The young seer nodded. His hair had sprung up into vigorous waves thanks to all the moisture in the air. It bobbed like a living thing. “I see you two together, at the end.”
Of course, she thought. Arguing about how the world will end. “Would you tell me if you knew otherwise? If you'd dreamed that he was going to die?”
He turned to look at her, frowning. “Would you want me to tell you?”
“Of course, so I could do something about it.”
“But what if I said you couldn't? How would you feel then?”
Shilly couldn't imagine what that would be like. She didn't want to imagine. “I think I'd want to know anyway.”
“I've dreamed all our deaths,” he said, as calmly as though talking about the weather.
“What?” Her stomach felt suddenly hollow. “Are you serious?”
“Of course. Yours. Mine. Sal's. Kemp's.” He looked away, following with his gaze the curvaceous sweep into cloud of a tethered building. “But they're not necessarily real. You know how dreams—real dreams, not a seer's dreams—are about everyday stuff? Things we forgot to do, or should have done, or wish we could do?” She nodded. “Well, being a seer is part of who I am, so I dream about it. I dream about seeing things. Those sorts of dreams sometimes aren't about knowing what's going to happen, but how it feels to know.” He shrugged. “It's very complicated.”
So she was beginning to appreciate. “You dream about seeing the people you know die—and then what? You try to help them?”
“No. I know I can't. There's nothing I can do. I'm trapped.”
“Goddess. That sounds awful.”
Tom nodded.
Ramal guided them across a broad walkway to a giddyingly high beanstalk of a tower, its base steadied by cables tied to five neighbouring structures. Its top disappeared into the clouds that were growing lighter with approaching dawn. Shilly pictured a lighthouse taken between two gigantic hands, stretched, and given a slight twist. They stepped through a gaping circular door into a round room with a caged platform in its centre and the base of a spiralling ladder-staircase to the left. There was no ceiling. Windows dotted the tubular interior, letting in shafts of pure white light. High above, the top of the tower faded into a blur.
“The injured ones go in there,” Ramal said, pointing at the cage. Her voice was rough and matter-of-fact. “The rest of us will climb.”
Shilly and Rosevear watched anxiously as Kemp's two guards lifted him from the stretcher and arranged him on the floor of the cage.
“Now you,” said Ramal, pointing at Shilly.
“Me? I'm not injured. A long time ago, yes, but—”
“The ascent is steep and exhausting, even for those whole of body,” said the Panic soldier, glancing upwards. Her dark recessed eyes glinted. “Your pride is not my concern.”
She indicated the cage again, and Shilly climbed aboard. One of Ramal's fellow soldiers shut and locked the door behind her. He untied a cord fixed to one side of the cage and gave it an almighty tug. Seconds later, the cage lifted off the ground and began its smooth ascent to the top of the tower.
“Uh.” Shilly shifted awkwardly, unable to stand fully upright. The cage was wider than it was tall, and wasn't built with human comfort in mind. Its floor consisted of nothing but wire netting. After waving nervously to Tom and Rosevear, she swore not to look down for any reason.
The cage rose at walking pace, powered, she assumed, by a chimerical engine at the top of the tower. If she moved, it swayed slightly, so she stopped doing that too. All in all, it struck her as a rather strange contrivance. Why have stairs and an elevator? Perhaps to ferry supplies to whatever lay at the top.
Kemp stirred at her feet. His waxen forehead crinkled.
“Don't you worry about a thing,” she told him. “It's all under control. Probably.”
She tilted her head upwards, hoping to gain a glimpse of their destination. The lines of windows converged impossibly far up—so far that she was soon heartily glad not to be climbing, despite the awkwardness of the cage.
A strange feeling overcame her. She squatted down on her haunches, feeling suddenly dizzy. The thin wire seemed to twinkle under her fingers.
The Change, Shilly thought. Some kind of charm, and a powerful one at that, was at work in the tower. She couldn't fight it, but she did her best to study its effects.
The swaying of the cage slowed; her limbs grew heavy; time dragged to a halt.
