Riding the Serpent's Back (66 page)

~

That night, she dreamed of a brother she did not know, a brother she felt she could never really know. When she woke she felt a desperate need to ask Herold what it could mean, but he was still out in the Heartlands on his lone mission.

In response to a message delivered by one of the raggies, she rode down into the small town of Seelwood to meet Chi, Joel and Petro for lunch. They were eating in the yard of a small inn, gathered around a long wooden bench.

She managed to smile at Chi and Petro, and then exchanged a few words with Joel, sitting as always above the others on the back of his horse. She had seen Joel only briefly since her arrival. Long enough to tell him Herold could not – or would not – cure him. In Edge City Joel had struck her as an ebullient character, yet now he seemed withdrawn and sullen. He thought this war was being entered too hastily, that their current position was far too exposed; he thought Chi too rash to be a successful commander. He had always known Herold – and by association, Monahl – would fail him.

Then she remembered her warning to Chi: in such a mood, Joel might easily be his betrayer.

She surveyed the small group at the bench: Marsalo, Echtal and three others she knew from Edge City. They all seemed tense and on edge, as if she had interrupted something.

There was a stranger, too. He was a slight man, with eyes that jumped about nervously. He was no soldier, that was clear.

Chi saw them staring at each other. “Monahl,” he said. “Come and sit down.” He waved a hand at the stranger. “This is our half-brother, Red Simeni of Totenang. He joined us this morning.”

Monahl sat, and reached over to fill a plate with some meat. She had dreamed of a brother she did not know, but it had not been Red Simeni, she was certain.

She remembered that Red had refused to join them before: he had preferred his comfortable life in Totenang. So why was he here now? An attack of conscience, perhaps?

She didn’t take her eyes off her new half-brother. He looked shifty and distrustful. Sly.

“You’re staring at me,” he finally said.

“You’re staring at me.”

She was aware of Chi and Petro grinning broadly as they watched the two of them. “Red thinks none of us trust him,” Petro said, finishing with a chuckle. “He thinks we all regard him as, at worst, a spy, or even at best an unreliable coward.”

Now Chi joined in, “And Monahl doesn’t trust anyone because she thinks you’re all out to kill me. The two of you will get along so well, I can tell.”

Monahl watched Red all through the meal. She made him feel uncomfortable, she noted. And so he should be.

Later, she took Chi aside and told him about her dream. “A man,” she said. “Dressed in a priest’s smock, with an ancient pendant of Tezchamna about his neck. I’ve never seen him before, but I was convinced he was my brother.”

“That would be Leeth,” said Chi. “He has been away finding out who he really is. What did you see?”

“He’s heading here,” said Monahl. “This evening, I think. Coming alone on foot along Two Rivers Road towards Brierley. And I don’t know why, but when I woke up I was convinced he was in danger: someone wants him dead.”

Red joined them then – he had been standing nearby making a poor pretence of not listening.

Now, Chi turned to him and reached up to put a hand on his arm. “You see, Red? It’s not just me Monahl fears for. Now she thinks someone wants to kill Leeth, too.”

Red raised his eyebrows. “He’s coming here?” he asked.

Chi nodded.

“Then, with your approval,” said Red, “I will set out and meet him and ensure his safe arrival.” He smiled at Monahl. “Perhaps then our sister will believe that my motives are pure.”

Monahl stared at him, and then at Chi. He couldn’t possibly let Red go and meet Leeth after the warning she had just given.

But he did.

Slowly, Chi nodded, then said, “Go on, Red. Demonstrate your loyalty. Go and make sure Leeth survives what remains of his journey.”

Red smiled and nodded at Monahl. “How will I know him?” he asked.

Chi shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “You see, our half-brother is a shape-changer.”

A sudden look of fear clouded Red’s face. He glanced at Chi, and then, again, at Monahl. “I’ll go immediately,” he said.

The first indication that he was near the edge of the jungle was the overpowering, fetid stench of decay. It was made all the more intense by the enhanced senses of his shifted jaguar body.

