The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  He killed that thought immediately. The missing tracker had surprised Sal with his ruthlessness. Kail would probably have slit the throats of the unsuspecting guards without a second thought, and gone on to kill anyone or anything who happened to cross his path.

  There had to be a better way.

  A Panic soldier strode across the deck, scattering the last shreds of mist, and walked through the doorway. His voice, commanding and confident, told the prisoners they would be leaving soon. Shilly asked how Kemp was expected to travel, and she was told not to worry about it; that wouldn't be a problem. She demanded greater assurance than that, no doubt thinking of the stress that carrying a stretcher would have on the other prisoners, and probably worrying about her leg as well. Neither she nor Kemp were up to climbing the cliff faces around them, down which the Panic had so easily descended.

  A deep droning sound from above distracted Sal from the conversation. Fearing the return of the ghostly creature, he rolled over and reached for the pocketknife. A large shape was descending from the clouds. Not a ghost, but a floating craft of similar shape to the boneship and a quarter its size. Suspended from two spherical balloons—each held at a constant distance from each other by a complex system of wires and cables—the gondola reminded him of the Laurean heavy lifter in which he had briefly travelled from the city of Laure over the Divide. That, though, had been a crude machine in comparison. This vessel possessed a baroque beauty that spoke of superior Engineering and maintenance, not just aesthetics. It looked more like a deep-sea fish than a bird.

  The humming grew louder as it descended. This, he realised, was the means by which the Panic would take their prisoners away.

  He had to get aboard.

  Voices called. The crew of the balloon threw ropes when they arrived within range of the boneship. For a moment he feared that the flying ship might land on him, but it dropped to hover level with the boneship's deck about a metre away from its edge. Perhaps its bottom touched water, but he couldn't tell. Either way, a gangway soon connected the two craft, and stolen goods began to flow from one to the other.

  Panic voices barked commands. The captives filed out of the boneship's cabin, Kemp suspended on a makeshift stretcher between Rosevear and a broad-shouldered man with greying hair who Sal had passed while climbing up the waterfall. There were only two foresters among them. Shilly came last, leaning heavily on her cane. She groaned when she saw the balloon, and muttered, “Here we go again.”

  Sal smiled and slithered across the roof to the side closest the balloon. Chu's talk of balloons and forests came back to him as he thought about what to do next. What else had she said? Something about cities in the trees and constant fog. Nothing about a nonhuman species of creature wielding thoroughly sharpened hooks.

  The boneship rapidly emptied. There was no sign of Marmion and the others. Sal didn't have long to consider what to do. Somewhere, on the other side of the mountains and through the permanent cloud cover above, dawn was on its way. His camouflage charms wouldn't hold forever.

  Two Panic soldiers carried Mawson like a sack of flour between them, and dumped him heavily out of sight. As the last of the bounty was loaded onto the balloon—which sagged ponderously under all the extra weight—and the last of the Panic straggled aboard, Sal decided. He would jump across as the balloon ascended and grab hold of either the edge of the gondola or one of the many ropes holding it secure. He would hang there, unseen, while the Panic carried their prisoners away. When they landed, he would drop away and hope to avoid being spotted by whoever waited on the ground. And then, depending on where he found himself, he would work out how to free Shilly and escape.

  The gangplank retracted. Knots slipped and ropes fell away. The humming noise returned and slowly, steadily, the balloon began to rise.

  Sal stood and backed up several steps. He tensed, waiting for the right moment. When the balloon was higher than his head, he ran forward three paces and threw himself into open air.

  The gondola rushed at him. He clutched its side, scrabbling for a handhold even as the air whooshed out of his lungs from the impact. His momentum sent the whole thing rocking. Cries of alarm went up from the Panic flyers. The ascent ceased. He slid downwards, caught a cable in a desperate one-handed grip. The thin wire bit into his fingers and he knew he couldn't hold on. With a cry he slipped free.