Then she blinked and the effects of the charm had vanished. She looked around her, then up, and saw the top of the tower's shaft finally coming into view.
She stood up as the cage creaked to a halt, suspended from the complicated-looking system of pulleys and wheels that had lifted it so high. The cage had risen into the centre of a broad, disc-shaped room with windows all around the outer wall. She had an unobstructed view of the entire space. Bookshelves, workbenches, chairs, cushions—all demonstrated that this was an inhabited space. But where was its inhabitant? There was no sign of the mysterious Vehofnehu.
“Hello?” she called. Bright yellow light poured through the windows, casting golden glints off instruments and ornaments. It was difficult to tell which was which. “Is anybody here?”
Something occurred to her as she waited for a response: yellow light, not white. The only way that could be was if the tower poked straight out the top of the forest's permanent cloud cover.
“Do I hear someone calling?” An unusual head popped up from behind a workbench. What hair remained—in a narrow tuft around the ears—was frizzy and grey. His distinctive Panic brow and mouth were heavily wrinkled and age-spotted. “Is that a visitor on my stoop? Ah!” On seeing Shilly and Kemp, the speaker stood up and smoothed down a faded aqua robe. Angular joints stood out beneath the fabric. “I'm not ready. No. Had no warning. No warning in the slightest. This won't do, won't do at all.” The grizzled Panic male bustled about, muttering and looking for something. Beyond that quick initial glance, he seemed happy to ignore Shilly completely.
“Are you Vehofnehu?” she asked him, swivelling to keep him in her line of sight as he overturned cushions and upended piles of notes.
“Eh? Oh, that's just one of my names. I've had several. Ha!” From beneath a ceramic plant pot that contained nothing but a bare stick the strange figure produced an ornate key, which he held up in triumph. “Knew it was here somewhere. Hold still, young human girl. I won't keep you dangling much longer.”
The cage hung in a hole surrounded by gleaming brass rails. All the furniture in the room pointed away from the hole—bookcases, desks, chairs—except at one point where a small gangplank rested, hinged away for storage. A tube dangled over the rail near that point, terminating in an ornate nozzle. The other end of the tube disappeared into the floor. Vehofnehu picked up the tube and blew into it, then recoiled when a cloud of dust blew back at him.
“I told you to give me notice when you send me visitors,” he barked into the nozzle. “It's discourteous and improper. What if I'd been working on something important? What if you'd distracted me?”
A tinny voice, too low for Shilly to decipher, squeaked back at him, and he held the nozzle to his ear for a moment.
“That's as may be,” he said, “but the fact remains. I—”
More squeaking. Vehofnehu nodded, then rolled his eyes at Shilly. “I'd better not keep her waiting then, had I? We don't want to add insult to injury.” He draped the tube over the rail, ignoring the ongoing squawk from the far end. “Now,” he said, tugging a section of railing out of the way and unfolding the gangplank, “let's take a look at your sick friend.”
He shuffled out to the cage, unconcerned by the height, and worked the key in the lock. His hands were sure and steady, despite his age. The cage door sprang open, but Shilly was prevented from exiting by a hand held palm outwards at her. She didn't move, more startled by the odd symmetries of his thumb and fingers than by the gesture itself.
“Not so fast, young lady. I can look quite w
ell from here, but I can't watch both of you at once.”
She resigned herself to spending longer in her half-crouch and leaned heavily on her stick as the elderly Panic male knelt down to examine Kemp.
“Hmmm.” Vehofnehu peeled back the dressing on Kemp's stomach wound and tested the clear liquid issuing from it with one long finger. The same hand cupped the albino's cheek and lifted one eyelid. Shilly gasped before she could stop herself at what lay beneath. Instead of Kemp's pale blue iris and black pupil, she saw nothing at all. Not even the white of his eyeball. What lay behind was the same colour as his skin, which was itself looking very strange indeed.
“All right,” Vehofnehu said, backing up. “We'll need to get him out of the cage. Can you help me with that?”
“I can try.”
“And do you have a name? Just one will do.”
“Shilly,” she said. “He's Kemp.”
“Not any more, I fear. You take his legs and I'll carry his head.”
