The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  Shilly looked unhappy. Sal couldn't tell which part of the plan upset her the most: leaving Kemp and Vehofnehu behind, or going out into the forest to hunt the wraiths while the issue of the Homunculus remained unsolved. He wasn't certain himself.

  Before anyone could object, an ear-splitting cry came from a forgotten corner of the observatory. Sal jumped to his feet, picturing wraiths and glasts, the Change already stirring at his command. Highson did the same, moving spryly despite his age. The hook at Griel's side came out of its sheath with the sound of an indrawn breath.

  All they saw was Tom, eyes wide with fright and one hand pointing up at the stars.

  “Tom!” Shilly hurried to him. “What's wrong? What can you see?”

  The young seer blinked furiously, noticed her at his side, and lowered his hand. It shook like that of an old man.

  “Blood and fire,” he whispered. “Death in our midst. In the mist.” He shuddered all over. “I've seen them. So has Skender. It's already happened, will happen again. Fire. And blood!”

  “Easy,” she soothed him, warning the others away. Sal forced himself to back off. A nightmarish vision, not an actual attack, but no less alarming for all that.

  “Do you have a name, Tom?” asked Vehofnehu softly. “Can you tell us the names of the things we face? The nine?”

  Tom squirmed as though the dream still had him in its grip. “Hard names. Cold names. The strangler, the blood-red, the screecher, the black-hearted—” He drew a sharp breath. “The Swarm.”

  Vehofnehu nodded as though all his worst fears had been confirmed.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I remember now. That was what they were called…”

  “Are you going to lie there all day or do you have something in mind?”

  Kail took his time answering. He wasn't just weighing all the options one by one. He was absorbing everything his senses told him. One of the first rules of tracking was to look everywhere a trail shouldn't be as well as where it should. Much could be learned from the periphery. Before considering a particular decision, he would examine every possibility once, and then again on the assumption that he had missed something the first time. Then if the decision he made turned out to be wrong, at least he would know that he had done his best with the information at hand.

  From the lip of the cliff where he lay stretched flat on the ground, the Homunculus likewise beside him, he could see down to where white water churned and roiled, stirred up by the waterfall to the north. At the base of the falls, rocking sluggishly from side to side, was the boneship, apparently abandoned to the elements. A splash of blood surrounded the body of a man splayed across its roof. Despite the wounds he had suffered, visible through Kail's spyglass as dark rents in blackening skin, there didn't seem to be enough blood by half. That worried him.

  Looking further afield, he saw signs of fighting: more blood, scuffed earth, a broken arrow, even a gleaming knife left behind by mistake. A night fight, then, and one conducted on several fronts. Above the falls, where a broad lake lapped against a muddy shore, he saw more signs of recent disturbance. How long ago, precisely, he couldn't tell, but judging by the condition of the body on the roof of the boneship, no more than a day, maybe less.

  Closer at hand, literally within arm's reach, he had already noted footprints and handprints along the Divide's edge, which meant that whoever had attacked the boneship had done so from above. Tree trunks some metres back from the edge bore marks of ropes and pulleys from which the attackers had descended. That they weren't quite human tracks also worried him.

  Above, looming like the clenched brows of an angry god, the clouds of the Hanging Mountains utterly obscured the noonday sun and cast a grim pall over the scene.

  “I'm going to take a closer look,” he said eventually.

  “What if you're seen?” asked the twins—and he could understand their reluctance. The three of them had gone to some lengths to avoid encountering anyone, especially the Sky Wardens whose path they followed.

  “There's no one down there. No one living, anyway.” He stood and dusted himself off, telling himself that he was as certain of that as he could be. The camel stood patiently as he removed a coil of rope from one of its saddlebags.

  “We want to come too,” said the twins.

  “I won't stop you, but wait until I reach the bottom before using the rope. It won't hold both our weights at the same time.”

  The Homunculus's strange head nodded understanding, and he descended backwards over the edge. Abseiling was an old skill from his boundary riding days near Iron Knob, one never entirely forgotten. He liked the moments of controlled freefall between each bounce, but hated not being able to see exactly where he was going. Given wings, he would rather have descended slowly and carefully, with bola spinning in readiness.

  He landed on a rock by the side of the river and signalled for the twins to follow. They scurried down the rope like a giant spider, black limbs standing out against the limestone cliff. By the time they reached the bottom, he had picked his way across tumbled stones to the base of the waterfall, on the far side of which the boneship had been securely tied by persons unknown. Still nothing moved apart from water, but he proceeded warily, nervous of a trap.

  Blood will run like water, the seer in Laure had told him. Blood will run like water ere the end comes.

  What have you got yourself into this time, Eisak Marmion? he wanted to know.

  Even from a distance Kail could tell that the body on the roof of the boneship didn't belong to anyone he knew. That came as something of a relief, but only relatively speaking. Whatever had killed the man had been vigorous and strong. The leather uniform he wore had been rent in numerous places, and by the look of it his throat had been torn out. Kail had seen a lot in his time, but this was one thing he had no desire to see at closer range.

