The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  She looked smug at that. “If both hands hold a dagger, keep one behind your back. So my martial instructor used to say.”

  Marmion nodded. Almost too casually, he produced his injured arm from where it nestled under his robes and let it hang at his side.

  “I don't like it,” growled the lieutenant to her left, a tall, solidly built man, with chiselled features and a sparse black beard. “First the flood. Now wardens with wings. Send them back where they came from and be done with it. The forest has suffered enough.”

  “Suffered from what, exactly?”

  The lieutenant ignored Shilly's question. “They have the stink of the bloodworkers on them.”

  “What exactly is it you don't like about us?” snapped Marmion. “That we aren't from here? That we don't look like you? That our dress isn't the same as yours? Get it off your chest now, man, so we can talk in earnest.”

  The lieutenant loomed over Marmion. “What's important is the forest. We are sworn to protect it. Threaten it, and you will die.”

  “No one's threatening anything, Heuve, so put your pride back in your pocket.” Lidia Delfine waved her lieutenant back. He retreated, albeit reluctantly. “Is there anything else we should know?” she asked Marmion.

  He nodded. “One of our number was injured during the journey here. We lack the facilities and the knowledge to treat him. Perhaps you can help us with that.”

  “Let me see him,” she told Marmion. “Then I will decide. Heuve, stay here.”

  Marmion led her into the cabin, followed by Rosevear. They were gone only a moment, during which time Heuve looked at everyone in the ring surrounding him, one after the other, openly measuring them up.

  “You've no reason to be frightened of us,” said Warden Banner soothingly.

  “He has every reason,” Highson disagreed with a wicked smile. “He's just one versus ten. I'd be nervous too, if I were him.”

  “If any harm befalls me—”

  “Oh, be quiet,” said Shilly, tired of posturing by self-important men.

  Delfine and Marmion returned. The woman's expression was grim.

  “We'll have to take him to Milang,” she told the gathering in general.

  “Who's that?” asked Sal, recognising Chu's surname with some surprise.

  “It's not a ‘who.’ It's a place. It's where we live.”

  “And where is that, exactly?” asked Marmion.

  She pointed at the waterfall, then upward and along the Divide.

  “I urge you to reconsider, Eminence,” said Heuve.

  Delfine cast him a look as sharp as a needle. “That's enough. Warden Marmion, take us back to the shore. There's a path past the falls. You'll want to explore the way if you intend to bring your ship of bone with you.”

  “I'd like to, yes. Is the Divide clear beyond this point?”

  “For a fair distance.”

  Marmion nodded. “Banner, Eitzen, I'll want you with me. The rest of you stay here. There's nothing you can do for now, and we'll need all our strength to move the boneship.” Marmion looked at Sal when he said this, and Sal nodded his understanding. “Good. Someone flash Chu and Skender and tell them it's safe to come down. Highson?”

  Sal's father had taken his familiar position by the tiller. He guided the ship smoothly towards the base of the falls. A cool, luminescent spray drifted across the boneship, making Sal's face wet.

  Delfine and Heuve jumped ashore, followed by Marmion and the two wardens he had asked to accompany him. They immediately began climbing from stone to stone up the side of the falls, where the rest of Delfine's people waited.

  “How old do you think she is?” asked Shilly, tapping Sal's leg with her cane.

  “I've no idea. Why?”

  “Just wondering why a big guy like Heuve is taking orders from someone as young as her. He doesn't look the sort who'd do that without a reason.”

  Sal watched the pair with keener attention as they climbed. Heuve's expression was determinedly disapproving, but couldn't hide genuine concern. He stayed as close to Delfine as she would let him, and his hand never strayed more than a few centimetres from the pommel of his sword. His gaze moved constantly, taking in everything and everyone around them.

  Bodyguard, he thought, not just a lieutenant—then he carried that thought to its logical conclusion. Delfine hadn't truly explained who she was or what she had been doing by the waterfall. Just who are you, Lidia Delfine?

  Knowing sleep wouldn't be easy to come by until this and other mysteries were resolved, he wished he hadn't agreed so readily to stay behind.

