The Hanging Mountains (61 page)

‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Schuet said, his gravelly voice softened by affection. ‘Your father made out he’d never put a foot wrong his entire life.’

‘That’s what parents do, isn’t it? We paint ourselves in the colours our own parents wore — and we see through our children’s disguises as though they were gauze.’

Sal felt uncomfortably as though eavesdropping. Neither had commented on his presence, although surely they couldn’t have missed his arrival. The fog soaked up all other noise around them. His breathing sounded horribly loud to his ears.

‘What do you think, Sal?’ the Guardian asked suddenly, startling him. ‘Is your mind broader for seeing the world? Are your eyes opened wide by travel and exploration?’

He cleared his throat, not sure where the question was leading. ‘I don’t truly know, Guardian. I’ve been travelling most of my life. My father and I never stopped for long when I was a child. We wandered up and down all along the borderlands between the Interior and the Strand, always on the run from the Sky Wardens. It wasn’t until I did finally stop that I had time to think. To learn.’
From Shilly,
he added to himself.

‘I see.’ He dimly made out the Guardian nodding, but he couldn’t read her expression. ‘Perhaps change is enough, then. Where it comes from doesn’t matter, or how.’

‘Lidia is brave and resourceful,’ said the Seneschal, leaning closer. ‘And she is restless, like your mother.’

‘Our son is dead.’ The pitch of the Guardian’s voice rose in a threnody. ‘I would not lose our daughter next, to a world I neither understand nor care for.’

‘She’s no safer here, as recent events have proved. Just because Panic and human are talking doesn’t mean all our problems will be solved. It will take more than the mist closing over us again to keep the world out.’

‘You’re thinking of sending Lidia with Marmion,’ Sal said. ‘That’s what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes.’ The Guardian sounded incredibly weary. ‘She wants to go. Maybe I could stop her if I expressly forbade it. Maybe she would go anyway. If I am to lose her, I would do so without harsh words between us. But I wouldn’t lose her at all, given the choice.’

Sal wondered what he would do in her shoes. Was it better to keep something caged and safe than free and in peril? He thought of Shilly and his jealousy of Kail, and felt bad for wanting to keep them apart. Now their positions were reversed, he wished more than ever that she was still around.

The polished wood under his hands felt as smooth as stone, but he could sense, through the Change, the way it had once been living. Fibres lay twisted in knots like ancient muscles. These planks had once held a tree together, had once been part of the greater creature humans called ‘the forest’. It still remembered life. At his urging, the wood began to glow like a brand, casting a faint reddish glow that seemed bright in the darkness.

‘Sometimes we just have to let go of things,’ he said, ‘and hope they come back. That’s what Highson, my real father, told me once. He gave me away, with my mother, before I was even born. The odds were against him seeing either of us again. When he did, we were both caged, and we didn’t want to be there. It went ... badly.’ He thought of his mother, tricked by one of the ghosts of the Haunted City into believing its promise of a way out. If Highson’s mad plan to rescue her from the Void Beneath had worked, she would have been trapped inside the Homunculus instead. Would that have been better, he wondered, or just another cage? ‘I escaped, but now I’m back. We’re still working things out. He knows, I think, that it wasn’t him I was running from.’

Even as he said the words, it occurred to him that Highson might not know that at all.

The Guardian’s eyes gleamed back at him.

‘I’m an optimistic person,’ she said. ‘I will try to believe that you’ll find Shilly and that my daughter will survive. Marmion will locate the source of the floods, and the evil rising in the mountains can be cast down. I will cling to these things here where I can do little but wait to see what eventuates — reassured by the knowledge that, if the world ends, I will lose no more than anyone else.’

The Seneschal put an arm around her shoulders.

‘Come back to us, Sal,’ he said. ‘Come back to us in peaceful times, and bring Shilly with you. Tell her Minister Sousoura owes her an apology, and that our hospitality will be better then.’

‘I will.’

