The Hanging Mountains (14 page)

Skender crawled over the top of the Divide. The edge was as bare as the edge at Laure or Tintenbar or the Lookout, but as his gaze rose from the ground immediately ahead of him and penetrated the swirling fog all around — beginning, even then, to glow with sunlight creeping around the mountains to the east — he saw the first low bushes and vines of a mat of vegetation that rose and thickened into a wall of fern and branch not five metres from him, hugging the sides of the steepening foothills. Trees rose up like statues within the undergrowth, supporting a canopy that looked well-nigh impenetrable. It extended upward as far as he could see, vanishing into the impenetrable fog, utterly fecund and utterly unbelievable for someone raised in a desert.

So much life! He couldn’t see over or through the overlapping boughs. For the first time, he could appreciate how it might be possible to lose oneself in such a profligacy of plants.

Still,
he thought,
how deep can it go? A dozen metres or so? Perhaps twenty? Not much more, surely.

Delfine and Marmion stood to one side, conferring as the last of the foresters and Banner climbed up from below. Marmion looked pale and drawn after the long, one-handed ascent. Chu stared at the wall of forest with an unreadable expression. She said nothing, and Skender was wary of approaching her.

Heuve ascended last. Taking one long look down the stone ladder he declared with confidence that they had not been pursued.

‘Good,’ said Delfine, flexing her left arm and wincing. ‘That’s one thing to be thankful for.’ Her cool façade broke, just for a moment, and Skender glimpsed the grief she felt at leaving her friends behind. She had already lost a brother. He considered telling her about the message from Sal, but he didn’t want to give her any false hope.

‘The path is clear,’ Heuve stated, inspecting a patch of the forest wall that looked no different from the rest. ‘We should keep moving.’

‘How far is Milang?’ Skender asked.

‘Half a day’s march,’ said Delfine.

On the other side of the forest, Skender assumed. Once they were through the trees and out in the open again, the only thing they would have to worry about was the increasing gradient.

‘I need to rest,’ said Marmion. ‘You can go on without me if you like —’

‘Of course we won’t. You’re injured.’ Delfine dismissed the suggestion out of hand. ‘There’s an arbour along the path. We’ll pause there to regain our strength. Will two hours be long enough?’

‘It will suffice.’ Marmion accepted the offer with a nod. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll lead the way. Please, all of you, do not leave the path — for the safety of the forest, as well as your own — no matter what you might see or hear.’

That puzzled Skender until they had broached the outer fringes of the forest and plunged inside. It was dark in there, and full of life. Everywhere he looked, plants crowded, blocking out the first glimmerings of dawn and choking any possible attempt at passage. The path beneath his feet was little more than a rut wide enough for one small person; roots snaked across it, always ready to snag an unwary foot.

He preceded Chu through the wild growth, holding one end of the wing behind his back with patient familiarity. Getting it up the cliff face had been a chore, but one he shouldered as his due. Leaving it behind for the Panic to claim as booty wasn’t an option. Although it had been Chu’s decision to come along on Marmion’s expedition, he would still blame himself if anything happened to the wing or to her.

They didn’t walk far. Delfine called a rest break when they reached a human-made clearing ten paces from the track. It was barely large enough for the eleven of them, even with the wing standing on one end, propped up between Skender and Chu as they sat and caught their breath. Skender leaned back and listened to the noises of the forest. Animals called constantly, hooting and hollering from unknown distances. Birds chattered among themselves, either ignorant of, or just plain ignoring, the humans in their midst. Smaller creatures rustled through the undergrowth. None of them were visible. All he could see when he looked into the forest were plants, some of which he recognised from books, but others he found strange and almost threatening in their weirdness: fungi clinging to rough-barked pines; ferns crowding every available space; brightly coloured flowers nodding sleepily in darkened recesses, heavy with nectar. Life thrived all around him, perhaps a little too vigorously for his liking.

His eyes closed in the moist air. He slept without knowing he had fallen asleep, and drifted into a strange state wherein he seemed to be awake but suspected he wasn’t. Events followed no obvious logic. People and things came and went without warning. He wandered among them, lost and confused and unsure how to make it stop. If he was asleep, why not give in and stop worrying about it? If he was awake, things had become very odd indeed.

