The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  “What use, then, is studying the sky? If the stars are unknowable and their names are meaningless, what's the point?”

  “The point is, of course, that although as individuals they cannot be known or even counted with any great precision, as a whole they are immensely interesting. Their ebb and flow reflects what happens beneath with more precision than you would credit, I'm sure.”

  “The Void Beneath?”

  “No, here. On the ground. Well, you know what I mean. Do you?”

  “You're saying that motions of the stars are influenced by what we do, how we move.” A new voice, one Sal knew instantly. Shilly's.

  “Yes, yes. And why shouldn't that be so? Everything else in the world is influenced by us. The Change flows through us from all corners of the sea, the stone, the sand—and the sky, too. It's all connected. All of it.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Well, just that. What makes us so special?”

  “Oh, we're not special. No more so than the trees or the ground or the air. We're just part of it. And by it—because I know you'll ask—I mean nothing more than just that. It. Everything. Does there need to be more of an explanation than that? When a cup is full, do you wonder why it has to be full? What it means to be full? How it got to be full? The cup is simply full, and that's all we need to know about it.”

  Sal welcomed the argument. It was a fine distraction from the climb, and a sign that he was getting somewhere. Far above, at the very limits of his vision, a faint yellow patch had appeared, as of a light burning somewhere impossibly distant.

  “Let me put it another way. Step on an ant and you don't even notice. But the ant notices, without a doubt, and so too do those around him. Was it special in some way to have been trodden on by you? Did you choose him specifically from the many you could have trodden on? Of course not. It just happened that way. We and the world are like that too. Are humans special to be living in this one, in this fashion? No. Are the man'kin, or the golems, or the kingsmen, or the glasts? No. We just are, and looking for higher meaning or a greater purpose is pointless.

  “Patterns and processes, on the other hand—they are what we must seek. Learn the way things work and you can work them to your will. Learn the way things will, and you can make them work for you.” The voice cackled gleefully. “Do you see? Mages and wardens understand some of this. The ones you call the Weavers understand more.”

  “You know of them?” Shilly sounded startled, with good reason.

  Sal hadn't heard that word for a long time either, outside of him and Shilly. The Weavers were a shadowy group that claimed responsibility for the Divide, and for maintaining a dynamic equilibrium between the Interior and the Strand. Highson Sparre had once been one of them, as had the Alcaide Dragan Braham.

  “Of course I know of them. I see many things from up here—and much that you ground-folk assume is well hidden, I assure you.”

  A wave of strangeness rolled over Sal between one rung and the next. He froze in midclimb, fearing what such disorientation might do to him at this point in the ascent. His head swam so badly that he could hardly tell which way was up any more. There was no handrail on the spiral staircase. If he put one limb wrong and slipped—

  “Keep moving, Sal,” called Griel from below. “I told you not to stop, no matter what. Do as I tell you and it'll be all right.”

  Sal forced himself to obey the Panic soldier's gruff words. With a tremendous effort of will, he brought his right hand out and forward, to where body memory told him the next rung should be. It was indeed there, and he gripped it tight, and forced himself onward, rung by rung, until the effect faded.

  The voice had stopped too. So he realised when his senses cleared. The interior of the tower was silent, and the light above had become abruptly brighter.

  “Hello?” came a cry from the summit. “Is that more visitors I hear?”

  Sal peered up and saw a stocky figure silhouetted against the warm yellow glow, looking down at him. He managed a wave with one cramped hand. “Are you the empyricist?”

  “I'm many things. That will do for now.”

  Relief lent Sal new strength. Not only was Shilly at the top, but Griel had led them truly. After their meeting with the Quorum, Griel had come for him, Mawson, and Highson in the holding cells as promised, leaving Schuet and Mikia behind, but he had been less than communicative during their crossing of the balloon city. When pressed, he had said only that Vehofnehu was an empyricist who could help them work out what to do next.

