The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  “What exactly did the Guardian say?”

  “Say? Let me see, now.” Kelloman rummaged in a haphazard pile of notebooks and flicked through one in particular. “Yes, here. I remember noting it down because it seemed a particularly artless response. ‘Does the sea need to talk to tell the tides?’ she said. ‘Does stone announce itself before falling in an avalanche?’” He rolled his eyes. “I mean, really. What utter rot! If they spent less time doting on the trees and more exploring the bedrock beneath, they wouldn't be tucked away in this bug-ridden corner of the Earth.”

  Kelloman indicated the bilby with a wave of one hand, then nodded smugly as though that proved his point completely. Skender hadn't the energy to argue.

  “Have you got anything to eat?” he asked instead.

  “Roots and berries,” came the unhappy reply. “And the odd nut.”

  Skender's stomach rumbled. “Sounds wonderful.”

  “You might think so now, but try eating it for two years.” Kelloman gave him directions, clearly not intending to move from his chair for anyone but himself. “Have they tried the ghost frog trick on you yet?”

  Skender grinned. Yes, they had, and it would be a long time before he believed anything the foresters told him about food, but that didn't mean he disliked them. He might have done the same thing in their shoes.

  The bilby ran up his left arm and onto his shoulder when he tried to put it on the ground.

  “Don't feed it, whatever you do.” Kelloman watched him sourly as he tried to coax it with an offering of dried fruit. “I'll never get rid of it.”

  The bilby snatched the morsel from Skender's fingers before he could withdraw it, and he hid a smile.

  This wasn't the first time Skender had come face to face with the advanced Stone Mage practice that allowed Kelloman to inhabit the body of another while his body rested in an inert state far away. The Mage Erentaite, an elderly woman who lived in Ulum, could only attend the monthly Synod in the ruined city of the Nine Stars by occupying the body of an empty-minded girl. There were many other mages in similar circumstances. Such transactions were considered mutually beneficial by most, since the recipients of the minds of travelling mages were often unable to care for themselves on their own.

  Skender found such a mismatch as Kelloman's between host and visitor spooky, though. Kelloman's presence seemed to strain at the seams of the body he had been given. When Skender looked away from the mage and pictured him in his mind's eye he was large of frame, overweight, and with hanging jowls—very different from his host's slight appearance.

  Maintaining conversation wasn't a problem, despite this. Kelloman was much more interested in talking than listening. As long as Skender stayed awake and occasionally feigned agreement, the man was happy. Among the many things the man complained about were his reasons for being in the forest. It transpired that such a remote outpost hadn't come his way by accident. As Kelloman put it, he was the innocent victim of professional rivalry. An expert in transcorporeal studies, he had locked horns with a senior mage over a matter of theory and found himself posted somewhere well out of the way quick smart. Despite protests and pleas for clemency—and “no small amount of first-rate research under incredibly difficult circumstances”—there he remained.

  Skender imagined the true story was more complex than the account he heard, but he didn't challenge Kelloman on its veracity. Best just to nod and pat the bilby—which had fallen asleep on his lap—and hope he hadn't been completely forgotten by those in charge.

  They came for him at sunset. Three brown-clad guards appeared at the door and entered without knocking.

  “You are to return with us.”

  Kelloman's face—already flushed red from pungent liquor—turned as dark as thunderclouds. “Now see here. My young friend has barely had a moment to—”

  The lead guard raised a hand. “Both of you, if you please. The Guardian wishes to see you.”

  “What if I don't want to see her?”

  Skender was disinclined to argue. He'd spent long enough in the company of Mage Kelloman and would accept any offer of a change.

  “We'll come,” he said, standing. The bilby started awake and scrabbled up his stomach and chest with tiny, sharp-tipped claws. He felt it tense for a moment, as though it might leap off, but it relaxed as Kelloman stood with a heavy sigh and smoothed down the front of his robe.

  “Very well,” he grumbled. “If I must. Do you see the sort of indignities I suffer, day after day? Come here; go away; come back again—without so much as a thank you or a by-your-leave. A lesser man wouldn't tolerate it.”

