The Hanging Mountains (31 page)

Sal stared it for an unknown length of time, hypnotised by its size and strange form. Its grey skin was pitted and worn by age. Even in the shadowy depths of the forest he could see faint colourful markings that might once have been charms painted down its flanks. On the right-hand side of its single front leg was a crack wide enough to put an arm through. Through the crack, he saw only darkness, as though the creature was hollow.

As he watched, it lowered its arrow-shaped head and began clearing the vegetation away from the moai. The giant head’s eyes slowly closed. Its mouth sealed shut in a straight line.

When the ground was clear around it, the massive, three-legged man’kin inserted the tip of its head into the earth at the moai’s back, and pushed. There came a grinding, splitting sound. The great stone head tipped forward, further and further, until it overbalanced. With a mighty series of crashes, it tumbled down the side of the hill, all the way to the bottom of the ravine.

Sal lay stunned into immobility as the echoes faded. The giant man’kin stood, braced firmly on its three legs, and peered down the slope where the moai had gone. Checking to see if the moai had been smashed to pieces, Sal assumed.

Then its head tipped upwards, at the sky. Through the misty foliage, Sal glimpsed the underside of the balloon drifting above the treetops, and he sent a hasty message to Shilly, warning her to stay clear.

‘Whatever this thing is,’
he said,
‘it’s big and mean. Stay away until I tell you otherwise?

A
faint whine came from the balloon’s chimerical engine as it lifted up and out of sight. The man’kin’s eyeless head swivelled to where Sal lay in the dirt, exactly as though it had heard his warning. He ducked his head down, hoping against hope that he hadn’t been seen.

A heavy crunching came from behind him. Footsteps, coming up the creature’s path. With a sinking heart, he rolled over and saw two grotesque man’kin lumbering towards him. There was nothing he could do to avoid them. He lay in full view.

One — a long-necked, short-winged gargoyle with a square face and pointed ears — thudded up to him. Its broad, lipless mouth opened.

‘Angel says run,’
it grated past fangs longer than Sal’s thumb.

He prepared to do just that.

Shilly hung half out of the gondola, trying desperately to see through the dense canopy at what was happening below. Since the almighty crash of something falling down the ravine wall and Sal’s warning to stay away, there had been no sound at all. She half-glimpsed shapes moving in the shadowy undergrowth, but she couldn’t make them out.

‘We have to go down,’ she told Griel. ‘I have to find out what’s going on!’

The Panic bared his teeth. ‘First up. Now down. What is this, Shilly? What are you playing at?’

She wanted to tear her hair out. She pulled herself back into the gondola and limped forward. Grabbing his leather jerkin she pulled him close. ‘Does it look like I’m joking?’

Griel’s nostrils flared. ‘You’re a human. Your face is small and flat. I can’t read it half the time.’ He brushed her aside. ‘All right. We go down, but not alone. I’m getting the others first. If Sal’s in trouble, I’m not throwing you in too. I want Jao with you, at least.’

Shilly couldn’t argue with that, although the thought of abandoning Sal ached inside her. She went back to her seat as Griel twisted the controls, lifting the balloon upward so fast her body felt heavy. Streamers of fog whipped by them, thrown into disarray by their sudden ascent. She wished there was something more concrete she could do than wait.

As they reached the level they had started at, she sought the hiding places of those stationed to catch the wraiths. The Panic were invisible in their brown-black armour. Where Tom and Mawson crouched in the tiny cave, she thought she glimpsed a flash of blue — Tom’s robe, she presumed — and a patch of glowing green.

Her eyes narrowed, struck by this detail. Griel angled the balloon in towards Jao, Rosevear and Mikia’s perch. As their perspective changed, she confirmed that it was Tom she could see, and a second figure that wasn’t Mawson. That figure matched the one she had seen by the waterfall, and Sal’s descriptions of the Quorum. But why would one of them be out in the forest, talking to Tom?

