The Hanging Mountains (36 page)

The exercise in logistics sustained him on their journey until midday — such as it was, with the sun stifled behind dense layers of fog and gloom-shrouded forest — when they paused to rest. Kail was acutely conscious of his slow pace, but he knew better than to push himself. The twins’ impatience was evident but contained. They made no move to strike off on their own, and probably wouldn’t do so while their fear of Upuaut and the Swarm remained strong. That they had not been attacked since the ill-fated trap Kail had set for their pursuer was of little reassurance.
A wolf knows how to wait.

The afternoon was spent walking again, waiting for the camel to slip or to baulk at a particularly steep slope. The overgrown path they followed led steadily uphill, following a series of long switchbacks up the side of the mountains. Under the constant cover of fog, it was hard to tell whether the slope they climbed was one side of a valley or an exposed face of the extensive range. Either way, the trunks around them grew taller and the undergrowth more variegated. If not for the path, they would have had trouble finding a safe route through the vegetation.

The air was cold, but unexpectedly still and close at the same time. Kail’s clothes were soon drenched from his sweat and the moisture in the air. He took great pains to keep his wound clean, although he worried that the damage had already been done.

The camel plodded on, managing surprisingly well on its wide-padded feet. What it thought of their journey, Kail couldn’t tell, but he was grateful for its perseverance. He walked when he could, and when he couldn’t he rode, ducking branches and constantly brushing webs and insects from his hair. The richness of the animal and vegetable kingdoms of the forest delighted and confounded him. For every species he recognised, there were dozens he had never seen before. Hunting for medicinal herbs became difficult, not through scarcity, but because they were among such a large crowd.

On the second day he felt a strange twitching in the small pouch of valuables he carried around his neck. Assuming that an animal had crawled into it — although how that could be possible he didn’t know, given that he kept it carefully tied at all times — he tugged it from its well-worn thong and looked inside. Several small, familiar trinkets greeted him, including his mother’s bond-ring, tarnished and worn; an ancient metal spring he had found in a previously unknown Ruin; two square coins from distant Ulum, carved with signs for prosperity; a brief note on a folded square of parchment from a woman he had once cared for, whose name he now couldn’t remember. And safely stored with these things, the source of the twitching: an opalescent fragment as large as the first joint of his thumb, plucked from a stone deep under the ruined city of the Aad.

He smiled to himself. Abi Van Haasteren was looking for the missing piece of the Caduceus, it seemed. Surveyors had ways and means of finding lost things, so it didn’t surprise him that she had negotiated the waters of the flood and, on reaching the resting place of the powerful relic, realised that part of it was gone. The tiny stone gleamed and shivered in his palm as though eager to be reunited with the rest of itself — a unique artefact older than humanity, older than the Change, perhaps even older than the mountains he climbed.

He put it back in the pouch and placed it once more around his neck. Then he dozed as the camel plodded onward along the path, taking one careful step at a time ever upward, mindful of the swaying passenger perched on its back ...

He dreamed of the vast, stony plains of his adolescence, where, free of the stuffiness of his family and the Haunted City, he had been able, finally, to find himself. The open spaces had simultaneously liberated and defined him. In the strange dancing of dust devils, in the shivering mysteries of the horizon, he saw a reflection of Habryn Kail that looked like a stranger; when he lost himself in the sky and the stars, he returned renewed, more sure of who he was than ever before.

The swaying of the camel’s back stirred memories of boundary riding — his first paid work — prowling the edges of the Strand for man’kin; and well-reading, when he sought signs and messages in the reflections of boreholes. But moisture in the forest air subverted the dreams, changed them into something very different from reality. Water bubbled up from the bores and flooded the land. His camel was swept from under him, and the flood carried him away.

‘Kail, you’re dreaming.’ Seth’s voice woke him from restless slumber.

‘Goddess,’ he muttered, feeling the flush on his skin. ‘I’m not well.’

‘We should’ve left you sleeping. I knew it.’ That was Hadrian, disagreeing with his brother again. They might have been arguing about him for hours inside their shared head.

