The Hanging Mountains (6 page)

He was glad she had let him come with her. All grudges and hostilities stayed on the ground when they flew together. She hung behind him, which enabled her arms and legs to maintain the greatest control over the wing above them. Her warm presence comforted him. He felt her shifting her balance from side to side, smooth muscles stretching and compressing with limber ease. At times he found himself instinctively helping her, swaying with the wing as it rode the endless currents of the air.

Officially they were watching the boneship’s progress for any sign of obstruction. Unofficially, Skender sensed Chu’s restlessness with the task they had been given. Always the nose of the wing turned to point forward and upward, at the line of clouds that marked the beginning of the fog forests — a shelf of white that stuck out from the buttressed flanks of mountains. The land hidden by those clouds was supposedly fertile, perhaps even fecund. A hint of green at the base of the shelf was enough to convince him of that.

But the details were utterly obscured, and that ate at Chu. Given her freedom, she would have flown steadily eastwards — of that he was certain — into the cloud and in search of the wonders beyond.

‘Now I see why they’re called the Hanging Mountains,’ Chu said into his right ear, face held close to be heard over the sound of the wind. ‘Look. Magnificent!’

He did look, but could see nothing to solve that particular mystery. All he saw were clouds, really. The fading sun painted them all manner of oranges and reds and yellows, and he imagined fleetingly that he could see the shadow of the wing and its passengers writ large on those distant, ever-changing ramparts.

‘Yes, but — what?’

‘The name isn’t referring to the mountains behind the clouds, but the
actual
clouds.
They’re
the Hanging Mountains. Get it?’

And suddenly he did. Instead of trying to look through the clouds or at colours or shadows painted across them, he saw the clouds themselves. They did resemble mountains cut free from the land below and set dangling in the sky. Incredible, flat-bottomed, weightless mountains of whiteness.

‘I get it,’ he said, ‘but I’d maintain that poets shouldn’t be cartographers.’

She laughed and sent the wing tilting to his right. ‘You’re no fun.’

‘So what do we call the real mountains, then? Don’t they have a name?’

‘I don’t know. Do they need one?’

‘Everything has a name, even if you only ever see it on a map. Otherwise we’d get lost.’

‘Names don’t always matter, not in the real world. I can find my way back to Laure perfectly well without knowing the names of any of the places we’ve flown over.’

‘But what if you had to ask for directions?’

‘I’d take a pointed finger over a name any day. Anyway, we’re not likely to get lost out here with the Divide to follow.’

‘True enough.’ He sought out the boneship in the fading light, and found it taking a sharp turn to port around one of the Divide’s sudden corners. He wondered what was happening down there. A twinge of guilt reminded him of the responsibilities he still had, no matter how far above them he flew.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing. ‘What’s that?’

The wing tipped as Chu peered in the direction he indicated. ‘Where?’

‘There ...’ Close to the base of the clouds, something broke the Divide’s regular lines. A smooth, circular patch bulged from one side, while the edge facing away from the mountains vanished in haze. ‘It looks like a lake.’

‘There must be a blockage,’ she thought aloud. ‘Still several hours away, at the rate they’re travelling.’

‘We should let them know anyway.’

‘Go ahead.’

Skender reached under his robes and produced the shuttered mirror Warden Banner had made for them. His memory recalled the details of the code with perfect acuity, enabling him to construct a brief message.
Obstruction ahead,
he flashed through the medium of stored starlight.
Lake. Three hours.

He waited for the flash of acknowledgment before putting the mirror away. Duty done, he was able to concentrate on the obstruction itself while the light lasted. It wasn’t the first they had encountered along the way. The worst had been a section of the Divide not far from Laure where a tight turn had become choked with debris and rapids, necessitating the building of a channel deep enough to allow the boneship to pass in safety. That had held them up for half a day, with Chu and Marmion chafing impatiently for very different reasons.

The dusk deepened. Red-tinged clouds formed an impenetrable wall ahead of them, while behind them the last glimpse of the sun faded into the haze of distance. The wind grew colder, and Skender hugged his windswept robes tighter about him.

