The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  “What's happened?” asked Marmion. “Why have you been recalled?”

  “I don't know,” Delfine said. “It could only be something important. Mother—the Guardian—wouldn't disturb us for anything trivial.”

  “Could the Panic have attacked?” asked a forester.

  “Perhaps the war started while we were away,” said another.

  “What war?” said Skender, wondering how rumours like this got started. “The Panic Heptarchy isn't our enemy. The Swarm is.”

  Some of the foresters looked less than convinced, and Lidia Delfine had more on her mind than countering anti-Panic rumblings. She had the camp to pack up and get back to Milang, and she had their failure to report to her mother.

  The foresters hastily gathered their gear in orderly piles. Skender helped Kelloman prepare his litter and made sure all his accoutrements were safely stowed. As he was strapping down the cases, he saw the man who had left with Chu to look for the search party run onto the knoll and talk in hushed, urgent tones to Heuve.

  The bodyguard nodded, then whispered in turn to Lidia Delfine, his face pale. When the three of them hurried into the forest, Skender wasn't far behind and was able therefore to overhear part of their conversation.

  “…not far from the camp. We would have come for you straightaway, but we had to see to them first. See if anything could be done.”

  “And?” prompted Heuve.

  “They had been there at least an hour, sir. We think they were taken elsewhere and brought here…afterwards.”

  “Why?” asked Delfine, her tone aghast.

  “To taunt us, Eminence. I can think of no other reason.”

  They came to a shadowy clearing and stopped so suddenly in their tracks that Skender almost ran into them. The first thing he saw was Chu standing in the middle of the clearing, her face streaked with tear tracks. Not thinking, just seeing her upset and responding with his heart rather than his head, he pushed past Heuve and Delfine and went to her.

  She grabbed the front of his robe and buried her face in his neck. His arms automatically went around her. He felt her shaking against him and held her as tightly as he dared.

  Only then did he look around and realise what she had found.

  Blood—on the ground at his feet, on the undergrowth where the bodies had been laid out, and on the four trees around the clearing where they had been discovered. The bodies themselves were barely recognisable as human. Their throats had been torn out and bellies opened. Eyes and tongues were gone, leaving sockets and mouths horribly empty. Naked, scored back to flesh, they looked butchered, not merely killed.

  “Who did this?” he heard Lidia Delfine say as though through kilometres of fog. “Who did this?”

  “We think—we assume it was the golem.” The man who had accompanied Chu into the forest sounded shaken. And no wonder, Skender thought.

  “Alone?”

  “Well, it wasn't the wraiths,” said Heuve. “We've seen what the Swarm can do. Look here.” Skender did the exact opposite. “Teeth marks. Tear wounds.”

  “The Swarm have teeth,” said Delfine.

  “Not like these. And the Swarm don't eat the flesh of what they kill. They just take the blood.” Heuve circled the clearing, inspecting the bodies one by one. “If I didn't know better, I'd guess a large dog or a wolf had done this.”

  “The golem.” Lidia Delfine's normally deep voice had risen a fifth. “It knew we'd send someone. It waited until they were far away from camp, so we wouldn't hear them screaming. Then it attacked them, maybe picked them off one by one. It killed them, then brought the bodies back here for us to find. While we thought they were tracking it, it was long gone and laughing at us.”

  “You didn't see anything?” Heuve asked Chu.

  “No, but—”

  “What about tracks? It must have left some trace, after doing this.”

  “There are tracks, Eminence.” The pinched, pale look on the face of the man who had found the site with Chu said more clearly than words what he thought of following them, after what had happened to the last group.

  “Eminence—”

  “If you're going to say that I shouldn't blame myself, Heuve—”

  “No, Eminence. I was simply going to point out that the golem might not be long gone at all. It might still be in the area, waiting to see what we do next.”

  A dreadful stillness filled the clearing as that thought settled in.

  “I can live with that,” said Delfine. “Our first priority is to get the bodies back to camp and prepare them for transport. I'm not leaving them here for scavengers, or worse. We're taking them home with us. Skender?”

  He stirred from shock at the mention of his name and looked directly at the woman. Not left, not right, and definitely not down. Keeping the red a blur at the corners of his eyes, he grated, “Mage Kelloman will be glad to volunteer his litter for this duty.” And if he wasn't, bad luck.

  Chu's shaking had eased. She stepped away and stood at arm's length.

  “We need to tell Marmion,” she said. “Warden Eitzen—” She stopped, swallowed, and pointed at one of the bodies. “I think that's him.”

  “Okay,” he said, trying not to think about who they had been. One of the bodies belonged to Navi, too. “Let's go do that.” He took her hand and held it in both of his. “Is that okay?” he asked Heuve. “Can we go back?”

  The bodyguard nodded and waved them up the trail. As Skender passed by, he thought he saw a glimpse of something new in Heuve's black stare. Guilt, perhaps?

  Skender had more important things to worry about. There was blood on his shoes and on his black robes where Chu had clutched him. Her hands were stained red-brown, and her clothes, too. The two of them looked fresh from a slaughterhouse.

  He felt Chu's need to talk: it radiated from her like heat. But her lips were sealed so tight it looked like she was trying not to vomit, and he didn't break the silence.