  Sal knew what an empyricist was but had never met one before, not in the Haunted City or anywhere in the Interior—his stay in both places had been too short and tumultuous. He imagined charts and strange instruments, and the faint aura of instability that so often accompanied exploration into the arcane.

  That he was proved right on all three counts didn't necessarily reassure him.

  When the top of the spiral ladder-staircase finally came into view, he saw an ancient Panic male waiting for him—grey-cheeked, wild-haired, and dressed in a worn robe that might once have been green. A wiry but strong grip helped him up the last two rungs to where Shilly was waiting for him with arms wide and eyes relieved. The pressure of her cheek against his felt like coming home.

  “When Mawson came up in the cage,” she said, helping him to a seat, “we knew you wouldn't be far behind.”

  For the moment, Sal was too winded to speak. He let gravity take him and folded gratefully onto a dusty cushioned surface. Distantly, he acknowledged the space around him: a circular room with a roof and many windows granting access to the night sky. A handful of clear yellow mist globes provided dim illumination. Tom lay curled in a shadowy corner, sound asleep with a worried look on his face. Rosevear helped Sal's father out of the stairwell and into another chair.

  Griel came last. Even with the Panic's natural stoop, he stood a full head higher than the empyricist. Despite that they gripped each other's hands as equals.

  “You are welcome here, my friend. Always welcome.”

  “Thank you. I'm sorry I can't come more often.”

  “Pfft.” Vehofnehu waved away Griel's apologies and went about pumping water for the new arrivals. “You have much to do below, I know, so I forgive you for sending that buffoon Ramal instead. How's Jao?”

  Griel's protruding brow became even more thunderous, but with concern, not anger. “She fears for us. Fears where we're heading and what we might become.”

  “As should you.”

  Sal accepted a tall glass of water from Vehofnehu and drank it in one gulp.

  “Where's Kemp?” he asked. “Were you able to help him?”

  “No one can help your friend now,” said the empyricist, turning his back and moving away.

  “He's dead?”

  The look in Shilly's eyes told Sal that Kemp's fate wasn't so simple. She explained the situation to Sal and Highson while Mawson watched stonily from the pedestal he had been placed upon.

  Sal felt equal parts dismay and concern at what he heard and saw as he wearily stood by the couch studying the way Kemp's tattoos appeared to float over skin turned glassy and grey. That Sal had known nothing about glasts before now didn't concern him: strange things lived in strange corners of the world, and the Hanging Mountains were very strange indeed, judging by what he had seen thus far. He only wished he had been able to act more quickly on the boneship to save his friend, and wondered what needed to be done to prevent the glast-Kemp from endangering anyone else.

  It was then his turn to bring the others up to date. His recollections of the audience with the Quorum possessed a dreamlike quality, as though it hadn't really happened, or not quite in the way he remembered it. Highson backed him up, however, supporting his description of the encounter with the cousins Tarnava and Elomia, who acted as guardians and translators for the Quorum itself.

  “Glowing green, you say?” Shilly's brow crinkled at the description. “I saw someone like tha
t at the base of the waterfall, just before the Panic fired on the boneship.”

  “Really? You didn't mention it before.”

  “There wasn't exactly time to, and I couldn't be sure I didn't imagine it. Now, though…”

  “Why would one of the Quorum leave the city?” Griel asked Vehofnehu.

  “They're not prisoners.” The empyricist had listened to their conversation with one ear as he fiddled with glass lenses mounted in several strange instruments. “They come and go as they will.”

  “They never have before.”

  “That you're aware of.” Vehofnehu winked. “They visit me here, sometimes. We talk as best we can.”

  “How?”

  “There are ways. They pass through time in the opposite direction to us, that's all. To them, everything is reversed. We come, and they think we are going. They leave, and we see them arriving. That's why the man'kin can talk to them. Our stony brethren exist outside of time as both we and the Quorum know it.”

  Sal nodded in understanding, remembering the strange speech of the glowing figures and Mawson responding to them in kind. I talk to them the same way I talk to you, the man'kin had said. Only backwards.

