Riding the Serpent's Back (16 page)

Although most of the population of Edge City seemed oblivious to what was happening – either through apathy or through the ingrained belief of the poor that there was nothing they could do to change their lot – there was a definite sense of change in the air, an unavoidable tension.

One day, Leeth went with Cotoche and Chi to the Falls in an inadequate pretence that things were not irreversibly changing. The three rode there on a pair of borrowed horses. The day was remarkably fine, the grey clouds thin, allowing the sun to shine weakly through.

Leaving the horses tied up, they headed down to the Falls. As Chi walked in sullen silence at his side, Leeth recalled the last time he had come here, on the day that Joel had arrived in Edge City. That day had been fine, too, with a brief parting of the clouds casting myriad rainbows into existence across the billowing mist of the Falls.

It had been the day he had suggested Chi might have the ability to change himself.

At the rock barrier that separated the open terrace from the giddy plunge down the cliff-face to the Burn Plain, they paused to look out. The spray and mist were clearer now and Leeth could see for perhaps sixty paces before the grey of the cascading water merged with the steam-clouds and spray. Down below them, all was murk and steam.

He remembered Chi disappearing in the fog on that day, the boy’s playfulness verging on cruelty as he took pleasure from Leeth’s confusion. Today, the Falls were more crowded, with trippers from Edge City, and a few parties out from the Junction, distinguishable by the quality of their clothes and the wariness of their manner. At least the two sections of the Shelf’s population could still mix, Leeth thought, although he didn’t know how much longer this might be the case.

It had all gone wrong, he thought. Everything. But he owed it to the boy, and to the man he had been, to stand by him. He had nothing else, after all.

They followed the barrier until a precipitous path took them from the edge of the open terrace down the face of the cliff. They paused as a group of worshippers filed past them, then continued down to where the path levelled out.

Now, to the left there was only a wall of steam and spray, no barrier to protect them from the drop. As they walked, a lip of rock curled progressively over their heads until they were passing along a tunnel, open only to the left. The air became even more thick and sticky, trapped in the tunnel by three walls of rock and the heaving screen of water that was the great river Hamadryad itself. They were walking behind the Falls.

After a short time the tunnel widened, cutting ever deeper into the cliff. It occurred to Leeth then how incongruous this was: the Falls cave was said to be protected from the frequent local earthquake activity by a stabilising Charmed Pact, cast many generations before by the young Donn – the father of the man-child now walking at his side. Leeth said nothing, walked on, their awkward silence underlined by the drifting voices of worshippers dispersed throughout the cavern.

They came to the main shrine, the centre of pilgrimage for most of the visitors to this humid underworld. Carved out of the rock, effigies of Habna the Creator and Samna the Preserver presided over lesser carvings of Tezchamna, Ixi, Zochena and others. One god stood slightly apart, even from Habna and Samna: Qez, the snake god. Snakes had always had a special significance in the True pantheon, associated with fertility, long regarded as immortal for their habit of sloughing off their old skins and emerging apparently reborn. Qez was singled out here because this was the place where the Hamadryad – the great river that meandered down the heart of the Rift like a giant snake – ended its life.

“To all beginnings an end,” said Leeth, repeating the familiar phrase.

Nobody was listening: Cotoche stood a short distance away, an arm clasped across her chest before the god Habna; Chi had run off into the distance, shouting so that his voice echoed unintelligibly back at them above the ever-present roar of the Falls.

Cotoche joined Leeth and they walked on.

Chi started to run back towards them and, as he came near, Leeth suddenly saw how close he was to the edge. The rock was uneven there, curving away, its surface slick with spray and the ubiquitous green slime.

Leeth shouted but the boy either failed to hear or ignored him.

Leeth took two giant strides, grabbed the boy by his arm and swung him away from the precipice.

They landed in a heap and Chi struggled desperately to break free. He lashed out at Leeth and for a few seconds they sat on the wet rock facing each other aggressively.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said Chi, his voice cracking to alto from its new deep tone. He climbed to his feet and now his head was on the same level as Leeth’s. “There was no need.”

“You’ve been drinking again,” said Leeth, tugging his skirt back down to cover his grazed knees. “You could have fallen.”

