The Hanging Mountains (21 page)

Fundelry hadn’t felt remotely civilised while she’d lived there, but she didn’t argue the point. ‘Tea would be good,’ she said. Tom and Rosevear echoed her.

‘Good.’ He fussed and bothered over a chimerical water heater. A moment’s rummaging up to his shoulders in a cupboard produced five green ceramic mugs. ‘You’ll have to excuse my kin. They have no manners, and no taste for subtlety. Few of the so-called kingsmen do, so I prefer to stay out of their way. They’re spiteful as well as ill-mannered. Did you hear them questioning my work? Appalling behaviour.’ He poured hot water from a kettle and added a pinch of dried leaves to each cup.

‘One for your friend,’ Vehofnehu said, placing the extra cup near Kemp’s head. ‘The scent may soothe his journey.’

‘There really is no hope for him, then?’ Rosevear asked.

‘None,’ he said, with sympathy. ‘I am most dreadfully sorry. But look on the bright side. You’ll be here tonight, and the skies are clear. We’ll keep a vigil for your friend, and much more besides.’

In the face of the puzzlement of his guests, Vehofnehu simply grinned and pulled a lever.

With a clanking groan, the ceiling of his circular room folded back, revealing a glass dome filled with arcane equipment: great tubes and clockwork and crackling chimerical reservoirs, drawing in the energy of the sun and the wind.

‘The stars, my friends,’ he crowed. ‘We’re going to watch the stars.’

* * * *

The Mage

‘The Change is truly a wonderful thing, but one

can have too much of a wonderful thing.

That the mind exists in a world of change readily

demonstrates the necessity for balance between

order and chaos, rigidity and flux.

The Change needs Sky Wardens just as much

as Sky Wardens need the Change.’

MASTER WARDEN RISA ATILDE:

NOTES TOWARD A UNIFIED CURRICULUM

hwack.

‘Thoroughly unacceptable.’

Thwack.

Skender flinched as a spray of petals fell across his face. He brushed them away and followed the Stone Mage Aldo Kelloman along the narrow path.

‘Don’t you think so, boy?’

An awkward second played out, during which Skender tried to think of something noncommittal to say. Kelloman spoke and acted with the aggrieved boredom of a civil servant, but inhabited the body of a young forest woman not much older than Skender. He had had her head shaved, and he dressed her in voluminous robes that more or less approximated a mage’s formal regalia. He walked with the aid of a fragile-looking bowed cane carved from ivory. His voice never rose out of her lower registers, and his irritation with everything seemed unappeasable.

‘What exactly do you mean, Mage Kelloman?’

‘Everything! All these ridiculous trees and the
things
that live in them. The foresters and the farce they call a meal. And the mist — oh, bless my socks, the mist! Stifles during the day; chills at night. Puts rot and mildew in everything. How one is supposed to find one’s way in it, I’ll never know. And yet it never rains — ever. Unbearable!’

Skender cleared his throat. He agreed on some points, but he wouldn’t go so far as to damn everything he had seen. The foresters had a right to live any way they wanted. As long as they didn’t hurt him and his friends, they really could eat spiders for all he cared.

‘I’m sure they’re not always like this,’ he ventured. ‘I mean, after the flood —’

‘After the flood? Not always?’ Kelloman fired his words back at him with outraged venom. ‘I tell you, boy, their barbarism is untempered by the slightest degree of civilisation. Not even when word came from the Synod itself, instructing me to determine the source of the flood and giving me Special Powers to do so —’ Skender heard the capital letters clearly in the mage’s pronunciation ‘— even then, they continue to ignore my requests and relegate me to the shadows. I am ignored, boy. Treated as a second-class citizen. The irony, that one such as I should be so maligned, is unimaginable!’

The mage had stopped on the path to pepper his words with pokes at Skender’s chest, as though trying to physically batter him into agreement.

‘And the circumstances in which I’m expected to live ...’ Kelloman rolled his eyes and shuddered. With the sigh of one very much put upon, he turned and resumed his journey along the path. ‘Simply intolerable.’

Thwack.