Awkwardly, and leaving her no energy for conversation, Shilly and Vehofnehu carried Kemp out of the cage, across the gangplank, and away from the elevator shaft. She glimpsed blue sky as she neared the windows. She blinked, dazzled, and almost tripped over a brass telescope lying on the floor.
“Careful! That's very valuable. Lay him down—here on this couch will do. I can see him much better now. Yes.”
Shilly let go of Kemp's feet with relief, and staggered back on her good leg. Her injured thighbone ached from the exertion. She clutched her stick and waited impatiently for her eyes to adjust.
“Where are you from, Shilly?” Vehofnehu asked her. She could hear him rustling and fiddling as he examined Kemp, but she couldn't quite make him out. Again, the feeling that a powerful charm was at work nearby thrilled through her.
“The Strand,” she said, fighting the dizziness by concentrating on his words. “Kemp and I used to live in the same town, but he lives in the Interior now.”
“And now you're both here. That's odd, isn't it?”
She blinked the last of the glare from her eyes, and saw Vehofnehu hunched over Kemp's broad, hairless chest. For a moment, she saw someone quite different: a younger version of him, perhaps, with straighter back and thick dark hair, his strong, straight fingers outspread as though feeling the warmth of a fire, not bent and arthritic. A faint red spark burned in the centre of each of his pupils.
Then she blinked, and he was old again. From somewhere—a pocket, maybe—he had produced a pair of wire-framed glass spectacles and placed them over his eyes.
“I can think of odder things,” she said.
He laughed and turned to face her. “I'm sure you can. You've seen a thing or two in your time, judging by the look of you.”
She glanced down at her dusty dress and plain leather sandals, all fraying around the edges. “Well, I wasn't expecting to be kidnapped when I got up yesterday morning—”
“No, Shilly. That's not what I meant. Your eyes. Your face. Everything about you tells me you've experienced more of the world than most people. You've seen a glast, at the very least.”
This confused her. “A what?”
“A glast.” Vehofnehu indicated Kemp. “The thing afflicting your friend here.”
“That's what it was called?” It was a relief to have a name for the creature, finally. “It came out of the water in the Divide and took us by surprise. Kemp was hit. The venom spread before we could stop it. Rosevear tried—”
Vehofnehu held up a hand for silence; again, the reminder of his nonhuman nature stopped her in her tracks. When he talked and moved, she could easily pretend that he was nothing but an old man, hunched and scrawny with age. But those long fingers, the oddly foreshortened thumbs, the lined, pink palms…
“Let me make something clear,” he said. “The shape it possessed when you encountered it—that's not the glast. That was just one of its victims. Where did you say it came from? From the water?”
She nodded. “A giant snake, eyeless, with whiskers.”
“I've heard of such things. They live high in the mountains, in glacial lakes where the prey is plentiful and the competition light. They don't usually come down to the plains. Was that where you encountered it?”
“A short way into the foothills,” she said. “A day or so from the forest's edge.”
He clucked his tongue, making a surprisingly loud noise. “Very much out of their range. Not that it would have made much difference. Your snake wasn't a snake any more. It was a glast, possibly infected during the flood, or before, or after. Am I making sense to you? Something poisoned the snake and turned it into a monster. Not a physical poison, but a chimerical poison. The snake in turn poisoned Kemp, and now he's turning into a glast too.”
A feeling of foreboding was growing in her belly. “Is there anything you can do for him?”
“No.” Vehofnehu straightened. “Shilly, your friend is already dead. It's best you accept that. He will never return to you, as you knew him. Our only concern now is what to do with the glast. This is one occasion on which all my skills as a healer will be of no use whatsoever.”
Shilly backed away, every last hope for Kemp settling into dust. She didn't doubt for a moment that Vehofnehu was telling the truth. The pallor of Kemp's skin grew worse with every hour. The weeping of his wound continued unchecked. Either his hair had begun falling out, or it was losing even the little colour it had once possessed.
The brightness of the sky brought tears to her eyes. Kemp would never see the sun again.