Chi pushed his chest out aggressively. “I was in complete control,” he said. “Or I was until you nearly knocked me over the edge.”

“You drink too much for such a small body,” said Leeth, aware that he was provoking the boy by reminding him of his small stature. “You should be more careful.”

Chi reached out and pushed Leeth’s shoulder. It was not a bad-tempered gesture, not a hard push, but it was all the more intimidating for its calculated restraint.

“Are you going to stop me, then?” said the boy. “Go on: what are you going to do about it?”

Leeth stood carefully. A number of possibilities rushed through his head, but by the time he had resisted the temptation to thump him the boy had gone, running off into the misty depths of the passage behind the Falls. Watching him go, Leeth was sure the boy was sobbing but the roar of the water covered any sounds.

He was sorry instantly. There had been no reason to provoke Chi as he had. He had been looking for this confrontation for days, he realised.

He took a step to go after him, but was stopped by Cotoche’s hand on his arm. “No,” she said. “Let him go. He’ll find his own way back. He needs to get mad every so often. Otherwise he’d be a little mad
all
of the time.”

Leeth slumped. “I don’t know how to handle him any more,” he said. “Before, I could always get through to the boy in him, and I was often close to the man in him too. Now he seems to be neither.”

“He’s both,” said Cotoche. “The two have become more closely bound. One gets nowhere by treating him as one or the other.”

Leeth looked at her now, the sunken look in her eyes making him hurt even more. “It must be hard for you,” he said. “At night...I hear you at night. I’m sorry. But...”

Again, she put a hand on his arm. “I know that you must,” she said. With the tip of a finger she wiped a tear from his face. “I hear you too. When you become sad.”

Leeth tipped his head back and ran his hands through his hair. “Let’s go,” he said. To be alone with Cotoche was the most exquisite torture and even at other times, when he was less emotionally fraught, he could only ever take so much. Now it was just too hard to bear.

Cotoche’s mood suddenly lifted. She skipped round to stop before Leeth and hold both his hands. “Can we fly?” she asked eagerly. “Is Sky near enough for you to call?”

They hadn’t flown together since the time on the Serpent’s Back when Cotoche had been heavily pregnant.

Leeth closed his eyes and sent his summons. “Let’s walk up to the terrace and find someone to take the horses back,” he said. “Then I’ll fly you wherever you want to go.”

Sky was waiting for them when they returned to the open space beside the Falls: a great dark shape that could have been a boulder but for the steady flow of activity spilling over from her Bonded mind.

Leeth helped Cotoche into the straps, then climbed on behind her.
Fly
, he thought at the courser, and it was all he could do not to tell her to fly as far away from Edge City as possible. He held his arms tightly around his passenger as they lifted up above the billowing clouds – let her think what she might. Sky took in a wide circle, heading out over the steaming sea that covered this part of the Burn Plain and then back across the face of the Falls so that the turbulence sucked the air from their lungs.

Leeth buried his face in Cotoche’s hair and soon one of her hands left Sky’s neck and reached back to rub tenderly at the side of his head. She was saying something, but her words were lost to the background roar of the plunging water. Leeth kissed her shoulder through the fabric of her top and her hand found his cheek and caressed the soft stubble that followed the line of his jaw.

They were back over Edge City in cruelly short time. “We could go somewhere,” said Leeth. “Anywhere.”

Cotoche wouldn’t look back at him. She shook her head, almost imperceptibly.

Leeth remembered Joel’s boast that he could seduce anybody if he pushed at a vulnerable moment. Leeth did not have the Talent of which Joel bragged, but he knew that this was just such a moment.

He couldn’t do it.

Home
, he thought at Sky, and the courser took them to the hill where they lived with Chi.

When they had landed, One Green Eye, one of the Raggies, came running up to them. “Where’s Chi?” she asked. “We’ve been waiting all morning.”

“He was with us,” said Cotoche, as Leeth helped her out of her harness. “He must have forgotten. He’s making his own way back – he probably won’t be long.”

But he didn’t come back at all that night.