  “Beware the sisters of the night: black of heart

  and aspect, horrible huntresses all.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 175

  Skender felt Chu's nervousness as the wing spiralled down to land. The two of them watched the people moving up and down the side of the ghostly waterfall. They were little more than dots, but he knew who they had to be. Chu's people. The ones she had come from Laure to find.

  “When Sal finally met his grandmother,” he said, “I thought he was going to wet himself. It didn't go very well. And that's okay. You don't have to like your family. There's no rule that says you must. I just—” He felt himself beginning to babble, and tried to slow down. “They're no reflection on you, if they're not who you want them to be. That's all I'm trying to say.”

  She was silent for a long moment as she guided the wing down into the close confines of the Divide. “I don't have any family,” she said. “My parents are dead. I've never known anyone else. These people—well, I don't know who they are to me, but I do want the chance to find out. Don't worry,” she added with her usual bravado, “I can look after myself. How bad could it be, anyway?”

  His stomach tried to jump out of his mouth as the ground suddenly rushed up at them. Cliff faces and roiling water blurred into one.

  “Is this your way of telling me to change the subject?”

  The wing twisted to one side, rose slightly.

  “The Divide is too narrow and turbulent where the boat is,” she explained, tugging vigorously at the frame. “I'm going to have to land further up. It's wider there, and therefore safer.”

  Skender nodded, understanding that he played no part in the decision-making process. The wing swooped downward again, this time aiming further uphill from where the boneship floated, docked at the base of the glowing waterfall. The source of the water lay in a small lake, where the Divide had been dammed. Cupped into a stone niche formed by the collapse of the cliff face, and given space to grow by further collapses, the lake stretched perhaps thirty metres across, with a flat space to the east where the canyon resumed its normal zigzagging progress into the mountains. Not far beyond that point, the cloud cover became impenetrable. Even as the wing came in to land, wisps cut across its flight path, momentarily blocking their view. Cold shivers ran down his neck and spine.

  Snatches of voices reached them as they descended. Hands waved. He hoped it was in welcome.

  “I'm starving,” said Chu, taking aim for the smooth shoulder of land she had picked as their landing spot. “And dying for a drink.”

  Skender would've been just as happy to curl up somewhere for a quiet snooze, but figured there was little chance of that any time soon.

  He braced himself for landing. His legs would be the first to make contact with the ground, so the one responsibility he did have was to hit it cleanly. Too early and he would never be able to run fast enough to keep up with the wing, thereby driving its nose downwards into the ground; too late and they would land on their backsides. He was gradually improving at it, but he had plenty of bruises to prove that he had learned the hard way.

  He ignored a renewed shouting and waving as the ground came up at them. Whatever they wanted, it would have to wait. Chu tipped the nose up, slowing them. The ground hung just a metre out of his reach. It gleamed slightly. A smell came off it that reminded him of his home's ancient latrines.

  Only then did he
feel the slightest misgiving.

  “Wait, Chu. I'm not sure—”

  Too late. Chu brought the wing down and he splashed feet-first into thick, cloying mud. He tried in vain to run, but all that did was drag him down more quickly. The wing tipped and wobbled and barely remained horizontal as, first, his legs then Chu's were sucked in. Eventually, all airworthiness evaporated and they fell face-forward into foulness.

  For a terrifying moment, all was brown and muffled. A hideous taste crept down his throat. He gagged. Then his kicking legs hit something solid, and he managed to force himself—and Chu, strapped to him, along with the wing—above the surface of the mud.

  He choked and spat and wiped at his face. Chu did the same, with a healthy dose of cursing, as her slippery fingers fumbled with the latches. The wing fell away, and he found himself able to stand upright, still submerged up to his waist but at least well clear of the noisome surface. Chu slipped and splashed back in, making a dense glop sound as she vanished under the wing. He tugged it aside and helped her back to her feet.

  “Nice landing,” called a man's voice. Skender blinked mud out of his eyes and made out a dark figure standing on solid ground some metres away. “Are you all right in there?”

