The Hanging Mountains (11 page)

‘We thought it yours.’ Schuet stood poised for a moment, then lowered his blade. ‘If we are not to be harmed, I will yield to you.’

‘Seneschal!’ the other soldier exclaimed.

‘Quiet, Mikia. I have little choice.’

‘Indeed. We outnumber you three to one.’ The creature took Schuet’s blade from him. ‘Your safety is assured, if you do as you’re told.’

‘Wait.’ Shilly was confused. Did that mean Schuet had surrendered? Where did that leave her and the others? ‘Who are you?
What
are you? Where did you come from?’

‘I am Griel,’ said the creature, frowning. ‘Do you not know my kind?’

She shook her head.

He — given a lack of obvious breasts and hips, Shilly settled on that pronoun — looked around the chamber at the wardens, then back to her. ‘His kind —’ Griel pointed a long index finger at Schuet ‘— the foresters, call my kind “the Panic”. We call ourselves kingsfolk. We live in the forest.’

‘I thought
they
lived in the forest,’ she said, pointing at Schuet.

‘We both do,’ said Schuet. ‘Therein lies the problem.’

She understood, and so did the wardens captured with her. Highson raised his eyes to the ceiling. Tom sat heavily on a bale of supplies. Rosevear stayed carefully between Griel and his patient.

They were caught in the middle of a territorial war.

Two more long-limbed Panic appeared in the entranceway. One said something to Griel in a whisper too soft for her to overhear. Griel nodded.

‘We’re leaving,’ he announced. ‘All of you, including the sick one. You’re coming with me to stand before the Quorum. Pack everything you need, quickly.’

With a hollow feeling in her stomach, Shilly thought of Sal, last seen on his way to help Skender. ‘What about the others?’

‘They fought well. The survivors are retreating up the Pass as we speak.’

Who?
Shilly wanted to ask.
Who are the survivors?
But Griel was unlikely to know names. To him, they were probably indistinguishable: flat-faced, short-armed, in various shades of brown.

‘How long will we be gone?’ asked Rosevear, rummaging among his supplies.

‘Assume forever,’ said Griel, turning and walking out onto the deck. He clicked his fingers before disappearing into the mist, and two guards came to take his place.

‘This is just great,’ Shilly muttered, fighting tears of frustration and anger. ‘Now what do we do?’

‘As we’re told,’ said Schuet. A significant glance added more clearly than words,
for now.
It was little comfort. In the time it took them to think of a plan and escape, they might be marched kilometres away. Where would Sal be by then? Would he think her dead?

Deep inside her burned the spark connecting them. While that lived, she would never give up hope — and neither would he, she knew. But hope was a tenuous thing, just like life itself. It could be snuffed out in a moment. She dreaded that day more than she dreaded her own death.

Putting the thought from her mind, she set about packing on the assumption that Sal would join her at some point, stuffing as many of their belongings into one bag as she could carry, then helping Rosevear prepare Kemp to be moved.

* * * *

Sal stopped by one of the human bodies to pick its pocket. Seeing the narrow hilt of a pocketknife protruding from its belt, an idea occurred to him — one both unpalatable and necessary at the same time. He needed something more permanent than the muddy concealment charms he had drawn on his forehead and chest while descending. Already the waterfall was beginning to undo the protection they provided.

Ducking into a small recess near the base of the waterfall, he set to work. The sound of fighting from both quarters had died down, but he was aware that he might be spotted at any moment. Charms to confuse the eye and ear were second nature to him, but he had never been in such concentrated combat before. He preferred not to test them against a sword-wielding warrior whose senses were heightened from adrenalin.

The blade was clean and sharp. Its tip tugged neatly across his skin, leaving bloody lines in its wake. Quickly, calmly, he redrew charms that wouldn’t fade in a hurry. Just as long as his concentration remained intact, so too would the illusion that he wasn’t there. The pain helped keep his mind focused.

When he was finished, he folded the blade closed with a snap and put it into a pocket. Blood trickled down his cheeks and neck, but he ignored it. Stepping out of the recess, he headed off through the fading fog to where the boneship still floated, tied firmly to the shore. Shilly was in there; he could feel her anxiety, her nervousness. He wanted to call her, to put her mind at ease, but feared alerting the Panic. If there were Change-workers or sensitives among them, he would immediately reveal himself by doing so.

