The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  The long-faced animal blinked uncannily at them as the water boiled and they made preparations for breaking camp. When Kail's wound was clean and the bandages sterilised, they picked him up in their arms. He was heavy but not unbearable for their Homunculus body.

  There they froze, just for a moment.

  What do you think is going on? Hadrian asked, unable to put the encounter with the runner out of his mind. In the forest, I mean. Ymani knew about the Swarm, that much was obvious. Yet still she was out in the forest at night, on her own. Why? What could possibly have been so important?

  It's not our problem, brother.

  I fear it might be.

  Well, if it is, we'll deal with it when we have to. I don't think anyone can ask more than that from us. Do you?

  Hadrian supposed not.

  Kail stirred in his sleep.

  “Easy, big guy,” Seth said to him. “You get to sit this one out.”

  Leading the camel on a short length of rope, they headed off along the path uphill, and the mist grew tight around them.

  “The Goddess ascended in a vessel of pure gold.

  Together, she and the Sun-King vanished behind

  a cloud and were never seen again.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 146

  “Attacked?”

  The single word hung in the predawn air like a curse. Sal heard the disbelieving tone in his own voice and saw it echoed on the faces—human and Panic—of those sharing the balloon with him. They waited with tense anticipation for Griel to reread the message that had arrived with a flutter of feathers out of the night, strapped to the leg of a wild-plumaged bird.

  When he was finished, he folded the paper and put it carefully back into the tube.

  “Two hours after midnight,” he said, with no discernible emotion, “the wraiths struck the city. Four of them in total, from two directions, under the cover of dense fog. They hit before the alarm could be raised.”

  Sal imagined them shrieking and slaying through the walkways and ladders of the airborne city. It wasn't a pretty picture. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “They cut three stays of a dormitory vessel. We take precautions against accidents, but this was too much. Forty-five people fell to their deaths before the wraiths were repelled.”

  By the light of Highson's pocket mirrorlight, Jao's face visibly aged. “We have to go back,” she said. “This is more than just a hunt, picking people off one at a time. This is war.”

  “What about Tom and Mawson?” asked Shilly.

  “We've been looking all night and haven't found them. While we were looking, my home was attacked. People died. This is more important.”

  Shilly nodded, even though her friends were still missing. It wasn't about the dead; nothing could be done for them. Jao needed to go back to tend to the living, to help organise a counterattack, to search for reasons…

  “We have to go back,” Highson agreed. Rosevear nodded, curls bouncing, adding his support.

  Griel chewed the inside of his full lower lip. “There's something else,” he said. “In the wake of the attacks, Oriel has disbanded the Heptarchy and placed the city under his rule.”

  “Of course,” sneered Jao. “Expect him to use this as an excuse to further his own ambition. He probably says it's only temporary, but a fool knows better.”

  “It gets worse still. There's evidence that humans were involved in the attack.”

  An awkward silence greeted the news. Sal glanced at Mikia, who raised her chin defiantly.

  “I don't know anything about this,” she said, “but I can tell you one thing. We'd never work with the Swarm. They kill us too.”

  “I believe you,” said Griel. “Oriel won't, though. Most won't, while fevers are up. That means we can't come into the city the usual way.”

  “Is there another?” Mikia asked.

  Griel nodded.

  “Through the observatory,” Shilly said.

  “Yes.”

  Sal remembered the open skies and cloudy expanses visible from the empyricist's aerie. If they could get there, it would be a relatively simple matter to climb down the Way connecting it to the city and get past the guards at the bottom.

  “How long will it take?” he asked.

  “The rest of the night.”

  “Are you going to last that long?” They were all exhausted. The encounter with the Angel had been draining enough, but combined with the fruitless search for Tom and Mawson, and the ever-present fear that the Swarm might strike at any moment, all of their reserves had run low. Griel seemed particularly haggard. His hair and goatee hung limp; his broad lips drooped.

