The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  “In what way, Mother?” asked Lidia Delfine, standing to one side with her arms folded.

  “They hunt purely for the sport of blood and they have no sense of honour. We should not expect to treat with them. We should show them the same mercy they would show us.”

  “Who said anything about mercy?” asked Chu softly.

  “Not me.” Skender stared in horrid fascination at the face of the creature that would have torn him to ribbons, given the chance.

  With a click, its eyes opened.

  “Back!” The Guardian leapt to her feet. Heuve and Lidia Delfine lunged forward. The creature twitched and hissed, gouging furrows in the dirt as it attempted to right itself. Its teeth snapped at Heuve's sword, unafraid of the metal. Clouds of choking black soot rose from its skin.

  Skender froze, again. Kelloman was still out cold, drained by the first attack. The mage was recuperating in one of the Guardian's antechambers, watched over by a healer and the bilby. Skender knew he didn't have the strength to summon such a powerful flame.

  “Out of the way.” Marmion's whipcrack command caught the ear of all those retreating from the creature. With his one hand he scratched a charm into the grassy surface of the chamber's floor, a complicated pattern of circles and crosses that Skender didn't recognise. “Lure it over here, quickly.”

  “I don't think it wants to be lured,” said Heuve, jumping back from a sudden snap.

  Marmion didn't look up until he had finished the charm with a flourish. Then he turned to face the creature, unwinding the bandage around his truncated wrist.

  “Here,” he said, thrusting the stump forward. “This is what you like, isn't it?” As though throwing punches with an invisible hand, he caught the attention of the blackened husk. “Smell me. Taste me. Come and get me!” He sidestepped neatly as the creature lunged forward. “That's it.”

  Marmion dodged again, and again, proffering his injured arm as bait until the creature lurched onto the charm he had drawn. Then he shouted a word that Skender had never heard before, and stepped hurriedly away.

  A miniature hurricane sprang into life, defined by and confined to the dimensions of the charm. The column of violent air swept the creature's bitter smoke into a cylinder, and dragged it up as well, so it hung vertically in the air, struggling and snarling. No matter how it squirmed, it couldn't break free. The charmed air coiled up and down around it like a nest of translucent snakes, binding it firmly in place.

  “Nice one,” said Chu, helping Skender to his feet. He had tripped over his robes and gone sprawling, unable to take his eyes off the unnatural creature's malevolence. The Sky Warden didn't respond. His eyes were fixed firmly on the creature he had captured. He clutched his injured arm tightly to his chest.

  “Fire to burn it,” said Lidia Delfine, sheathing her blade and walking shakily to her mother's side. “Air to bind it. But how do we kill it?”

  “Dismember it,” suggested Warden Banner from the small crowd gathered around. “Chop it into pieces.”

  “And then what?” asked Heuve.

  “I don't know. Throw it into a river, let the current disperse it?”

  “Sow it into the Earth,” suggested the Guardian. “Let the roots dissolve it.”

  “I wouldn't trust the tree that fed on such a thing,” said Marmion softly. “Would you?”

  The Guardian looked at him, and shook her head.

  “Cast it,” suggested Skender, hating the faint tremor he heard in his voice but ploughing on. “Cast it into metal. Burn it, dice it, grind it, whatever; smash it down into a powder; then mix it with molten lead and let it cool. The metal will hold its mind fast—the part of it that will never burn—and if you engrave the metal with binding charms, the deal will be sealed. Then you can drop it down Versegi Chasm and forget about it forever.”

  Everyone was staring at him by the time he had finished, making him wonder if what had seemed a good idea a second ago was actually the most stupid ever uttered in public.

  “Uh, or you could just chop it into pieces like Warden Banner said and leave it at that.”

  “No,” said Marmion, breaking his silent confrontation with the thing in the whirlwind. “That's a good idea. Nearly perfect. The only suggestion I'd make is to cast it in iron, not lead.”