The man’s long ivory cane whipped out and knocked the head off another flower. More petals flew and Skender winced. On the one hand, flowers were just flowers, so what did it matter if Kelloman wilfully cut them back? On the other hand, they were part of a forest revered by the people who lived in it. The foresters definitely wouldn’t like it if they saw what he was doing.

Then Skender wondered if they knew full well what he did, and that was why they treated him with disdain. They might not go so far as to expel a representative of a distant, powerful country, but they could make life unpleasant for such a person.

Eventually they came to a small treehouse jutting out of Milang’s upper levels. The position gave a clear view over the treetops — which meant a clear view of mist only — and it should have had a spacious feel. However, Kelloman’s quarters were cramped and messy, filled with dirty dishes, discarded clothes and thick with webs that Skender eyed with suspicion. The mage cleared two spaces for them to sit, pulled a bottle of something dark and pungent-looking from under a chair and poured himself a drink. When offered one, Skender rapidly shook his head. The glass Kelloman took for himself was brown around the lip and fluffy where it had lain on its side in the dust. Skender had no doubt the one he received would be in even worse condition.

‘If you haven’t been sent to replace me, what are you doing here?’ Kelloman said, settling into a well-worn rut of immobility and dissatisfaction. He was sweating heavily after the brief walk, and Skender wondered why he didn’t just take off, or loosen, some of his robes.

Skender opened his mouth to give the standard explanation: that they were seeking the source of the flood, the Angel, the reason for the failure of the seers to see beyond a certain point in the future, and the Homunculus, too, if it was still alive. But as he went to say it, he knew it wasn’t the truth. Not the entire truth, anyway. His mission had ended on the rescuing of his mother from the Aad. He could have gone home to the Keep with a clear conscience, confident that Sal and Shilly would do what needed to be done next, wherever and however that might be. As much as he enjoyed their friendship and felt honour-bound to help them, that wasn’t the complete answer.

He couldn’t talk about it with Kelloman, of all people, but the thought of lying once more didn’t appeal either.

‘I’m looking for something,’ he said. ‘Or hoping to find something. Perhaps that’s a better way of putting it.’

‘Something,’ asked Kelloman with a shrewdness Skender hadn’t expected, ‘or someone?’ He winked.

‘Perhaps the Guardian simply threw you to me as a distraction. A sop to keep me off her back for a day or two. Despite my best efforts to educate these people, they refuse to listen, but I persist, exercising patience beyond reasonable expectation. I will endure this indignity, as I endure others. Do you see, boy, how they disrespect us? How they wilfully turn their backs on civilisation? One can’t be too judgmental — they are, after all, little more than savages — but one can be wounded on behalf of one’s betters.’

‘How long have you been here?’ Skender asked, relieved that the matter of his motives had been forgotten so quickly.

‘Two years. And a long two years it has been, let me tell you, without proper spices or educated company, without the arid gravity of the desert, and without even a decent roof over my head. You know, these people have no use for stone. Can you credit that? None at all! It might as well be gravel to them, fit to crush underfoot. It’s all leaf and vine, bough and trunk — endlessly fecund and feckless. Splinters and sap, I call it, and good for nothing. A breeding place for bugs and worse! You hear that buzzing sound? It’s made by insects as big as your thumb, all whining at the same time. And — ah!’ The mage jumped as something small and lithe dropped from the ceiling onto the back of his chair. ‘Speak of ill and ill comes. Look at this filthy rat, will you? An infestation in my very home. Appalling!’

Kelloman pushed the creature off the chair and to the floor, where it pounced on his feet. He kicked and sent it skidding into Skender’s chair. There it rolled over with a skittering of claws and righted itself, and Skender received a proper look at it.

Not a rat, not quite. It was smaller than a possum, with disproportionately large, fan-like ears, tiny fingers and toes, and a long thin tail. Its hind legs were longer than its front, and its face tapered down to a pointed nose that sniffed curiously at his ankles. Its colouring struck him as distinctly unusual: bluish-brown on its body and black around the eyes, its tail dark for half its length, fading to white at its brush-like tip.

‘Is that a bilby?’ he asked, dredging the name from his voluminous memory.