  “I'll last as long as I'm needed,” said the Panic soldier with grim certainty. “And I will offer you this much. My duty takes me to the city, but yours may not. By coming with me, you place yourselves in danger. I do not believe that you are responsible for this attack, so I will leave behind those who don't wish to come with me. Where you go from here will be your problem, not mine.”

  Sal and Shilly exchanged a glance. She looked torn, but he wasn't. Being stranded in a forest, kilometres from anywhere, solved nothing. He would rather be hard on the heels of the Swarm, even if doing so put him at risk from reprisals.

  “I think we should go,” said Highson.

  Sal nodded. “Me too.”

  “All right,” said Shilly. “And me.”

  Mikia pulled a face. “I'm going to take my chances on the ground. No offence.”

  “None taken,” said Griel. “In your position, I would do the same.”

  The balloon descended until it brushed the treetops. A soft rustling came from the sea of leaves as the branches below swayed in a cool predawn breeze.

  Mikia climbed over the side, then paused.

  “Thanks,” she said to Griel. “When I reach Milang, I'll make sure your side of the story is heard.”

  “I would be grateful for that.”

  She briefly placed a clenched fist across her heart and then dropped out of sight. When the ladder stopped moving, Jao drew it up, arm over long arm, and placed it in a bundle on the gondola floor.

  Whirring, the balloon rose through the clouds. Sal silently wished Tom farewell, for now. Whether they would meet again, only the seer himself could possibly know.

  Shilly drowsed as the balloon ascended through the clouds. Dimly she overheard a conversation between Highson and Griel about how high the balloon could go. There was a limit, apparently, which it would strain to achieve with so many people aboard. As the air thinned, its buoyancy dropped. At extreme altitudes, breathing itself became difficult. Eventually, the charms helping the balloon stay aloft would fail, and a return to the Earth would become unavoidable.

  Shilly couldn't see why anyone would want to fly that high. It sounded boring and dangerous. She had had enough flying for one lifetime, and would trade the solid ground beneath her feet for even the highest view ever obtained.

  “She's asleep,” she heard Sal say to someone, and she wanted to correct him. Not asleep; just resting. Then the world faded away entirely, and she was asleep. And the dream came almost instantly.

  Tom and Mawson featured in the beginning. Sand had buried them and she tried with all her strength to uncover them, but with every armful she swept away another wave rolled down the dunes and filled in the hole. The miniature avalanches came with greater frequency and severity until she began to fear for herself as much as her friends. She staggered backwards, feeling feathery tendrils of sand creeping over her ankles.

  “Take my hand.” The woman's voice came out of the sun. Her face was hidden in shadow. Shilly took the offered hand and immediately found herself at the top of a large dune, overlooking a petrified forest. Blunt stone stumps lay on the ground beneath the heel of a wide blue sky. The woman holding her hand was chocolate brown, with long, straight hair that made a streamer in the wind. Lithe and straight-backed, she had a proud nose and blue-flecked eyes.

  “Who are you?”

  �
�Do you really not know me?”

  There was something familiar about her, but Shilly couldn't put her finger on it.

  “We have something in common, you and I.” A fleeting sadness crossed the woman's face. “We both came to the attention of ghosts in the Haunted City.”

  Realisation struck her then. “You're Sal's mother?”

  “I was.” Years of age and time took their toll in moments. Hair greyed and hands bent into claws. Mere moments passed as she turned from a beautiful young woman, not much older than Shilly, to a beldam old enough to be her great-grandmother. “I am no longer.”

  The woman's face changed again. Beneath wrinkles and age spots, she became someone else entirely, a woman with round cheeks, piercing green eyes and a slight squint. Wiry grey hair hung in a thick ponytail down her back.

  “Come with me, girl. You have work to do.”

  The hand holding hers clutched painfully tight. Shilly resisted. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I want what you want. You just don't know it yet.”

  “What does that mean?” Shilly found it surprisingly hard to resist the woman dragging her across the dunes. Her feet made furrows in the sand. Her wrist bones grated against each other. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Look up,” said the beldam. “See what I see. Know what I know. Stand still if you can.”

