The Hanging Mountains (3 page)

Distantly, he felt a thunderhead of the Change building as the wardens concentrated on steadying the ship. Sal was in that blend of wills, and Highson Sparre, bolstering the reservoir stored in the hull of the boneship itself. Skender cursed himself, told himself to get his shit together and
stand up.
The rope around his waist tangled in his legs and he went down again.

A large hand grabbed the neck of his robes and hauled him to his feet. Startled, he windmilled and kicked frantically until his feet found something approaching a grip on the deck. The hand let go, and he clutched the tunic of the person who had rescued him. Kemp’s broad, pale face beamed down at him, entirely too amused.

‘Here.’ The albino pressed the rope into his hands. ‘Hold this and try to stay out of trouble.’

Kemp went to move off, but Skender pulled him back. ‘Tell Marmion. This isn’t just a current. There’s something else. It —’

The boneship tipped under them, throwing more people than just Skender off his feet. Kemp went sprawling, and so did half the wardens.

‘Hold tight!’ bellowed Marmion from his position at the prow. ‘Concentrate! We’ll ride it out!’

Skender couldn’t blame him for thinking it would be that simple. This wasn’t the first patch of restless water they had encountered on their journey; nor was it likely to be their last. The Divide was a nightmare of capricious currents and barely navigable hazards.

Gripping the rope tightly with both hands, Skender managed to bring himself vaguely upright again. He didn’t stop to wonder at the disappearance of his nausea. In the face of a concrete threat, he didn’t have time to be sick.

Another powerful jolt sent people flying in all directions. A cry of pain testified that someone had gashed themselves on a bony protuberance. The bilge took on a reddish tinge.

‘Listen to me,’ shouted Skender over the cries of alarm. ‘Something in the water is trying to capsize us!’

Marmion, poised at the front of the boneship, glanced at him then at the churning water ahead. Skender couldn’t tell what he saw, but he raised his bandaged arm above his head and waved for attention.

‘Sal! Up here!’

Wardens parted for Sal as he left the tiller and moved forward. Skender couldn’t make out the words he and Marmion exchanged. The boneship shook again, and Skender hoped the crunching sound he heard wasn’t bone breaking. Hullfish owed their buoyancy to bubbles of air trapped in their featherweight bones. If the attacker shattered enough of them, the boneship would sink.

Skender broke out in goosebumps, chilled by more than just the water. Water-sickness and giant snakes were bad enough; not being able to swim capped off the situation beautifully.

Marmion and Sal finished their hasty consultation. Nodding, they drew apart. Marmion called for his wardens to cluster around him. They made furious plans as the boat shook beneath them. Skender felt the flow of Change begin to shift into a new configuration.

Wind alone was insufficient to propel the boneship against the incessant current pouring down from the mountains. They relied on the efforts of the wardens to move anywhere but backwards. Following Marmion’s instructions, the steady acceleration that had carried them from Laure suddenly ebbed. Skender felt the boat give itself completely to the current and begin to float downstream.

The mental effort made by the wardens didn’t ease off, however. It was in fact redoubled. Skender looked around, saw their eyes closed in concentration. Some muttered words under their breath; some leaned with palms spread flat against the yellowish bone; others traced complex geometric shapes in the air with their fingers — employing whatever means suited them best to focus on their common purpose.

A handful of the shapes Skender recognised; he had glimpsed them in books and, once seen, never forgotten them. A sign for
mastery over water
came and went, followed by one controlling the flow of heat. A cloud of steam rose up from the surface of the boneship when Sal lent his wild talent to the charm, giving Skender a hot flush.

A new crunching sound arose from outside the boat. Not bone this time, but ice. The boat spun through a slurry of half-frozen water that cooled even further as the charm stole its warmth and sent it billowing in clouds to the sky. The bone deck shuddered underfoot, and Skender clutched the rope, wide-eyed.

Suddenly all was quiet. The boneship sat with its prow slightly upraised in a miniature iceberg that bobbed and spun gently on the surface of the Divide. The snake had been locked in the ice, trapped in mid-squeeze.

‘Good work,’ said Marmion into the uncanny quiet. Apart from the sound of water lapping against the ice and people regaining their footing, the silence was complete. ‘Now, let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with.’