  He grabbed Skender by the arm and breezed haughtily past the guards, picking up his cane as he walked out the door. Skender readied himself for a furious row when the mage started thwacking at flowers, but fortunately Kelloman restrained himself. Conserving energy, perhaps, for the uphill climb. Despite the youthful body he inhabited, the trip soon took its toll. Kelloman was very much out of shape, and his clothes were completely inappropriate for the humid weather.

  Skender looked back on his visits to the Haunted City and Laure and hoped he had never been so gauche.

  They walked and climbed in silence, followed closely by the guards. The light of the fading sun deepened to pink through the clouds, casting the forest in peculiar hues: green leaves turned to black, while red flowers seemed to shine; wisps of fog resembled crimson streamers as they snaked through the branches. Bird calls echoed from the surrounding canopy as raucous daytime species settled in for the night and their nocturnal counterparts stirred. The bilby clung tight to Skender's shoulder, wide eyes watching for predators; each time a branch moved, twenty tiny pinpricks in four groups of five made Skender shiver.

  “Ghastly place,” panted Kelloman as they passed the halfway point.

  Before Skender could answer, a chill wind rushed down the pathway, bringing the smell of blood with it. He stopped dead in his tracks, recognising that terrible spoor.

  “Goddess! Here?”

  “What, boy?”

  “We need to get away. Now.” Skender looked around for a hiding place, while Kelloman and the guards milled in confusion.

  “It's just a breeze,” said one of them.

  “Believe me, it's not. It's the thing that killed Lidia Delfine's brother.” He couldn't help yelling at them as the cold deepened and the fog grew tight around them. “The wraith!”

  Comprehension dawned, but still they dragged their feet. Skender grabbed Kelloman's arm and tugged him off the wooden path. The mage had frozen in his tracks, staring wide-eyed uphill as though he could see what was coming and had been struck dumb by it.

  “Come on!” The bilby scampered in fright from shoulder to shoulder across Skender's back. Kelloman weighed less than he had expected—fooled once again by the man's manner. Under the robes, the physical form of Kelloman's host body was as light as deadwood. “Down here!”

  Skender had spotted a gap in the platform's boughs that led to the level below. Skender pushed Kelloman ahead of him. The mage dropped with a flutter and tearing of robes but surprisingly little complaint. Skender followed barely in time. The three guards had drawn their weapons and braced themselves against the rising wind. He glanced back at them and saw an icy blackness sweep down the path, snapping branches in its wake, and snatch one of them off her feet.

  Skender dropped, hearing the beginning of a scream whip overhead. The cries of the other guards rose in fright and horror.

  “What is it?” hissed Kelloman, clutching Skender's robe and pulling him close. “What's it doing to them?”

  Skender furiously shushed him. A sound much like tearing wind came from above. Icy dust and leaf fragments rained down through the boards. A clash of weapons suggested that the guards were putting up a fierce fight, but then something hard clattered away from where the footsteps thumped and shuffled, and a dark rain began to fall.

  Skender backed away, filled with revulsion. Blood poured through the cracks in the boards.


  “What's going on?”

  Skender dragged Kelloman further downhill, away from the slaughter. He could hear only one guard now as she fought for her life. Although his cowardice sickened and dismayed him, the thought of death was worse. He couldn't defend himself against such things. He wasn't nearly strong enough. Running was his only option. Or dying.

  “No.” Kelloman gripped him tightly, and not only out of fear. With a surprising turn of strength, the mage brought Skender to a halt. “Wait. Feel it.”

  Skender tried to pull himself free, then felt cold air coming upwards from below.

  Another one.

  Ice blossomed in his gut, radiating through veins and nerves like fractures in a pane of glass. Every sense became powerfully acute—but he might as well have been deaf, dumb, and blind for all the good it did him. The slightest tap would shatter him into a million pieces.

