself knew that the winged could reproduce in a similar manner to chimeras. Servants assigned to the watchtrees—”
“Why was I never assigned to the watchtrees?”
“Were told to beware male flying lizards clothed in leaves, perhaps disguised as balls of flame, coming down in the direction of the mountains in the south. If we saw any hatchlings near Airakland, we were to exert all of the god’s power to prevent or divert any lightning. As for you. You, in a watchtree. I can picture you, cooking your supper in the focus of the lens.”
Ha!
Maybe.
“It’s a wonder,” Leaper said, “the lightning god didn’t change his mind about the agreement with Hunger and send armies to exterminate her. He had more say over Icacis’s soldiers than Icacis ever did.”
“Canopians have found their way here before. I know of at least one for certain—the clockmaker from Eshland. She made the soul trap that Imeris and Anahah used on Kirrik.”
“Hunger sees Canopians coming,” Leaper said slowly, remembering. “She makes prophecies about herself, and they come true. That’s how she knows when to start brooding her eggs.”
“If she prophesied that you would save her—”
“She prophesied that I’d come. She only hoped that I’d save her hatchlings. Aforis, how could any Servant of Airak do as Hunger wanted and call lightning to her hatchlings, unless they carried a piece of Old God’s bone about with them? My sister bestowed protective amulets on our family for a while, but she hated every moment of it. Airak would never have allowed it. I found bones of the life and death gods in the clockmaker’s home, but if they’d known the bones were there—”
And then Leaper recalled that he had another piece of Old God’s bone. It was in his carrysack. It had been there since he fled the City-by-the-Sea.
“Aforis,” he said, awed at his own realisation. “Let’s go find the others. I think I know a way to get us all safely back to Canopy.”
THIRTY-THREE
THE SWORD.
The sword is made from a bone of one-fourteenth of a titan who now calls herself Orin.
Leaper led the way through the upward-sloping tunnel, holding the broken lantern full of live coals ahead of him to light the way. Aurilon’s ivory sword, which Yran had used to control his crocodile on their voyage across the floodplain, had been ground into powder by Atwith and mixed into a paste in the stone mortar.
They’d shaped half into a pellet the size of Leaper’s fist. His intention was to dose the winged one with it.
Leaper himself had eaten the other half, a deliberate overdose, but after his experience with the Bag of Winds, he was prepared to contain it. The potential to perform magic swirled around him, an invisible caged beast. Somehow, he could smell goats cropping moss on the mountainsides high above his head. He could taste the clouds and dried blood on the talons of distant birds of prey.
But he was saving that potential for the moment he seized control of Hunger.
You weren’t born in a crocodile’s nest, Yran had warned him on the raft as they rode out the monsoon. You weren’t taught to separate her thoughts from yours. You try to take her from me, and you’ll get stuck in her body forever. Your human self will stop eating or drinking, waste away and die. And then you’ll die, Canopian, because your soul can’t survive in a crocodile’s body.
Leaper would have to learn quickly to separate Hunger’s thoughts from his own, or die in the attempt to control her.
You can control her with hate, Frog’s childish voice whispered to him, and he stopped so suddenly, so surprised and appalled, that Unar crashed into him from behind.
“Oof,” she said. “What is it?”
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Are you still there? Leaper asked his former self guardedly, in silence, inside his head.
We are all still here, Frog answered, laughing slyly. You can tell us to go. You can even make us go. Orin has the power to build barriers, and her power is in you. But don’t you want to know the secret to overriding another’s will?
“Leaper?” Aforis asked. “Is something wrong?”
Leaper took a little of Orin’s power and built a barrier inside himself, sealing Frog’s voice away.
No, he told her, knowing she was gone and couldn’t reply. I am me. I don’t want to be you. True, you were never tricked into serving gods, but you never left the forest, either. I don’t want to be cursed like Aforis, trading all that he’s learned for something as commonplace as youth. I’ve washed my face in the spring water of Time and the salt of the sea. I’ve lain with somebody I love.
I am a father.
How can I be a good father, filled with hate?
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, starting forwards again.