  He crept across the gangplank onto the boneship, noting signs of hasty craftwork as he went. The massive exoskeleton had been prepared with maximum speed and efficiency, with little opportunity for art, but he noted flourishes in odd places: a spiral motif, perhaps the signature of a Laurean carpenter pressed into unfamiliar shipbuilding service, repeated on gunwales, rails, and lintels; an impractical fineness to the handle of the tiller; a perfect symmetry to the anchor where none was required. Such examples contrasted with the roughness of bone underfoot, and the asymmetrical curves of the doors. Os, the Alcaide's ship of bone, was carved and polished across every surface, a seaworthy ornament big enough for thirty crew plus passengers. It made Marmion's boneship look like a toy in comparison.

  Still, Kail thought, full marks for effort and for taking an opportunity as it came. Marmion's initiative hadn't impressed him much prior to that point.

  The boneship's central cabin was empty, except for some ransacked crates and discarded goods. He hadn't really expected a pile of bodies stacked up for the scavengers to take, but he'd had to check before he could move on. Wherever Marmion and the others had got to, they weren't anywhere nearby.

  The ship rocked as the Homunculus boarded.

  “Any sign?”

  “None,” Kail said, stepping out of the cabin. “The boneship is drained. My guess is that someone used up the reservoir to fight off their attackers, failed, and was taken prisoner. Or they fled, and their attackers went in pursuit. Either way, someone took the trouble of removing the ship's supplies before leaving, and they did it in a hurry.”

  “The Marie Celeste,” said one of the twins. Seth, perhaps, with a tone of wonderment in his voice, as though surprised by the memory.

  “The what?”

  “A ship found drifting in the ocean, empty, with meals half-eaten still sitting at the tables. No one ever learned what happened to the crew.”

  “I don't think there's much ambiguity here,” he said. “There's an arrow sticking out of the starboard bow.”

  “Is this what boats are like now?” asked Hadrian, peering at the rough bony surface.

  “A few. Not many.” Kail
had learned everything he could from the boneship and was already losing interest. “Take a look around if you like. Maybe you'll find something I missed.”

  Leaving the twins to explore the empty cavities of the massive exoskeleton, Kail walked to the front of the ship and stood with his hands against the rails. He leaned there for a long moment, looking down through the white-flecked water, apparently deep in thought.

  Behind that masquerade, his sharp eyes peered out from under his brows at the stark line cut against the clouds by the cliff face to his left, down which he and the Homunculus had recently scaled. He waited, not obviously but patiently, and was soon rewarded.

  Something moved up there, exposed only by the silhouette it cast against the grey sky. Kail might not have seen it had he not been looking, made wary by small signs in the previous days—signs he had detected on the periphery of his senses, rather than on the trail itself.

  Someone was following them. He didn't know who or what, but he had proof of it now. That was something.

  “Find anything?” he called, turning from the rail.

  The twins emerged from a nook at the rear of the boneship. “No notes to say where everyone went, unfortunately.”

  “They're a long way from here. That's my guess. And it's not our job to find them.” Kail's shoulder blades itched, but he refused to look up. “Have you heard from that creature, Upuaut, lately?”

  “No.” The Homunculus's features took on a worried cast. “That's sort of worse than if we had…you know?”

  “I think so.” Kail was concerned. The twins described Upuaut as a being without flesh, much like a golem, but the figure he had seen silhouetted against the sky was definitely solid. “We'd better keep moving. We're exposed here.”

  That wasn't the worst of it, he thought, as they retraced their steps past the waterfall to where they had descended the cliff face and would now go back up. Someone at the top could cut the rope when they were halfway; or have poisoned their supplies already to do them harm later. Camels didn't make good watchdogs.

  But if he didn't climb the rope, their pursuer would know that he, she, or it had been discovered.

  “You go first,” he told the twins, trusting in the resilience of their artificial body. They had survived one fall already, down the side of the Divide; one more wouldn't kill them. “Toss me the waterbags when you get to the top and I'll fill them while we have the chance.”

  If the twins suspected his ulterior motive, they didn't hesitate to be the first to climb the rope. Kail watched from the bottom as they scaled it with ease, four arms and four legs working independently but with an instinctive synchrony to raise them at a much faster rate than any ordinary human could manage. They did it silently, too, which only added to their alienness.

  Kail had had a week and a half now to study the pair, and he was no closer to understanding them. Anything or anyone that could emerge from the Void Beneath with any memories intact was a miracle in itself; they had lived in that place for hundreds of years, trapped with each other in a state of nearly complete sensory deprivation, and emerged in a state at least approximating sanity—something he could barely credit. Yet there they were, undoubtedly present, and uniquely so, giving him little reason to doubt their story. He did know that they were not overtly malicious by nature, since they could have harmed him many times during their journey and had not done so even once.

  They seemed calmest when moving, plodding faithfully to their goal, whatever that was, far to the northeast. When they had to stop, inner tensions emerged, bubbling up from the core of them to manifest in the Homunculus's black skin. Kail was used to silence, but the silence during such times was often riddled with tension. He imagined the twins arguing with each other inside their strange skull, perpetuating disagreements that might have raged for a millennium. What that would be like he could barely conceive.

