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Authors: Sean Williams

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BOOK: The Hanging Mountains
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Lidia Delfine pushed forward. He could faintly hear her asking what had happened. Had Marmion killed it? Was it gone? The warden shook his head, words seeming to come from a great distance away. Sal looked around, feeling the small of his back a-twitch. The mist was breaking up and the ghostly dark shape wasn’t immediately visible. But there were other dark shapes streaming down the walls of the Divide and arrows raining out of the darkness.

Sal’s ears slowly recovered to bring him the sound of Sky Wardens and foresters, Stone Mage and Outcast, all turning to face this new threat, shouting orders and, for the moment at least, putting aside their differences.

Then from the boneship at the base of the waterfall came the sound of screaming, and he forgot everything else.

* * * *

The Panic

 

‘The Panic are monstrous beings who track

wanderers through the forest, catch them with

hooks at the end of long wires and drag them up

into the sky. So parents tell their children to stop

them straying from the well-known paths. When

these children grow up, they naturally believe

that the Panic Heptarchy is responsible for crop

failure, disease, internal unrest and any other

misfortune the forest should suffer. If the King

should ever return, the foresters say, peace will

end and the sky will fall. This is their simple but

earnest belief.’

STONE MAGE ALDO KELLOMAN:

ON A PRIMITIVE CULTURE

S

kender had no idea how much information lay in the recesses of his memory. Certainly everything he had ever read — but how much was that? How many books had he scanned in the Keep’s enormous library and his father’s private collection?

Associations surprised him, sometimes. Years ago a strange glyph carved on a milestone on the road across the Long Sleep Plains had reminded him of one described in an ancient tome as the lost cenotaph of an ancient ruler — and such it had turned out to be when Surveyors had followed up the connection. A line of verse from a children’s song overheard in Millingen matched one transcribed in Boliva thousands of kilometres away and five hundred years earlier. He never knew when something would leap out at him to say,
You’ve seen me before. Can you tell where?

It could be distracting at times — and was almost fatally so when a half-dozen strange creatures suddenly dropped from the walls of the Divide in front of him. Luckily, dropping and firing arrows didn’t marry well, so he and Chu were spared while darts hit people behind him. Skender and Chu dived under an overhang to let those with skill and power battle it out. Seeing the two of them defenceless, Heuve immediately took a knife from one of his fallen comrades and tossed it to Skender.

Then the creatures — quite different to the deathly cold shadow that had knocked Sal and Marmion to the ground — were among them, long-limbed and agile, and not quite human in shape. Their silhouettes seemed familiar to him, although he couldn’t imagine why. At close quarters they slashed with curved hooks and ducked under sword strokes. White teeth gleamed in the mirrorlight; wide eyes flashed in the light from the foresters’ glowing brands. Hooting calls and shrieks matched the cries of anger and surprise from their human adversaries.

Only when one dropped on all fours in order to dodge a knife-thrust from Heuve did recognition fall into place. The
Book of Towers,
yes — but the Fragments or Exegesis? The former, perhaps. A snippet of words, and a drawing.
Definitely
a drawing ...

The creature didn’t move fast enough. Lidia Delfine caught its throat in an upswing. The slash was powerful enough to send it spinning sideways to land at Chu’s feet, spraying blood, and thrashing as it died.

Chu turned her face away. Skender barely noticed. He was thinking: ‘
Pan troglodytes sapiens?’
That was the handwritten note scribbled on the side of the drawing he remembered — a drawing which captured the same posture, the same wide mouth and teeth, the same outstretched arm as the creature prostrate before him, gurgling its last.

He felt as shocked as he would have if the mountains themselves had suddenly sat up and walked off. These things were legends. Stone Mage scholars had debated their existence for hundreds of years. Kept deep in the heart of the desert lands were memoirs written by men and women who had devoted their entire lives to dividing and classifying imaginary beasts such as these — and here was one of them dying at his feet, still hot from the exertion of trying to kill him!