  The knoll was abuzz when they arrived. That threw him for a second. How could they possibly have known? No one had said anything.

  But the reason for the excitement wasn't the discovery in the forest. It was a messenger who had arrived during their absence and who immediately sought directions from Skender and Chu on how to reach Lidia Delfine. Skender gave them, and the messenger—a red-faced, breathless teenage girl—hurried off.

  “Who was that?” he asked Warden Banner.

  “Ymani, a runner from Milang. It was she who sounded the warning signals before.”

  “It can't have taken her that long to get here, surely.”

  “She was held up on the way, apparently, by someone needing help on the road.”

  “Did you hear her message?”

  “No, but Marmion did.”

  As a group they confronted the warden. His expression was grim.

  “Milang was attacked last night while we were away. At least twenty people are dead and many more have been wounded.”

  “Who?” asked Skender. “Who did this?”

  “The Swarm,” Marmion said bluntly.

  Skender felt awful for adding to the man's worries. “You need to follow the runner to the others. You need to see what happened.”

  Immediate concerns replaced those more distant. Marmion noticed the blood on their clothes for the first time. “Are you all right? Is anyone hurt?”

  “Don't waste time talking about it,” Chu said. “Just go.”

  Marmion did, with Banner close behind. Skender and Chu were suddenly alone again. The knoll had fallen restlessly silent, as preparations to move out ground to a halt. Too much was happening to concentrate on ordinary chores. People clumped in curious groups, speculating worriedly about what was going on.

  “I—I need to be alone for a bit,” said Chu to him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He looked down at the ground. She wasn't meeting his gaze. “Don't go anywhere. Don't go off on your own.”

  “I won't
. I'll stay right here. Just give me a minute or two, and I'll try to be all right.”

  The rawness in her voice matched the redness of her eyes. “You don't have to be okay,” he said. “Not for my sake.”

  “I know. It's not for you, or me. It's—” She stopped and turned away, shoulders shaking.

  He understood, then, and let her be. She was not just trying to be stalwart in the face of death. The uniform she was wearing; the work she was doing; leaving her wing behind in Milang…everything fell into place. The people of the forest were the closest thing to family that she had. She was trying to fit in. She was trying to be worthy.

  His mind full of death and foreboding, he went to give Mage Kelloman the bad news about his litter.

  For the next two days, Kail woke up certain he would have to set the camel free.

  After bathing and gingerly changing the dressing on his wound, replacing the sticky brown bandages with ones he had boiled the previous night and hung out to dry, he ate breakfast and contemplated which supplies he could most afford to lose. Without knowing how great a distance stretched ahead of them, it was impossible to calculate how much food they would need. Similarly with clothes—if their destination lay high in the mountains, he would need protective garb to avoid freezing—and medicine. The extra precautions he had taken had already proved invaluable. A wound such as the one he had received from the Swarm would have killed him had he not had the camel to supplement what he and the Homunculus could carry on their own backs.

  The exercise in logistics sustained him on their journey until midday—such as it was, with the sun stifled behind dense layers of fog and gloom-shrouded forest—when they paused to rest. Kail was acutely conscious of his slow pace, but he knew better than to push himself. The twins' impatience was evident but contained. They made no move to strike off on their own, and probably wouldn't do so while their fear of Upuaut and the Swarm remained strong. That they had not been attacked since the ill-fated trap Kail had set for their pursuer was of little reassurance. A wolf knows how to wait.

  The afternoon was spent walking again, waiting for the camel to slip or to baulk at a particularly steep slope. The overgrown path they followed led steadily uphill, following a series of long switchbacks up the side of the mountains. Under the constant cover of fog, it was hard to tell whether the slope they climbed was one side of a valley or an exposed face of the extensive range. Either way, the trunks around them grew taller and the undergrowth more variegated. If not for the path, they would have had trouble finding a safe route through the vegetation.

  The air was cold, but unexpectedly still and close at the same time. Kail's clothes were soon drenched from his sweat and the moisture in the air. He took great pains to keep his wound clean, although he worried that the damage had already been done.

  The camel plodded on, managing surprisingly well on its wide-padded feet. What it thought of their journey, Kail couldn't tell, but he was grateful for its perseverance. He walked when he could, and when he couldn't he rode, ducking branches and constantly brushing webs and insects from his hair. The richness of the animal and vegetable kingdoms of the forest delighted and confounded him. For every species he recognised, there were dozens he had never seen before. Hunting for medicinal herbs became difficult, not through scarcity, but because they were among such a large crowd.

  On the second day he felt a strange twitching in the small pouch of valuables he carried around his neck. Assuming that an animal had crawled into it—although how that could be possible he didn't know, given that he kept it carefully tied at all times—he tugged it from its well-worn thong and looked inside. Several small, familiar trinkets greeted him, including his mother's bond-ring, tarnished and worn; an ancient metal spring he had found in a previously unknown Ruin; two square coins from distant Ulum, carved with signs for prosperity; a brief note on a folded square of parchment from a woman he had once cared for, whose name he now couldn't remember. And safely stored with these things, the source of the twitching: an opalescent fragment as large as the first joint of his thumb, plucked from a stone deep under the ruined city of the Aad.