  “Where do you fit into all this?” he asked the empyricist.

  “I?” The elderly Panic male raised his eyebrows as though Sal had accused him of a crime. “I don't fit into anything. I am merely an observer.”

  “How is that possible? Earlier, you said everything is connected. So did Tom. If that's true, you must be connected too.”

  Vehofnehu barked in amusement. “Indeed I did say that, young human. And indeed it is true. I am connected in ways you couldn't imagine. So are we all, in our unique ways. Who can say what effect our actions will have on the world? What changes we might wreak with a single word, the slightest gesture? Even a lack of action can make a difference. Mere observation, my friends, is a powerful tool.”

  As he spoke, the mist globes dimmed and darkness fell in the circular room. Sal reached out and found Shilly's hand. He clutched it tightly, feeling the night outside creep through the clear glass windows, bringing with it a chill of the mind rather than the body. He shivered.

  Vehofnehu's observatory rose above the all-encompassing cloud cover. No wonder, Sal thought, the climb to its summit had taken so long. The sky was visible in all directions except to the northeast, where the shoulder of the mountains loomed. Apart from the mountains, under the cool, hard light of the stars Sal saw nothing but clouds.

  Even after a lifetime spent in the borderlands or on the far fringes of the Strand, he felt that he had never seen the stars so clearly and in such quantities. Uncountable, unchartable, they reminded him of glowing grains of sand scattered across the surface of an icy black sea. They gleamed and glittered; they held his eye and threatened to hypnotise him. In the sky he saw nothing familiar, only alien forms.

  He didn't see shapes, as some people claimed to. Stars weren't clouds in which one could see camels, fish, buggies, even faces, as high-altitude winds moulded them. He didn't possess the visual knack needed to connect all the disparate dots into a whole picture, although he suspected Shilly probably did. He saw the broader brush strokes instead, the patches of relative light and dark. The metaphors and similes he called on to describe them came from his knowledge of the world below: reefs and rivers where sprays of stars clumped together; barren fields where few congregated. In the former he glimpsed wonder, and a mystery he doubted he would ever fathom. Through the latter he felt as though he could see forever, to the emptiness at the edge of creation.

  The moon rode low and dark over the horizon. Skulking, Sal thought, as though afraid of coming out into full view. He was glad for that. Had it been full, the spectacle of the stars would have been much reduced.

  “As below,” announced Vehofnehu, “so above. In recent times, the sky has been highly active. Instead of the usual tides, I have witnessed ruptures representing dramatic events in the world around us: significant births and deaths; disasters natural and unnatural; happenstance and circumstance that will affect many, in ways even I cannot always see. Your blossoming, Sal, was visible in the stars, as is the awakening to power of all wild talents. The making and waking of your Homunculus, Highson Sparre: that, too, I have seen reflected in the sky above me. Reflected, I say; not directed. The stars control us no more than sea or stone. But it is possible, I believe, to see in their movements a glimpse of what might be—just as the close examination of people enables one to guess what they will do next. Tides, yes. And tidings. The two are connected.”

  “You mentioned natural disasters,” said Sal. “Does that mean you saw the flood?”

  “Of course. It came to me as a mighty concatenation.” The empyricist was in silhouette beside him, one long arm gesticulating in a vain attempt to convey what he had seen. “A juncture I have never witnessed before, and did not see coming. The sky shuddered, and shudders still, for those with eyes to see it. It quakes for what has been, and what might yet come.”

  “Oriel and the other Heptarchs believe the end times are here,” said Griel.

  “They aren't alone in believing that. Am I right, Highson Sparre, when I say that your leaders suspect the same?”

  Highson acknowledged the guess as true, even though he knew as little about it as Shilly. If the Weavers had told him more, he wasn't letting on.

  “They are correct in thinking so,” said the empyricist. “The stars and the Quorum deliver the same message. We would be fools to ignore them.”

  “So we sit back and let it happen?” Sal heard the frustration in Shilly's voice, but was too exhausted to be sympathetic. “We watch the world end without doing anything at all?”