Two slope-shouldered Panic stood on guard by the gangplank. These creatures had the same physical arrangement as a human of two arms, two legs, trunk and head, but the way they walked and moved was very different. When they attacked the humans on the beach, he had seen that they loped with smooth grace across flat and stony ground and that their long arms had the extra strength that better leverage would allow. When they stood erect their heads jutted forward in a profoundly threatening manner. Sal had no intention of taking anyone on face-to-face if he could avoid it.

Slipping into the water under cover of water-hugging mist, he waded out, then swam when the bottom dropped Out beneath him. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but he managed the distance to the ship. Getting aboard was more problematic, and it took him several attempts to get a hand up onto the bulwark and pull himself over.

He crouched on the deck for a moment, catching his breath and dripping red-tinged water. He could hear footsteps all around him. The Panic were ransacking the ship’s supplies, rummaging through everything and obviously taking what they thought valuable. That fitted their reputation for ‘banditry and murder’, as Delfine had put it. He only hoped their need for the former had put the latter on hold for the moment.

One of their number ran towards him. He shrank back into a niche, putting his trust in the charms to keep him hidden. The Panic ran by, but it had been a close call. It wouldn’t be long before one of them tripped over him. He needed to get off the deck and find somewhere to think.

Up.
When the way was clear, he climbed onto a barrel and then raised himself up onto the boneship’s sloping roof. The piscine shape of the hullfish skeleton was most apparent from that vantage point: a ridged crest ran along the top, where dorsal fins had once been attached; various holes and indentations, all now carefully caulked or turned into exhaust vents, marked where eyes, ears and other organs had reached from the protected interior to the world outside. Sal slipped off his sandals and clambered on the balls of his feet towards the front of the ship.

What he saw there chilled him even further than the water had. A man’s body was splayed on the bony surface, unnaturally still. His russet uniform had been torn open in several places and Sal saw deep gashes in sickly white flesh. Blood — surprisingly little — lay in a spreading pool around him. Not a large man in life, he now looked like a broken doll discarded by a giant child.

Sal remembered the dark shape that had swooped on Marmion and him above the waterfall. He had no evidence to connect that shape with the dead man before him, but it seemed to fit.

It killed my brother two nights ago,
Delfine had said with hatred in her voice,
and I will see it dead.

Sal carefully skirted the body, hearing voices faintly through the boneship’s roof. Shilly and Rosevear were down there, along with Tom and Highson and another man whose voice he didn’t recognise. When he reached the forward edge of the roof, he peered carefully over. Another two Panic guards watched the doorway, making sure the prisoners couldn’t escape. He considered dropping down on them, but didn’t feel confident of taking on two at once. If only Kail had been there ...

He killed that thought immediately. The missing tracker had surprised Sal with his ruthlessness. Kail would probably have slit the throats of the unsuspecting guards without a second thought, and gone on to kill anyone or anything who happened to cross his path.

There had to be a better way.

A Panic soldier strode across the deck, scattering the last shreds of mist, and walked through the doorway. His voice, commanding and confident, told the prisoners they would be leaving soon. Shilly asked how Kemp was expected to travel, and she was told not to worry about it; that wouldn’t be a problem. She demanded greater assurance than that, no doubt thinking of the stress that carrying a stretcher would have on the other prisoners, and probably worrying about her leg as well. Neither she nor Kemp were up to climbing the cliff faces around them, down which the Panic had so easily descended.

A deep droning sound from above distracted Sal from the conversation. Fearing the return of the ghostly creature, he rolled over and reached for the pocketknife. A large shape was descending from the clouds. Not a ghost, but a floating craft of similar shape to the boneship and a quarter its size. Suspended from two spherical balloons — each held at a constant distance from each other by a complex system of wires and cables — the gondola reminded him of the Laurean heavy lifter in which he had briefly travelled from the city of Laure over the Divide. That, though, had been a crude machine m comparison. This vessel possessed a baroque beauty that spoke of superior Engineering and maintenance, not just aesthetics. It looked more like a deep-sea fish than a bird.