He held the lantern in his left hand. In his right hand was a face mask he’d made from the tapestry and the goat’s skull. The pellet of bone paste rolled about loosely in the shallow bowl of the mask.
When they reached the wall of collapsed stone between the tunnel and Hunger’s lair, the excavated hole where Atwith had crawled was filled in by loose rock and dust again.
Atwith snorted at the sight of it.
“Stand back, everyone,” he said. “I’ll move the rubble. I’ve got the longest arms.”
“I’ll help,” Unar said. “Two people can fit side by side, and I’m not the one about to run across a cavern and try dosing an angry monster. Sit there and save your strength, Leaper.”
Leaper moved back from the rock pile, put his lantern down and sat cross-legged on the dirty floor with Aforis. Distracted by the smoothness of his shins beneath the windturner, he patted them and wondered if Ilik would find him more or less attractive without his spines.
“At times like this,” Aforis murmured, “I think that if I have to grow younger, I’d have it over and done with in a hurry. A single leap of thirty years might be nice.”
“What about the memories you’d lose all at once?” I’d lose my whole life in a leap of thirty years. Everything I’ve seen. Everyone I’ve loved. It dawned on him, then. “You’re going to forget him. You’re going to lose the memory of him dying, and then the memory of being with him, and then eventually you’ll lose the memory of meeting him. You wish that all that would be over at once.”
“Meeting who?”
Can he have forgotten already?
“Edax,” Leaper said. “Your one true love.”
At the rock pile, Unar dropped a rock on her hand and swore loudly. Atwith hushed her.
“Edax.” Aforis sighed. “Age smoothed the edges of those memories a long time ago. The last time I thought of him, I was watching your head get forcibly shaved, thinking how much like him you were, irreverent and careless, almost as if we’d miraculously procreated and his death had left me behind with you. No. What I’d really miss are my memories of trying to teach one particular very bright, very disobedient pupil. You remember when we met?”
“I remember your arms were like steel bars, hoisting me by the harness out of that ti chest. I’d never felt smaller or more helpless!”
“You wanted to see the sun, to stay in it, all day, every day.” Aforis qui
rked the brow over his white-irised eye. “The first time I informed you that you were free to visit your family in Understorey, you shrieked at me that you would not go back down, that you were never going back down. Naturally, no sooner had Ulellin cursed you, forbidding your descent, it was all you ever talked about.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yes. It was.”
“No, it was not.”
“So,” Atwith said, coming to stand beside them and take a swig of water from a gourd. “Edax, did you say? The Edax that was Ehkis’s Bodyguard, appointed not long before I was drowned?”
Aforis sighed.
“There’s nothing wrong with my early memories,” he said. “I was a teacher well before I was a Skywatcher. My mother taught arithmetic. She loved the curiosity of children. My father taught philosophy. He thought every child deserved somebody who believed in their capacity for good. It was natural for me to want to follow them. The king of Airakland employed me to teach the children of the citizens of his niche.”
“You were like me.” Atwith dusted his hands off. “Trying to ignore the call. I ignored the Lake. You ignored the lightning. I’m told it never works.”
“I came late,” Aforis said, inclining his head, “to the Temple. I was a grown man, with a man’s desires. The strictures didn’t settle on me lightly, and I loved Edax, against Airak’s wishes. Edax was killed, though not by the gods. The punishment for my small rebellion, which escalated out of my control, was to be reduced from Servant to Skywatcher.”
“Master back to apprentice,” Atwith said wryly. “I’m sorry you lost somebody you loved.” He turned back to the work. It was Unar’s turn to stop for a swallow of water and short rest.
“I wasn’t the only one,” Aforis said softly, eyeing her.
She choked on the water. Spat it out against the tunnel wall.
“Those events lie far behind us, Aforis,” she gasped, “like you said.”
Aforis turned his regard to Atwith’s naked, muscular, sweaty back.
“Not as far for some.”
Leaper, who had overheard her advances being rejected by Atwith, decided gallantly to extricate her from the conversation, or at least to share the discomfort all around.
Tides of the Titans Page 27
