The Hanging Mountains (23 page)

The platform was gone. Where it had been there was a hole in the canopy, open to the sky. Tendrils of smoke and fog wreathed the charred remains of whatever had stood between Kelloman and the wraith: grey-black sticks marked the skeletal framework of supports, load-bearing beams, walls, ceilings and floors. Nothing else had survived the power of the charm Kelloman had used.

Voices echoed from above, exclaiming, calling, inquiring. The burned canopy shifted beneath him again, and he struggled to maintain his grip on the limp mage.

‘Over here!’ he yelled at the top of his lungs. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can hold on!’

The bilby leapt from his shoulder and scampered away through the canopy. He wished he could do the same, even as he cursed its sudden cowardice. He hollered until the ash in the air made him choke. Coughing violently, he felt his feet begin to lose traction and scrabbled for a new handhold.

‘Help us!’

‘Hang in there, Skender,’ yelled a familiar voice from above. ‘We’re coming.’

Blinking ashen tears from his eyes, he looked up into Chu’s face.

Beside her, Heuve fastened a rope to a beam two levels up, allowing one of the guards to clamber down to his level. The bilby jumped off the guard’s back as he drew nearer, and scampered up Skender’s outstretched arm.

‘Guess I shouldn’t have been so hasty,’ he told it, as the guard took the mage’s weight from him.

‘I’ll come back for you in a second,’ the guard told Skender as he and Kelloman were pulled away by those above.

Relief at being rescued faded as memories of the thing that had attacked them flooded back. He peered down through the blasted branches, searching for its body. All he saw was a blackened hole, smoking.

‘Don’t take too long,’ he called up at the others, and clung tighter to his awkward perch.

* * * *

The Stars

‘The sky is a mirror to the world.

Stare at it long enough and you

will see yourself.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
EXEGESIS 5:33

 murmur goaded Sal onwards and upwards through the darkness. Every muscle burned and his spine felt like an over-stressed mast. His head ached from the repetition of taking one rung at a time, over and over, without slipping. He kept climbing, safe in the knowledge that he was faring much better than his father, two rungs behind and breathing in rapid, ragged gasps.

The voice wasn’t one he recognised. A curious mixture of excited and querulous, it followed long, lilting trajectories from topic to topic, not deflected by the occasional question or comment from those listening to it, but striking out along newly syncopated pathways leading the Goddess only knew where at its own whims. No matter how he strained, Sal couldn’t quite make out the words. For what felt like a small eternity, he was caught in the darkness, reaching for some anchor of comprehension just as he reached for the next thin rung in sequence, one after the other, trying hard to ignore the gaps between them. Each time he thought he was getting a grip on the words, they slipped out of reach again. He found it maddening.

What would happen if he ever reached for a rung and it wasn’t there? His body was so trapped in the repetitious rhythm of its ascent Sal was sure he would climb through one of the gaps in the ladder and fall down the way he had come, to a pointless and messy death.

Finally — inevitably, perhaps — burbled consonants and vowels coalesced into words, and words strung themselves into sentences. Sentences tied knots of conversation and argument around concepts he had never heard discussed in so much detail before — not even in the Haunted City or the Keep, where such things, he supposed,
should
be discussed.

‘I watch the stars every night,’ said the voice, ‘and I am no closer to knowing them than I ever was. Understanding? Yes, I aspire to that. But knowing them, no. That I will never achieve. How could I? It would be like watching a busy market, day after day, with the expectation of knowing every face in the crowd. I can imagine coming to recognise a number of individuals out of such a crowd, because some have distinctive features that recur every now and again, but would that mean I
knew
them? I fear not.’

‘There are maps,’ said a male voice. It sounded like Rosevear. ‘In the
Book of Towers.
I’ve seen them. Maps of the sky, with names.’

