The Hanging Mountains

by Sean Williams

  “Your father.”

  Both Sal and Marmion reacted, but neither said anything at first. Marmion, Kail assumed, would want to keep the former fugitive under his watchful eye, while Sal would probably have preferred to go on his own. They both knew it made sense, though. Highson had a stake in Shilly's fate, just as Sal did. And he was no lightweight when it came to the Change.

  “All right,” Sal said. “We'll ask him. If he wants to come, he can come.”

  Marmion said nothing, but the wrinkles around his eyes tightened.

  Afterwards, while Sal talked with the city suppliers, Kail took Marmion aside. “Are you going to tell anyone what really happened down there, during the fires? Are you going to tell me?”

  Marmion looked cornered. “It was very confusing. In the heat of the moment—”

  “Bullshit. Don't try to play me. The others might not need a detailed explanation, but I do. I saved your life, remember. I touched it.”

  Relenting, Marmion took him to a small antechamber and shut the doors. They sat on two beautifully carved wooden chairs with armrests the colour of bleached bone, not quite facing one another. On a small table next to his seat, Marmion placed a small silver pin Lidia Delfine had presented him with in thanks for saving her and the Guardian during the attack on the city. In the shape of a curled banyan leaf, the pin caught the light and held it, made it flow like liquid across the smooth silver surface.

  “I'm still working it out myself. When the wraith attacked us in the Divide, I put up my injured arm to drive it off. It worked, but a piece of the wraith got into me in the process. It burned in me, ate at me, but it took me a long time to work out what it was. It didn't talk, didn't try to take me over. It just made me feel…different.”

  The one-handed warden rubbed his scalp as though at an itch. “The swarm tried to get it back. That's why they attacked the citadel so boldly the very next day. My plan to trap them should have worked, but not for the reasons I thought it would. The thing in me was the bait, not the charms Kelloman and I were working. By then, though, the golem had taken charge of them, and they reined in their baser impulses. The piece in me and the one called Giltine were abandoned for the time being.

  “I swear I didn't know about the ghost hand until you saved me. I thought I was just imagining things. But once I knew that the thing in me could manifest, was powerful, I wondered what else it could do.

  “The weather was the key. The fire had stirred everything up, made the clouds volatile. It reminded me of spring storms back home, with the horizon alive with lightning. We'd tried air and fire, I thought, and hadn't killed the wraiths. What if I combined the fog and the forest instead? There's a tension between ground and clouds that sparks lightning; it was just a matter of tapping into the roots of the trees and letting nature do the rest. Giltine's cage acted as the lightning rod. The fact that I wasn't actually holding it—my ghost hand had that honour—protected me from the shock.”

  Kail acknowledged the gambit with no small amount of admiration. “That was quick thinking.”

  Marmion pulled a faintly irritated face. “I was lucky, and I'll admit it. If it hadn't worked, none of us would be here now.”

  “It did work.” Kail thought of the twisted lump of inert metal found at the epicentre of the first lightning strike. “You killed six wraiths at once. That's something anyone would be proud of.”

  “Not quite six.” Marmion reached out with his injured arm and picked up the silver pin. Invisible fingers held it in midair a palm's-length away from his bandaged stump. “I think I'm stuck with this now. Not as good as the real thing, and certainly not something I'd like to use in public, but better than nothing. Don't you think?”

  Kail didn't know what to think. He had guessed part of the truth, but in the heat of the moment had feared Marmion had accepted the ghost hand as a bribe in return for the imprisoned wraith. The fact that it wasn't a powerful charm at work but something more primal, more insidious, wasn't necessarily better…

  Marmion tossed the pin from his ghost hand to his flesh-and-blood hand.

  “Please, don't tell anyone. I don't want people getting jumpy.”

  “I won't.” Kail wasn't sure anyone would believe him.