Then she remembered Sal telling her about Mawson speaking the Quorum’s strange backward language. Maybe Tom wasn’t the reason for the Quorum member’s visit, but the man’kin.

There was no time to ponder the mystery. Jao was waving at her with one long arm, calling for a rope. Shilly tossed one to the Panic female and helped her climb aboard, her beaded hair flailing like whips. Mikia and Rosevear followed, full of questions. Why had they dropped down to the bottom of the ravine? What had they seen? Where was Sal?

Shilly felt too exhausted and full of questions herself to reply. Had
they
seen the glowing person sitting with Tom? Did they know what was going on inside that tiny cave?

Barely were they aboard when Griel sent the balloon plummeting downwards again. Shilly clutched the side of the gondola, afraid of falling out. Only minutes had passed since they had left Sal, but it felt like hours. The day was darkening. It wouldn’t be long before night fell.

Finally, as the bottom of the ravine appeared through the mist, word came from Sal.

‘Shilly, I’m okay. I’m sorry if I gave you a fright. I’ve had a bit of a one myself. There’s something down here you need to meet. It’s not the Swarm. I don’t think it means us harm.’
He paused for a second, as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe what he was about to say.
‘It’s the Angel, Shilly. We’ve found the Angel.’

* * * *

In the excitement over the Swarm, Sal had quite forgotten the
other
mystery creature they were supposed to be looking for in the Hanging Mountains.

Angel says run.

The words, uttered by a voice as rough and grating as a tombstone dragged along a road, triggered a cascade of memories from his brief journey along the bottom of the Divide, before it had been flooded. Several of the man’kin that he had asked about the Angel had each given him a different answer. The Angel was necessary, Mawson said. It was a gathering point of some kind, a focus; it drew many towards it; it told man’kin they must be free; it said that humans were nothing, not worthy even of anger. No one would survive without the Angel.

The last statement was the most peculiar of all. Sal had been unable to determine if Mawson had been referring to man’kin only, or every living thing. Either way, the Angel was clearly important. Its word alone had triggered the migration down from the mountains that had saved thousands of man’kin from the flood, apart from those who hadn’t moved fast enough.

Angel says run,
the gargoyle man’kin had said.

At first he had thought the words constituted an order, perhaps a threat. Then he guessed that the man’kin was using the words as a mantra or a mnemonic, similar to those used by Sky Wardens and Stone Mages. To it, he was an alien, peculiar creature, just as it was to him. It might even have offered the words to him as advice, the only form of verbal communication it had to give.

He rose slowly to his feet, holding his hands up and palm forward, indicating that he was unarmed. That was true enough, although the Change was ready to do his bidding, should he need to defend himself.

The man’kin repeated its simple mantra, while the second, a muscular, bat-winged beast that walked on four clawed feet, watched in silence. Their blank, granite eyes didn’t blink.

‘My name is Sal,’ he said, conscious of the creature behind him. Wood and Earth complained as it shifted position. That was the only sound it made. For the first time, he became aware of how eerie it was that man’kin didn’t breathe.

‘I set a man’kin free, once,’ he said, hoping to avoid a repeat of that particular dispute. He glanced over his shoulder, and found the tip of the arrowhead snout directly behind him. He hadn’t imagined it could move so fast.

‘Angel knows,’
said the gargoyle.

Sal took a deep breath and forced himself to face the worn, featureless head. Its surface was lined with cracks that crossed and re-crossed like a crocodile’s back.

‘Are
you
the Angel?’ he asked.

‘
Yes,’
said the gargoyle from behind him.

‘Why don’t you talk to me directly?’

‘
You don’t have the right ears.’

‘What ears should I have?’

‘Ones that hear.’

The Angel’s head didn’t move, which he took as a positive sign. It could have killed him easily, had it wanted to. He wasn’t planning on giving it a reason to change its mind.

The balloon had obediently flown away when he had thought that the man’kin might grow angry at its presence. Taking advantage of the frozen stillness, he quickly called Shilly. She simply had to see this; she would understand it better than him. After a moment he heard the humming of the chimerical engine returning.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked the Angel to cover the sound.

