The Hanging Mountains (60 page)

Then — gone. Sal looked down at the ground, exhaled, and looked at Jao.

‘I want to know how it happened.’

Kail heard a threatening edge to Sal’s voice. The anger was not erased, merely buried for the time being.

The Panic female looked shaken and upset. ‘It wasn’t an attack. I keep telling people that, but no-one will believe me.’

‘Then what was it?’

‘I think ...’ She hesitated, looking around the room at the people staring at her.

Rosevear sat next to Marmion, and Lidia Delfine sat next to him, a large bruise turning yellow down the side of her face. Heuve stood at the back of the room, looking naked without his beard. The fire had crisped it clean off, along with his eyebrows. Seneschal Schuet stood next to him with his right arm in a sling. The Guardian was elsewhere dealing with a mess of ministers ‘needing discipline’ as she had put it.

Warden Banner was also missing, nursing a broken leg earned while standing in the man’kin’s path.

‘I think they only came for her,’ Jao said. ‘I know that sounds crazy, but that’s the way it looked to me. They came bursting through the citadel wall. They could’ve crushed her and killed everyone else, if that’s what they wanted. But they didn’t. They stopped in front of her. She spoke to them.’

‘What did she say?’

‘The same thing they kept saying the last time we saw them.’

‘“Angel says run”?’

She nodded. Her eyes shone. ‘They didn’t say anything in return. The leader, the one in front, just knelt down like a camel and she climbed onto its back. Then they went off the way they had come, carrying her with them.’

‘Ways of running,’ Sal said slowly, ‘that don’t require legs ...’

The way he said it, Kail could tell it was a quote.

‘Why would she go with them?’ asked Lidia Delfine. ‘They’d just knocked down half the city.’

‘She had no reason to be afraid,’ said Sal. ‘Man’kin have never hurt anyone we know.’

‘But without an explanation, without saying
anything..
.’

Sal looked as though he was grappling with that particular issue too. ‘Shilly isn’t stupid. She wouldn’t have gone unless she thought she had to. It might be something to do with Tom and Mawson. Maybe she hoped the man’kin would be able to lead her to them. Or maybe —’ He stopped abruptly, and shrugged. ‘You know as much as I do.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jao, bowing her head with a tinkling of beads.

‘Don’t be.’ Despite Sal’s obvious confusion and hurt, he was clear on that point. ‘It’s not your fault.’

Kail cleared his throat. ‘Did they leave a trail?’

‘Clear through the city then off into the forest,’ said Heuve. ‘A child could follow it.’

‘Then I suggest I do just that.’ Kail had become accustomed to hiding the tightness in his chest, and Rosevear’s ministrations seemed to be having some effect. ‘The sooner I leave, the better.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Sal.                   

‘Just hold on a moment,’ said Marmion, raising his hand for silence. ‘Let’s not dive into anything too hastily.’

‘I’m going,’ said Sal, ‘and you can’t talk me out of it.’

‘Let me finish. Tom spoke to you of a prophecy, did he not? Something concerning him and Shilly and a cave of ice? Doesn’t that suggest to you that she’s safe for the moment? Or at least that she will be, until that particular prophecy comes true?’

Sal nodded stiffly.

‘Well, then. You can go after her with my blessing. I’d do it myself if I didn’t have more pressing matters. But at least stop to think, first. We don’t want you running into a trap.’

‘That does make sense,’ said Kail. ‘And there’s someone else I’d like to have along. If we wait until he arrives, we’ll be better off. There’s safety in numbers, after all.’

‘Who?’ asked Sal.

‘Your father.’

Both Sal and Marmion reacted, but neither said anything at first. Marmion, Kail assumed, would want to keep the former fugitive under his watchful eye, while Sal would probably have preferred to go on his own. They both knew it made sense, though. Highson had a stake in Shilly’s fate, just as Sal did. And he was no lightweight when it came to the Change.

‘All right,’ Sal said. ‘We’ll ask him. If he wants to come, he can come.’

Marmion said nothing, but the wrinkles around his eyes tightened.

* * * *

Afterwards, while Sal talked with the city suppliers, Kail took Marmion aside. ‘Are you going to tell anyone what really happened down there, during the fires? Are you going to tell me?’