By morning everyone was worried. “He’s never done this,” Leeth told Marsalo. “He’s never stayed out like this before – someone has always known where he is.”

When Chi had been missing for two nights, the search began in earnest.

From each of the five corners of the enchanted island-city of Zigané a slender spur of basalt jutted out over the glowing, belching cauldron of the Burn Plain. At the corner they called Gold and Green, the spur extended upwards and outwards for a distance of forty standard paces, so that its flattened tip was suspended some thirty paces out over the magma. At its narrowest point, the spur was little more than the thickness of a small child’s waist.

Monahl of Camptore sat on the flattened tip of this finger-like protrusion, with her legs crossed and her arms spread wide. It was now mid-afternoon, yet she had not moved since climbing out here at first light.

Monahl was a short woman. Her stocky build was the combined result of a solid frame and the hard physical work of the Order. The spread of her backside completely covered her small rocky perch. Lack of attention on her part, or a tremor from below, might easily dislodge her.

She felt the slick rock against her bare skin. Over the generations the spur’s pale pinkish-buff surface had been polished to a glassy sheen. Yet despite her exposed position, Monahl nearly always felt safe out here.

The city’s progress was smooth today.

~

A slight breeze stirred.

She was grateful for the movement of air across her golden, sweating skin. All morning, the sun had burnt down through the smoky veil of the Burn Plain sky, its oppressive, dry heat matched by that which rose up from below. The heavy silver necklets and arm-rings – her only covering – would certainly have burnt their imprint into her skin once again. She would be sore tonight, she knew.

A dragonfly with a head the size of her fist hung for a few seconds in front of Monahl’s face. Sometimes they would alight on a devotee’s skin to steal moisture and salt. This jade-green beast merely hovered before her for a short time, then turned through 180 degrees and sped off across the Plain.

She stared after it, losing track of time.

The Burn Plain, here, was a scrappy affair, nothing like the ‘lava sea’ they spoke of on the mainland. The magma was mostly covered with a thin crust and on this a fuzz of stabilising jungle had spread. Lava pools and lakes were scattered across this menacing landscape – like the wide lake through which the city now passed – connected by meandering rivers of lava that were shrouded in yellow steam. A chain of perfectly conical andesite volcanoes bit saw’s-tooth chunks out of the horizon, each exhaling a drift of smoke and steam from its summit.

It almost looked inviting: a lush, virgin landscape. But even where the crust was thick enough to bear human weight it was liable to crack and buckle without warning as the fragile and temporary land responded to the stresses that were fundamental to the nature of this place.

Monahl’s vision blurred. The harsh greens, blacks and oranges of the Burn Plain suddenly became a nightmare mosaic without any apparent sense or interpretation. Before her, all was wild and chaotic and, behind, she could sense the solid, reassuring bulk of Zigané. In between these two extremes, Monahl alternated between feeling sandwiched and torn apart. She was the glue that bound all together, the armour that kept them apart.

Both one thing and its opposite, she felt herself whole. Such duality was embodied by the fundamental nature of the gods: Habna, who created the world and wrought destruction at the end of each of the four Eras of humankind; Qez, who lives forever and yet is dead; his mother Zochena, guardian of fruitfulness, yet handmaiden to Michtlanteqez in the land of the dead. All gods but one were thus divided in themselves.

Monahl hummed a prayer to Samna, the one god who was different. When Habna created Samna from a sliver of his heart, that seed material contained only the benign aspect of his nature. Samna became Habna’s tutor and sage, and in his devotion he sustained that which his father had created. While Habna gave the habitable lands into the trust of the True Families, it was Samna who gave humankind the gifts of language and civilisation. It was Samna who taught the heathen to worship – the gentle art of appeasing and placating the gods so that humankind’s precarious existence could be perpetuated.

Monahl was a devotee-priest in the Church of the Preserving Hand, of which Samna was patron. As she prayed, she was again aware of the continuity of the underlying fabric of her world. Much the same as people and animals, the world itself had animus. Where a healer reached out her mind to Charm the animus of the sick, and a flier reached out to Charm the bond with his courser, Zigané’s devotee-priests reached their hearts out to Charm the fiery earth itself.