‘What are you hoping for from the people in the forest?’ he asked. ‘Your family left them generations back, and you’ve never known why. What if they moved on for a very good reason?’

‘There might well have been a dozen good reasons, all forgotten now. But no one ever told me I shouldn’t go back. I take that as a good sign.’

‘People have a way of forgetting things they don’t want to remember.’

‘Do they?’ she asked with a hint of sharpness.

‘Not me, of course,’ he amended, kicking himself. Whatever had happened between the two of them that night in Laure, he desperately wanted to remember, but no amount of mental persuasion or cursing himself could shake the details free. He had barely touched araq since then, for fear of a repeat performance.

‘I just worry,’ he said, ‘that you might be disappointed.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

They flew on in silence over the darkening land.

* * * *

The wardens slept in shifts as the boneship sailed onward through the night. Tom and Highson occupied the camp beds next to Kemp and Sal. Shilly stayed up, watching with a feeling of apprehension as blackness slid across the sky, stealing away the stars. She couldn’t see the clouds, but she could feel them creeping over her, their mass increasingly oppressive and ominous. Ever since Skender’s warning of an obstruction ahead, she had been unable to sleep. When Sal had returned to oblivion, still drained from the encounter with the snake earlier that day, she had come forward to meditate on the boat’s deck, her thoughts as dark as the sky above.

Whoever wins gets to choose the way the world ends...

Water rushed by the boneship’s charmed bows with a sound of heavy wind. Marmion sat on the prow, as unmoving and solid as a figurehead, the stump of his right hand cradled protectively in his lap. Almost she moved to join him, but in the end decided against it. The night was quiet; she wasn’t going to push her luck.

The Divide walls drew steadily closer together as the boneship continued eastward. That, combined with the spreading roof of clouds above, gave her the feeling of a trap closing around them. Periodically, one of the wardens keeping watch would play a powerful beam of mirrorlight across the way ahead, checking for obstacles not seen in the dark. Each time the light flashed, she swore the cliffs were nearer and taller, rising like black wings to sweep them away.

Two tight turns came and went. The water grew choppier, more restless, whispering like people engaged in a furtive argument. Shilly felt the boneship straining forward, rushing headlong to their unknown destination.

Gradually, over the muttering of the river, a new sound became audible: a roaring that put her in mind of the flood itself, all bass and treble mixed up into one growing cacophony.

Shivering, she did eventually move forward, exchanging her wariness for the desire not to be alone.

‘What is it?’

Marmion looked at her with dark-rimmed eyes then turned his attention forward again. Although she could make out very little in the darkness, she knew that wardens had ways of negotiating water not available to ordinary people. They could see well even under faint starlight. The Change made many such things possible, for those with the knack of tapping into it.

‘Waterfall,’ he said.

‘How far away?’

‘Around the next bend, I think.’

‘That must be the obstruction Chu saw.’

Marmion nodded. ‘All complications are unwelcome, but this one particularly so. We’ll have to stop until dawn, then survey the ground ahead. If we can’t raise the boat over the falls, we’ll be forced to continue on foot.’ He looked at her. “Walking long distances will be difficult for you, I know. Don’t doubt that I’ll do everything I can to spare you that chore. And Kemp.’

She studied him as best she could in the darkness. Was he trying to be nice to her? It seemed so. But his choice of words was unfortunate. Irrespective of her own feelings, she was sure Kemp wouldn’t like to be lumped in with a
complication
like a waterfall.

Instead of berating him, however, she tried a small joke. ‘Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to full-on mountain climbing, or we’ll both be in the shit.’

One corner of his mouth curled upwards, then both went down. His eyes turned forward. ‘I still feel it,’ he said, shifting his bandaged stump a little. ‘The fingers ... They itch. I long to scratch them.’

‘I still dream I’m running, sometimes.’ She wanted to tell him it would get easier, but there was no way she could promise him that. Her leg had healed to the point where at least she could walk again. Marmion didn’t have that hope to cling to.