The pair drew away into the darkness, leaving him alone with his bodyguard, who looked steadfastly out into the night, pretending not to have heard a word. Sal set free the wood beneath his fingertips, and the crimson glow died. The air felt colder than it had before, but he didn’t care. Its crispness was bracing, clearing his head of the day’s cobwebs and tangles.

Okay, Carah,
he sent out into the night.
You’ve got what you wanted. Highson has had his day with the Homunculus; it’s told him everything he needs to know. It’ll be just the two of us on your tail, with Lodo’s nephew as adjudicator. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, we’ll find you
—
and each other
—
along the way.

He waited a long time for a reply, but nothing came. Not even the use of her heart-name could penetrate whatever hid her from his senses.

Eventually, when the curdling mist had brought ice to every square centimetre of his skin, he went back inside and began packing for the journey ahead.

* * * *

The Cabal

‘We
are beams of white light caught by a prism.

At the end of our lives, we look back at the

brilliant colours that make us whole: the fiery red

of our childhood; the cool yellows and greens of

our middle years; the bluish purple of age and

decay. Beyond those shades lie colours our

ordinary eyes can’t discern. We cannot know,

except by hearsay, what happened before we were

born; we only glimpse in dreams what might

come after. A seer, however, is different. A seer

perceives the world in all its colours at once,

recombined as though through a second prism
—

and the beam of pure, terrible white they see is a

dangerous light indeed.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
EXEGESIS 5:5

fter a full day riding on the man’kin’s back, Shilly wished she’d found a new way to run that involved padded chairs and protection from the rain. Since leaving Milang, she had been relentlessly soaked, whipped by branches, pounded by unyielding stone, and ignored. Nothing she said provoked a response, not even when she had threatened to jump off if the man’kin didn’t tell her where she was going. They were smarter than they looked, obviously.

She hung on, determined to find out what was going on. The uncertainty of what lay ahead bothered but didn’t frighten her. If the man’kin had wanted her dead, they would have killed her as soon as they saw her. The fact they hadn’t killed her told her that another fate entirely waited at the end of her journey. What that was, she would only discover when she arrived.

The day grew old and still the man’kin ran: up and down valleys, fording rivers, climbing cliffs, leaping fallen trees, not missing a single step. Birds scattered at the sound of their heavy footfalls. Every bone in her body felt broken. She was afraid to look down at herself for fear of the bruising she would find.

Finally, as the fog turned golden with dusk, the man’kin came to a narrow ravine covered with a dense growth of vines and tree roots. Trickling water echoed from its depths. Her ride made its way almost delicately along a meandering stream, its clawed feet crunching on the hard stone. The air was very still.

Where the ravine should have been darkest and most quiet, a ghostly green glow shone. The burbling of conversation competed with the stream.

Shilly had wondered many times who would be waiting for her at the end of her journey. She never expected to see all of them at once.

Vehofnehu was the first to acknowledge her, rising from a low, knuckled crouch and executing a courtly bow as the man’kin halted in front of the group and stooped for her to dismount. She gingerly did so, feeling as though the bones of her bad leg had been smashed to jelly. Leaning on her stick with greater need than normal, she limped around the broad shoulders of the man’kin to confront the group.

‘Hello, Shilly,’ said Tom around a mouthful of roasted chicken. Her stomach growled at the sight, but her confusion was too great even to contemplate eating.

Behind him sat three of the Quorum, watching her with luminous jade eyes, and Mawson, propped upright by a cloth-covered bundle. Over him loomed the massive, rounded shape of the Angel, blind and expressionless.

‘You —’ She wanted to say something appropriately outraged, but the right words failed her. Yes, she was angry, but she was also desperately curious. ‘What in the Goddess’s name are you all doing out here?’

The empyricist grinned broadly. ‘For exactly that reason, Shilly. Please, join us. We’ll tell you everything.’

The ground shook gently beneath her as she hobbled closer. She looked up nervously, dreading a rockfall, but the tangle of roots and vines above effectively kept such at bay.

