The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  “Did you really give me your heart-name, back in Laure?” he said, hearing his own voice as though through ears blocked by altitude.

  Finally, she moved. A quick nudge to tip the wing slightly to port, but it was something.

  “Does it make any difference?” she asked.

  “Of course it does. I hate myself for not remembering it, and I can understand why you hate me too.”

  “I don't hate you.”

  “Do you wish you hadn't told me your name? Do you wish I hadn't told you mine? I can't take that back—but you can. We can pretend it never happened. We can try to be friends, if that's all you want to be. I can live with that.”

  “Can you?”

  “Well…” He wanted her to be honest with him, so he supposed he should be honest in return. “I'd be alive, but I might not be living.”

  Her right arm let go of the wing's control surfaces, just for a moment. Not for more than a second or two, but long enough to snake around him and press them together. For one warm, charged moment their differences were forgotten. Words were unimportant. And neither the past nor the future mattered at all.

  By the time he had reached up to take her hand in return, it had slipped away and resumed control of the wing.

  “There's something coming,” she said. “I can feel it through the licence.”

  “Where?” he asked, taking a deep breath of cold night air to clear his mind. “Is it the city?”

  “I don't know, but it's right ahead of us and getting closer.”

  She flew on, gripping the controls tightly. He could feel her tension growing as she concentrated on the wind, looking for any sign at all, any hint that she should pitch the wing left or right, up or down, to avoid a collision.

  Skender noticed three things almost simultaneously: a tremor in the air, as of a note so low he felt it more than heard it; a smattering of lights ahead, uncannily like the stars on a cloudy night; and a deadening of the background potential. The last bore no resemblance to that caused by the Homunculus or the Caduceus in the Aad. This felt more as though every last drop of the Change had been sucked out of the world, out of the fog.

  “I think you're bang on target,” he said, staring in a mixture of awe and curiosity at the clump of fake stars coalescing out of the darkness. His voice sounded strange in the vibrating air. “The question is: what now?”

  “Now we work out where the thing is headed.” She tugged the nose of the wing up. It moved sluggishly but obeyed. “Then we call the gang back home and let them know.”

  Skender resigned himself to a closer approach than he would have preferred. Inexorably, the lights ahead grew brighter, resolving into the angular shapes of the city. Skender made out dozens of odd-shaped “buildings” hanging from a dense mass of balloons. There were spheres, cubes, pyramids, and combinations of all three, all connected by walkways, ladders, and cables. Chimneys, doorways, windows—every aspect of ordinary architecture was present despite its unusual location, hundreds of metres above the Earth. The structure seemed both rigid and haphazard at the same time, as though it had been cobbled together more or less at random in its early days, but somehow became fixed during its evolution, locked into one particular configuration by necessity or tradition, or some other factor Skender couldn't imagine.

  Among the cool, misty globes suspended over walkways and shining through windows, Skender made out flickering yellow patches that looked like nothing so much as fire, and clouds of black smoke rising through the grey mist.

  He pointed them out to Chu, who had been concentrating on navigating their way up and over the city.

  “Signs of fighting?” she suggested.

  “I can't imagine what else it would be.” He peered through the intervening fog, trying to absorb as much detail as possible before the mass of balloons got in the way. Black specks—Panic guards—ran back and forth on mysterious errands. None of them, as far as he could see, stopped to gawk at the wing flying by. They were a shadow moving swiftly against a dark sky.

  A particularly strong vibration shook the wing. Chu wrenched it from side to side as though wrestling it into submission.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked, tightly gripping the harness's leather straps.

  “Just some…minor turbulence,” she said through gritted teeth. “Nothing I…can't handle.”

  The nose of the wing lurched downwards, threatening to dump them headfirst into the conglomeration of balloons. Chu forced it back up, but not before losing altitude. They were now unlikely to clear the top of the city.

  “Hang on,” she said, dipping the left wing and giving up the fight. “Going over obviously isn't going to work. We'll try under.”