‘How should I know?’ Kelloman shuddered, making an elaborate display of wiping away imaginary germs. ‘Filthy thing keeps following me around. The locals won’t do anything to get rid of it — yet another example of their vile temperament. Disease-carrying rodents don’t worry them, but some tiny avalanche that destroys a bit of their forest gets them all in a tizzy.’

Some tiny avalanche,
Skender wanted to say. That
bit of the forest
had contained a village of one thousand people, all of whom had died. He perfectly understood the concern it had caused, and felt no wonder at all that they dismissed Kelloman’s relatively minor complaints about creatures living in his home.

Unable for a moment to think of anything to say that wasn’t disrespectful or downright rude, Skender bent to touch the bilby. It didn’t pull away. If anything, it craned up to sniff at his finger, as though hoping he had food in his hand. Tiny whiskers tickled him. Reassured by its reaction, he stroked the rough fur of its neck and back.

‘Don’t encourage it,’ spluttered Kelloman.

Too late. The bilby leapt onto Skender’s lap and nuzzled into a ball.

‘Perhaps I could take it outside,’ he suggested, although he was quite touched by the way the creature had adopted him.

The mage dismissed the suggestion with a scandalised sneer. ‘Just don’t blame me if you get fleas.’

‘I won’t.’

Kelloman drank deeply from his glass. ‘So, to home. What news of the Synod? Of Ulum?’

‘Well ...’ Skender struggled to think of anything that might be of interest. Interior gossip and politics had been effectively quashed by more recent events.

‘Come on. You’re a Van Haasteren. I know that Keep of yours is a long way from anywhere, but you must have something to report.’

Skender struggled through an anecdote about a councillor caught fiddling the books in one of Ulum’s many underground halls. Kelloman soaked up the tale with relish, begging every detail Skender had overheard. Skender did as he was told, even as a strange sense of dislocation crept over him. Kelloman’s manner and appearance were completely at odds, as were the circumstances of their meeting and their conversation. Not two weeks after the greatest flood the world had ever known, and on the brink of an even greater catastrophe, they discussed a minor scandal that most people had already forgotten.

Are you faring any better, Chu?
he wondered.
Are your distant relatives still hung up on the actions of your parents?

If the world ended, he thought, it would be because little things like this got in the way of doing what was right, not because of the actions of any one man or woman.

‘So the Synod asked you to find out about the flood,’ he said, when an opportunity to change the subject presented itself. ‘What have you learned?’

‘I told you,’ Kelloman sniffed. ‘The foresters won’t tell me anything.’

‘But you
have
asked?’

‘Of course! What do you think I am? They think the Panic did it, just as they blame the Panic Heptarchy for
everything
that goes wrong: floods, plagues, famines, even leaf-rot. You name it.’

‘Why would the Panic do something like this?’

‘A good question, boy. To drive the Guardian and her cronies out of the forest is the accepted answer. Seems the Panic don’t so much live
in
the forest as
over
it, and there are those who assume that the Panic would want it the other way around. Maybe that’s so; maybe it’s not. You’d have to ask the Panic and they don’t talk to humans much these days.’

‘Have you ever spoken to them?’

‘Stone the bards, no. That rowdy bunch is even worse than this lot.’

‘What about the wraith thing, then? Do you know anything about that?’

‘Well, now. That
is
interesting.’ Kelloman leaned forward, fingers steepled in front of him. ‘Rumour has it something’s been picking off the foresters one by one over the past two or three weeks — and the Panic too, apparently — but I have my doubts. The Guardian’s fool son got himself killed during a patrol three nights ago and all manner of fuss erupted. They’re so full of pride, these Delfines, that rather than admit he made a mistake — slipped off a cliff, perhaps, or shot himself with his own arrow — they’ve co-opted some ridiculous creature to explain the accident away.’

‘It’s not ridiculous,’ said Skender stonily. ‘I’ve seen it myself.’

‘Have you really? Are you sure it wasn’t the Panic? They’re adept flyers, you know.’

‘I’d know the difference.’

‘You who have only just arrived and don’t know one thing from another?’ Kelloman laughed as resoundingly as his small frame would allow. ‘Dear boy, you overestimate the Guardian and underestimate the Panic. But at the end of the day, they’re all savages. We could teach them a thing or two, if only they’d listen.’