Chu pulled him back as the outflung arm twitched one final time, swinging its smoke-blackened hook towards him. It missed by more than a metre. He stared in fascination at the creature’s hairless body and sinuous limbs; the leather harness and apron it wore; its long fingers and toes; its mouth set in a permanent pout; its pale pinkish skin. Each hand bore curved nails painted a deep green, the colour of leaves. Stitching in black thread traced a pattern of branches and roots across its chest covering. A cap of densely woven black thread protected its domed skull, but left the protruding ears exposed. One lobe was pierced with a single ebony stud.

For a timeless awestruck moment one single thought utterly consumed him:
What had been its name?

Then chaos returned as Lidia Delfine’s foresters fell back, shouting and arguing. Blood-spattered blue robes jostled alongside them, forming a defensive ring within which a hurried conversation took place.

‘There are too many of them!’ Delfine said, favouring her left arm.

Heuve nodded tightly. ‘We must retreat back up the Pass.’

‘But we can’t! The boneship!’ Only then did Skender realise that their number wasn’t complete. He looked around, growing increasingly frantic. One of the wardens was missing, and so was ... ‘Sal! Where is he?’

Marmion pressed closer, thinning hair in disarray. ‘He went back alone. I couldn’t stop him.’

Of course,
Skender thought.
Shilly.
‘We can’t leave him behind. We can’t leave
them.’’

‘We must,’ Heuve insisted. ‘The Panic lie between you and the boneship. You’ll die if you try.’

‘So we run?’

‘We survive,’ Delfine’s bodyguard snarled. ‘Our duty is to Her Eminence.’

‘Not mine!’

Skender lunged forward, his intention only the Goddess knew what. A slight but strong hand pulled him back.

‘No,’ said Delfine, lips twisted as though every word pained her. ‘Heuve is right, although I hate to admit it. I have loved ones down there, too. They are strong; they may prevail. We can regroup later, or not at all.’

Skender looked at Chu in despair. She nodded. He let his muscles go limp.

‘The Panic?’ he asked, querying her earlier use of the word.

Delfine answered his question by pointing at the body at his feet. ‘We leave now.’

‘What about the Outcast?’ asked Heuve.

Chu gripped Skender so tight she hurt him.

Delfine looked at Chu, then at her bodyguard. ‘I place her in your charge, Heuve. It’s up to you to keep the forest safe.’

‘No, Eminence, you can’t —’ He could say no more. She had moved into the fray and begun telling her people to fall back.

Chu stood taller and let go of Skender’s arm. ‘Well, then. Shall we go?’

The big man’s beard twitched, but he said nothing.

* * * *

‘Down!’

Seneschal Schuet pushed Shilly’s head below the top of the gunwales. Something dark rushed over them with a deafening shriek. The tide of fog which, just moments before, had crested the top of the glowing waterfall now swept over them in a wind so cold it pained her.

A human scream joined the shriek. Shilly turned in time to see one of Schuet’s brown-clad companions — one of the few who hadn’t left in response to Lidia Delfine’s call to arms — snatched off the deck by invisible hands and whipped upwards into the mist. He disappeared, but his scream continued.

Shilly stared in open-mouthed horror.

‘What—?’

‘Stay still,’ Schuet hissed. ‘Where it flies, the Panic are sure to follow.’

She jumped as a glass dart thwocked into the bulkhead by her leg. ‘How do you know?
What’s going on?’

‘Quickly!’ He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. Hunched over to keep his profile low, he dragged her across the deck to the cabin entrance. She was half-limping, half-hopping, her walking stick useless. Thick mist wreathed the boneship, making even nearby objects hazy.

They stumbled through the door. Rosevear stared up at them, eyes full of questions they didn’t have time to answer.

The scream of the taken man ceased with an agonised choking sound. A second later, something crashed onto the roof of the boneship. Arrows staccatoed sharp impacts all around her.

Two dark shapes loomed in the doorway. She raised her stick automatically until she recognised one as Tom and the other as Highson. A forester woman followed, holding a scrap of cloth to her forehead. Blood trickled around her fingers.

‘How many?’ asked Schuet as Rosevear tended to the woman’s wound.

She shook her head, breathless. ‘All around us. Couldn’t count.’

‘Too many to break through?’

The woman nodded. ‘There’s only two of us on the boat.’

Schuet cursed. ‘Why here? Why now?’