‘It’s the way of things,’ said a sinister, insidious voice from the bushes. ‘Don’t you know that, rabbit?’

Skender stiffened, looking around him in a guilty panic.’
You
— here?’

A wall of fronds parted to his right, revealing the twisted, scarred face of the jailer he had left behind in the Aad, horribly injured by the Homunculus and abandoned to die in the dirt. ‘Yes. It’s me. You’ll never be rid of me. Ever.’

Clawed, black-nailed hands reached out of the forest, clutching at Skender’s face, and he jerked awake with a cry and leapt to his feet.

‘Easy,’ said Navi, leaning over him. ‘It’s just a bad dream.’

‘He has them all the time,’ said Chu blearily from the other side of the wing.

‘He was here,
right here .
..’ Skender pointed vaguely at the ferns, aware that the foresters were watching him with a mixture of weariness and alarm. He scoured the undergrowth, afraid of what he might detect in there, and of course he saw nothing.

‘It’s gone now.’ Navi leaned away from him, staring at him as though he had gone quite mad. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, genuinely embarrassed at what, to her, must have seemed a total overreaction.

‘Sit down, Skender,’ said Chu, reaching around the wing to tug at his robe.

He resisted, still rattled by the dream and an uneasy feeling about what the undergrowth might be hiding.

‘Sit.’ She pulled him so hard he almost fell on her. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it,’ she said, not very helpfully. ‘Instead, look at that tree over there and tell me why it’s so weird.’

He did as she indicated, knowing she was only trying to distract him and perversely reluctant to go along with it. The tree was by far the largest abutting the clearing, with a broad, rippling trunk from which extended branches heavy with glossy dark leaves. He had glanced at it on arriving in the arbour but given it no more than a single thought. A tree was a tree was a tree.

He chastised himself for being so lazy. Rocks weren’t just rocks, just as deserts weren’t just deserts and people weren’t just people; everything in nature came in many different shapes, sizes and qualities. To a forester, each tree was probably unique, with its own strengths and character. He wouldn’t get very far if he assumed everything was the same.

Looking at the tree more closely, he realised that there
was
something odd about it, on two levels. Superficially, strange whorls and lines marred the relative smoothness of its bark. The patterns didn’t look entirely natural, as though they had been carved there as a sapling and left to heal over. Like scars, in other words, or tattoos.

And like the tattoos he had earned during his training, these marks appeared to follow flows of the Change. With senses more subtle than sight alone, he traced powerful energies moving up and down the trunk, from its roots to its branches and back again. The tree glowed like an enormous candle, rich with life — and more than that. The whole forest was full of life, but most of it was without direction. This tree took that life and did something with it.

But what was that?

‘Well?’ Chu nudged him, waiting for an answer.

‘I don’t know.’ The dream was quite forgotten as he contemplated the problem. ‘It doesn’t seem to be alive —’

‘You mean someone killed it?’

‘No. Just not alive like we are. It’s not about to uproot and go for a walk, or start talking to us.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’

He thought about it some more. ‘I wonder if this is why we’re here, in this particular spot. The tree could be a signpost.’

‘Or a guard?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘To stop enemies from coming up the path — out of the Divide and into the forest. Maybe it’ll fall on anyone who is unauthorised.’

‘Interesting.’ And it was. The Keep’s library contained nothing like this.

‘Keep it down, you two,’ said Heuve. ‘People are trying to rest.’

‘Sorry.’ Skender was genuinely repentant. His own fatigue had begun to return after his shocked awakening. He would have been quite happy to let the matter of the tree drop forever, but for the bodyguard’s next words.

‘The forest is none of your business. Keep your nose well out of it.’

‘Kind of hard to do that
now,’
said Chu testily, ‘don’t you think?’

Heuve ignored her, and Skender ignored him in turn. His attention drifted back to the tree. He sensed more than just innocent exhaustion in Heuve’s irritation. Was there something about this particular tree he didn’t want them to see or understand?