  “Don't just stand there, boy.” Kelloman's voice came from the other side of the world. “Give me a hand!”

  The mage was clambering over the guide rail of the path and forcing his way through the canopy. Blood-spattered and out of shape as well as out of place, he made a ludicrous figure. Skender felt like screaming with laughter. What's the point? It's going to find us in there just as easily as out here.

  With a squeak, the bilby jumped off his shoulders and scrambled into the canopy after Kelloman.

  The hairs on Skender's arms stood on end as the shadowy, sharp-clawed fiend rushed up the mountain towards them. He could hear it shrieking, made hungry and urgent by the crying of the guards above. Perhaps it could smell the blood and honed in on its primitive power. The yadachi bloodworkers of Laure used the power of blood to bring life to their desiccated city, but it could just as easily be turned towards bringing death. The more the wraiths killed, the more power they would have, and so it would go until blood-soaked vampires ruled the night, and every living thing huddled in fear.

  Blood. Trees. Power.

  In a flash, Skender knew what Kelloman was trying to do. Skender vaulted the guide rail with a single movement and landed on a branch. It didn't move even slightly beneath him. Kelloman was up to his waist in a tangle of vines, flowers, and leaves, emitting a steady stream of cursing. Soft fungus broke and gave way beneath Skender's fingers as he dived in after the mage, tearing the foliage apart in his desperation to get deeper. The bilby ran back and forth, guiding him. He lunged with his right hand, felt it break through a tangle of roots and fibres. Something cool and hard and familiar greeted his questing fingers.

  Stone.

  With his other hand he gripped Kelloman's shoulder as tightly as he could.

  “Through me,” he said via the Change. “Whatever it takes.”

  Kelloman didn't grace his offer with a reply. Instead, the mage turned to face the creature that menaced them and channelled the Change contained in the mountain's backbone directly to his will.

  The world whited out for a moment and a roaring noise drowned any sound Skender might have heard from either the second wraith or its intended victim. The smell of the forest, the feel of stone under his hands and wood beneath his feet, the taste of coppery fear on his tongue—all vanished. All he had left were his thoughts.

  Granted, Skender told himself—even as the full force of the bedrock flowed through him and into Kelloman's body—granted, the man was a fool. But he was also a trained mage, one powerful enough to throw his mind from one side of the world to the other for two entire years without suffering any ill effects. That said something. A person didn't need to have good manners or refined communication skills to use the Change, just as a blacksmith didn't need them to hammer iron or a mechanic to tighten a bolt. The world didn't care about such things. Only people did.

  When people were being eaten, Skender would cheerfully put aside all his prejudices to avoid being one of them.

  The roaring faded. Sight returned. Skender felt as though the world had aged several days, but his position in the canopy hadn't changed in the slightest. A shocked silence echoed through the treetops; even the moaning moai were silent. There was no remnant of chill in the air. In fact, it was dry-hot like an oven and smelled of ash. He took that as a good sign, and twisted to see what had happened.

  Kelloman stood beside him, still connected to him by the hand touching his shoulder. The last dregs of the Change flickered through them both, and the mage's tattoos writhed into golden life over his host body's face and fingers: fine swirls and circular patterns that crossed and recrossed in ways that made Skender's eyes swim. Then they were gone, and the mage sagged. Skender caught the slight body just in time. The mat of vines and branches crackled and groaned beneath them, and he became acutely conscious of just how exposed they were. If the lot collapsed, they could skid down the side of the cliff face all the way to the bottom.

  He had no choice but to try to get Kelloman back to the relative safety of the platform they had so hastily left. When he turned to judge the distance, however, grunting and struggling with his awkward burden, he saw that this option was no longer open to him.

  The platform was gone. Where it had been there was a hole in the canopy, open to the sky. Tendrils of smoke and fog wreathed the charred remains of whatever had stood between Kelloman and the wraith: grey-black sticks marked the skeletal framework of supports, load-bearing beams, walls, ceilings, and floors. Nothing else had survived the power of the charm Kelloman had used.