  Strong hands grabbed his wrist and arrested his fall. He jerked like a puppet in midair. His shoulder felt as though it had been dislocated.

  “Here's the problem,” called a voice from above. Sal looked up into the dark eyes of the Panic soldier who had ordered Shilly and the others to get ready to leave. Other long arms reached over the edge of the gondola to help haul Sal aboard. He didn't fight them. His attempt to rescue Shilly might have been unsuccessful, but at least they would soon be together.

  He tumbled gracelessly over the edge and sprawled to the deck, surrounded by leather sandals. Abandoning the camouflage charms, he clambered upright to take stock, blinking blood out of his eyes. Two soldiers searched him, took away the knife he had found but let him keep yadeh-tash on the thong around his neck.

  “Are you hurt?” Shilly pressed through the Panic with concern and relief mingled in her eyes.

  The leader kept her at arm's length. “You know this one?”

  “Yes. He's with me. Can I—?”

  “Not until I know what he wants.”

  Sal stood, flexing his stinging hands in a manner he hoped wasn't threatening. “She already told you. I'm with her. That's all.”

  The leader of the Panic assessed them quickly, then nodded. “All right. Sit down, both of you. If you cause any more problems, I'll tip you out.”

  Sal nodded and went to join Shilly. She put an arm around him and led him to where Highson sat on one side of the gondola. Tom sat on the other side, watching him with a worried expression. Rosevear reached into a satchel and offered him ointment for his cuts.

  “You took your time,” Shilly whispered. “I was beginning to worry.”

  “You didn't honestly think I'd let you go without me, did you?” He tried to smile reassuringly, but it didn't sit well.

  “What about the others?” she asked. “Are they all right?”

  Instead of answering, he cast his mind out into the night.

  “Skender, can you hear me?” The balloon's humming engines grew louder and they ascended rapidly into the mist. “You don't have to say anything. Just let me know you're listening.”

  The faintest hint of recognition came from an unknown distance away.

  “We're okay,” he broadcast, hoping the message was getting through. “The Panic have us. No one's been harmed. I'll keep you informed if things change.”

  Feeling Highson's eyes on him, Sal added, “Tell Marmion to keep on going without us. We'll catch up later. Okay?”

  Again the barest hint of affirmation.

  “They'll be all right,” he told Shilly, squeezing her hand and trying not to think about what might happen next.

  On the fifth day from Laure, the twins collapsed in midstep and fell unconscious to the ground. Kail, taken by surprise, was momentarily unsure what to do. He had assumed the twins' body to be indefatigable. Although it had bled a strange silver gas after being stabbed by Pirelius during the siege of Laure, the wound had closed over within hours and left no visible scar. He had had no occasion since to believe that Highson Sparre's strange creation might not last forever.

  Here, though, was evidence of its fallibility. He immediately stopped and managed—with no small amount of difficulty—to get it onto the back of the camel, where it lay splayed like a giant drugged spider. The body was warm to the touch. Neither Seth nor Hadrian Castillo stirred at his rough treatment of them. They rode insensate while he looked for shelter.

  He found it in a sprawling copse halfway up the shoulder of the Hanging Mountains. They had travelled an appreciable distance since buying the camel in Laure. Every night he slept in the saddle, lulled by the
regular swaying of the broad back beneath him, while the twins loped steadily alongside, as black as the deepest night and engaged in what manner of internal conversation he couldn't tell. It was peculiar to say the least to see individual faces moving beneath the unnatural skin of the creature's head, faces which moved at odds but also in perfect unison, creating strange, ever-shifting expressions he found impossible to interpret. Only practice enabled him to distinguish one from the other in a head that at first glance looked like nothing more than a monstrous amalgam of features.

  During the day they kept to old roads where they could. As the ground slowly rose beneath them to meet the mountains ahead, the trees and grasses grew taller, denser, and greener, and the going became increasingly difficult. In situations where there was no obvious track to follow, they shadowed the edge of the Divide itself, although Kail felt exposed in the wasted, crumbling terrain. He didn't want to be seen by Marmion or anyone else before time.