  He smiled to himself. Abi Van Haasteren was looking for the missing piece of the Caduceus, it seemed. Surveyors had ways and means of finding lost things, so it didn't surprise him that she had negotiated the waters of the flood and, on reaching the resting place of the powerful relic, realised that part of it was gone. The tiny stone gleamed and shivered in his palm as though eager to be reunited with the rest of itself—a unique artefact older than humanity, older than the Change, perhaps even older than the mountains he climbed.

  He put it back in the pouch and placed it once more around his neck. Then he dozed as the camel plodded onward along the path, taking one careful step at a time ever upward, mindful of the swaying passenger perched on its back…

  He dreamed of the vast, stony plains of his adolescence, where, free of the stuffiness of his family and the Haunted City, he had been able, finally, to find himself. The open spaces had simultaneously liberated and defined him. In the strange dancing of dust devils, in the shivering mysteries of the horizon, he saw a reflection of Habryn Kail that looked like a stranger; when he lost himself in the sky and the stars, he returned renewed, more sure of who he was than ever before.

  The swaying of the camel's back stirred memories of boundary riding—his first paid work—prowling the edges of the Strand for man'kin; and well-reading, when he sought signs and messages in the reflections of boreholes. But moisture in the forest air subverted the dreams, changed them into something very different from reality. Water bubbled up from the bores and flooded the land. His camel was swept from under him, and the flood carried him away.

  “Kail, you're dreaming.” Seth's voice woke him from restless slumber.

  “Goddess,” he muttered, feeling the flush on his skin. “I'm not well.”

  “We should've left you sleeping. I knew it.” That was Hadrian, disagreeing with his brother again. They might have been arguing about him for hours inside their shared head.

  “No, you did the right thing. I need to be awake to tell you what to do at the next stop. There's a herb I need, a particular plant called harpweed. It'll be difficult to find so you'll have to look hard for it, then grind the leaves into a paste so I can apply it to the skin around the cut. I have a fever, and it's worsening fast. I might not be able to help much.”

  He could feel the sickness rising in him, fogging his mind and sapping his strength. The wound was festering, despite his best efforts. He didn't think the problem was poison in the wound. Just the air, ripe and heavy with moisture, a breeding ground for disease.

  “Tell us what to do,” said the twins. “We'll look after you.” He wondered if that might be cause for argument between them, but didn't ask. He didn't want to know.

  “What will happen if you die?”

  The question took him by surprise. He hadn't seriously considered the possibility, although he knew it to be one. Far from medical help, in an environment he knew little about, with unknown enemies possibly closing in and his health fading by the hour…

  “What do you mean, what will happen? You'll leave me behind and keep going. There's nothing else you can do.”

  “No, I mean what happens to you?”

  “What happens?”

  “Where will you go?”

  He pondered the question, struggling to think clearly through waves of sleepiness. The proper answer was “into the air,” since he, like most Sky Wardens, expected to be cremated on death and scattered to the winds. If he died in the forest, though, he was unlikely to be burned—he could hardly expect the twins to backtrack many hundreds of kilometres to the Haunted City just to ensure the proper respect was accorded him—so he supposed he would go the way of Stone Mages, and be buried in the soil.

  When he tried to explain all that, he soon realised that it wasn't what the twins were asking at all.

  “No, your self, your soul—where does that go?”<
br />
  “My what?”

  “Your essence, the part of you that survives death. Who you are, behind everything.”

  “Who else could I be but who I am right now, right here?”

  This puzzled the twins, and prompted a swap of legends and stories. Most of his were about the Cataclysm and the early days of the Change, when the world was fluid and humanity struggled to survive. Theirs were about quests for secret lands, higher beings, or life after death—an obsession that struck Kail as deeply peculiar.

  “Why worry about things you can't see or touch when the world itself is already complicated?” he asked. “Aren't there enough questions waiting to be answered without inventing new ones?”

  “In the world we came from,” the twins began, speaking in one voice as they did less and less these days, “humans lived in three Realms. The cycle starts in the Realm of flesh, the First Realm, where the physical body is born and lives. When it dies, the people we have become wake in the Second Realm, the Realm of the mind, where will determines the way life is lived. The First and Second Realms are very different, but they are connected, for humans anyway, by our lives in them. One follows the other as naturally as day follows night.”

  Kail had heard this before, but understood it no more than the first time. “Where was this Second Realm? Underground? In the sky?”

  “Neither. It wasn't part of the physical world. That's the whole point. The Realms were separate; they didn't touch. To get there humans and other beings had to cross through Bardo and the Underworld, which kept everything apart.”

  “Until you brought the two Realms together,” he said, remembering that much.

  “Yes, but the important thing is the Third Realm, which connected birth and death by creating a circle. Reincarnation. We're born in the flesh; grown in the spirit; made whole by…destiny, I suppose you'd say. In the Third Realm, you can look at your life as though it was a tree, seeing every decision you made or might have made, and all the different consequences that flow from each. In the Third Realm, we get to see how things could have been, and choose a point from which to start over.”