‘No, you did the right thing. I need to be awake to tell you what to do at the next stop. There’s a herb I need, a particular plant called harpweed. It’ll be difficult to find so you’ll have to look hard for it, then grind the leaves into a paste so I can apply it to the skin around the cut. I have a fever, and it’s worsening fast. I might not be able to help much.’

He could feel the sickness rising in him, fogging his mind and sapping his strength. The wound was festering, despite his best efforts. He didn’t think the problem was poison in the wound. Just the air, ripe and heavy with moisture, a breeding ground for disease.

‘Tell us what to do,’ said the twins. ‘We’ll look after you.’ He wondered if that might be cause for argument between them, but didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know.

‘What will happen if you die?’

The question took him by surprise. He hadn’t seriously considered the possibility, although he knew it to be one. Far from medical help, in an environment he knew little about, with unknown enemies possibly closing in and his health fading by the hour ...

‘What do you mean, what will happen? You’ll leave me behind and keep going. There’s nothing else you can do.’

‘No, I mean what happens to
you?’

‘What happens?’

‘Where will you go?’

He pondered the question, struggling to think clearly through waves of sleepiness. The proper answer was ‘into the air’, since he, like most Sky Wardens, expected to be cremated on death and scattered to the winds. If he died in the forest, though, he was unlikely to be burned— he could hardly expect the twins to backtrack many hundreds of kilometres to the Haunted City just to ensure the proper respect was accorded him — so he supposed he would go the way of Stone Mages, and be buried in the soil. When he tried to explain all that, he soon realised that it wasn’t what the twins were asking at all.

‘No, your self, your soul — where does that go?’

‘My what?’

‘Your essence, the part of you that survives death. Who you
are,
behind everything.’

‘Who else could I be but who I am right now, right here?’

This puzzled the twins, and prompted a swap of legends and stories. Most of his were about the Cataclysm and the early days of the Change, when the world was fluid and humanity struggled to survive. Theirs were about quests for secret lands, higher beings, or life after death — an obsession that struck Kail as deeply peculiar.

‘Why worry about things you can’t see or touch when the world itself is already complicated?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t there enough questions waiting to be answered without inventing new ones?’

‘In the world we came from,’ the twins began, speaking in one voice as they did less and less these days, ‘humans lived in three Realms. The cycle starts in the Realm of flesh, the First Realm, where the physical body is born and lives. When it dies, the people we have become wake in the Second Realm, the Realm of the mind, where will determines the way life is lived. The First and Second Realms are very different, but they are connected, for humans anyway, by our lives in them. One follows the other as naturally as day follows night.’

Kail had heard this before, but understood it no more than the first time. ‘Where was this Second Realm? Underground? In the sky?’

‘Neither. It wasn’t part of the physical world. That’s the whole point. The Realms were separate; they didn’t touch. To get there humans and other beings had to cross through Bardo and the Underworld, which kept everything apart.’

‘Until you brought the two Realms together,’ he said, remembering that much.

‘Yes, but the important thing is the Third Realm, which connected birth and death by creating a circle. Reincarnation. We’re born in the flesh; grown in the spirit; made whole by ... destiny, I suppose you’d say. In the Third Realm, you can look at your life as though it was a tree, seeing every decision you made or might have made, and all the different consequences that flow from each. In the Third Realm, we get to see how things could have been, and choose a point from which to start over.’

‘Like a moth,’ said just one of the twins, perhaps Seth. ‘It starts off as an egg, then becomes a caterpillar. The caterpillar goes into a cocoon and wakes in an entirely new state. It flies around, looking for a mate, then lays an egg, which starts the cycle again. We’re not exactly the same — there aren’t as many transformations for a moth as humans have — but the metaphor is sound. In the Third Realm, humans are like moths trying to work out where to lay the egg. We get to try again, to live our lives over and over any way we want — the same again and again, or in new ways each time. In sadness, in happiness, in terror, in peace. The choice is ours.’