The humming grew louder as it descended. This, he realised, was the means by which the Panic would take their prisoners away.

He had to get aboard.

Voices called. The crew of the balloon threw ropes when they arrived within range of the boneship. For a moment he feared that the flying ship might land on him, but it dropped to hover level with the boneship’s deck about a metre away from its edge. Perhaps its bottom touched water, but he couldn’t tell. Either way, a gangway soon connected the two craft, and stolen goods began to flow from one to the other.

Panic voices barked commands. The captives filed out of the boneship’s cabin, Kemp suspended on a makeshift stretcher between Rosevear and a broad-shouldered man with greying hair who Sal had passed while climbing up the waterfall. There were only two foresters among them. Shilly came last, leaning heavily on her cane. She groaned when she saw the balloon, and muttered, ‘Here we go again.’

Sal smiled and slithered across the roof to the side closest the balloon. Chu’s talk of balloons and forests came back to him as he thought about what to do next. What else had she said? Something about cities in the trees and constant fog. Nothing about a non-human species of creature wielding thoroughly sharpened hooks.

The boneship rapidly emptied. There was no sign of Marmion and the others. Sal didn’t have long to consider what to do. Somewhere, on the other side of the mountains and through the permanent cloud cover above, dawn was on its way. His camouflage charms wouldn’t hold forever.

Two Panic soldiers carried Mawson like a sack of flour between them, and dumped him heavily out of sight. As the last of the bounty was loaded onto the balloon — which sagged ponderously under all the extra weight — and the last of the Panic straggled aboard, Sal decided. He would jump across as the balloon ascended and grab hold of either the edge of the gondola or one of the many ropes holding it secure. He would hang there, unseen, while the Panic carried their prisoners away. When they landed, he would drop away and hope to avoid being spotted by whoever waited on the ground. And then, depending on where he found himself, he would work out how to free Shilly and escape.

The gangplank retracted. Knots slipped and ropes fell away. The humming noise returned and slowly, steadily, the balloon began to rise.

Sal stood and backed up several steps. He tensed, waiting for the right moment. When the balloon was higher than his head, he ran forward three paces and threw himself into open air.

The gondola rushed at him. He clutched its side, scrabbling for a handhold even as the air whooshed out of his lungs from the impact. His momentum sent the whole thing rocking. Cries of alarm went up from the Panic flyers. The ascent ceased. He slid downwards, caught a cable in a desperate one-handed grip. The thin wire bit into his fingers and he knew he couldn’t hold on. With a cry he slipped free.

Strong hands grabbed his wrist and arrested his fall. He jerked like a puppet in midair. His shoulder felt as though it had been dislocated.

‘Here’s the problem,’ called a voice from above. Sal looked up into the dark eyes of the Panic soldier who had ordered Shilly and the others to get ready to leave. Other long arms reached over the edge of the gondola to help haul Sal aboard. He didn’t fight them. His attempt to rescue Shilly might have been unsuccessful, but at least they would soon be together.

He tumbled gracelessly over the edge and sprawled to the deck, surrounded by leather sandals. Abandoning the camouflage charms, he clambered upright to take stock, blinking blood out of his eyes. Two soldiers searched him, took away the knife he had found but let him keep
yadeh-tash
on the thong around his neck.

‘Are you hurt?’ Shilly pressed through the Panic with concern and relief mingled in her eyes.

The leader kept her at arm’s length. ‘You know this one?’

‘Yes. He’s with me. Can I —?’

‘Not until I know what he wants.’

Sal stood, flexing his stinging hands in a manner he hoped wasn’t threatening. ‘She already told you. I’m with her. That’s all.’

The leader of the Panic assessed them quickly, then nodded. ‘All right. Sit down, both of you. If you cause any more problems, I’ll tip you out.’

Sal nodded and went to join Shilly. She put an arm around him and led him to where Highson sat on one side of the gondola. Tom sat on the other side, watching him with a worried expression. Rosevear reached into a satchel and offered him ointment for his cuts.