  “Yes, of course.” Skender nodded, feeling himself beginning to babble with relief. “Iron is stronger, and even if it took hundreds of years for that thing to get out of lead—”

  “It won't. It attacked us, and it will pay the price. It and all its kind. That's a mistake they will not make again.”

  Skender's mouth snapped shut at the fierceness of Marmion's tone. He had never heard the warden speak like that before. The dark anger in every line of the warden's face was echoed in the foresters around him, and he knew that this promise was being taken very seriously indeed.

  Later, when the Guardian's citadel was cleared so Marmion and Lidia Delfine could begin the chopping-up process—which Skender preferred not to think about, although he felt no pity for the captured creature—he and Chu were given the opportunity to eat and freshen up in temporary quarters set aside for the visitors. Skender had become conscious of a smell emanating from himself that had something to do with the mud of the previous day and a lot to do with fear. The foresters showed him to a bath filled with warm water and left him alone. He soaked and soaped until his skin tingled, and then he just lay back and relaxed. For once, no one was pressing him for information or trying to eat him. All he could hear was the dripping of water, a low murmur of voices in the distance, and from still further away an enigmatic moaning that he eventually identified as the stone faces the locals called moai. He pictured them leaning out of the cliff, staring fixedly into the mist and singing their strange, fearful song. Their combined chorus was peaceful, but in an unsettling way, as though at any moment it could rise up and explode into an angry crescendo.

  Flashes of the day's events—teeth and fire and blood—came and went. There was nothing he could do about them. Neither time nor effort could erase them from his perfect memory, but at least he had a patina of good memories between them and the present moment. If he breathed deeply, he smelled sweet perfume instead of a reminder of his recent travails.

  When he clambered out of the bath, he found that his robes had been taken away. In their place lay an entirely new outfit: ochre pants and a baggy black shirt. He groaned on seeing them, but had little option but to put them on. He struggled into the pants and slipped the shirt over his head. A green thong went around his waist when he was done.

  “Fresh as a daisy,” Chu commented as he walked into the common area given to the visitors. She was sprawled comfortably on a broad cushion, dressed in a yellow-and-white robe and picking at a platter of fruit and nuts. The space was elegant in its simplicity, with sliding doors separating the many bathrooms from the common area. The floor was neither stone nor wood, being covered with delicately woven mats that gave slightly underfoot. Each cushion possessed a different colour and arboreal pattern, yet they complemented each other perfectly. Warden Banner lay sound asleep in the far corner on three cushions laid end to end. From another room came the sound of Warden Eitzen humming as he continued to bathe.

  “Do you have daisies in Laure?” Skender chose a cushion facing Chu and leaned on one elbow, leaving the other hand free to sample the food. He wasn't particularly hungry, but he knew he should eat. The sight of Chu in what amounted to a dress definitely made up for not having a robe of his own. “I thought it was all dead rats and dust.”

  “We hear stories,” she said. “I saw a picture of one, once.”

  Skender couldn't tell if she was being serious or not. He wasn't, not entirely, but his impressions of Laure had for the most part been grim and unhappy. A city where the rulers drained the blood of the populace to draw water up from the depths of the Earth was by nature a desperate one. But that didn't mean that joy couldn't exist there. People could get used to anything—even a sudden excess of wa
ter.

  They exchanged easy, free-flowing banter for a while. He had thought Chu knew nothing about his home, but it quickly became clear that she had been making inquiries. The Keep wasn't well known beyond the borders of the Interior—not being as famous as the Nine Stars where mages met every full moon to apply the laws of the land, or as essential to trade as such cities as Ulum and Mayr—but it had a certain notoriety. Some of the Interior's finest mages had studied there, and the name Van Haasteren was closely associated with it. Nine consecutive generations had overseen the school, earning the privilege by virtue of their remarkable memory and—Skender admitted in the face of Chu's suggestion—a profound disinterest in doing anything else.