  “We'll be fine,” Chu snapped, pulling away from Skender. She looked barely human. The stink nearly overpowered Skender, who was trying to breathe through his mouth as much as possible.

  “Come this way.” The man beckoned with both hands. “The ground is firmer.”

  Skender heard footsteps and a smattering of laughter as others came to watch. “Chu, are you okay?”

  “Give me a hand with this,” she said, fumbling the wing in her haste to collapse it. “How was I supposed to know there'd be mud here?”

  Skender did his best to help, but it only seemed to worsen her mood. He didn't blame her for the unfortunate landing. Until the flood, she had never seen a body of water larger than a bathtub, so the existence of mudbanks wouldn't have occurred to her. They looked flat from the air, and flat was good for a Laurean miner seeking somewhere to land.

  By the time they had bundled the wing into a cocoonlike shape for easy carrying, she was fuming so thoroughly he thought it a miracle the mud on her hadn't baked into clay.

  “This way. That's it. Keep coming.” The man who had called to them continued to offer words of encouragement as they splashed through the thick sludge. When they were within reach of the spectators, he helped them out of the mud and onto blessedly solid rock.

  “I can manage,” Chu said, brushing away hands at her elbows and back. “Be careful with that!” The people who had taken the wing from her put it down on the ground between them. “What are you laughing at?”

  The last she directed at a smirking young woman with a long black ponytail and eyes as exotic as Chu's. They all had the same eyes, Skender realised, and hair in shades of black. Their skins were neither black nor white, but something in between, and their uniforms rust-brown. There were six of them. Two carried wooden brands that cast a bright orange light, like glowing coals.

  “Yes, Navi,” chided the man who had helped them. Older, with splashes of grey at his temples and several gold circles of varying sizes stitched into the breast of his uniform, he kept any amusement he might have felt carefully contained. “Don't add mockery to their list of misfortunes.”

  The woman called Navi saluted with a fist over her heart, and stepped forward to help Chu with the wing.

  “I'm Schuet,” said the older man. “You must be Skender and Chu. Her Eminence told us to keep an eye out for you.”

  “Her what?” Chu asked.

  “The Eminent Delfine. She's down there now, talking with your man Marmion.”

  Schuet pointed at a huddle of people on the far side of the lake, where a cloud of glowing mist rose from the waterfall.

  “Not our man,” growled Chu.

  Skender spat in a vain attempt to get rid of the taste in his mouth. One of the uniformed men handed him a flask of water, which he gratefully accepted.

  “Who are you people?” he asked after gargling and spitting again.

  “Foresters,” said Navi, saluting again, “and servants of the Guardian, at your service.”

  “We'll give you space to clean up in a moment,” said Schuet. “I know you're eager to. Just let me ask you something first. During your descent, or earlier, did you see anything unusual?”

  “Unusual how?” asked Chu.

  “I'm not sure, exactly. I've never seen it properly myself. People talk of a wraith or phantasm, but I'll keep my mind open until it stands before me and I can give it a name of my own.”

  The members of the uniformed band had lost their amused demeanour. For all its oddness, Skender could tell that the question was seriously meant.

  “We saw nothing but those who met the boneship,” said Skender, “and they're your people, I suppose.”

  Schuet nodded, although he didn't seem entirely pleased by the answer. “Well and good. It's only newly night, and I expected no more. Still…”

  A uniformed man jogged up to the gathering. “Seneschal, Her Eminence calls for you.”

  Schuet nodded. “I'm on my way. Chu, Skender—Navi will show you where to bathe. We'll find some clean clothes for you while yours dry. I'll talk to you again later.”

  With that, he hurried off in the direction of the waterfall. Navi gestured at two uniformed men, who picked up the wing between them and followed Schuet at a more measured pace.

  “Be careful with that,” warned Chu again.

  “Don't worry,” Navi reassured her. “We're not going far. Just there, where the bank slopes down to the water.” She pointed. “The lake is shallow there, the water clean.”