Wardens spread out around the edge of the boneship and peered carefully over. Kemp joined them, and so did Shilly, emerging from the hollow cavity at the heart of the bony hull, leaning heavily on her walking stick. She looked as startled as Skender felt. He had no intention of going any closer to the edge than he absolutely had to.

‘Can you see it?’ called one of the wardens.

‘There’s something over here,’ someone else replied.

‘And here,’ said another from the far side of the boneship.

Skender pictured long, python-like coils entwined around the ship, frozen solid in the act of crushing it.

‘What
is
this thing?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it before,’ said Highson, standing at the tiller Sal had earlier abandoned.

‘Want me to cut off a piece?’ suggested Kemp, raising one leg to hop over the side of the boat.

Ice cracked and the boneship lurched. Kemp almost tipped out as one coil of the frozen serpent, then another, broke free of the ice. Hands clutched at Kemp and strained to pull his bulk back to safety. More cracking sounds came from all around the boat. Icy, translucent coils whipped and writhed. Cold splinters and cries of alarm filled the air.

The head of the snake appeared over the bows, a cone-like, tapering affair boasting numerous writhing whiskers that shook itself free of the last of the ice with an uncannily dog-like motion. Skender could see no eyes or nostrils — not even a mouth — but he had no doubt that it could see
them.
The whiskered head stabbed down at the boneship, narrowly missing Marmion. It emitted a keening, hissing noise more piercing than a whistle as it pulled back into the air.

The boat lurched free of the short-lived iceberg. Kemp had almost made it aboard, but slipped back as the boat tipped under him. Wardens pulled at his arms. A glassy coil flailed over Skender’s head, and he ducked barely in time. Remembering his despairing death wish, he hastily retracted it. The last thing he wanted was to be killed by a monster.

The head rose up to strike. Sal pushed forward, mouth set in a determined line. The air crackled around him, ripe with wild talent. Shards of ice flashed into vapour where he stepped.

The snake sensed him and its screeching grew louder. It swayed to triangulate on its intended victim then lunged downwards.

Sal blocked the strike with his arms crossed in front of his face. The snakehead ricocheted away and, with a piercing snarl, struck at Kemp instead, impaling him on its whiskers as though they were the spikes of a mace. Kemp roared with pain and would have been thrown from the boneship entirely but for the wardens holding him fast.

The snakehead pulled free, dripping blood from its deadly whiskers. Kemp fell limp. Sal leapt over him and caught the snake about its throat. Although unable to get his fingers completely around the slippery body, the Change made up for what he physically lacked. With a loud cry, he wrenched it down and smashed its head against the boat’s bony bulwarks.

A silent concussion pushed Skender off his feet and turned the day momentarily dark. The boneship skidded sideways, missing the cliff on the starboard side by the smallest of margins. With one startled squawk, the snake shattered into a cloud of fine sand and blew away on the wind.

Skender blinked dust from his eyes and hurried with Shilly to where Kemp lay on the rocking deck. The albino bled profusely from two wounds: one to his abdomen and the other to his thigh. Sal had dropped like a stone after killing the snake and lay next to him, unmoving. Shilly brushed long, mousy hair out of her lover’s eyes and made sure he was breathing.

‘Is he —?’ Skender didn’t know how to finish the question.

‘He’s still with us,’ she said. Her brown eyes brimmed over with concern. ‘He’d never go that far again.’

Skender didn’t hide his relief. Every Change-worker knew that the Void Beneath awaited those who took too much of the Change at once. That Sal had drawn so deeply as to knock himself out was worrying, but Skender believed Shilly when she indicated that Sal would recover. She knew Sal better than anyone, even Sal himself.

Kemp was a different question. The healer among the wardens, Rosevear, had stooped to examine him. A young man with dark skin and thick, curly hair, he was already sweating from exertion. ‘The wounds are very deep,’ he said. ‘We need to stop him bleeding before I can do anything else.’

Rosevear Took from three of his colleagues to staunch the flow of crimson from Kemp’s side. Afterwards, the albino looked even paler than usual. Skender sat by him, wishing there was something constructive he could do. Remembering the albino coming to his aid during the attack of the snake, a new sickness filled Skender’s stomach.

Rosevear’s will moved deep in Kemp’s wound. A glassy shard as long and sharp as a toothpick emerged from his side and fell to the deck with a faint, almost musical sound. Marmion, closely watching the healer’s ministrations, ground the fragment underfoot.