  “Maybe you're the one to break the chain,” she said, smiling as she popped a dried fig into her mouth. “Isn't it about time you lot let someone else have a go?”

  Skender dreaded what his father would say if he even suggested such a thing—then berated himself for letting his father's feelings rule what should be his own decision. Perhaps that decision would be easy to make: his mind was full of images of murdered old women, malicious golems, rampaging man'kin, and now bloodthirsty wraiths…He didn't know how much more it could hold before he would never sleep again.

  To change the subject, he asked her what she had done that afternoon, while he had been with Stone Mage Kelloman. Nothing much, she told him, beyond more talking and arguing. Marmion and the Guardian had done most of it while she had stood around, waiting. Two guards had come to take her wing away, and that had caused a lively argument. In the end she had relented, having no real choice but to accept the word of the locals that her means of flight would not be damaged. They only wanted to move it to keep the Guardian's open-air hall tidy. The Outcast's baggage messed up the place.

  By that time, they had been seated in a close triangle on delicately carved wooden seats brought in by underlings, with Lidia Delfine and Heuve standing apart but watching closely. As the cloud-obscured sun moved slowly across the framed sky, the discussion finally came to focus on what to do with the visitors, rather than what the visitors were doing in the forest.

  “That's when the Guardian sent for you,” she said. “I think she already knew what we'd decided, but needed to go through the motions for the people around her. They're sad and angry people. They've lost loved ones and friends. They need an outlet. Hunting the wraiths will give them that.”

  Skender still couldn't quite accept the decision, although he could understand it. Putting all their problems in one basket made sense, especially when a small chance existed that the problems might actually cancel each other out.

  The hunting party would be led by Lidia Delfine and include the visitors to the forest, Mage Kelloman being one of those. Skender didn't know what he himself could offer, except to be someone to trip over and to have panic on demand.

  “Don't be so hard on yourself,” Chu told him. “You have your moments.”

  “Like when?”

  “Well, when we crash-landed and everyone was giving us—me—a hard time, for instance. I could only stare at them, but you took them on. I was quite impressed. It makes a change to step back and let someone else fight for you, every now and again. I could get used to it.”

  “Well, that's my usual modus operandi. Did you see me earlier, with the wraith?”

  “And I was right there beside you, rooting Marmion on.” She tilted her head to one side. “I'm not going to agree with you when you say you're hopeless or a coward. You wouldn't be here if you were either.”

  Wouldn't I? he asked himself, unable to face the intensity of her brown eyes. What if I didn't have a choice about it? What if I'm just too stupid to know when something is more trouble than it's worth?

  “I'm lucky to be here at all,” he said, “after the snake-thing and the wraith almost got me.”

  “Exactly. That's twice this week I've thought I was going to have to take you home to your parents in a box.”

  “Three times, if you count the crash in the mud.”

  She threw an almond at him. He responded in kind, and that resulted in the sort of play fight he had occasionally had at the Keep with members of the opposite sex. Close physical contact with girls was something he never quite got the hang of. He either flushed and went quiet or overcompensated, becoming boisterous and belligerent. He could hear it in his voice and see himself as though standing outside his body, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had once been too scared to approach a girl he had had a serious crush on. The thought of being close to her had made him preempt the possibility by fleeing before anything happened.

  Not so with Chu. They were all over each other before he had time to become nervous of the possibility, scrabbling for grip and flinging their centres of gravity backwards and forwards, looking for leverage. Mindful of Banner, who slept through it all, they kept their battle as quiet as they could, but cries of outrage and victory still filled the room. Of about the same height and weight, both with short hair and trimmed fingernails, neither of them possessed a clear physical advantage over the other. But Chu was nastier than any schoolgirl Skender had fought, and Skender, unaccustomed to trousers, found his usual tricks didn't work quite as well. Barely had he had time to work up a serious sweat when he found himself pinned beneath her, her hips pressing down on his waist and her hands forcing his wrists onto the floor.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Shouldn't I be saying that?”