‘Liberating the ‘kin.’

‘Which ‘kin?’ Then he realised. ‘Oh, the moai. What are you liberating them from?’

‘That which comes.’

‘What which comes?’

‘Angel says that which comes.’

‘We want to help you,’ Sal said, slowly and clearly, emphasising the plural. ‘Many man’kin died in the flood. We want to find out why that happened and prevent it ever happening again. Will you help us? Will you help us understand what’s going on?’

‘Angel says ‘kin do not die. We are not born. We just are.’

‘Drowned, then. Buried in mud. Whatever. You’d have to agree that this isn’t a good thing.’

‘All things are as they are. Angel says
—’

The Angel says a lot of things.’ Sal thought of Mawson, far above. Now more than ever he needed a man’kin interpreter, a voice he could trust among these strange, confounding minds.

Three stone heads swivelled as a rope ladder slithered down the trees nearby. Sal hastened to reassure them.

‘It’s just Shilly. I want you to meet her.’

‘
We have met her,’
said the gargoyle.

‘You have?’ His puzzlement couldn’t have been more complete.

‘She raised us.’

‘She
raised
you? I don’t understand.’

‘She knows us.’

The bottom of the rope ladder danced as someone descended. It was moving too quickly to be Shilly, though, with her weakened leg. Sal assumed it wouldn’t be Griel, since Shilly didn’t know how to operate the balloon’s controls. They must have ascended and brought someone else down with them.

‘This isn’t Shilly,’ he told the man’kin as Jao climbed warily into view, moving with swinging, loose-jointed grace. ‘This is Jao. She’s a friend.’

‘Let me judge that for myself, will you?’ said the Panic female, dropping to the ground with one hand on the pommel of her hook. ‘Griel sent me to check on things before letting Shilly down.’ Her dark eyes took in the tableau before her: two roughly human-sized and human-shaped man’kin, plus another considerably more alien, surrounding Sal near the clod-filled hole where a moai had once sat. Seeing that Sal wasn’t obviously harmed, she waved vigorously at the balloon, barely visible through the foliage.

‘I wouldn’t have called Shilly down if it wasn’t safe,’ said Sal, resentful at having his judgment questioned.

‘Griel wouldn’t let her go until he knew what else was down here.’ Calm black eyes regarded him, then flicked to the Angel. The tip of its nose didn’t shift to acknowledge her. ‘Another friend of yours?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Are we friends?’ he asked it, then corrected himself, remembering what Tarnava had said about man’kin not knowing the meaning of friendship.
They will charm your mind into knots.
‘Are we on the same side?’

‘We
are not your enemies,’
ground out the gargoyle.

‘That’s something, I guess.’ Jao walked around the giant man’kin while Shilly descended one awkward step at a time. The balloon dipped lower, saving her some degree of effort. When its underside bent the topmost boughs, she was within a metre of the undergrowth.

Sal gripped her hips and lifted her the rest of the way.

‘Where’s my flower?’ she asked.

‘I got you this instead.’

She leaned on him, missing her walking stick, and looked at the man’kin in wonder.

‘I know you,’ she said, pointing at the two facing the Angel.

‘That’s what they say.’ Sal turned to study her, mystified. ‘How is that possible? I didn’t think man’kin ever came as far south as Fundelry.’

‘They don’t. I fished these two out of the lake by the waterfall, while the Panic were attacking us.’

‘We weren’t attacking you,’ said Jao in a defensive tone. ‘Griel thought you were human reinforcements from the west, come to fight alongside the Guardian. Then the wraith attacked, and he assumed you had summoned it.’

‘However it happened, you were boarding the boat and I couldn’t just sit back and
let
you.’ Shilly turned back to Sal. ‘The bottom of the lake is full of man’kin. These two looked the most desperate. But when I pulled them up, they ran away.’