The Hanging Mountains (15 page)

Marmion acknowledged this with a nod. ‘Very good, but shall we keep moving?’

‘I thought you’d like the chance to rest for a moment.’                               

‘That will not be required.’

Skender was about to protest that it was indeed required when he realised that Marmion’s revived testiness came from a desire to put the bridge behind him. The crossing would be especially difficult for him with only one hand to balance himself. No wonder he was acting with such impatience.

Then Skender remembered the wing, and groaned. He too would be crossing the bridge without both hands on the guide ropes. If he dropped the wing, he might as well follow it over the edge. Chu wouldn’t suffer him to live after a mistake like that.

‘All right, then.’ Delfine nodded. ‘Let’s keep moving.’

‘How much longer?’ Skender blurted.

‘Not far. I’d suggest keeping your eyes up as you go across, but I don’t want you to slip either.’

With that, she headed out onto the bridge and strode confidently over the chasm. The bridge swayed alarmingly with every step she took. Skender tried not to pay too much attention to that.

Marmion waved Eitzen after her, then followed when Eitzen had vanished into the mist and the bridge ceased dancing. He walked slowly and carefully, making no attempt to be as quick as Delfine or young Eitzen. Hunched like an old man, he made it across in twice their time.

‘We’ll go last,’ Skender told Heuve as the other foresters went ahead.

‘No. You’ll go next.’

‘Do you think we’ll run away?’ Chu asked him. ‘We have no idea where we are, and just one path to follow. It wouldn’t be a very smart move.’

‘No,’ Heuve repeated, cracking his knuckles. ‘It would not.’

Chu rolled her eyes and turned to Skender. ‘Want to go first?’

‘Sure.’ He swapped places with her and picked up his end of the wing. The truth was, heights didn’t bother him. He had spent much of his early life scaling the cliffs into which the Keep had been built centuries ago. It was slipping and falling to his death he didn’t like the thought of.

‘If I said I was nervous,’ he asked Chu, ‘would you kiss me again?’

‘Nice try, but I want you concentrating firmly on your feet, nothing else.’ The wing poked him in the back. ‘Get going, mage, or you’ll let the crowd down.’

Skender took a deep breath and stepped out onto the bridge. It wobbled underfoot, but not as badly as he had feared it might.

‘Keep going.’ The wing poked him again. ‘The faster you go, the easier it’ll be.’

He had no choice, the way she was shoving him. With his left hand alternating between the guide ropes and steadying the wing, he moved forward one step at a time, eyes fixed firmly on where his next footfall would be.

The fog swallowed the two of them, tugging at their clothes and the wing with insubstantial fingers. Wind moaned eerily along the canyon, growing louder with every step he took. In his peripheral vision he noticed the cliff face behind him fade to grey long before their destination appeared.

Even when it did, he kept his eyes down and his pace unchanging. He resisted the urge to hurry as the last metres swept by. The last thing he wanted to do was become overconfident and trip on the verge of safety. Only when hands reached out for him and the world stopped rocking did he breathe easily again.

‘Well done,’ said Marmion.

Delfine nodded in approval at the warden’s side. ‘You can look up now,’ she said.

‘What? Oh, right.’ He put down the wing — thinking for the first time how much easier it would have been just to fly over, if only the foresters would have let them — and tilted his head back.

What he glimpsed through the fog made him gape in awe — and when Chu softly exclaimed ‘Goddess’, he could think of no better word.

* * * *

The Quorum

‘Jade is stone like any other, and as such it

possesses distinct chimerical properties. The

angels of jade who carried the Goddess aloft

might be nothing more than metaphorical

creations, hut they might also be very real beings

we have simply failed to encounter in our

exploration of the world thus far.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
EXEGESIS 25:11

he balloon swayed and rocked as it travelled through the fog. Shilly shivered, feeling cold and damp. She shuffled closer to Sal for warmth, and he snorted awake, having nodded off without her noticing. She apologised and encouraged him to lean on her. The cuts and scratches on his face and hands had turned brown and stopped bleeding long ago, thanks to Rosevear’s ministrations. They might not even scar. That took some of the edge off her apprehension. The camouflage charms had been part of their life for years, since their return-to Fundelry from the Haunted City, but she had never wanted them to be permanently etched on him.