‘This is Shathra, Bahman, and Armani.’ The three glowing figures didn’t react when introduced. Scattered tiles, each displaying a different letter, lay in lines on the loamy ground between them. One line spelt out the cryptic phrase:
world-tree needs pruning.

‘They already know who you are,’ Vehofnehu went on, reminding her of the time she had seen one of them by the waterfall, and the sense of recognition she had gleaned from that quick glance. ‘We’ve been waiting for you. Our numbers are almost complete.’

‘“Our numbers”?’ she echoed, finally finding her tongue. ‘Who exactly are you, anyway?’

‘Sit, Shilly. Eat,’ he insisted, and she gave in. He squatted opposite her on wiry, flexible legs. Tom’s gaze didn’t shift from her even as he continued to eat. ‘We are those who have some knowledge of what’s to come — although you must understand that what I mean by “knowledge” is an ambiguous thing, just like the world itself and the future awaiting it. We know enough to understand that we don’t know enough. That’s why we have gathered together. To compare notes, if you like. Between all of us, we have a chance of determining what path to take.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Don’t you already know what’s going to happen? You —’ she pointed at the Quorum members ‘— travel backwards in time, so you’ve seen our future already. You —’ Mawson and the Angel ‘— see all times as one. And you —’ Tom didn’t react when she singled him out ‘— have been dreaming about it for weeks. How much more information do you need?’

Vehofnehu was nodding excitedly long before she finished. This was the most animated she had ever seen him. ‘On the face of it, my dear, you’re absolutely right. But the face is just one aspect of a person, and it’s also just one aspect of the truth. We see the future from many different angles, and what we see is always incomplete. Tom’s dreams are fragments; the man’kin see all possible futures, not just one; the Holy Immortals — as I have known the Quorum for many, many years — are still recovering from that future, and their memories are shaky, traumatised things. And then there’s me. Back in my observatory, I studied the movements of the stars, seeing reflected in them the deformations of this Earth. Even there I found only ambiguity and confusion.

‘Into this confusion stepped two people. One of them was you, although your significance was not immediately obvious. Only much later, when I had organised the extraction of your friends Tom and Mawson, did the man’kin mention the dreams you’ve been having. The pattern, the sand, the voice. You’ve been struggling to understand their meaning, and I believe that I have deciphered them. They’re a message, a very important message indeed, and I think our best efforts should be expended in doing as it says — once we work out what that is.’

‘I thought of that.’ She stared at him as one slightly concussed, hit by too much information at once. ‘But who could it be from?’

The Panic empyricist grinned. ‘I’m pretty certain you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Why not?’

With a clinking of tiles, the glowing man called Shathra spelt out a new message:
not all golems are evil.

She stared at the words, unable to decipher them even though their meaning was simple. How did they connect to her question, to her dreams? Was Shathra trying to tell her that the message came from a golem? She couldn’t work it out.

Trading one mystery for another, she asked: ‘So who is the second person?’

The empyricist barked with laughter, and spent a moment spelling out her question with the tiles — so the Holy Immortals could appreciate the joke too, she assumed. She flushed and balled her hands into fists, feeling mocked and left out of some grand conspiracy.

Tom still watched her, as silent as a mouse from his corner of the group. She thought of him, just a handful of days ago, saying
I’ve dreamed all our deaths
as casually as though talking about eating breakfast or taking a shit, and she wondered what he was thinking about now.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I came here for answers. If you’re not going to give me any, I might as well go back to Milang and work it out for myself.’

‘Let me tell you something you already know.’ The empyricist calmed her with outstretched palms, patting the air, and she knew she would never get used to the sight of his long fingers and short thumbs like that. ‘You’re here for a reason. We are all here for a reason. What’s coming sends shockwaves backwards in time, changing the world in ways big and small. More wild talents; restless man’kin; new movements in the stars; and dreams like yours, filled with strange urgencies. Those of us who see the symptoms must band together to do something about the problem. You’re part of that now. You can’t go back to Milang.’