  When the time to be seen would come, he didn't know. He kept moving in the hope that it would announce itself in due course.

  Untying the Homunculus and letting it collapse to the Earth in the shade of a wide-branched tree not common along the Strand, he set up a temporary camp for the three of them, treating the camel with the same respect he would himself or his odd companion. Night wasn't far away, so he prepared a fire and went off in search of game. With two rabbits in hand, he returned to find the twins sitting up and hand-feeding the irascible camel grain from one of the saddlebags.

  “What happened back there?” he asked, placing the rabbits on the ground and skinning them with long practised strokes of his knife.

  “I think…” The twins hesitated, and their form dissolved for a moment as each individual within moved at odds with the other. “I think we fell asleep.”

  Kail nodded, having wondered if that might have been the case. “You've been in that body for two weeks or so. It's about time it needed a rest.”

  “We didn't see it coming,” said one of the twins—the more strident of the two, with whom Kail had learned to associate the name Seth. “We just dropped in midstep. What sort of body is this? When's it going to fail on us again?”

  “All good questions.” Kail didn't offer any false reassurances. “I've been asking them myself. Highson Sparre made that body and put you in it. It's still working, even though everything around you is dead of the Change. That seems contradictory to me.”

  “I have a theory,” said the more thoughtful of the two: Hadrian. “It goes back to where we came from, what we are. I belong to the First Realm, Seth to the Second. In this body we're existing side by side just as we did in Bardo, the place you call the Void Beneath, between our two Realms. But we're not in Bardo any longer; we're in your world. And whatever sort of Realm this is, it's still adjusting to us being here.”

  Kail nodded, even though he didn't entirely understand the twins' talk of Realms and other worlds. Only the existence of the Void Beneath encouraged him to keep an open mind. That was another world, of a sort. There might be more no one else had ever suspected.

  “This world doesn't like us,” Hadrian went on, his half of the Homunculus moving inside Seth's like a tarry ghost. “We don't work like it does, we don't fit in, but we're not completely alien. We made it, after all. It's modelled on us. It might try to reject us by cutting us off from the Change, but we have our own powers. We're the source of everything.”

  “And the end of everything,” added Seth in a more baleful tone.

  “We could be,” Hadrian agreed.

  Kail tugged the skin off the second rabbit and tossed it aside. “Your body, the Homunculus, is quickened by the Change like every other living thing. Is that what you're saying?”

  “It has to be,” the twins said.

  “But if you're cut off from the rest of the world, that means the Homunculus is drawing directly from you, and I don't care how old you are or how powerful you might be, that's got to cost you in the long run. You have to learn to feel the symptoms and rest when you need to.”

  They offered him no argument to that. “Do you think we should try to eat?” Hadrian asked.

  “It certainly won't hurt.”

  The twins watched him gut the rabbits with quiet fascination. He couldn't tell what they were thinking.

  “I remember being a vegetarian,” said Hadrian after a while.

  “When you were twelve,” Seth countered in a mocking tone. “You did it to get attention.”

  “That's what you thought I was doing, but I really meant it. At least, I think I did.”

  Both heads lifted at a sound Kail couldn't hear. He waited a moment, watching them closely. This happened regularly, at least once every day.

  “Want to talk about it yet?” he asked.

  The twins didn't reply immediately. They turned away to resume feeding the camel. It snorted at them and moved off to crouch on bony knees, resting.

  “I killed a man, once.” Hadrian, surprisingly, said that, over the Homunculus's shoulder. Kail would have thought Seth the more likely to commit murder. “He wasn't just a man; there was something else inside him, controlling him.”

  “A golem,” said Kail.

  The Homunculus's head came up. “I thought they were made of clay, a bit like robots.”

  “You can indeed house a golem in a clay body, but they don't last long. Flesh is better. What are robots?”