All the time Leeth had been in Zochi, he had been aware of the background odour of the rot, the gases released by layer upon layer of vegetation decomposing in the standing water.

But this was far more intense than any background odour.

From somewhere up ahead he heard a sudden screech, followed by a torrent of chattering and scolding sounds.

He reached a raised bank of mud and advanced cautiously along it. Even as he had slowed in his headlong escape, he had felt his body shifting again, the sudden pains as his form eased itself back into a familiar shape. Soon he was walking upright, struggling to keep his balance on the slippery surface.

He could see daylight penetrating the trees ahead. As the light broke through, the vegetation thickened and he longed for a knife with which to hack his way through.

When he came to the edge of the jungle he was momentarily dazzled by the hazy sunlight burning through its grey veil. The smell here was so vile he felt the gorge rising in his throat.

He had come to a wide lake, its surface almost entirely covered by a flotilla of logs. Leaping about on this strange mass of flotsam were troupes of red-faced monkeys, screeching and chattering, a moving carpet of black crows, hopping about and squabbling. Rats, he suddenly saw, swarming over the logs and swimming through the water.

Then he looked more closely.

Many of the ‘logs’ were covered in red drapes, but where these had been pulled aside by the scavenging hordes, Leeth saw bloated and torn carcasses, exposed bones and red meat.

This was no lake, it was the dead-end of the Hamadryad. Somewhere, a few leaps to the north at Stopover, the New Cut would break away from the great river, but sluices and locks at the junction would prevent most of these corpses getting through.

This was the place where the river finally sank into the porous, raised ground of the Zochi jungle.

Leeth stared at the sinking-lake, the final resting place for the Rift’s dead.

He counted a block of ten funerary rafts, estimated nine more blocks of a similar size, and another nine blocks the size of the resultant hundred-strong block. A thousand dead in so small an area! The dead, here, must easily number in the hundreds of thousands.

In a single day he had found both a dead city and now a city of the dead.

He looked back. For an instant he had become oblivious to the danger, so stunned had he been by what was before him. The cat-people had been following at a distance for some time, struggling to keep up with his enhanced pace.

Now, he could hear noises in the jungle: the splash of footfalls in the swamp, the rustle and crackle of vegetation being pushed aside and broken. They were drawing closer again.

He looked ahead. He had no choice.

He stepped onto a funerary raft that had run aground on the mud. It wobbled precariously, but he managed to remain upright. He tried to squeeze out of his mind the sensation of his bare ankles pressing against the draped corpse, but it was not possible. He could feel the bones jutting through the faded red cover. This body could be centuries old, he realised.

Cautiously, he stepped onto the next raft. It lurched suddenly, and he squatted, hanging onto the sides. Ahead, a cloud of crows rose up, cawing angrily at being disturbed at their feeding ground.

The sounds coming from the jungle were louder now. Closer.

The corpse on the next raft was exposed: a skeleton, bones picked clean and bleached by the sun. Nestling in the back of its skull was the small polished gem which had been placed in its mouth long ago to sustain it on its journey into the afterlife.

He stepped onto the next raft, and the next, gradually learning the rhythms of movement across this bizarre pontoon bridge.

One time, as he stepped onto a raft, there was a sudden movement under the covers. A trio of enormous brown rats emerged at the far end of the raft, then threw themselves into the river and swam, holding their bloodied snouts high out of the water.

Leeth realised he must be reaching the fresher corpses.

Eventually, he judged it safe enough to pause for breath.

Looking back, he saw a crowd of cat-people congregated at the fringe of the jungle, watching him escape. None of them made any attempt to follow him. As he watched, several of them rolled their lips back in a snarling grimace, maybe even a smile, and he suddenly had the impression that they had not been chasing him at all, that they had merely been pacing him as he ran through their jungle, making sure he found his way out.

He stared down into the water, lost in thought.

He remembered the moment when he had suddenly realised he could sense their minds, as he sensed that of a courser, the seething mass of their ur-human thoughts. A kind of bonding, he realised: having severed the bond with Sky, had his mind been desperately seeking out something to replace that link? Was
that
what had released these people from their punishment, if that was, indeed, what had happened?