‘We’re an odd lot,’ he said. ‘Cripples, fugitives, wild talents, failures. Does it seem fitting to you that we’re the ones racing to meet doom head-on, not some brawny band of adventurers?’

‘Perhaps it’s fate.’

‘Fate is for fools,’
said a familiar voice from below them, barely audible over the rising sound of the waterfall.

Shilly turned to look at Mawson where he sat on the deck behind her. The dome of his stony skull was barely visible. ‘Can’t sleep either, huh?’

‘
I
do not ever sleep.’

‘Tell us, then,’ said Marmion. ‘What does Tom see, if not the workings of fate?’

‘He
sees history in reverse. You look back and
see
connections between events; he looks forward and does the same. You both see an illusion. The connections are transitory. From moment to moment, all things are separate.’

‘To you, maybe,’ said Marmion, ‘but not to us. Our lives are entirely about connections. Without them, we are no better than animals, devoid of conscience, morality, hopes and dreams.’

‘I am not without such qualities.’

‘How can you dream if you don’t sleep?’ Shilly meant the question facetiously. She knew better than to get into an argument about time and destiny with a man’kin. The stone intelligences saw all things at once, and more besides: some things that didn’t happen Mawson claimed also to know about.

The man’kin didn’t grace her comment with a reply, as she’d expected. Marmion called over his shoulder to indicate the last turn before the waterfall. Shadows shifted around them. Looming limestone cliffs slid smoothly by. A faint gleam of green light caught her eye, and she squinted to make out where it came from. It couldn’t be a star, since the dense cloud cover obscured everything in that direction, and it was too low to be a signalling flash from Skender and Chu.

She was about to point it out to Marmion when the boneship rounded the corner and she had her answer.

Shilly gasped, and heard Marmion’s indrawn breath at the same time.

Before her, the Divide narrowed in fits and starts to a jagged bottleneck. One of the canyon’s steep slopes had collapsed into the water flow below. The tops of massive boulders poked out of the turbulent water like the heads of submerged giants; rounded natural steps led to the top of the Divide on the southern side where the earthfall had originated. Between that side and the other, through a gap in the top of the landslide, the water had forced a way.

The sight was magnificent. Shilly knew that the sea at night glowed sometimes. As waves rolled in and out at the beach near Fundelry, tiny sparkles of green glittered in the foam; the short-lived trickling gleams had captivated her as a child. In the waterfall at the base of the Hanging Mountains she witnessed the same phenomenon, only magnified a thousandfold. A great sheet of water, divided into three unequal sections by protruding spars of dark stone, jetted over the lip of the rock shelf six metres above them and plunged in a glorious green rush to the canyon below. The splash it formed was an explosion in viridescence. Shimmering concentric ripples of light expanded in vivid waves across the river. What caused it, she didn’t know. Some happenstance confluence of the Change at this particular location, perhaps, or an ancient charm long-buried in the Divide, awakened by the flood. Either way, it was beautiful and eerie at the same time.

She glanced at Marmion, and saw that he was looking down into the water ahead of them, not up at the falls. The water’s glow, although quickly diluted, still cast enough light to see by. Squinting down, she could make out what lay at the bottom of the river amongst the rubble tumbled too recently to be covered with silt.

There she saw faces: a multitude of upturned eyes and mouths gazing back at her with mute appeal, the bodies they belonged to pinned between stone slabs heavier than houses. Hands clenched and unclenched as though trying to reach her; legs kicked futilely for freedom. The boneship sailed implacably over their resting places, mute witness to the fate that had befallen them.

‘Man’kin,’ she breathed.

‘Yes,’ Mawson replied. ‘The Angel told them to run, but still they didn’t escape the flood.’

Shilly thought of all the man’kin swept away from the walls of Laure when the flood had come. Those obviously weren’t the only ones caught in the raging torrent.

She shuddered. The man’kin weren’t dead, but they were trapped. If silt ever buried them, they would remain in darkness forever.

What sort of fate was that? Couldn’t the Angel have warned them to run faster?

Shilly thought of Tom and his own dire warnings. She had had quite enough talk of end-times and the failure of prophecy for one day.