Tracing the trunk up into the canopy, Skender tried to follow and count the branches through the tangle above him. Even with the help of the Change, he couldn’t do it. The tree was intimately bound up in the fabric of the forest, so whatever capacity it possessed, the forest possessed it too.

Bringing his gaze back to the clearing, he found Marmion watching him. The warden inclined his head in something that might have been a nod, then closed his eyes and went to sleep.

* * * *

By mid-morning, the forest was raucous and stifling. Mist curled through the trunks like ghostly fingers, making the air heavier and warmer than it had been in the Divide. Skender rolled up the sleeves of his robe, but that didn’t stop him sweating. The rumbling of his stomach as they resumed their journey only made him more uncomfortable still.

‘What, no breakfast?’ Chu had commented on Delfine’s call to rise and resume their journey.

‘Did you bring any food with you?’ asked Navi, brushing down her uniform and adjusting her boots.

‘There wasn’t time.’

‘No breakfast then, I guess.’

‘What about fruit? There’s plenty on the trees.’

‘Can you tell the safe from the poisonous?’

‘No, but I presume
you
can.’

‘The Outcast will not take from the forest,’ grated Heuve, even grumpier after a couple of hours sleep than he had been before. ‘If she does —’

‘Yeah, yeah. I get it. I’ll just starve, then.’

‘We eat in Milang,’ said Delfine, more reasonably but with a warning edge. ‘We lost our supplies in the attack, too.’

Chu had turned away and busied herself with getting the wing ready to travel. This time she went first, leaving Skender with nothing better to do while he walked than contemplate his empty stomach and her behind.

The sun, diffused by fog and leaves; cast no shadow, but he could follow its steady progress across the sky through breaks in the canopy. He reckoned by its position that they were heading due north. By the time the sun reached directly overhead, he felt ready to take his chances with the local produce and Heuve both. The wing seemed to weigh a tonne or more, and his fingers were getting cramp. But he didn’t complain. The thick moist air left him panting like a dog. He had barely enough energy for walking. The others, Chu included, seemed to be in much the same state, as no one spoke at all, except to curse.

The forest towered over them, seeming more impenetrable than before, not less. His eyes were becoming desensitised to green. Remembering his expectation that the forest would soon peter out, he began to wonder just how far it might extend. They had walked at least two kilometres through the dense vegetation, their path rising and falling and taking sudden turns to avoid sheer rock faces that couldn’t be crossed, but in general their altitude rose. He watched for paths leading elsewhere; they either didn’t exist or were as well hidden as the entrance to the forest had been. Soon the fog was so dense that he could barely see as far as Lidia Delfine, leading the way at the head of the group.

Finally the foliage parted before them. Chu stumbled as she stepped from thick undergrowth onto solid stone, and he did the same two paces later. When he had recovered, his gaze lifted up to find nothing but fog ahead and above him, its hazy white brilliance blinding after the mottled shadows of the forest.

Chu put down the wing to look around. Those ahead of them had stopped on the edge of a cliff and were peering along an insubstantial-looking rope bridge which vanished into fog barely halfway across its span. The far side was invisible, except as a very faint shadow. There could have been anything there.

Skender regarded the bridge with a sceptical eye. It appeared to be well maintained, but the planks were thin and the way narrow. Ropes at his waist height provided the only handholds.

‘Looks safe enough to me,’ pronounced Warden Banner, the Engineer of the group.

‘Of course it’s safe,’ said Navi. ‘Unless you’re Panic soldiers, in which case ...’ She mimed cutting one of the ropes securing it to the cliff wall.

‘How would you know if we were Panic or not?’ asked Chu. ‘Who can see through this murk?’

‘There are lookouts stationed at every bridge,’ said Delfine with the air of someone determined not to reveal any secrets. ‘We call this the Versegi Chasm, after the man who built the first bridge across it. People used to think it bottomless; if you drop a stone anywhere along the bridge’s length, you’ll never hear it hit the bottom.’

‘What is down there?’ asked Skender, hoping it was soft, just in case.

‘A riverbed, and plants growing from seeds that fall from above. It’s very dark and very quiet. The people who live there are said to be mad or mystics, depending on who you ask.’