He raised a hand to wave, but when he looked up at the bank again there was only a seemingly solid wall of trees joined together by a tangle of undergrowth.

Some distance from the shore, the going became more difficult. In the deep water the rafts became increasingly unstable as they were pulled and pushed by currents and the wind. Spaces opened up between the rafts, so that each step was a gamble.

Every time he landed on a new raft, he nearly overbalanced. Repeatedly, he found himself kneeling astride a soft, pulpy corpse, its bloated flesh ready to split open at the slightest nudge. Constantly, he was beating away the flies that tried to land on him and drink his sweat, knowing that only seconds before they had been all over a corpse, laying their eggs, digesting the putrefying remains.

He knew he couldn’t go on like this. The smell alone had become so intensely overpowering he felt dizzy with every breath. If he fainted now, he would certainly drown.

Watched by a resting troupe of monkeys – he now saw that their snouts were not naturally red, as he had first thought: they were smeared with blood from their macabre feast – he looked down at the red-draped corpse on the raft he now occupied.

Resting in the middle of what he took to be its chest, there was a pool of wax, and he thought of the funeral he had seen at Hazlet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Then he reached down and seized the thing.

He cried out in horror as his fingers broke through the decayed fabric and sank deeply into the soft, almost liquid, flesh of the corpse’s arm.

He closed his eyes and made himself continue. Fingers locked around the arm-bone, he heaved at the body.

It didn’t want to move. It was as if it was stuck to the raft.

He pulled harder, knowing that if it suddenly shifted he would most probably follow it into the water.

It came free and he staggered. Then, with a final heave, he rolled the body over into the Hamadryad.

The waters suddenly heaved and bubbled, and he saw a mass of silver. Fish, he realised. He watched, horrified, as they set on the body, tugging and pulling the flesh from the bones. Within the space of a few minutes, even the red drape was gone and all he could see were the bloody white bones sinking slowly into the murk.

He sat on the raft, shaking his head slowly. He looked at where he was sitting, and saw the black outline of the corpse imprinted on the wood.

He reached across to the nearest raft and pulled himself along, careful to keep his hands clear of the water. Eventually, he came across the remains of a broken raft and found a piece of wood he could use as a paddle.

The far shore must be at least two standard leaps away.

He started to paddle.

~

The last stretch of the Hamadryad was clear water. As he paddled, Leeth realised he was fighting a slight current – the reason why the dead congregated where they did.

There was a stretch of low, wooden decking along the bank, with a few small boats tied up. Standing along this rough quay was a line of men in plain grey overalls. Their heads were shaven and their faces were painted the same even grey as their uniforms, hiding all expression and individuality. They looked like votaries or priests, although he knew of no sect that adopted this barren uniform.

They watched him in silence as he pulled up to the quay and then clambered onto the wooden decking, before pushing his raft back into the river to drift back to the city of the dead.

He looked at them. None showed any sign of rank, so he nodded his head briefly, taking them all in with the gesture.

Nobody spoke.

Suddenly, Leeth realised how peculiar he must look: dressed only in a kilt and a pendant, his skin painted in the drab colours of a jaguar.

“I am pleased to find you,” he said uncertainly. “I was lost in the jungle.”

Finally, one of the votaries nodded. “We know,” he said. “We expected you.”

Leeth must have betrayed his surprise, for the man continued, “We are the Last Mourners,” he said. “Our order lives in this place because it is the place of departure from this world. Amongst our number is one gifted with the sight. He anticipated the possibility of your arrival among us.”

“Where is this?” asked Leeth. “How near am I to the New Cut?” Already he was thinking of arranging passage on a boat down to the Shelf – he could be back in Edge City within a day or two.

As one, the votaries turned and filed away along the quay.

Leeth felt perplexed by their inscrutability. It was almost as if they were being deliberately obstructive, although he knew that his peculiar arrival must be quite a shock to a sect that could hardly be accustomed to visitors.