The Hanging Mountains (2 page)

The wolf’s call was a little closer this time.

Hadrian shivered and the Homunculus skin containing him and his brother rippled. Set up under a stone slab as large as a three-storey building, their campsite offered protection on just two sides. Despite this, Kail had assured them they would be safe, that no one would dare bother them, and they had accepted the Sky Warden’s assurance readily enough. Nothing had prepared them for the sound of a wolf.

I don’t feel secure here.

Seth agreed.
We could move, I suppose
—
but where to?

Keep on going,
Hadrian suggested.
North-east. Kail would follow us. He knows how to.

We’d be more vulnerable out there than we are here.

Do you really think if we stay still and don’t move, it’ll just go away?

Both Seth and Hadrian recovered the same memory at exactly the same moment. Their minds had been so intimately entangled in the Void that they had started thinking as one. Independently yet together, they reached for the words Pukje had spoken to them, a hundred lifetimes ago:
Wolves know how to wait.

Neither of them knew how much credence to give that particular statement. But the fear was very real, and so was their ignorance; they understood too little about the world as it existed now. Talking to their guide only made the situation worse.

The sound of rattling rock grew louder. They pulled further into the shadows, instinctively raising their arms to present a more threatening figure. Their legs tensed to run.

‘It’s only me,’ called a familiar voice. A large shape pressing out of the gloomy myopia surrounding them resolved into Habryn Kail leading a camel under the overhang.

‘We weren’t sure,’ said Hadrian, letting down his guard. ‘We didn’t know
what
you were.’

Seth remained as taut as a bowstring. ‘Did anyone follow you here?’

‘If they did, they’re a better tracker than I am.’

‘You were gone a long time,’ said Hadrian.

‘I had a lot to do.’ The rangy, tall man settled the dripping camel and eased himself down to a squatting position. His dark skin blended almost perfectly with the shadows. ‘I found out that Marmion and the others have gone upriver along the Divide looking for the cause of the flood and the man’kin migration. And you, I presume. They’d be fools to presume you dead without evidence.’

‘Are they still hunting us?’ asked Seth.

‘Not actively. They have no trail, and no hope of finding one. The flood has proved a stroke of good fortune for you.’

Seth finally began to relax, allowing the Homunculus’ many-limbed shape to move. Together they sat and addressed the tracker face to face.

‘How are they travelling?’ asked Hadrian.

‘That’s the interesting thing. Our maps become increasingly unreliable the further east you head, so overland journeys can be dangerous and slow. Given the resources of the Strand, if I was still with them I would have suggested following the course of the Divide when the initial turbulence of the flood died down — but Laure doesn’t have boats, and probably lacks the infrastructure to make one in a hurry. So I assumed that Marmion had taken the hard road and wouldn’t be far ahead of us.’

Kail’s words came with an unfamiliar bafflement, as though for once the long-limbed tracker’s instincts had led him astray.

‘Tell us,’ said Seth.

‘Three days after the flood, the Engineers in the expedition found the skeleton of a hullfish in the torrent. They hauled it ashore, cleaned it and tested its fitness. Apart from a couple of minor breaches, it held water. They must have worked amazingly fast to get it ready, but that’s how they’re travelling; exactly how I least expected them to.’

‘Hullfish?’ asked Hadrian.

‘Sometimes called an ivory whale.’ The tracker adopted a cautious expression they had come to recognise. ‘You don’t know what that is?’

The Homunculus’ head shook as both twins indicated their ignorance.

‘It’s a beast normally found in the deep ocean. Ten, twenty metres long, and almost impossible to kill because of their thick, bony hide. The carcasses are airtight, so they occasionally drift ashore when they die. Five of the largest ever found became
Os,
the Alcaide’s ship of bone. You’ve never heard of that, either? Well, you only need to know that one hullfish is enough to make a perfectly serviceable vessel. Especially with the Change strong in the Divide.’