Marmion looked cornered. ‘It was very confusing. In the heat of the moment —’

‘Bullshit. Don’t try to play me. The others might not need a detailed explanation, but I do. I saved your life, remember. I
touched
it.’

Relenting, Marmion took him to a small antechamber and shut the doors. They sat on two beautifully carved wooden chairs with armrests the colour of bleached bone, not quite facing one another. On a small table next to his seat, Marmion placed a small silver pin Lidia Delfine had presented him with in thanks for saving her and the Guardian during the attack on the city. In the shape of a curled banyan leaf, the pin caught the light and held it, made it flow like liquid across the smooth silver surface.

‘I’m still working it out myself. When the wraith attacked us in the Divide, I put up my injured arm to drive it off. It worked, but a piece of the wraith got into me in the process. It burned in me, ate at me, but it took me a long time to work out what it was. It didn’t talk, didn’t try to take me over. It just made me feel... different.’

The one-handed warden rubbed his scalp as though at an itch. ‘The swarm tried to get it back. That’s why they attacked the citadel so boldly the very next day. My plan to trap them should have worked, but not for the reasons I thought it would. The thing in me was the bait, not the charms Kelloman and I were working. By then, though, the golem had taken charge of them, and they reined in their baser impulses. The piece in me and the one called Giltine were abandoned for the time being.

‘I swear I didn’t know about the ghost hand until you saved me. I thought I was just imagining things. But once I knew that the thing in me could manifest, was powerful, I wondered what else it could do.

‘The weather was the key. The fire had stirred everything up, made the clouds volatile. It reminded me of spring storms back home, with the horizon alive with lightning. We’d tried air and fire, I thought, and hadn’t killed the wraiths. What if I combined the fog and the forest instead? There’s a tension between ground and clouds that sparks lightning; it was just a matter of tapping into the roots of the trees and letting nature do the rest. Giltine’s cage acted as the lightning rod. The fact that I wasn’t actually holding it — my ghost hand had that honour — protected me from the shock.’

Kail acknowledged the gambit with no small amount of admiration. ‘That was quick thinking.’

Marmion pulled a faintly irritated face. ‘I was lucky, and I’ll admit it. If it hadn’t worked, none of us would be here now.’

‘It did work.’ Kail thought of the twisted lump of inert metal found at the epicentre of the first lightning strike. ‘You killed six wraiths at once. That’s something anyone would be proud of.’

‘Not quite six.’ Marmion reached out with his injured arm and picked up the silver pin. Invisible fingers held it in midair a palm’s-length away from his bandaged stump. ‘I think I’m stuck with this now. Not as good as the real thing, and certainly not something I’d like to use in public, but better than nothing. Don’t you think?’

Kail didn’t know what to think. He had guessed part of the truth, but in the heat of the moment had feared Marmion had accepted the ghost hand as a bribe in return for the imprisoned wraith. The fact that it wasn’t a powerful charm at work but something more primal, more insidious, wasn’t necessarily better ...

Marmion tossed the pin from his ghost hand to his flesh-and-blood hand.

‘Please, don’t tell anyone. I don’t want people getting jumpy.’

‘I won’t.’ Kail wasn’t sure anyone would believe him.

‘No, I suppose you won’t. You’re very good at not telling people things, like your relationship to Lodo, or that the Homunculus was with Sal on Geraint’s Bluff — even when I asked you not to go behind my back again.’ Kail began to defend himself, but Marmion waved it away and leaned forward in his chair, his expression grim. ‘I don’t like this expedition you have planned with Sal and Highson any more than I like that
thing
walking around among us. I will accept both only under duress, so don’t take any more chances with my patience. Please.’

‘Yes.’

‘What does that mean? “Yes” to what?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Kail felt absurdly like laughing, being lectured to by a man he had written off four weeks earlier as a pompous fool, and actually feeling like he deserved the lecture. ‘Yes, you’re right to be angry. I should’ve told you.’

‘You should’ve — but I’m honestly not that angry. Sometimes I surprise myself. We’re both trying to bluff our way through this. Maybe it’s the only way to cope.’