Then something Vehofnehu had said came back to haunt her.
“What do you mean: as I knew him?”
Ramal and the others took longer than an hour to climb the stairs. By the time they reached the top, Tom was red in the face, and Rosevear looked set to become one of his own patients. Even the Panic soldiers accompanying them seemed winded, stretching gratefully on reaching the summit and accepting Vehofnehu's offer of a drink.
“This is all terribly inconvenient,” the empyricist muttered while bustling about, pumping water from a large brass tap near the elevator shaft and shifting rolls of charts and diagrams off seats. His mood had turned from friendly to irritable again, and he treated the soldiers with exaggerated, almost sarcastic deference. The soldiers in return maintained a bored distance from the observatory and empyricist both. Only Ramal watched closely as Vehofnehu repeated the explanation he had given Shilly to Rosevear and the others.
“Glasts, you see, don't reproduce like other creatures. They don't breed and have children. They don't mate like us, or like other animals.” The empyricist rummaged behind a stack of dusty books until he found an elaborate family tree, which he unrolled and placed on the ground. “Here is the lineage of the kingsfolk. At the top, the Handsome King. His children married and had children of their own; his grandchildren did the same, merging and mixing the bloodlines until they were inseparable. That's the way the Panic work—and humans too, although they place more store in who begat whom than we do. A glast, now—” He pointed at the top of the family tree “—a glast starts off alone in the world, a creature that is neither body nor mind but something else entirely. How did it come into existence? What was the first begetting from which all glasts arise? I can't answer that question. I can tell you, however, where more glasts come from. Not by finding another glast, oh no. By infecting an innocent host—a host with which the essence of the glast merges to create an entirely new glast. Not the old glast in a new shape, but a new being, one with the nature of a glast and something of the donor, too. Thus the lineage progresses. Water snake is infected, becomes a glast-snake. Glast-snake infects Kemp, and he becomes a glast-Kemp. The lineage could continue forever that way, if unchecked.”
Vehofnehu let the parchment roll shut with a snap.
“Is that clear?”
Tom nodded. Rosevear looked slightly stunned. “But he still lives.”
“Only after a fashion. Look.” Vehofnehu stunned everyone by crossing to Kemp, rem
oving the thick bandage placed over his weeping stomach wound, squeezing the moisture it contained into a small glass, and knocking back the thimbleful of clear liquid in one gulp. “Pure water, nothing more. What did you think it was?”
“I—I wasn't sure. That is—” Rosevear had trouble finding words. “I didn't know—”
“You couldn't have known unless you'd seen a glast in action before.”
“And you have, I suppose?” asked Ramal.
“Not me personally, but someone I know well.” Vehofnehu hurried to fill the guard's pitcher with water from the tap, and managed to spill a small amount on Ramal's armour.
“I knew he was dead,” said Tom.
That brought Shilly out of her daze. She had sunk into a seat, half-listening as she processed the information herself. “And that makes you happy?” she snapped. “He was your friend. You coached him through School and the Novitiate. You knew him even longer than I, you—” She stopped, seeing Tom recoil and turn away from her. He didn't know why she was so angry at him, and she wasn't entirely certain, either. Kemp hadn't been her best friend in the whole world. She had actively hated him during his years of bullying in Fundelry. He had put that behind him, though; he had begun to make a life for himself in the Interior. The tattoos that Stone Mages placed such value in had begun to take shape across his skin. In time, perhaps, he might have become a Surveyor, like Skender's mother, and unearthed all manner of mystery from Ruins across the world.
But Tom had condemned him to death, or something even worse than that, by not warning him of the glast's attack. Shilly didn't care if the glast was important; she didn't see the future as Tom did. She just knew that someone she cared about was gone, and Tom had allowed it to happen.
Her chain of thought suddenly skipped a link. Something had moved on Kemp's strange skin. She stood up, pointing through a hot rush of tears.
“His tattoos! Look!”
Vehofnehu bent over Kemp's body. The black marks that had once stood out so strongly against the albino's paleness were shimmering, shifting like reflections on milky water.
The Hanging Mountains Page 15