‘But now that choice is gone?’ asked Kail, struggling to stay upright on the camel let alone grapple with the metaphysics of a lost world.

‘You brought the Realms together. You broke the cycle.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Hadrian. ‘The First and Second Realms were one in a time before we were born. Someone cut that Realm in half like we would slice an apple in two. Humans adapted, took the change in their stride. Then we came along and mashed the two halves back together. But doing that doesn’t make the apple whole again. It just makes a mess.’

‘I think,’ said Seth, ‘that you live your First and Second Realm lives at the same time. That’s why you have the Change — some of you, anyway — and why you don’t seem to have any knowledge of the afterlife. We, in our days, had legends of heavens and hells inspired by memories of the Second Realm. Here, you don’t have anything like that — but you do have Second Realm creatures all around you, like ghosts and golems.’

‘And the Third Realm is still out there,’ concluded Hadrian. ‘Humans must still end up there, otherwise you wouldn’t be human. The signs might be hard to see, but they must exist, somewhere. Its existence will make itself felt.’

‘How?’

‘The same way it did in our world, I guess. Prophetic dreams; people who move the wrong way through time; déjà vu.’

Kail thought of seers and the man’kin, two types of being he found equally puzzling. ‘So if I died,’ he said, ‘I would go to this Third Realm and choose where to start again?’

‘Yes. I’m sure of it.’ Hadrian didn’t sound certain, just emphatic. ‘I can’t imagine how else it could be.’

Kail wondered what he would possibly do differently, and was immediately swamped with choice. ‘What if I don’t want to come back?’

‘I don’t think it works like that. Does the caterpillar have any choice about becoming the moth?’

Kail supposed that was a reasonable question, even if it didn’t truly answer his. He thought of the seer in Laure and her fear of the darkness:
Your shadow stretches before you, blacker than night.
The blackness of his own death, perhaps? But why would that have frightened her so badly?

‘I’m not planning on dying,’ he told the twins as they plodded on through the trees and the thickening mist. ‘Just in case you were wondering.’

‘Good,’ they replied. ‘So tell us about that plant you need, and leave the rest to us.’

Kail had quite forgotten about the harpweed in all the discussion about death and what came afterwards. That was a bad sign — one that would’ve hastened his end if he’d fallen into a feverish coma and been unable to finish instructing the twins. He told the twins everything they needed to know, and more besides, before allowing his heavy eyelids to fall.

The desert of his dreams awaited him. He strode forward, unafraid and heartily glad to see the sun again.

* * * *

They camped that night near the intersection of the path they were following with another path, which crossed at right angles and led steeply uphill on the left and equally steeply down on the right. What lay at either end, the twins didn’t know, but they saw no harm in halting nearby. Although Kail had slept most of the afternoon his skin was flushed and sticky, his breathing as ragged as his pulse. Being bounced around on the back of the camel probably wasn’t doing him any good.

They laid him flat and started a fire — a skill they had picked up by watching the tracker over the previous nights, just as they had learned to care for the camel without his help. Then they went in search of harpweed before the light failed completely. Fine, feathery strands dangled from a single, threadlike stalk, Kail had said, and the plant would be protruding from the trunk of unfortunate trees; unfortunate because harpweed was a parasite, one that reached deep into the heartwood and sucked it dry. It was also a powerful curative — the local version of aspirin, Hadrian assumed. It might make all the difference to Kail.

The forest was full of parasitic plants. They found several handfuls of the weed competing for space among giant fungi, lichen and things they didn’t have words for. Taking it back to camp, they became aware that certain trees visibly reacted to their presence, shaking their limbs as though in a heavy wind and dropping all manner of litter on them. The phenomenon seemed neither deliberate nor directed specifically at them. Not unlike a sea anemone reacting to the touch of a passing fish, Hadrian thought. A reflex.

But what did that say about the trees? That they were alive in a different way to normal trees? He thought of the creatures called man’kin and the way they reacted in the presence of the Homunculus. Stripped of the Change, they froze solid. Perhaps something similar was happening here.