That raised a whole series of thoughts she was reluctant to pursue at that moment: how
did
she view their future, if hiding forever wasn’t an option? She and Sal had no intention of starting a family any time soon; they were too young, for a start, and their existence on the outer fringe of Fundelry didn’t allow easy access to schooling. At some point, kids or not, they would have to reconnect permanently with the world around them. But how, and when, and where? Perhaps, she thought, they had already done so by joining the expedition hunting for the Homunculus. Perhaps it was already too late to turn back ...

Too edgy to sleep, she tried to focus her attention on the world around her rather than on her thoughts.

It was impossible to tell how high they were flying, since the cloud — even with the dawn slowly lightening it from behind — was impenetrable, but they had to be well above the treetops that she had glimpsed while taking off from the boneship. The Panic crew swarmed all over the balloon and its gondola, adjusting vanes and tightening stays with assurance, gripping wherever they needed to with strong hands and feet and sometimes using the hooks they carried at their sides as well.

Their long-armed grace was prodigious and sure; they moved as though gravity barely mattered to them. One even scurried up and over the forward airsac, dropping with quiet grace in front of her when his job was done. Their leader, Griel, watched from the rear by the pilot. Behind goatee beard, ebony eyes, protruding jaw and brow, his mood was unreadable.

Shilly’s fellow passengers maintained a subdued silence. Rosevear tended Kemp with weary diligence. She was afraid to ask how her old friend was coping, fearing the worst. Tom, like Sal, had fallen asleep and slumped open-mouthed against Highson, who watched the world as she did, with a frown.

How long they travelled she couldn’t tell. She felt cut off from the world, as though the balloon was hanging motionless in a grey void.

‘This isn’t the first time you’ve flown,’ said Schuet, sitting opposite her with hands clutching the rail.

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You? Oh, yes, that’s right. You said your people don’t trust things that fly.’

‘It’s dangerous and disrespectful.’ One of the Panic soldiers issued a noise that might have been a snort of amusement, but Schuet ignored it. ‘Our place is among the trees, not above them.’

Shilly wondered how that fitted in with Chu’s image of balloon cities in the forest. ‘Do you worship the trees, then,’ she asked bluntly, ‘or just like them a lot?’

‘Something in between. “We protect them and they shelter us. We tend them and they provide for us.’

‘How? By letting you build houses and fires out of them? Doesn’t sound like much of a deal for the trees to me.’

The response came from Griel, not Schuet. Reaching down between his feet, he produced one of the brands the foresters had been carrying and tossed it to her. She caught it with both hands, too surprised to wonder whether it might still be hot.

She had glimpsed such brands glowing red with heat earlier, as if recently pulled from a fire.

The brand was cool and surprisingly heavy. As long as her forearm and slightly thicker at one end, it looked at first as though it had been carved. Closer inspection revealed that the patterns were the work of boring insects, weaving and digging under the protection of the bark outer skin which had since been stripped away. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the faint but unmistakeable tingle of the Change.

‘It’s a reservoir,’ she said, understanding now that the glow hadn’t come from heat, but from the release of more subtle energies. Her walking stick had been imbued with such potential by Sal, although she wasn’t about to admit that to anyone else lest it be taken from her.

The brand was almost empty, containing barely enough for the flicker of light that danced across the faces of those around her, making them momentarily brighter than the filtered light of dawn.

‘Houses
and
reservoirs, then,’ she said, amending her earlier pronouncement.

Schuet shook his head. ‘We didn’t make that brand,’ he said. ‘We grew it. The
forest
grew it.’

‘Sure, and you chopped it off and filled it with the Change. The end result is the same.’

‘We don’t chop anything, Shilly. We encourage particular plants to tap into the forest’s root system and draw out the potential we need. The wood is grown to be rich in the Change, and grown to be harvested, too, like seeds. It’s a partner in the process.’