  “No, I suppose you won't. You're very good at not telling people things, like your relationship to Lodo, or that the Homunculus was with Sal on Geraint's Bluff—even when I asked you not to go behind my back again.” Kail began to defend himself, but Marmion waved it away and leaned forward in his chair, his expression grim. “I don't like this expedition you have planned with Sal and Highson any more than I like that thing walking around among us. I will accept both only under duress, so don't take any more chances with my patience. Please.”

  “Yes.”

  “What does that mean? ‘Yes’ to what?”

  “I'm not sure.” Kail felt absurdly like laughing, being lectured to by a man he had written off four weeks earlier as a pompous fool, and actually feeling like he deserved the lecture. “Yes, you're right to be angry. I should've told you.”

  “You should've—but I'm honestly not that angry. Sometimes I surprise myself. We're both trying to bluff our way through this. Maybe it's the only way to cope.”

  “Maybe.” This time Kail did laugh, and it felt good, as though it had released something built up in him that he hadn't been aware of. “Shilly would be pleased to see us jumping like this. She's been missing barely a day and everyone's fighting over who gets to go find her.”

  “I'm not. I can't. I get to fly a balloon up the side of a mountain in search of something that might not exist—and might kill me if it does.”

  “So that's your plan?”

  “Once we've honoured Eitzen and the others, yes. The kingsfolk have returned all the goods stolen from us, so we have no shortage of supplies.” Marmion issued a sound that was almost a laugh. “From bonefish to balloon. If you can think of a better way, let me know.”

  Kail thought of the seer in Laure and what she had told him: You're walking to the end of the world and do not know it. He felt he had gained a better idea of what he was doing, but that wasn't the same thing as knowing why. Blood will run like water…

  He leaned forward and held out a hand. “The same goes for you, of course.”

  They shook, flesh to flesh.

  We've both changed, thought Kail as he went off in search of the young runner who had stopped to heal him when she should have been delivering her message to the Guardian. After thanking her, he had an appointment with Rosevear. He would need as much of the local salves and unguents as he could carry if he was going to survive the hunt for Shilly. Unconsciously, his right hand crept up to the pouch around his neck and gripped it tightly. He could feel the Caduceus fragment vibrating through the parchment wrapped tightly around it.

  I just hope, he thought, it's a change for the better…

  Sal barely heard a word Marmion spoke as he outlined his plan for a combined expedition of foresters, outsiders, and kingsfolk not long after lunch. Sal hadn't eaten. Inside he felt only tension and worry, as though his intestines were maritime ropes coiled in complicated knots.

  Shilly was gone. First Kemp, then Tom and Mawson, then Eitzen, and now her. It seemed that she had gone of her own accord, but that didn't make her absence any easier to accept. Nor was it made any easier by the ache in his gut that told him she was still alive, somewhere. The last time he had seen her, on the jagged slopes of Geraint's Bluff, she had been worried about him disappearing. Events since then had taken turns neither of them could have anticipated.

  He remembered the confrontation with Upuaut, its taunting of him with knowledge about his missing friends. Had he missed an opportunity to find Shilly without knowing it? Would he have decided any differently then, had he known?

  Arguments and suggestions filled the meeting room as densely as smoke. He had to get out. Ignoring questioning looks, he stood and slipped quietly out the door.

  A guard peeled away from the many w
atching the entrance and followed him as he wandered, at random at first, through the citadel. Night had fallen some time ago. The air quivered with the smell of trees and cooking and smoke from spot fires, which hadn't been fully extinguished, drifting up from below. He needed to get higher, away from everything. He needed to think.

  As he climbed the steps to the top of the citadel wall, where Jao had said that she, Banner, and Shilly had been held captive, he thought of Marmion's plan to cross the mountains by air and remembered the dream Tom had told them about, seemingly months ago in Fundelry.

  Something dark and ancient lived there, under the ice, and it knew we were coming.

  Under a starless sky, not far from the hole the man'kin had made, he saw only doom ahead of them all. He leaned on the wall and breathed deeply, as though filling his lungs might somehow clear the pressure mounting in his chest. The citadel's giant bell had been salvaged from the wreckage apparently, but that was very small consolation for other losses.