  “Says who?” She grinned wolfishly. “Tell me you're sorry for forgetting that night in Laure.”

  “Tell me what happened and I'll tell you if I'm sorry or not.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Do you think we had sex?”

  He bucked and twisted but couldn't get her off him. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because it's fun.”

  “You might think so.”

  “Oh, I do.” She laughed at another attempt to free himself. “I could keep this up for hours.”

  “Please,” he begged, giving in to his helplessness. “You got me. I give in. Let's go back to talking about why I'm a loser. That seems to be the theme for the evening.”

  “You're not a loser,” she said, her face turning serious but her grip not letting up one iota. “Don't say that, or I might start to believe it.”

  She leaned down to kiss him and he arched up to meet her halfway, struck by the fresh fragrance of her skin and the heat of her lips. All other thought and sensation vanished. The universe consisted of her and nothing else. Even time stopped, and he didn't quite notice when it started up again.

  She leaned back and studied him with half-lidded eyes. “I know your heart-name, Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth.”

  “How?” Of all the things he had expected her to say at that moment, that wasn't one of them. “Who told you?”

  “Can't you guess?”

  “Sal or Shilly? Highson Sparre?”

  “Not even close.”

  “They shouldn't give out things like that, whoever it is. My heart-name is private.” An uneasy indignation rose up in him. Enough people already knew his heart-name: the golem that Sal and Shilly had fought in the Haunted City; the Homunculus; everyone who had been locked up with him in the Aad, including Mawson, Shom Behenna, and Kemp. Too many by half. “It's supposed to be a gift!”

  “Oh, I agree.”

  “I bet you don't really know,” he said. “You're just making it up to taunt me.”

  “Why would I do that?” Her fingers tightened around his wrists. “Is it really that big a deal to you?”

  “Of course it is! What if I knew yours and you didn't want me to. How would that make you feel?”

  “Much like you seem to feel at the moment, I guess.” All sense of play had vanished from the conversation. “I'd only tell mine to someone I really liked. Someone who liked me back. And even then, I'm not very trusting. You know that. I've been betrayed by me
n before. He'd have to give me his first, before I'd consider reciprocating. It'd have to mean something. Or I'd have to think so, anyway.”

  “You mean I—” His mind tripped over the revelation. “But surely I'd remember!”

  Her weight came off him. “Surely, yes. I would've thought you'd remember thinking about doing it, too. Or were you so drunk at the time you weren't thinking at all? Was it just a spur-of-the-moment joke to you, something you didn't mean?”

  “No, I—that is, I don't know.” He stared up at her in despair. “Are you sure you're not having me on?”

  She towered over him, impossibly distant.

  “If you really want me to believe you're a loser, Galeus,” she said, “you're doing a bloody good job of it.”

  She was gone before he could sit up. He didn't call after her, knowing it would be useless. Knowing, at last, that it would be the wrong name.

  The cushioned chamber turned out to be a communal sleeping area. Banner slept on, undisturbed either by Skender and Chu, or by the others coming in, one by one, to rest. Marmion looked exhausted, and immediately collapsed in the nearest available spot, his wounded arm stretched before him as though appealing to someone in his dreams. His stump had been bandaged with fresh linen, but that was the only concession he had made to cleanliness.

  Not long after Chu ran off, Skender had found a selection of robes in one of the other rooms and swapped them for his ridiculous pants. He didn't care if they were meant for women or men, as long as he was comfortable. There was nothing in traditional Stone Mage colours, so he made do with black.

  Chu hadn't returned by the time the delicately carved brands dimmed. He considered going to look for her, but figured she would have come back had she wanted to see him. He had no doubt that she would be safe, wherever she was. Heuve wasn't going to let her roam unchecked through the city, no matter how badly she might want to. He tried to put her out of his mind as best he could.

  You're not a loser. Don't say that, or I might start to believe it.