  Shilly looked up. A wave of giddiness swept through her. The sky was blue no longer. Night had taken its place, deep and profound. Stars turned in that blackness, wheeling and spinning around a central point. The longer she watched, the faster they moved, faster and faster until the horizon contracted around her and she was swept up into the hurricane of light.

  “Now look down,” came the voice of the old woman, clear and gravelly through the scintillating brilliance of the stars. “Do what you need to do. Don't delay any longer. There's almost no time left.”

  Shilly stared down between her feet at a depression forming in the sand. The sand blew back to expose bedrock carved with a pattern too complex for her to bear.

  She cried out in protest, “I can't do this! Why won't you leave me alone?”

  “Just look,” said the voice. “Stop complaining and really look. I won't leave you alone until you try.”

  Despairing, Shilly did look. The lines and whorls were as complex as ever, crisscrossing as though carved over and over down thousands of years. She could never remember it, never copy it down, not if she stared at it for the rest of her life.

  Then a new presence moved into the dream, one she hadn't felt before. Male and calm, it too prompted a strong sense of recognition.

  “Lodo?”

  “No, but look here.” Shilly's gaze moved across the face of the pattern as though following a pointed finger. “Doesn't that remind you of something?”

  Shilly opened her mouth in denial, then froze. It did look familiar. She had seen something very much like it the previous night, in the stars above Vehofnehu's observatory.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. “Who are you?”

  “So many questions. Who do you think you're asking them of?”

  “Kail—you're Habryn Kail! What are you doing here?”

  “I'm not, Shilly.” The tracker's long, lean face leaned towards hers. The way he appeared reminded her of someone coming out of the sea or emerging from a very deep bath. “I'm not here at all. There's only you. Only you…”

  He faded back into the dancing lights surrounding her. Though she clutched at him, she couldn't pull him back. “Kail, wait! Don't leave me here!”

  With a hissing roar, the sand rushed back in, swallowing the pattern and her and the stars, all at once.

  Shilly woke in darkness, the echo of her cry ringing in her ears. Or so it seemed to her. The dream had been so vivid, so convincing—and yet, on waking, so nonsensical and frustrating it made her want to scream.

  She sat up and adjusted the shawl Sal had draped over her shoulders. The air was bitterly cold and damp, as it always seemed to be higher in the mountains, sapping the warmth from her bones. Everyone was asleep apart from her and Griel. The Panic soldier hunched over the controls like a man tending a fire, occasionally adjusting a lever or turning a handle by minuscule amounts.

  Shilly tried to go back to sleep, but her tiredness had evaporated. The dream disturbed her, confounded her. She tried not to think about it, but it kept returning to her thoughts. What did it mean that Sal's mother and Lodo's nephew had appeared to her? Were they ghosts haunting her, taking shapes she knew in order to taunt her? Or was she losing her mind?

  And that brief moment of recognition, when she had glimpsed something comprehensible in the terrible pattern, where there had never been anything comprehensible before—what did that mean? Was it a genuine insight, or was her sleeping mind manufacturing insight where none truly existed? Once, she had dreamed that a talking, three-eyed crab had told her the meaning of life. On waking, she had been convinced that seaweed possessed a special significance. The feeling had persisted all morning, unshakeable despite its absurdity. Could this new feeling be nothing more than that?

  She despaired of ever knowing. Insight or illusion, it was gone now, vanished into half-memory and confusion, where imaginary solutions to imaginary problems arguably belonged. She scolded herself for mourning its passing. Like it would make any difference at all…

  The fog seemed to be getting lighter. She sat up and looked around, wondering what was happening.

  “Despite everything that brought me here, to this moment,” said Griel softly, barely audible over the sound of the engine, “I'm glad of it. Watch.”

  The command woke new echoes of the dream—-Just look—as with a soundless rush the balloon cleared the top of the clouds and launched into a sky freshly painted with the colours of dawn.