  “We live our lives in shadow.”

  The woman's voice came from his right, further along the wall. He looked up with a start, wondering who had spoken. Too deep and mature to be Shilly; too smooth and human in inflection to be Jao.

  His eyes, still adjusting to the darkness, made out a shadowy shape, head tilted slightly back.

  “I saw it, briefly. The sky, I mean. My mother used to talk about it. She went for a ride in a captured balloon once, so high she came out the top of the clouds. I never quite believed what she said. It didn't seem real, that there could be so much beyond the forest, outside our world. Why should there be? It doesn't make sense—yet there it is.” The woman sighed. “My grandmother was furious when she found out, and had my father flogged for allowing it. He was, in fact, very nearly dismissed from service. Mother only stopped that by threatening to elope.”

  Sal knew her, then, as the Guardian, absent from the meeting on the pretext of attending to matters of state. Behind her, standing close but not intrusively so, Sal made out the silhouette of the Seneschal.

  “It's hard to imagine,” Schuet said, his gravelly voice softened by affection. “Your father made out he'd never put a foot wrong his entire life.”

  “That's what parents do, isn't it? We paint ourselves in the colours our own parents wore—and we see through our children's disguises as though they were gauze.”

  Sal felt uncomfortably as though eavesdropping. Neither had commented on his presence, although surely they couldn't have missed his arrival. The fog soaked up all other noise around them. His breathing sounded horribly loud to his ears.

  “What do you think, Sal?” the Guardian asked suddenly, startling him. “Is your mind broader for seeing the world? Are your eyes opened wide by travel and exploration?”

  He cleared his throat, not sure where the question was leading. “I don't truly know, Guardian. I've been travelling most of my life. My father and I never stopped for long when I was a child. We wandered up and down all along the borderlands between the Interior and the Strand, always on the run from the Sky Wardens. It wasn't until I did finally stop that I had time to think. To learn.” From Shilly, he added to himself.

  “I see.” He dimly made out the Guardian nodding, but he couldn't read her expression. “Perhaps change is enough, then. Where it comes from doesn't matter, or how.”

  “Lidia is brave and resourceful,” said the Seneschal, leaning closer. “And she is restless, like your mother.”

  “Our son is dead.” The pitch of the Guardian's voice rose in a threnody. “I would not lose our daughter next, to a world I neither understand nor care for.”

  “She's no safer here, as recent events have proved. Just because Panic and human are talking doesn't mean all our problems will be solved. It will take more than the mist closing over us again to keep the world out.”

  “You're thinking of sending Lidia with Marmion,” Sal said. “That's what you're talking about.”

  “Yes.” The Guardian sounded incredibly weary. “She wants to go. Maybe I could stop her if I expressly forbade it. Maybe she would go anyway. If I am to lose her, I would do so without harsh words between us. But I wouldn't lose her at all, given the choice.”

  Sal wondered what he would do in her shoes. Was it better to keep something caged and safe than free and in peril? He thought of Shilly and his jealousy of Kail, and felt bad for wanting to keep them apart. Now their positions were reversed, he wished more than ever that she was still around.

  The polished wood under his hands felt as smooth as stone, but he could sense, through the Change, the way it had once been living. Fibres lay twisted in knots like ancient muscles. These planks had once held a tree together, had once been part of the greater creature humans called “the forest.” It still remembered life. At his urging, the wood began to glow like a brand, casting a faint reddish glow that seemed bright in the darkness.

  “Sometimes we just have to let go of things,” he said, “and hope they come back. That's what Highson, my real father, told me once. He gave me away, with my mother, before I was even born. The odds were against him seeing either of us again. When he did, we were both caged, and we didn't want to be there. It went…badly.” He thought of his mother, tricked by one of the ghosts of the Haunted City into believing its promise of a way out. If Highson's mad plan to rescue her from the Void Beneath had worked, she would have been trapped inside the Homunculus instead. Would that have been better, he wondered, or just another cage? “I escaped, but now I'm back. We're still working things out. He knows, I think, that it wasn't him I was running from.”