‘Yes, and great constellations marked too, I bet.’ The owner of the voice sniffed contemptuously. ‘A map is not the thing,’ my friend. I too could draw a map, right here and now; it might even be accurate one day in a thousand. Would that please you, make you feel you were closer to some deep understanding of the world we live in? Would it reassure you to have that piece of paper in your hand, even as you tried to find the stars you sought, and failed?’ A balled-up piece of vellum fluttered past Sal, taking him by surprise. He forced himself to resume his steady rhythm. ‘A map is worth less than the paper it’s printed on unless the person who drew it knew what they were doing. And even then, you need to know how it works. Maps are like machines, you see: only as good as the thought that goes into them, and liable to be a danger to those who
don’t
think.’

‘What use, then, is studying the sky? If the stars are unknowable and their names are meaningless, what’s the point?’

‘The point is, of course, that although as individuals they cannot be known or even counted with any great precision, as a whole they are immensely interesting. Their ebb and flow reflects what happens beneath with more precision than you would credit, I’m sure.’

‘The Void Beneath?’

‘No, here. On the ground. Well, you know what I mean. Do you?’

‘You’re saying that motions of the stars are influenced by what
we
do, how
we
move.’ A new voice, one Sal knew instantly.
Shilly’s.

‘Yes, yes. And why shouldn’t that be so? Everything else in the world is influenced by us. The

Change flows through us from all corners of the sea, the stone, the sand — and the sky, too. It’s all connected.
All
of it.’

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean,
why?’

‘Well, just that. What makes us so special?’

‘Oh, we’re not special. No more so than the trees or the ground or the air. We’re just part of it. And by
it
— because I know you’ll ask — I mean nothing more than just that.
It.
Everything. Does there need to be more of an explanation than that? When a cup is full, do you wonder why it has to be full? What it means to be full? How it got to be full? The cup is simply full, and that’s all we need to know about it.’

Sal welcomed the argument. It was a fine distraction from the climb, and a sign that he was getting somewhere. Far above, at the very limits of his vision, a faint yellow patch had appeared, as of a light burning somewhere impossibly distant.

‘Let me put it another way. Step on an ant and you don’t even notice. But the ant notices, without a doubt, and so too do those around him. Was it special in some way to have been trodden on by you? Did you choose him specifically from the many you could have trodden on? Of course not. It just happened that way. We and the world are like that too. Are humans special to be living in this one, in this fashion? No. Are the man’kin, or the golems, or the kingsmen, or the glasts? No. We just are, and looking for higher meaning or a greater purpose is pointless.

‘Patterns and processes, on the other hand — they are what we must seek. Learn the way things work and you can work them to your will. Learn the way things will, and you can make them work for you.’ The voice cackled gleefully. ‘Do you see? Mages and wardens understand some of this. The ones you call the Weavers understand more.’

‘You know of them?’ Shilly sounded startled, with good reason.

Sal hadn’t heard that word for a long time either, outside of him and Shilly. The Weavers were a shadowy group that claimed responsibility for the Divide, and for maintaining a dynamic equilibrium between the Interior and the Strand. Highson Sparre had once been one of them, as had the Alcaide Dragan Braham.

‘Of course I know of them. I see many things from up here — and much that you ground-folk assume is well hidden, I assure you.’

A wave of strangeness rolled over Sal between one rung and the next. He froze in mid-climb, fearing what such disorientation might do to him at this point in the ascent. His head swam so badly that he could hardly tell which way was up any more. There was no handrail on the spiral staircase. If he put one limb wrong and slipped —

‘Keep moving, Sal,’ called Griel from below. ‘I told you not to stop, no matter what. Do as I tell you and it’ll be all right.’

Sal forced himself to obey the Panic soldier’s gruff words. With a tremendous effort of will, he brought his right hand out and forward, to where body memory told him the next rung should be. It was indeed there, and he gripped it tight, and forced himself onward, rung by rung, until the effect faded.

The voice had stopped too. So he realised when his senses cleared. The interior of the tower was silent, and the light above had become abruptly brighter.

‘Hello?’ came a cry from the summit. ‘Is that more visitors I hear?’

Sal peered up and saw a stocky figure silhouetted against the warm yellow glow, looking down at him. He managed a wave with one cramped hand. ‘Are you the empyricist?’

‘I’m many things. That will do for now.’