  “What's the problem?” he asked as his heart leapt into his mouth. Guides and stays rushed by as the wing picked up speed.

  “Whatever's moving the city is trying to move us, too. That's all.”

  That's all? he wondered as a blur of misty lights swept past much closer than they had been before. This time, they were seen. At least one Panic guard looked up when they dropped past, eyes widening before disappearing behind them.

  “Shit,” he said. “We've been spotted.”

  “I can live with that,” she said. “We'll be gone before they can do anything about us.”

  Their downward plummet ended with a twirling flourish that saw them swooping parallel to the underside of the city. Skender felt truly exposed there, unable to see directly above them because of the wing and imagining dozens, if not hundreds, of archers lining up for a clear shot. But Chu was experiencing similar difficulties as before; when she tried to peel away from the city, the motivator field resisted, drawing them back in. They were trapped.

  He frantically thought through the situation, seeking any possible way out. The city's underside was ugly and not even remotely aerodynamic: pipes and chutes opened into clear air; maintenance ladders and balloon docking points protruded at odd angles. Fewer individual lights marred the sooty blackness, but from one particular structure a strong radiance shone.

  “What do you think that is?” he asked, pointing.

  “What's what?” she responded, distracted by the recalcitrant wing.

  “That?”

  “What?”

  They could have gone on all night if he hadn't realised that she genuinely couldn't see it. That meant the light he saw was coming solely through the Change.

  “I think I've found the source of the problem,” he said, kicking himself for not thinking of it sooner. An energy source powerful enough to shift an entire city should stick out. “That round hull over there, the one that looks like a giant almond shell. That's the motivator.”

  “Is there anything we can do about it?”

  He hadn't thought that far ahead. A quick consideration of their options didn't give him reason to hope. “Not without a dozen Sky Wardens behind us, or maybe Sal.”

  “Well, I don't see any of them here with us, so we'll just have to ride it out.” She put the wing into another nosedive, but it lasted barely five metres before curling around to face the way they had come. The interference didn't feel like wind blowing them off-course. It didn't really feel like anything. Instead of flying in the direction they wanted, the world seemed to turn around them, pointing them another way entirely.

  As Chu tried once more to orient the wing away from the city, a dartlike arrow hissed past them, missing by barely a metre.

  Chu cursed under her breath. Skender twisted to see who had fired at them. The arrow had come from the bottom of the glowing hull. Another quickly followed. Chu wrenched the controls and sent them spinning away.

  No more arrows came from that quarter of the city—which surprised Skender, for they were still within both sight and range—but moments later a new salvo came from elsewhere. Three separate archers sent volley after volley at the dodging wing. Some missed by several body-lengths. Others were so close Skender felt they would be hit until the very last second when the wing shifted.

>   Chu zigzagged as best she could, but her grim silence told him everything he needed to know. She couldn't maintain that sustained effort much longer, any more than she could break the hold of the motivator. It was only a matter of time before one of the archers got lucky.

  Glancing at the motivator, he found even more reason to panic. A small balloon had detached from the docks and was angling to intercept them. He pointed it out to Chu, who said, simply, “Fuck.”

  There was no way out of their predicament. Pinned on two sides, they had zero chance of escaping.

  Somehow the balloon managed to move easily against the bubble of energy surrounding the city. It was more cumbersome than the wing, yet flew with surprising agility, slipping out from the glowing hull and swinging smoothly through the air towards them. He looked closely, but could see no obvious countercharms or chimerical mechanisms.

  A pinprick of light flashed from the tiny gondola, spelling out letters in code that—much to his surprise—he recognised.

  -U-C-H-U-C-H-U-C-H-U-

  He stared dumbly for a moment, realising only slowly that one of the passengers in the balloon was wearing blue, not the brown and black of a Panic guard. He twisted around in his harness.

  “Do you have that mirror thing Marmion gave us to communicate with?”