  He remembered the days when Lodo, his uncle and Shilly's former teacher, had caused an upset in his family: selected to join the Novitiate, Lodo had run away to the Interior midway through his studies, there to become a Stone Mage. For a family proud of their high standing in the Strand and delighted that one of their number might become a Sky Warden, the betrayal was unbearable.

  Although open conflict no longer marred relations between the Haunted City and the Nine Stars, enmity remained in some circles. By leaving, Lodo had turned his back not only on the country of his birth but his family also. They had instantly closed ranks against him. Upon his return from the Interior, having learned that being a Stone Mage wasn't right for him either, and hoping to seek inspiration somewhere else, he must have thought the family front completely united.

  But Kail had known the truth. On the inside, arguments had raged for days, forming cracks in previously close relationships, some of which turned sour overnight; others festered over the years until every word became poison. While Lodo had calmly gone into the west in search of his dream, his family had descended into rage and bitterness.

  He tried to imagine his mother and her brother, Lodo, coping with confinement such as the twins endured. Or himself and his younger brother, an ironworker in Samimi. They hadn't spoken for two years, which suited both of them fine. Their mother had never acknowledged Lodo after his departure for the Interior. Not even on her deathbed.

  Kail smelled the tension between the twins sometimes, like the vapour from an overcharged chimerical reservoir. When they were quietest, the smell was strongest. Sometimes he feared what might happen if their filial enmity reached a crisis point that could not be resolved.

  The distant, spiderlike shape of the Homunculus crawled safely over the edge of the Divide. Kail chewed his lip, waiting for a sign that they had been attacked. He nodded with relief when the black shape reappeared, waving two pairs of arms. Moments later, a bundle of empty waterbags sailed down inside a sack. Kail did as he said he would and filled them from the clear water at the base of the falls. Then he slung them over his shoulder and began the slow, careful climb to the top.

  Why are we doing this? Seth asked. Remind me again. And keep reminding me. Maybe one day it'll start to make sense.

  You know why. Hadrian sounded as exhausted as his brother felt. The closer they came to Yod, to the shadow looming over the land, the harder each step became. We have to finish things once and for all.

  But how exactly are we going to do that? What's your grand plan to kill a creature big and mean enough to eat everyone alive? Are you keeping something from me, or are you as much in the dark as I am?

  We'll think of something.

  I fucking hope so, or we're going to end up as dead as everyone else.

  Do you have to be so negative? It's not just up to us, you know. There's Kail, now, and we know Pukje's out there somewhere.

  You think this Pukje of yours is out there. You don't know anything of the sort. And what use will he be, anyway, wherever he is? That mutant dwarf could be on the other side, for all we know. He might not want us to succeed.

  No, said Hadrian, stubborn as ever in the face of the evidence. I saw him, flying. He's not just a dwarf. And he wants Yod to lose as much as we do. I couldn't be wrong about that.

  Yod losing doesn't necessarily mean we win. You should remember that, little brother. Kail has his own agenda too. Do you think he's helping us out of the goodness of his heart? Fat chance. He's doing it to save his own arse, and the arses of his friends.

  Hadrian said nothing as they saddled up the camel. No doubt fuming over the “little brother” remark, Seth thought, wondering why they couldn't help needling each other. It didn't matter what they argued about; they always ended up in the same place.

  Not everyone's like you, Seth.

  If you want to win, you have to be.

  Who wants to live that way? You're always fighting, always on guard even when you win, because there's another battle looming ahead. Where's the joy in that?

  Life isn't about joy.

  It's about more than fighting.

&nb
sp; I don't know. We seem to do plenty of it.

  An uneasy truce fell when Kail returned, heavily laden with the waterbags. They helped him load up the camel and prepare to resume their journey. The tracker seemed ill-at-ease, but that struck them as reasonable, given what they had found by the waterfall below. His friends had vanished, leaving a bloody corpse behind. That would worry anyone.

  They resumed their lonely journey, following the Divide up into the mountains. Every day they had travelled, the cloud level came closer; the vegetation rose up to meet it, progressing from low desert shrubs to scrub, to patchy forest, and finally, judging by what the Homunculus's sharp eyes made out ahead, full-blown forest. Despite the clouds, it never seemed to rain, which struck Seth as odd, but the air was becoming cooler—and more humid without direct sun baking it dry. That was something to be grateful for.

  Kail didn't talk about the boneship, and the twins didn't prompt him on the matter. They had learned that the tracker's silences could be long and productive. If he had something to say, he would say it. They were feeling talked out, anyway. Every conversation seemed to end in a tangle of unspoken assumptions. Clearly, the world didn't work they way it had when they'd last been in it. They were over that startling realisation, but they hadn't yet got their common head around what it had become. Flat but not-flat. Round but not-round. It seemed to have the properties of both, like an electron that was both a wave and a particle.

  There were too many mysteries. It had been bad enough previously, in the First and Second Realms, with secret histories and unknown characters retaking centre stage during the Cataclysm. Part of Seth had hoped that things would have settled down after the global conflagration, but he now knew that thought to be naive. Nature always bounced back, filling empty niches with new creatures, some stranger and more dangerous than the ones before.