‘I hate to be a wet blanket,’ Shilly pointed out, ‘but we won’t be running anywhere. Look behind you.’

Schuet did and saw Kemp, inhumanly flushed and motionless.

‘Yes,’ the Seneschal said. ‘Of course. But what other hope is there?’

Something splashed outside. The boneship swayed beneath them.

‘The ship,’ Shilly said, waving to attract Highson’s attention. ‘It’s a reservoir. How much potential is left?’

‘Not enough to sail it away,’ he said. ‘Not on our own.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that. We can channel the potential somewhere else, use it to keep them at a distance — whatever they are.’

‘Just the Panic now,’ said the injured woman. ‘The wraith is gone.’

‘Thanks, but I’m none the wiser about either of them. Highson, can you do it?’

‘We can only try. What do you have in mind?’

She thought furiously. Footsteps were audible on the deck outside. With the mist still thick, she couldn’t see what was going on, but she presumed it wasn’t rescue. The only voices she heard were unfamiliar inhuman ones.

‘The man’kin,’ she said. ‘In the water beneath us. We’re going to raise them.’

Highson hesitated. ‘We don’t know whose side they’re on.’

‘That doesn’t matter. At least they’ll be a distraction.’

‘All right.’ He nodded, and closed his eyes. With one hand, he reached for her. ‘Guide me. You too, Tom.’

The three of them joined, with Highson as the focus. Shilly had no natural talent, but she could help others to use theirs. Designing a charm was akin to drawing, but much more powerful. Instead of drawing from life, a Change-worker drew from
within
life, tapping into the deeper layers of existence where life made the leap from the abstract to the real, from thought to action. It was, she sometimes thought, the ultimate art. Tom’s Engineering knowledge helped her refine the mnemonic she came up with even further, until the mental schema spinning in Highson’s mind was one of the most elegant she had ever seen.

All that remained was to tap into the ship’s stored reserves, which Highson did by leaning forward and placing his forehead against the bone deck. The Change thrilled through him, pure and unalloyed. Shilly’s mind lit up like the sun in response, and she cried out for the joy of it.

She barely heard the explosion outside as two stony forms erupted from the surface of the water, limbs waving and tumbling through the air. They landed heavily on the shore with a distant clatter, like the echo of a stone tossed down a dry well. The bellowing they made as they shook off water and walked again struck her as little more than a murmur.

‘There’s something out there,’ whispered Schuet, who had inched forward to peer through the entranceway.

Yes,
Shilly wanted to say, seeing through the Change the ferocious confusion of horns and claws that she and Highson had raised from the deep.

A stooped, vaguely humanoid figure loomed out of the mist and stood framed in the doorway. Schuet backed away, blade upraised.

‘Yield, human.’

Shilly returned to reality with a jolt at the sound of the voice. It wasn’t a man’kin’s voice. A crisp tenor, it reminded her of wood splitting. The face it belonged to was no less remarkable.

Small eyes peered from beneath low brows and around a broad nose with nostrils flared wide. Thick, freckled lips barely concealed the sharp teeth within. The creature’s protruding chin was tufted with white hair that had been plaited and beaded with gold. It wore a leather uniform decorated with brown-and-black ribbed straps down its sides. The arms it held in readiness at its sides were prodigiously long and wiry, but muscled, perfect for a warrior. It smelt musky, of exertion and exhaustion, of flesh, not stone.

In its right hand it held a wicked, curved hook pointed directly at Schuet.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘I heard you,’ said Schuet. Over his shoulder, he asked Shilly, ‘What happened to the man’kin we raised?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was as surprised as he was. The charm had evaporated in her shock at seeing the creature before her.

‘They ran away.’ The creature’s eyes shifted to her. ‘Why would they do that, if you summoned them?’

‘I don’t know that either,’ she admitted, cursing the failure of their one and only chance. The boneship’s reserves were now drained. She had no more surprises up her sleeves. ‘They’re fickle.’

‘They are indeed.’

‘What do you want with us?’ asked Schuet.

‘We hunt the winged old one. We assumed it came at your bidding, until we saw it take one of your own.’

BOOK: The Hanging Mountains
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