  “For me, in this age and place, doing nothing suits me. Sooner rather than later, perhaps, I will play more of a role.”

  “So there will be a later?” Sal asked. “I thought that wasn't guaranteed. Tom can't see anything beyond a certain point. Neither can the man'kin.”

  “There will always be a later,” said Vehofnehu. “Not all of us will be in it, however.”

  “That's just splitting hairs,” said Shilly with an irritable snap.

  “Not to some. To golems, say. Or glasts.”

  “Who'd want to live in a world full of golems and glasts?” asked Rosevear.

  “Golems and glasts, of course. And probably ghosts too, for all we know.”

  Shilly sighed and rubbed at her eyes with one hand. Sal could tell that she was tired. It had been a long day for all of them. “So what do you advocate for us?”

  The empyricist waved his right hand and the mist lights came back up—not as brightly as they had previously been, but seeming so to Sal's eyes.

  “Forces from before your time are stirring,” Vehofnehu said. “Ancient, dark things that do not belong here and now. You have met one of them.”

  “The twins.” Shilly stood and leaned on her cane.

  “Yes, and others. One rises from the depths of stone: this one must be stopped, lest a fate worse than any Cataclysm befalls all of us. The three-in-one sleeps in an icy tomb, awaiting only the call to awake. Nine hunt the trees beneath us, killing all who cross their path. Ah…” The empyricist put shaking fingers over his eyes. “I see too much. Beings I had thought best forgotten are in motion again, just as the Quorum said they would one day be. I didn't believe them, and now it will cost us all.”

  “Peace.” Griel came to the empyricist's side and steadied him with both broad hands. “You have done all you could. It's not your fault Oriel and the Heptarchs won't listen.”

  “Fools,” the empyricist said in a softer tone, letting himself be guided into a comfortable chair. “We were fools. We should've killed it when we had the chance, and hang the consequences.”

  Sal glanced at Shilly, who shrugged. Griel handed Vehofnehu a glass of water and stood protectively over him as he recovered.

  “Perhaps we should leave,” said Highson, looking to Griel for guidance.

  “Y
ou will soon enough,” said the empyricist, straightening. “But not tonight. Tomorrow you hunt the hunters. To do that, you will need all your strength.”

  “Hunt who?” asked Shilly, frowning. “What hunters are you talking about?”

  “The creatures that have been preying on both kingsfolk and humans of the forest in recent times. They must be stopped. With each blood meal they grow stronger and more daring, and hungrier still. If unchecked, they will sweep all life from the forest. You, Griel, will lead the expedition to rid us of them. The Heptarchs need not know.”

  Griel hesitated, then nodded. “You're talking about the wraith, aren't you?”

  A brisk nod. “Not just one wraith. These are the nine I spoke of.”

  “I have authorisation to pursue that end.” If Griel seemed at all perturbed by the thought of hunting nine of the things that had attacked the Sky Wardens at the base of the forest, he showed no sign of it. “Am I to go alone?”

  “No. You will take the others. You're all connected, yes indeed. Fail in this instance and all will fall. I will remain here with the glast, so none but me will be infected should it break free.”

  “And who will stop you, when you become a glast?” asked Rosevear.

  “If that looks likely, I will sever the way you came up here. You may have noticed,” said the empyricist, beginning to regain his former garrulousness, “that it is much more than an ordinary stairwell.”

  Among the nods of agreement, Highson said, “Yes. It's a Way.”

  “And Ways can be sealed.”

  Sal understood, then, why he had felt a moment of disorientation while climbing the endless stairs. Ways connected widely separated points by means of a much shorter tunnel—such as the one connecting his and Shilly's underground home to the beach near Fundelry. Although that tunnel was scarcely three metres long, the workshop was in fact a hundred kilometres west, near a town called Tumberi. So, if the empyricist cut the Way connecting the top of the tower to its base, he would effectively isolate himself from the rest of the Panic.