Before Shilly could ask for more details, Griel barked a command to his crew and reached for the brand. Shilly handed it over as the balloon began to sink. She could sense no change in the misty haze around her, but her stomach felt light and the stays holding the airsacs in place thrummed as though plucked.

‘Are we landing?’ she asked.

Griel shook his head, an ambiguous gesture that could have been a simple
no
or a warning to keep quiet. Shilly opted for the latter, telling herself to wait and see what happened next.

She wasn’t kept waiting long. Dark shadows loomed out of the fog on either side — nebulous, elongated shapes that could have been towers or branches, or even the fingers of a giant hand — reaching up to enfold them.

In looking around to see better, she woke Sal again, who blinked blearily at the view. ‘Where are we?’

‘Home,’ Griel rumbled.

One hand tugged at a stay, adjusting the balloon’s trim. The dark shapes grew slowly clearer, resolving into the trunks of giant trees, dozens of them stripped of their branches and covered with cascading vines. They reminded Shilly of the poles of a rotting jetty protruding from a dried-up sea. The balloon and its crew navigated between them with long-practised ease.

A larger shadow coalesced ahead of them — a shadow composed of many shadows, like that cast by the leaves of a tree. Shilly narrowed her eyes, trying to make out what lay behind the mist. The larger mass resembled an upside-down triangle, or a mountain turned on its head. The smaller components had no common size or shape. It was difficult to tell how far away these objects lay, and therefore how large they were. They could have been just off the balloon’s forward bow in dense fog, or kilometres away in relatively clear air. Only the unmoving, stately trunks that glided slowly by suggested that the objects were neither small nor near.

A gust of cool wind rattled the gondola. Shilly clutched Sal’s hand, reminded of the vast drop below them. Even though they must have risen far up the side of the mountain to be so deep in the clouds, she had seen no sign of solid ground.

When she looked ahead again, the shadow had resolved into a city of balloons — or rather, when she took it in properly, a city suspended by wires beneath hundreds of balloons untethered to the ground below. The structure as a whole was too large to absorb at once. Her gaze skated over its complexity during their approach. Teardrop shapes were most common among the balloons, but there were also spheres or fat ovals or discs made from gold and silver fabric. The structures beneath ranged from simple platforms to long cylinders with windows and curving walkways leading between them. Balloons swooped and glided around it, trailing white wakes. Light gleamed off occasional highlights of metal and glass, but wood and canvas predominated, dyed or painted every imaginable colour. Shilly estimated the city’s size to be about half of Laure’s — which made it all the more impressive for something hanging unsupported in the air.

A Panic soldier raised a compact curved horn to her lips and blew a loud call, rising in pitch as if questioning, which was immediately answered from the city. A yellow light began to flash on the underside of one of the larger structures, a bulbous quarter-moon canted slightly so its horns pointed downward. The balloon changed direction to head for the space between the horns. As it drew closer, Shilly made out several large hooks hanging from ropes. Another balloon — this one a complicated arrangement with five bladders of various sizes bundled up in netting like a bunch of grapes — had been snagged on the hooks and tugged upward into some sort of dock. Panic swarmed back and forth, carrying sacks and boxes deeper into the structure.

The balloon fell under the shadow of the city, and even the feeble light of dawn dropped away. Shilly felt a chill pass over her. She could sense Sal’s mood beside her, and it was as wearily sombre as her own.

‘What’s that up there?’ asked the forester called Mikia, pointing.

Shilly followed the direction indicated by Mikia’s finger and saw a much larger shape nestled in the underside of the city’s many structures. It resembled an oval brass vase tipped on its side, dozens of metres long, with a round opening at one end and a long spike at the other. A curved metal keel protruded at an odd angle, tapering to a stubby point and lending the structure a boat-like shape. What a boat was doing floating in the sky over a forest of fog, Shilly couldn’t guess.

Griel stroked his gold-beaded chin and didn’t answer Mikia’s question. As they drew nearer, Shilly made out patches of corrosion in the metal hull. Whatever it was, age had taken its toll. A line of boltholes suggested that another keel, equal in size to the one she could see, had once graced the far side. Cannibalised, perhaps?