  “Never mind. Back then, this thing was a creature of the Second Realm, but it could join with people in the First Realm, as it did with this man, in order to act on both sides of Bardo. We called such alliances energumen. They had their own agenda, their own plans. The creature inside the man I killed was Upuaut, the Wolf. It hunted and tried to kill me. When I killed its host, it disappeared. Ordinarily, I guess, it would've gone back to the Second Realm, but the Realms merged so it was free to stay. It has probably been looking for me all the time since.”

  “And now it's found you,” said Kail, even as he wondered why anyone would willingly let a golem into their body. “Is that what you think?”

  “Maybe. Something out there is howling at us.”

  “Well, a golem can only take over a Change-worker if they've overextended themselves and entered the Void Beneath first. When they do that, their bodies are left empty, easy to take over. If you've no talent in the Change, you're not in any risk from this thing.”

  “Except from someone else,” Seth said, “someone who has been taken over.”

  “Conceivably, yes, but your body is still strong. You have no need to be frightened.”

  He could tell that his words offered little comfort. “You don't know Upuaut,” said Hadrian. “If there's a way to hurt us, it'll find it.”

  “Were there only forces for evil in your world?” asked Kail. “Perhaps some good has survived as well.”

  “Perhaps.” The twins returned to introspective contemplation, and he couldn't rouse them until the rabbits were cooked and cooling. Even then, they did little more than pick at the roasted meat he served them, clearly feeling no hunger at all.

  What had they seen? What had they done? Not for the first time, Kail turned over what little he knew about the Cataclysm, fruitlessly searching for clues. That he was talking to the only living eyewitnesses to the event and was barely able to wring sense from them seemed a terrible tragedy for all concerned.

  The day grew old. Kail was in no hurry to move, and the twins were loath to press him. Their collapse had profoundly frightened them. What might their Homunculus body do next that they hadn't expected? What if it were to just stop one day, reach an expiration date built into its strange flesh, unknown to them, and bring their mission to an inglorious end?

  “I don't understand,” Hadrian said to Kail as the sky flooded with reds and oranges. “I don't understand how the sun sets.”

  He had been watching it ever since the sky had become clearer to them. At first, the world had been little more than a blur. Gradually, pieces of it were reso
lving into focus. The sun and moon were two such pieces, although they made less sense the more Hadrian could see. The moon appeared to have phases like the ones he remembered, but those phases followed no obvious pattern. The sun didn't so much set each night as shrink into a hazy dot on the western horizon and vanish.

  “‘Sets’?” echoed Kail, not understanding the question.

  Hadrian didn't pursue it.

  What does it matter, little brother? asked Seth, feeling his frustration. We don't need to know how the world works. We just need to save it.

  What if we can't do the one without the other?

  Seth had no good answer to that.

  “Who's the Goddess, then?” he asked instead. “I've heard people mention her, but I don't know if she's a myth or a legend, or someone real.”

  “You're asking the wrong person,” said the tracker. “I'm neither theologian nor historian. I studied just enough to get through the Novitiate, and no more.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “Well…They say she shaped the world after the Cataclysm, gave it form and laws and set all its peoples in their places. There are a lot of stories about her: that she was haunted by ghosts who whispered constantly to her; that she lived in the sky and will return again, one day. Whether she actually existed, I don't know. She might have been modelled on a leader who saved her people from the chaos you left in your wake.”

  “Not us,” protested Seth. “Yod.”

  “It was our plan to bind the Realms together,” Hadrian reminded him. “There's no point hiding from what we've done. The world must've been in a terrible state when we went into the Void. All the old rules broken, no new rules to take their place. Things must've been in one hell of a mess.”

  “That's what we hear,” said Kail. “All the folk tales about the Cataclysm, all the stories in the Book of Towers, are concerned with strange deaths and the world shifting underfoot. Unreliable, dangerous—that's what it was like back then. Whoever the Goddess was, it's a fair bet we wouldn't be here at all but for her.”