  Chu reached over her head and slipped a tiny case from a junction of wing struts. “This?”

  “Perfect!” He took it from her and opened the metal lid. Stored light flared right into his eyes, and he hurriedly faced it away from him. Snapping the lid open and shut, he rattled off a quick reply.

  H-E-L-P-Y-E-S-H-E-L-P

  The cycle of letters changed. F-O-L-L-O-W-F-O-L-L-O-W-F-O-L-L-O-W

  “Go where they go,” he told Chu, pointing. “They're friendly!”

  Chu struggled to bring the wing under a semblance of control. Gradually, painfully, it came around on a heading that would take them to the tiny balloon, even now turning to follow a new course.

  “Who is it?” she asked. “Highson or Rosevear?”

  “Too far to tell.” He didn't care either way. “They look like they know what they're doing.”

  “I certainly hope so.” The wing lurched as another glassy arrow came entirely too close. “I'm sorry, Skender. I wasn't planning on us having to be rescued.”

  “Don't worry. It's better than being killed.”

  The little balloon led them directly under the glowing hull, where the disturbance was greatest. The wing swayed and shook as though trying to fly through treacle. Skender still wasn't sure they hadn't been lured into a trap. Having all hope snatched away just as he had regained it would be worse than never having had it at all.

  “Try flying where they fly,” he said. “There might be a particular path to follow.”

  “Just one? Unlikely, given the way the pilot was zipping around before. But there might be a—” She grunted with satisfaction as the turbulence around them suddenly eased. “Yes. Thank the Goddess. The balloon is protected, and it's leaving a clear path behind.”

  The going was almost too good, all of a sudden. The wing rushed forward as though set free from a cage. Clear air filled its charmed fabric with a snapping flutter and the little balloon loomed large ahead of them—small compared to the city but broader and more substantial than the wing. Skender saw Rosevear's face clearly illuminated as the warden reared back in alarm and dropped the signalling mirror to the floor of the gondola.

  Then Chu lifted the wing half out of the wake. The drag of the motivator partially caught them again and decelerated the wing with a jerk. By dipping in and out of the wake, she was able to keep their speed down to that of the balloon, neither falling completely back under the spell of the motivator nor lunging forward too fast.

  Rosevear and the single Panic pilot led them along the underside of the city, then sharply downwards as another brace of archers took a shot at them. As the distance between them and the motivator increased, so too did the turbulence steadily ease. Fog thickened around them; the city lights blurred. The soundless rumble that had rattled Skender's inner ear for entirely too long began to fade.

  “Whew,” Chu breathed as they finally passed outside the city's powerful influence. “That was too close.”

  Skender went to reply, but was interrupted by a voice threading through the Change.

  “What are you doing here, Skender? I thought you were out hunting.”

  Skender concentrated to answer Rosevear's faint query. “We were, but things got complicated. Chu and I came to check on your progress, since we hadn't heard anything.”

  “Yes, sorry about that. We saw your wing getting stuck in the motivator field and came out to rescue you before the kingsfolk mistook you for the Swarm. Things have been complicated here, too. We triggered a full-on revolt between Oriel loyalists, the Heptarchists, and old-time monarchists. With the Quorum gone, there's no one left to decide which group to listen to, so they've had to talk to each other—and that's only causing more fighting.”

  “We saw the fires from the air.” Skender glanced behind him, at the glowing smudge of the city fading once more into blackness. “But at least the city's moving. Does that mean Oriel will talk?”

  “Griel is still working on him. We're hoping he'll cave in, if only to save face. If the city's parked next to Milang and he refuses to show, it'll look bad for him.”

  Skender hoped the warden was right. “Well, that's something to tell Marmion, anyway. Do you want to do it or shall I?”

  “I will, but then I'd better get back. This balloon is our only escape route. While it's gone, Griel and Highson are stuck.”