  “Not an actual bath, then?” muttered Skender, longing for the warm water and brass tubs of the Keep. Even the tepid sinks of the Black Galah in Laure would have done.

  Navi's teeth flashed white in the gloom. “The nearest is a day's walk from here. Think you could bear your stink that long?”

  He grimaced. “Pass.” Feeling mud squelching between his toes, he followed Navi around the shoreline to the place she had indicated. Chu's expression was completely masked by the drying mud, but he could tell she was embarrassed and annoyed at herself, and perhaps dreading the thought of having to wash in front of a bunch of strangers as well. She said nothing, however, and he imitated her stoic silence.

  “There you go,” said Navi when they arrived. She turned her back to give them privacy, and indicated that the others should do so too. “Sing out when you're done. If your new clothes aren't here by then, put your old ones back on for the time being.”

  Skender splashed into the water with a startled cry. It was much colder than he had expected. Chu gulped a deep breath and dived completely under. She emerged a moment later, shivering and rubbing at her muddy hair, her licence removed and tucked into a pocket, and her skin returning to normal. He resigned himself to doing the same, and dunked himself with his eyes shut and nostrils pinched tightly closed. His robe billowed around him, tangling his arms. When he stood up, the water had turned brown around him, and Chu was unlacing her leather top.

  He concentrated furiously on what he was doing. Tugging his robe over his head, he wrung it out under water and draped it over his bare shoulder. A quick scrub sluiced the last of the mud from his upper body and face. He had no intention of removing his underwear in front of anyone—especially in such frigid circumstances—so he did his best and left it at that.

  When he turned back to the shore, he found that Navi had broken her promise. She stood facing them with her hands on her hips. Her friendly expression had quite disappeared.

  “You!” she exclaimed, pointing directly at Chu.

  He turned to look at Chu who, dressed in sopping singlet and shorts, was occupied with flushing the last of the mud from the delicate folds of the wing.

  She looked up, puzzled. “What?”

  “Step out of the water.”

 
“I don't understand.”

  “Do as you're told, or we'll come in there and get you.”

  Skender stepped closer to Chu, whose shocked look perfectly matched his own. Navi's harsh commanding tone was at complete odds to her earlier manner. “Hey, now,” he said to the uniformed woman. “You should think carefully before trying that.”

  “Be quiet, Skender. This isn't your problem. It's hers.” To Chu she said: “I see you clearly now. Put down the wing, Outcast, and come out now. I won't ask again.”

  “Outcast?” Chu repeated in a soft voice.

  Navi snapped her fingers, and two of the uniformed men splashed into the water. Skender put himself between them, and called on his memory in desperation.

  Stone Mages were rarely challenged on their side of the Divide. Even in Laure—ruled by isolationist bloodworkers—Skender's status had earned him a certain amount of authority. That had been in part due to Chu's insistence on introducing him as a full-fledged mage, not the nearly graduated student he actually was, but the fact remained that mages were respected and sometimes feared, with good reason.

  He would never be a strong mage, his talent being for minor things like lighting stones and starting fires, but he knew more than his fair share of tricks. A lifetime of scanning through books and an eidetic memory had to be worth something.

  Calling forth a little-used mnemonic from the depths of his mind, he raised his hands to point at the men closing in on him and Chu.

  With a soundless flash, every one of his tattoos changed from black to bright red. Running in parallel lines down his arms, crossed every ten centimetres with a symbol culled from the deepest recesses of the Keep's library, they burned as brightly as the wooden brands two of Navi's companions still held. That small effort almost drained him, but the foresters weren't to know that. Using the last of his reserves, he coaxed an impressive rumble from the stones along the shore. Pebbles tinkled in tiny avalanches down the side of the Divide.

  “Stop right there,” he said.

  To his amazement, they did just that.

  Shilly was the only one on the boneship who didn't hear the commotion. She was with Rosevear, helping the warden prepare Kemp for moving. The albino's skin was hot to the touch and flushed pink all over his abdomen and chest. She didn't need to see under the bandage to know that he was getting worse.