‘Maybe.’ This time Kail
did
laugh, and it felt good, as though it had released something built up in him that he hadn’t been aware of. ‘Shilly would be pleased to see us jumping like this. She’s been missing barely a day and everyone’s fighting over who gets to go find her.’

‘I’m not. I can’t. I get to fly a balloon up the side of a mountain in search of something that might not exist — and might kill me if it does.’

‘So that’s your plan?’

‘Once we’ve honoured Eitzen and the others, yes. The kingsfolk have returned all the goods stolen from us, so we have no shortage of supplies.’ Marmion issued a sound that was almost a laugh. ‘From bonefish to balloon. If you can think of a better way, let me know.’

Kail thought of the seer in Laure and what she had told him:
You’re walking to the end of the world and do not know it.
He felt he had gained a better idea of what he was doing, but that wasn’t the same thing as knowing why.
Blood will run like water...

He leaned forward and held out a hand. ‘The same goes for you, of course.’

They shook, flesh to flesh.

We’ve both changed,
thought Kail as he went off in search of the young runner who had stopped to heal him when she should have been delivering her message to the Guardian. After thanking her, he had an appointment with Rosevear. He would need as much of the local salves and unguents as he could carry if he was going to survive the hunt for Shilly. Unconsciously, his right hand crept up to the pouch around his neck and gripped it tightly. He could feel the Caduceus fragment vibrating through the parchment wrapped tightly around it.

I
just hope,
he thought,
it’s a change for the bett
er...

* * * *

Sal barely heard a word Marmion spoke as he outlined his plan for a combined expedition of forester, outsider and kingsfolk not long after lunch. Sal hadn’t eaten. Inside he felt only tension and worry, as though his intestines were maritime ropes coiled in complicated knots.

Shilly was gone. First Kemp, then Tom and Mawson, then Eitzen, and now her. It seemed that she had gone of her own accord, but that didn’t make her absence any easier to accept. Nor was it made any easier by the ache in his gut that told him she was still alive, somewhere. The last time he had seen her, on the jagged slopes of Geraint’s Bluff, she had been worried about
him
disappearing. Events since then had taken turns neither of them could have anticipated.

He remembered the confrontation with Upuaut, its taunting of him with knowledge about his missing friends. Had he missed an opportunity to find Shilly without knowing it? Would he have decided any differently then,
had
he known?

Arguments and suggestions filled the meeting room as densely as. smoke. He had to get out. Ignoring questioning looks, he stood and slipped quietly out the door.

A guard peeled away from the many watching the entrance and followed him as he wandered, at random at first, through the citadel. Night had fallen some time ago. The air quivered with the smell of trees and cooking and smoke from spot fires, which hadn’t been fully extinguished, drifting up from below. He needed to get higher, away from everything. He needed to think.

As he climbed the steps to the top of the citadel wall, where Jao had said that she, Banner and Shilly had been held captive, he thought of Marmion’s plan to cross the mountains by air and remembered the dream Tom had told them about, seemingly months ago in Fundelry.

Something dark and ancient lived there, under the ice, and it knew we were coming.

Under a starless sky, not far from the hole the man’kin had made, he saw only doom ahead of them all. He leaned on the wall and breathed deeply, as though filling his lungs might somehow clear the pressure mounting in his chest. The citadel’s giant bell had been salvaged from the wreckage apparently, but that was very small consolation for other losses.

‘We live our lives in shadow.’

The woman’s voice came from his right, further along the wall. He looked up with a start, wondering who had spoken. Too deep and mature to be Shilly; too smooth and human in inflection to be Jao.

His eyes, still adjusting to the darkness, made out a shadowy shape, head tilted slightly back.

‘I saw it, briefly. The sky, I mean. My mother used to talk about it. She went for a ride in a captured balloon once, so high she came out the top of the clouds. I never quite believed what she said. It didn’t seem real, that there could be so much beyond the forest, outside our world. Why should there be? It doesn’t make sense — yet there it is.’ The woman sighed. ‘My grandmother was furious when she found out, and had my father flogged for allowing it. He was, in fact, very nearly dismissed from service. Mother only stopped that by threatening to elope.’

Sal knew her, then, as the Guardian, absent from the meeting on the pretext of attending to matters of state. Behind her, standing close but not intrusively so, Sal made out the silhouette of the Seneschal.