  Chu circled the balloon while Rosevear called his superior. Skender couldn't hear the conversation, so he used the time to fill Chu in on what he had learned.

  “Sounds to me like Oriel has Highson holed up in the motivator room,” she said. “If he gets in there, it's all over.”

  “Don't bet on it,” he said. “Highson is Sal's father. He may not be a wild talent, but I bet he can pull a trick or two out of his sleeve when he needs to.”

  Rosevear returned, sounding weary. His hair looked flat and inert, lacking its usual curly spring. “Marmion asks that you keep following the city—from a safe distance, of course. If there's any deviation from its course, or any new developments at all, you're to let him know at once.”

  Skender resigned himself to spending the rest of the cold night in the air. “No worries.” The balloon was already swinging around to head back to the city. “Good luck in there.”

  “Thanks. I think we're all going to need it.”

  “All the ambition in the world counts for nothing

  when one is isolated from or excluded by

  those with influence and power.”

  STONE MAGE ALDO KELLOMAN: ON A PRIMITIVE CULTURE

  Shilly woke in the dead of night badly needing to relieve herself. She tried telling herself to ignore it and go back to sleep, but neither her bladder nor her brain would relent. She lay awake for what felt like hours with her legs crossed, worrying about Sal, Kemp, Tom, and Mawson, pondering the maddening patterns in her dreams, and mulling over the words of the Angel. There are ways of running that don't require legs, just as there are ways of hearing that don't involve ears. Perhaps there were ways of dreaming that didn't involve being asleep. If so, she had never learned how to do it.

  Cursing the deep draught of water she had downed before retiring, she struggled out of bed and onto her feet. The visitors' quarters were very dark. The only sounds were the whirring of insects and the sighing of leaves, and from one of the rooms nearby a gentle, regular snore. Tapping ahead of her with the tip of her cane, she proceeded slowly out of the room she shared with Warden Banner and along the hallway towards the toilet facility: a small cubicle and a hole in the floor that led to a simple but practical system of treated bamboo pipes, flushed by ewers of dew-water refilled by attendants at odd times of the day. Banks of moss and fungus inhabited the sewerage channels,
treating the waste so quickly and voraciously that only pure water emerged from the bottom of the pipe network at the base of the city. As marvellous as the system was, Shilly just wanted to get there quickly and to be back in bed as soon as possible.

  Her cane encountered the chair standing in the middle of the hall before her sleep-heavy eyes registered its presence. She stopped, forcing herself to concentrate on the unexpected obstacle. What on Earth was a chair doing in the hall? As she walked around it, her bare feet crunched on a leaf lying next to it on the polished wooden floor.

  Slowly, her mind unfogging with glacial momentum, she looked up and saw the hatch.

  Putting aside her need for the toilet, she hurried from room to room, performing a quick head count. There were so few people left it didn't take her long. Kail lay as silent as a board, barely breathing, on his cot in the common area. Banner was where Shilly had left her. Mage Kelloman snored softly with the bilby tucked tidily at his side. Jao curled around herself like a child in the room next to the mage's. When she looked into Skender and Chu's room, she found it empty—as she had expected—and so too was Marmion's.

  Stranger and stranger.

  Shilly found the warden in the kitchen, sitting at the table staring at his unbound arm. She froze in the doorway on seeing him, wondering if she should retreat and leave him to whatever private contemplation gripped him. A wooden brand glowed in one corner of the room, casting a faint yellow light over the awful truncation where his wrist had once been. The wound was puckered and raw-looking, not bleeding but still far from fully healed.

  “What is it, Shilly?”

  She wrenched her gaze from his arm and realised that he was looking at her.

  “Skender and Chu are gone.”

  “I know. They went off the roof with the wing.”

  She blinked, startled by his calmness. “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  He shrugged. “Their beds are cold, so they've been gone a while. No alarm has been raised. If we tell anyone now, our hosts will only cause a fuss—especially on the eve of the summit. I think it's best we keep it under our hat for the moment.”