The twins struggled with the explanation. Kail obviously thought it made sense, and they supposed it did, in a way. There had been minds to talk with in the Void — desperate, dwindling things that had told stories among themselves in order to prolong existence before the endless hum ground them down. The twins had sometimes moved among them, and learned of the world outside through those stories. Their memories were confused, though; it was sometimes hard to disentangle the distant past from the stories of the Lost Minds after an eternity of sensory deprivation.

The twins remembered skyscrapers and a world overflowing with people. They remembered machines and power grids and television and ballpoint pens. Now the world’s inhabitants had buggies and airships and the Change. The Lost Minds had told of empty ruins and depopulated wastes, and spoken of cities as fearful, haunted places.

It seemed utterly preposterous to the twins that the corpse of a fish as large as a whale could be fashioned into a ship, but Seth remembered an equally preposterous vessel called
Hantu Penyardin
— and Hadrian had used the Change to fashion a pencil into a spear in order to kill the energuman, Volker Lascowicz. They could accept strangeness as fact if they had to. As far as they knew, Kail had no reason to lie.

‘Could we travel that way?’ they asked. ‘Upriver?’

Kail shook his head. ‘Even if we could find another hullfish, I couldn’t make a ship of it on my own, not in time. No, we’re best sticking to the original plan: I ride the camel while you walk alongside, disguised under the cloak. That way, we’ll be slow but steady. And we won’t have to worry about what the flood’s left in its wake.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Hadrian.

‘Well, the Divide was home, or prison, to more than just man’kin. And sometimes a burial ground for creatures that might not be completely dead, even now. The water will stir all manner of things from their rest.’

Kail stood and went to the camel. He opened a saddlebag and took out a handful of small, nut-like objects. He picked at them, flicking seeds out into the darkness, and paced as he talked.

‘I worry about the others. They’re rushing into a situation for which they’re ill-prepared. I know you’ve tried to explain what’s growing up there in the mountains, but I still don’t entirely understand what it is. It’s dark and dangerous, you say, and it eats people. It comes from before the Cataclysm and isn’t really part of our world. If I called Marmion with this information, he’d think me mad — and then he
would
be hunting you again, because he would have good reason to. So I can’t tell him that he’s putting himself and the others in danger — and I don’t like that.’

The twins let him think aloud. Their thoughts were full of dying cities and worlds rent asunder, of billions dead and more to come.

‘They’re too far ahead for us to catch up, even if we walk our mount into the ground,’ the tracker said. ‘We can’t steal a buggy because it won’t work with you aboard. There’s no point in calling Shilly or Sal, since Marmion won’t believe them either, not without evidence. We don’t have any other options that I can see, but to walk. Do you have any suggestions?’

Features blurred in the Homunculus’ face as the twins shook their heads.

Kail nodded. ‘I’ve promised to get you to the mountains so you can deal with this thing, whatever it is. My path and my conscience are clear. I just wish there was more I could do to help the others. There has been, as you said, enough death already.’

The howl of a wolf cut the air like a knife.

‘What?’ asked Kail, head snapping around as the twins jumped in fright. ‘What is it?’

‘Didn’t you hear it?’ asked Hadrian.

‘Hear what?’ The tracker’s brows crinkled.

Kail didn‘t hear it,
said Seth, his internal voice brittle.
We’re not imagining it, are we?

Perhaps he
can’t
hear it.

It’s just for us, then? A warning?

Or a threat,
said Hadrian. Another thought struck him.
Perhaps the time isn’t quite right yet.

For what?

For the gloves to come off.

‘We think we should get moving,’ they told Kail. ‘Standing still for too long probably isn’t a good idea.’

‘Want to explain why?’

Hadrian tried to explain. ‘There might be people out there —’

‘Things,’ Seth added.

‘— who remember us and the way the world used to be. Some of them good, some of them ... less so. I’m not sure they count as evil, but they don’t always want the same thing as us. And we hurt them, a long time ago.’

Kail studied their strange black features for a long moment. ‘You’re not talking about this Yod creature. This is something else entirely.’

