The Hanging Mountains (62 page)

She started to protest, but he hadn’t finished. ‘You’re not a prisoner, Shilly. Don’t think that. You came of your own free will, as we knew you would. Sal will follow, but we have a good headstart, and that gives us some time. When he catches up, you can go with him. Indeed, it seems important that you do, judging by what Tom has told us. We don’t want to stand between the two of you.’

Still Tom said nothing, but she heard his words as clear as day:
Kemp is the only one who stands between you
... he had said on the boneship,
when the end comes.

‘Where’s Kemp?’ she asked. ‘What did you do with him?’

‘Let’s talk about golems, first,’ said Vehofnehu, shifting on his rump. ‘Shathra is quite right. They are not all evil, although they seem so to us. You’ve met a couple and have had good reason to fight them, but there are others with different agendas. They move through the world at an angle to us, finding their own way to their own destinations. When our paths cross, it can be for good or ill, but they have as much right to be there as we do. And some of them can be beneficial.

‘There is a crown in my observatory,’ he started to explain, ‘a simple circle of iron —’

‘I’ve seen it,’ she interrupted him. ‘Sal put it on, then Griel. The last I heard, Oriel was considering wearing it.’

That took him off-guard, which pleased her. ‘Oriel? What on Earth was Griel thinking?’ He put the issue aside with an obvious effort. ‘My point about the crown is this: it’s occupied by a creature that has no name, which grants to its wearer a vision of his or her profoundest desire. I’ve worn it, and I can tell you that the visions are powerfully seductive.’

She nodded. ‘Sal and Griel were very different afterwards. The crown seemed to make them capable of anything.’

‘That’s the charm of the crown. It’s not really doing anything but unlocking its wearer’s potential. The crown thrives on the achievement of that potential, or at least the striving towards it. It’s not harming the wearer, but it is, technically, a parasite, a kind of golem that lives in the crown rather than in a person’s mind.’

‘And that makes it okay?’

‘I don’t know. That would depend on who is wearing it, I guess, and what they do with their potential.’

She could see that, but she still struggled with what it meant. People could be coerced by dreams as well as threats, and coercion of all sorts struck her as being intrinsically wrong.

‘This is where you talk about the glast,’ she guessed. ‘It’s a sort of golem too. Right?’

The empyricist nodded.

‘And the glast is the second person?’

With a flick of one long wrist, Vehofnehu peeled back the cloth covering the bundle beside him.

Shilly tried not to react, but her shock was difficult to suppress. Kemp’s body lay under the cloth, curled into a foetal ball with knees tight up against his chin. His eyes were open but saw nothing. He could have been dead for all the movement he made; even his breathing appeared to have ceased. But he wasn’t dead. He was something else.

In appearance, he had changed utterly. His flesh was black and glassy. His tattoos were white and seemed to hover a fingernail’s thickness above his skin. The blacks of his eyes had also turned white and gleamed with a light of their own.

The thing before her was still recognisably
him.
His features were unchanged; the sheer size of his body was unaltered. That it wasn’t really him was hard to accept.

‘Is he —?’ She swallowed. ‘Is
it
awake?’

‘Not yet, but I don’t think we’ll have long to wait.’

‘What makes you think it’s going to help us? It attacked the boneship, remember?’

‘That was no accident, Shilly. It was trying to become one of you, I think, in order to communicate. Sal was probably its first target, but it settled on Kemp when Sal proved too strong. We’ll find out what it wants to say when it wakes up — but I can’t believe it went to so much trouble without having something to offer.’

Shilly nodded distractedly. A cold feeling spread through her at the thought that it might have been Sal lying in front of her, not Kemp. She would have preferred none of her friends to be hurt, had she a choice, but she was acutely aware now of how much worse it could have been, from her point of view.

‘And then what?’ she asked. ‘Where is all this leading us?’

‘That’s the problem,’ Vehofnehu said. ‘The future is hidden from us, so we’re going to have to make it for ourselves. That’s why we’re gathering, here and elsewhere, to increase the clarity of our foresight and to muster our full strength. We’ll need all we can muster to make sure we
have
a future, to take on Yod and erase it from our world once and for all.’

She nodded, thinking:
it had slept for an eternity, but was waking now, and it was hungry.

‘Is this what you dream, Tom?’ she asked, remembering his coldness in Vehofnehu’s observatory, the sense of increasing distance between him and everyone else.

Tom nodded. Among his new friends he looked perfectly comfortable.
Normal.

‘Have you always known it would end up here?’

He shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Dreams are confusing. I see lots of things.’

‘He does indeed,’ said Vehofnehu. ‘Good and bad, bad and good.’

‘I see Fundelry a lot, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever go back there.’

The letter-tiles tinkled again, spelling out the word:
Goddess.

Shilly frowned at the tiles, wondering what that interjection could possibly mean. The Holy Immortals were watching her, their glowing eyes creepy and intense. The Angel was watching her too, and so was Mawson. They were all watching her, she realised, and all of a sudden she didn’t like it much at all.

‘Well, what’s your big plan? How are we going to kick Yod out of here, once and for all?’

Vehofnehu indicated the tiles. ‘My friends here have already answered your question.’

‘The Goddess? She’s just a myth. The weather-worker of the village Tom and I grew up in used to tell me the old stories of the Cataclysm, but that doesn’t mean ...’ She trailed off. Vehofnehu was nodding, and she realised that writing off stories about the Cataclysm could be slightly stupid, given the things she’d seen in recent weeks.

‘The Goddess is real,’ said Vehofnehu. ‘I knew her, and I know where to find her body. We’re going to waken her. She’s going to show us how to get rid of Yod.’

Disorientation swept through her. A goddess and a glast, a conspiracy of seers, glowing green people from the future, a mad not-quite-human — and her, a cripple with bad dreams. What sort of army was this? What hope of success had any plan they concocted?

‘You’re insane,’ she said.

‘Quite possibly.’ The empyricist grinned.

‘And you, Mawson — I can’t believe you’re going along with this!’

‘The time has come to stop running,’
said the man’kin.

‘Is that what the Angel thinks, too?’

‘
The Angel says fight.’

She felt like putting her head in her hands and either weeping or howling with laughter.
More gets done in the shadows than in the light,
Griel had said, but that reassured her not one jot.

‘Why me?’

Vehofnehu barked again. ‘Where else would you rather be, Shilly, than at the centre of the world? You’ve already spent too long at the periphery, watching as others excel. Here’s your chance to make a difference. Here’s your chance to shine. You won’t turn us down, not while there is breath in your body.’

‘You think so?’

‘Prove me wrong and I promise that the man’kin will take you back.’

She looked at them, all watching her, and knew Vehofnehu was right. At least about that. While there was a chance she could help, she had to stay. She was tired of hobbling along behind everyone else, always feeling left out. Marmion seemed to respect her now, and that was an improvement, but what use was respect when she still had no talent, no official position, no clear role except to boss people around?

‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’ve got me. But only if you tell me one thing.’

Vehofnehu spread his unusual hands, the picture of reason. ‘Ask away.’

‘Who is sending me the dreams? Why have they picked me to be part of your little gang?’
Because I’m going to wring their neck when I eventually catch up with them.

‘There’s only one possible person,’ he said, sobering, ‘and I don’t think she had a lot of choice. It’s you, you see. You from the future — or from
a
future, at least — reaching back to give you what you need to defeat Yod. Only time and unlocking the message will reveal what that is. Does that answer the question to your satisfaction?’

She stared at him for a long time, weighing up possible responses. When she did speak again, the single word made birds, not long settled, take to the night sky in a flurry.

* * * *

to conclude in

The Devoured Earth