  Voices echoed from above, exclaiming, calling, inquiring. The burned canopy shifted beneath him again, and he struggled to maintain his grip on the limp mage.

  “Over here!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “I don't know how much longer I can hold on!”

  The bilby leapt from his shoulder and scampered away through the canopy. He wished he could do the same, even as he cursed its sudden cowardice. He hollered until the ash in the air made him choke. Coughing violently, he felt his feet begin to lose traction and scrabbled for a new handhold.

  “Help us!”

  “Hang in there, Skender,” yelled a familiar voice from above. “We're coming.”

  Blinking ashen tears from his eyes, he looked up into Chu's face.

  Beside her, Heuve fastened a rope to a beam two levels up, allowing one of the guards to clamber down to his level. The bilby jumped off the guard's back as he drew nearer, and scampered up Skender's outstretched arm.

  “Guess I shouldn't have been so hasty,” he told it, as the guard took the mage's weight from him.

  “I'll come back for you in a second,” the guard told Skender as he and Kelloman were pulled away by those above.

  Relief at being rescued faded as memories of the thing that had attacked them flooded back. He peered down through the blasted branches, searching for its body. All he saw was a blackened hole, smoking.

  “Don't take too long,” he called up at the others, and clung tighter to his awkward perch.

  “The sky is a mirror to the world.

  Stare at it long enough and you will see yourself.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 5:33

  Amurmur goaded Sal onwards and upwards through the darkness. Every muscle burned and his spine felt like an overstressed mast. His head ached from the repetition of taking one rung at a time, over and over, without slipping. He kept climbing, safe in the knowledge that he was faring much better than his father, two rungs behind and breathing in rapid, ragged gasps.

  The voice wasn't one he recognised. A curious mixture of excited and querulous, it followed long, lilting trajectories from topic to topic, not deflected by the occasional question or comment from those listening to it, but striking out along newly syncopated pathways leading the Goddess only knew where at its own whims. No matter how he strained, Sal couldn't quite make out the words. For what felt like a small eternity, he was caught in the darkness, reaching for some anchor of comprehension just as he reached for the next thin rung in sequence, one after the other, trying hard to ignore the gaps between them. Each time he thoug
ht he was getting a grip on the words, they slipped out of reach again. He found it maddening.

  What would happen if he ever reached for a rung and it wasn't there? His body was so trapped in the repetitious rhythm of its ascent Sal was sure he would climb through one of the gaps in the ladder and fall down the way he had come, to a pointless and messy death.

  Finally—inevitably, perhaps—burbled consonants and vowels coalesced into words, and words strung themselves into sentences. Sentences tied knots of conversation and argument around concepts he had never heard discussed in so much detail before—not even in the Haunted City or the Keep, where such things, he supposed, should be discussed.

  “I watch the stars every night,” said the voice, “and I am no closer to knowing them than I ever was. Understanding? Yes, I aspire to that. But knowing them, no. That I will never achieve. How could I? It would be like watching a busy market, day after day, with the expectation of knowing every face in the crowd. I can imagine coming to recognise a number of individuals out of such a crowd, because some have distinctive features that recur every now and again, but would that mean I knew them? I fear not.”

  “There are maps,” said a male voice. It sounded like Rosevear. “In the Book of Towers. I've seen them. Maps of the sky, with names.”

  “Yes, and great constellations marked too, I bet.” The owner of the voice sniffed contemptuously. “A map is not the thing, my friend. I too could draw a map, right here and now; it might even be accurate one day in a thousand. Would that please you, make you feel you were closer to some deep understanding of the world we live in? Would it reassure you to have that piece of paper in your hand, even as you tried to find the stars you sought, and failed?” A balled-up piece of vellum fluttered past Sal, taking him by surprise. He forced himself to resume his steady rhythm. “A map is worth less than the paper it's printed on unless the person who drew it knew what they were doing. And even then, you need to know how it works. Maps are like machines, you see: only as good as the thought that goes into them, and liable to be a danger to those who don't think.”