‘Yes.’

‘An ally of Yod’s?’

‘No.’ Hadrian’s memories of Volker Lascowicz’s brutal death and the snarling of Upuaut, the demon-like creature that had inhabited him, were painfully clear to both of them. ‘Not an ally, but just as deadly.’

Kail nodded wearily. ‘Then I guess we need to get moving — and talking. The more you tell me, the more I’m going to understand. And the more I understand, the better I’m going to be able to keep us out of trouble.’

‘We’re trying,’ the twins said. ‘We really are trying.’

‘I know,’ said the tracker, pulling a thick cotton cloak out of a pack and holding it up for them to slip into, two arms into each sleeve. ‘Believe me, so am I.’

* * * *

The Serpent

‘Things in nature change of their own accord.

There is no mind in the flow of a river or the

grasping of a tree. There is, simply, the Change.

Yet minds as sharp as ours once believed in gods

of nature, seeing the need for design where nature

alone is sufficient. They could not grasp that

mind can ride the crest of the wave of nature

without itself driving the wave. A single breaking

wave is the summation of an entire ocean and all

the wind that blows across it; in one moment, it is

more than a mind will ever be throughout a

lifetime.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
EXEGESIS 1:7

kender saw it first, for no other reason than his face happened to be closest to the water. With his body bent over the boneship’s rough milky-white side and a rope firmly tied around his waist, he had little opportunity to look at anything other than the choppy, foaming water, relatively clear of debris since the flood eleven days earlier, but still an impenetrable muddy brown. He had no idea how deep it was, and preferred not to think too hard about that. He had no knowledge of sailing, let alone of large bodies of water in general. All he knew was that with every wave the boneship lurched from side to side and sent his stomach surging with it. His face burned when he thought of Chu, whose sense of balance had in no way rebelled at this mistreatment and whose sympathy had, to date, consisted of slapping him on the back and telling him, unhelpfully, that he couldn’t puke forever. He wasn’t so sure about that. The nausea showed no sign of abating. He wondered if he would ever eat again.

His only consolation was the memory of Gwil Flintham taking one look at the vessel bobbing precariously on more water than he had seen in his entire life, and swearing that he would never, ever set foot on it. If Skender had thought like that, he wouldn’t have been feeling so miserable, but at the same time he would have never seen anything, never met Sal and Shilly, and never
flown.

Far above, riding the turbulent thermals rising from the surface of the flooded Divide, Chu glided as freely as a bird under the warm afternoon sun. Dark, crumbling cliffs loomed on either side of the surging water and there were few places for the ship to dock. The boneship’s crew had no way to see what was ahead, so Chu had volunteered to reconnoitre the shorelines upriver. Only her word, and the shadow of the Hanging Mountains growing ever-larger, reassured them that they were actually getting anywhere.

Skender tried his best to focus on the distant peaks — vast, immoveable, and shrouded in permanent cloud — rather than the rocking, rolling boneship and the water beneath.

Goddess,
he thought, feeling as though he might throw up yet again.
If you’re going to kill me, do it now!

At that moment, something glassy slid through the water not a metre from his nose. It resembled ice but moved with a sinuous muscularity that made him think of a lizard or a snake. Its surface was carved with scales as perfectly hexagonal as honeycomb and worn with age. He froze in shock. One metre glided by, then two, before Skender thought to sound the alarm.

He hauled himself back into the boat, unable to take his eyes off the thing in the water below. It was still uncoiling. How long
was
it? He turned to shout a warning to where Marmion stood at the bow, bandaged arm held protectively to his chest, but the boneship shifted violently under him and he found himself dumped hard on his backside instead.

Everything went crazy. The boneship shook and rattled. ‘Whirlpool!’ the cry went up; a warden ran by, leather-bound boot narrowly missing Skender’s face; spray flew over the bows. Skender skidded from side to side across the slippery deck, unable to find purchase long enough to stand. Bilge water soaked him from head to foot.