  Shilly sat up straight, all sleepiness forgotten. The sight overwhelmed her, so wonderful and removed was it from her usual experience. Clouds stretched into the distance in ripples and dunes of pure white, like and yet utterly unlike a desert. The illusion of solidity was disarmingly convincing, leading her to wonder, just for a moment, if she was still dreaming. Or if this was the greater reality and her life up to that moment had been nothing but a dream.

  “It's so beautiful,” she whispered.

  “Yes. I'd live up here, given the chance. Some say the King did just that, before the Cataclysm.”

  “Why would he ever come down?” she asked, speaking rhetorically rather than literally. She could think of plenty of reasons: fresh fruit and vegetables, coffee, the sound of the sea…

  “It's said by some that the King was driven out of the sky by his own people; that they took control of the vessel he commanded and took it down, into the clouds. Another version of the story has it that the sky changed so much after the Cataclysm that it could no longer sustain my people. Rather than see them fade and die, the King ordered his vessel down as far as it would go, and relinquished command, for voluntary immobility was not something he enjoyed. His people founded the city and selected new leaders. A generation grew to adulthood that had never known the open skies. The memory of the King faded, became legend.”

  Griel spoke with longing and wonder—so much so that Shilly could barely credit it. His attention had shifted from the controls before him to the ancient memories he spoke of, and with it his posture had changed. He sat erect and twisted halfway in his seat to look at her. Light gleamed off the beads in his goatee.

  “Where did you hear these stories?” she asked.

  “Vehofnehu told me when I was a child. I used to climb to his observatory instead of going to school. He tried to get rid of me, but I wouldn't go away. I insisted on staying and watching what he did. When my parents found out, they were angry with him, tried to bring him before the Heptarchs for punishment. I had been earmarked for early service to the city, you see. My career lay before me, even then, and every day of missed study worsened my chances of advancement.” He patted the stitched chest of h
is leather armour. “The Heptarchy was kinder then, more tolerant of Vehofnehu and his ways. I received special dispensation in exchange for a commitment to make up the study in my own time. That seemed reasonable to me. I worked hard and received a better education for it. Nothing I learned in school came close to that which Vehofnehu taught me. He said—” Griel paused for a second, as though reconsidering what he had been about to say, then continued. “Vehofnehu told me that I should become his apprentice. The offer honoured me, but I knew my family wouldn't approve. I chose the path they had laid out for me instead. Vehofnehu tried to change my mind. He said that age had taught him the wisdom of keeping a low profile, that more gets done in the shadows than in the light. We argued many, many times—and still do, when the mood takes us. Sometimes I like to stray from the traditional routes, as he taught me to do, but overall I feel I made the right decision. Vehofnehu, you see, can be wise and knowledgeable without always being right.”

  Shilly nodded, reminded of Lodo. Although she had trouble picturing Griel as a child, his story was enough to make him feel more human to her. Or if not human, then at least comprehensible.

  “There it is.” Griel looked over the side, indicating a valley of clouds that pointed away from the strengthening sun. A long, skinny shadow ran up the centre of the valley: a shadow cast by the top of Vehofnehu's observatory tower. The Panic adjusted the balloon's course and headed straight for it.

  Amidst her relief they would soon be at their journey's end, Shilly was glad she had some time remaining to take in the view. The clouds approached infinity in all directions, but shied away from the brink; to the south and west, they petered out into empty air. Beyond that point lay the barren plains of the Eastern Interior. To the north and east, vast grey shapes loomed: mountains, jagged and forbidding, topped with ice. Compared to them, the mountains shrouded by the eternal cloud cover were just foothills.

  Griel brought the balloon around the observatory in an unhurried circuit. He seemed to be waiting for something—a signal from Vehofnehu, perhaps, that it was safe to land, but it either didn't come or was too subtle for her to see. When he had gone around once, he came in closer, clearly intending to settle on the roof.