  Even as he said the words, it occurred to him that Highson might not know that at all.

  The Guardian's eyes gleamed back at him.

  “I'm an optimistic person,” she said. “I will try to believe that you'll find Shilly and that my daughter will survive. Marmion will locate the source of the floods, and the evil rising in the mountains can be cast down. I will cling to these things here where I can do little but wait to see what eventuates—reassured by the knowledge that, if the world ends, I will lose no more than anyone else.”

  The Seneschal put an arm around her shoulders.

  “Come back to us, Sal,” he said. “Come back to us in peaceful times, and bring Shilly with you. Tell her Minister Sousoura owes her an apology, and that our hospitality will be better then.”

  “I will.”

  The pair drew away into the darkness, leaving him alone with his bodyguard, who looked steadfastly out into the night, pretending not to have heard a word. Sal set free the wood beneath his fingertips, and the crimson glow died. The air felt colder than it had before, but he didn't care. Its crispness was bracing, clearing his head of the day's cobwebs and tangles.

  Okay, Carah, he sent out into the night. You've got what you wanted. Highson has had his day with the Homunculus; it's told him everything he needs to know. It'll be just the two of us on your tail, with Lodo's nephew as adjudicator. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, we'll find you—and each other—along the way.

  He waited a long time for a reply, but nothing came. Not even the use of her heart-name could penetrate whatever hid her from his senses.

  Eventually, when the curdling mist had brought ice to every square centimetre of his skin, he went back inside and began packing for the journey ahead.

  “We are beams of white light caught by a prism. At the

  end of our lives, we look back at the brilliant colours

  that make us whole: the fiery red of our childhood; the

  cool yellows and greens of our middle years; the bluish

  purple of age and decay. Beyond those shades lie

  colours our ordinary eyes can't discern. We cannot

  know, except by hearsay, what happened before we

  were born; we only glimpse in dreams what might come

  after. A seer, however, is different. A seer perceives the

  world in all its colours at once, recombined as though

&
nbsp; through a second prism—and the beam of pure, terrible

  white they see is a dangerous light indeed.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 5:5

  After a full day riding on the man'kin's back, Shilly wished she'd found a new way to run that involved padded chairs and protection from the rain. Since leaving Milang, she had been relentlessly soaked, whipped by branches, pounded by unyielding stone, and ignored. Nothing she said provoked a response, not even when she had threatened to jump off if the man'kin didn't tell her where she was going. They were smarter than they looked, obviously.

  She hung on, determined to find out what was going on. The uncertainty of what lay ahead bothered but didn't frighten her. If the man'kin had wanted her dead, they would have killed her as soon as they saw her. The fact they hadn't killed her told her that another fate entirely waited at the end of her journey. What that was, she would only discover when she arrived.

  The day grew old and still the man'kin ran: up and down valleys, fording rivers, climbing cliffs, leaping fallen trees, not missing a single step. Birds scattered at the sound of their heavy footfalls. Every bone in her body felt broken. She was afraid to look down at herself for fear of the bruising she would find.

  Finally, as the fog turned golden with dusk, the man'kin came to a narrow ravine covered with a dense growth of vines and tree roots. Trickling water echoed from its depths. Her ride made its way almost delicately along a meandering stream, its clawed feet crunching on the hard stone. The air was very still.

  Where the ravine should have been darkest and most quiet, a ghostly green glow shone. The burbling of conversation competed with the stream.

  Shilly had wondered many times who would be waiting for her at the end of her journey. She never expected to see all of them at once.

  Vehofnehu was the first to acknowledge her, rising from a low, knuckled crouch and executing a courtly bow as the man'kin halted in front of the group and stooped for her to dismount. She gingerly did so, feeling as though the bones of her bad leg had been smashed to jelly. Leaning on her stick with greater need than normal, she limped around the broad shoulders of the man'kin to confront the group.