‘Please, give me space,’ Rosevear requested, leaning back on his heels and breathing heavily. His hands were bloody. ‘A steady surface to work on would help, too.’

‘Understood.’ Marmion stepped back and waved at the wing circling anxiously above. ‘I’ll see what I can do about that.’

At his signal, Chu dropped like a stone, tilting her wing and alighting at the last minute on the broad deck. A breath of air rippled across the boneship. Wardens took the weight of the wing from Chu’s back as she unclipped her harness and hurried forward, brow wrinkled with concern.

‘Skender, what happened? I couldn’t see clearly from the air.’

‘It’s Kemp,’ Skender explained. ‘He’s been injured.’

‘Kemp? Goddess.’ For the first time, she seemed to notice the albino splayed on the deck. A complicated range of emotions played across her face. ‘Will he be all right? What can I do to help?’

‘Tell us there’s somewhere to dock not far ahead of here,’ said Marmion, ‘or at least somewhere to shelter from the current.’

She nodded. ‘There’s a subsidence just around the bend. I don’t know how stable it is, but it could give you what you need.’

‘Good. Thank you.’ Marmion snapped orders to those wardens not assisting Rosevear. They moved off to rebuild the charm that propelled the boneship upstream while Rosevear worked on Kemp.

‘You’re
okay, then?’ Chu asked Skender, her deep, half-moon eyes studying his face closely. ‘When Marmion called me down, I thought —’ She hesitated, seemed to gather herself. ‘Well, I didn’t know what to think. That you’d puked your guts right out in all the excitement, maybe. I mean, this is the longest I’ve seen you upright in days. Could you
finally
be empty?’

She clapped him on the back, and went off to collapse her wing.

All right, Goddess,
he thought with a wince.
I’ve changed my mind
—
but this time I’m sure of it. You forget one little thing, and you pay and pay and pay. Spare me this torture!

If anyone heard him, Goddess or otherwise, no answer came.

* * * *

Shilly barely noticed the exchange between Skender and Chu as she tended to Sal. Everything had happened so quickly: the turbulence, which she had learned to endure by staying well out of the way, then Skender’s cry that there was more to it than simply crosscurrents. By the time she had emerged, Marmion had frozen the snake and solved the problem — or so it had seemed.

She had been too slow to help Sal when he’d rushed forward to save Kemp. Frightened, she hadn’t been, able to show him how to refine the charm he’d used against the snake. What he lacked in subtlety he had made up for with sheer grunt, turning a simple rock-crushing mnemonic into a powerful weapon. As a result, he lay unconscious before her, and there was nothing she could do about it.

His reservoir of the Change was empty. There was no strength left in him on which she could call to help him return. She would just have to be patient, to let him come back to her in his own time.

Make it soon, Sayed, my love,
she whispered in her mind, using his heart-name.
Make it soon.

The warmth of the afternoon sun was fading. The days became colder the deeper the boneship travelled in the foothills of the Hanging Mountains, but the nights weren’t as bitter as they could be in the desert. Shilly liked the crisp, moist air in the mornings. It helped her wake up, when she had to.

Beside her, Rosevear worked hard to save Kemp’s life. He moved quickly, assuredly, binding the less-serious gash in Kemp’s massive thigh with thick cloth bandages and concentrating primarily on the stomach wound. His expression was grim.

‘He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure.’ Rosevear glanced at her mid-ministration. ‘I’ll need to watch him closely. If the poison spreads, there might be nothing I can do.’

Poison?
she wanted to echo, numbly. The sides of her mouth turned down at the thought that Kemp might die. She had known him since her childhood in Fundelry. Just moments ago he had been strong and lively. That he could be so suddenly lost to them cast everything around her in a new light. She felt as though the bottom had dropped out of the boneship and they were falling free.

Beneath her, the vessel surged ahead, seeking the shelter Chu had promised. The sun swung in the sky as Marmion ordered the course changed. Highson, Sal’s natural father, still recovering from his pursuit of the Homunculus but determined to contribute in any way he could, swung the tiller hard to port. The rudder acted more on the Change contained within the boat than the water surrounding it, glowing a faint pearly white at night and leaving behind a trail of tiny bubbles during the day. She had watched the tiller’s attachment to the boneship in Laure, and wondered how so delicate a filigree of threads and filaments could possibly help the ship stay on course. Wardens used an entirely different watercraft to the fishers she had known in Fundelry.