Relief lent Sal new strength. Not only was Shilly at the top, but Griel had led them truly. After their meeting with the Quorum, Griel had come for him, Mawson and Highson in the holding cells as promised, leaving Schuet and Mikia behind, but he had been less than communicative during their crossing of the balloon city. When pressed, he had said only that Vehofnehu was an empyricist who could help them work out what to do next.

Sal knew what an empyricist was but had never met one before, not in the Haunted City or anywhere in the Interior — his stay in both places had been too short and tumultuous. He imagined charts and strange instruments, and the faint aura of instability that so often accompanied exploration into the arcane.

That he was proved right on all three counts didn’t necessarily reassure him.

When the top of the spiral ladder-staircase finally came into view, he saw an ancient Panic male waiting for him — grey-cheeked, wild-haired and dressed in a worn robe that might once have been green. A wiry but strong grip helped him up the last two rungs to where Shilly was waiting for him with arms wide and eyes relieved. The pressure of her cheek against his felt like coming home.

‘When Mawson came up in the cage,’ she said, helping him to a seat, ‘we knew you wouldn’t be far behind.’

For the moment, Sal was too winded to speak. He let gravity take him and folded gratefully onto a dusty cushioned surface. Distantly, he acknowledged the space around him: a circular room with a roof and many windows granting access to the night sky. A handful of clear yellow mist globes provided dim illumination. Tom lay curled in a shadowy corner, sound asleep with a worried look on his face. Rosevear helped Sal’s father out of the stairwell and into another chair.

Griel came last. Even with the Panic’s natural stoop, he stood a full head higher than the empyricist. Despite that they gripped each other’s hands as equals.

‘You are welcome here, my friend. Always welcome.’

‘Thank you. I’m sorry I can’t come more often.’

‘Pfft.’ Vehofnehu waved away Griel’s apologies and went about pumping water for the new arrivals. ‘You have much to do below, I know, so I forgive you for sending that buffoon Ramal instead. How’s Jao?’

Griel’s protruding brow became even more thunderous, but with concern, not anger. ‘She fears for us. Fears where we’re heading and what we might become.’

‘As should you.’

Sal accepted a tall glass of water from Vehofnehu and drank it in one gulp.

‘Where’s Kemp?’ he asked. ‘Were you able to help him?’

‘No one can help your friend now,’ said the empyricist, turning his back and moving away.

‘He’s dead?’

The look in Shilly’s eyes told Sal that Kemp’s fate wasn’t so simple. She explained the situation to Sal and Highson while Mawson watched stonily from the pedestal he had been placed upon.

Sal felt equal parts dismay and concern at what he heard and saw as he wearily stood by the couch studying the way Kemp’s tattoos appeared to float over skin turned glassy and grey. That Sal had known nothing about glasts before now didn’t concern him: strange things lived in strange corners of the world, and the Hanging Mountains were very strange indeed, judging by what he had seen thus far. He only wished he had been able to act more quickly on the boneship to save his friend, and wondered what needed to be done to prevent the glast-Kemp from endangering anyone else.

It was then his turn to bring the others up to date. His recollections of the audience with the Quorum possessed a dreamlike quality, as though it hadn’t really happened, or not quite in the way he remembered it. Highson backed him up, however, supporting his description of the encounter with the cousins Tarnava and Elomia, who acted as guardians and translators for the Quorum itself.

‘Glowing green, you say?’ Shilly’s brow crinkled at the description. ‘I saw someone like that at the base of the waterfall, just before the Panic fired on the boneship.’

‘Really? You didn’t mention it before.’

‘There wasn’t exactly time to, and I couldn’t be sure I didn’t imagine it. Now, though ...’

‘Why would one of the Quorum leave the city?’ Griel asked Vehofnehu.

‘They’re not prisoners.’ The empyricist had listened to their conversation with one ear as he fiddled with glass lenses mounted in several strange instruments. ‘They come and go as they will.’

‘They never have before.’

‘That you’re aware of.’ Vehofnehu winked. ‘They visit me here, sometimes. We talk as best we can.’