The Hanging Mountains (18 page)

The party of mixed foresters and captives entered the city of Milang at its base, past a steep wall of foliage between two giant trees that looked old enough to have been around since the Cataclysm. Skender had never seen such trees before. Their branches were angular and evenly spaced, tracing out — he realised with a shock — the shape of two giant charms, one for security and one for hospitality. The path between them was wide and well travelled, thickly coated with pine needles so their footfalls were almost silent.

Sentries watched them from the branches above, holding bows at the ready. Delfine saluted them briskly but didn’t stop. The way gradually steepened until it reached the level of the first platform, Delfine leading them across a walkway onto a level surface woven from branches, all carved with whorls and swirls like the one Skender had seen in the forest, and secured every square metre or so by winding, living vines. That was the last time in their journey that they touched the ground.

From there, they followed ramps and stairways up through the trees, rising ever higher into the city. There were few traditional buildings, as Skender knew them; individual dwellings blended into one another, overlapping as organically as did the trees themselves, linked by walkways that ranged from simple planks to broad thoroughfares covered with thatch. The cliff face and the plants that inhabited it were always visible, thickest in shadowy nooks and on miniature plateaus. The sounds of foraging animals and birds came clearly through gaps in the floors and walls. They made the trees their home, just as the foresters had. Skender wondered how well the many species coexisted, and thought uneasily about bugs and spiders getting into everything.

Within the canopy, it was hard to see very far. To make up for that, a complex system of bells, sirens and whistles sounded constantly, enabling the citizens of the city to communicate across distances greater than a few metres.

Skender kept an eye out for such details as he went. If he ever made it back to the Keep, his father would want to know all about the cultures of the forest and the various homes they had made there. Every beam was unique in shape and size, and great care had been taken in making the joints and stays that kept the greater structure whole, and yet flexible too, to allow for different rates of growth. Wooden limbs entwined around each other, adding sinuous strength and liquid beauty; floors and walls merged seamlessly into trunks and branches, giving Skender cause to wonder how much was fashioned and how much grown that way. Occasional tingles of the Change suggested that there was more to the city than met the eye. Some trees fairly throbbed with potential, like the one in the clearing where they had stopped to rest the previous night. He could feel powerful currents running beneath his feet, through branches and along entangled roots, spreading naturally into the city all around him.

The foresters had made it like that, he reasoned. They had come to the forest bringing Change-workers and other artisans, and from dumb static trees they had fashioned a city that could change both with its environment and with the people inhabiting it. It could expand in size, or contract, if needed. It possessed all the flexibility that a stone city didn’t have, and had the added advantage of growing itself. Stonemasons would be in very short supply in a city like this.

But what about ironmongers, Skender wondered. How would the foresters cook, or fashion their tools? They might be able to pluck food from the branches around them or tend stepped farms on the ridge’s broad flanks, but he doubted that growing swords or arrowheads would ever be practical.

They walked all morning, ascending steadily by switching back and forth across the steep cliff face. The cloud grew ever more dense and cool on his skin, making him feel clammy all over. Skender’s arm muscles burned from carrying the wing, and his knees protested with every step upwards he took. His head swam with hunger and the need for food.

Finally, Delfine called a rest break. On a circular platform surrounded by five muscular tree trunks, the party stretched out on flat brown cushions and rubbed aching muscles. Attendants appeared as if from nowhere, bringing food and water in sufficient quantity to feed twenty people. The foresters broke warm bread and dipped it in pastes and honeys of different hues, sampling from each bowl in sequence. Skender ate and drank without restraint, not worrying about the strange tastes greeting his greedy tastebuds. Only when the gaping void in his stomach was filled did he become slightly more discriminating.

The pastes satisfied him less than the array of meats available in delicate white wood bowls. He discovered at least three different sorts of flesh, marinated and cooked to the point of dissolving in his mouth, barely needing to be chewed.

When he asked Chu what she thought they were, she shrugged as she took a swig of purple fruit juice. ‘How would I know?’

‘That one,’ said the woman called Navi, indicating a morsel Skender had just raised to his lips, ‘is frog.’

‘Frog?’ he echoed, feeling instantly less hungry.

‘Ghost frog, specifically. They live on fungus at the bottom of the city. The one you just ate is roast crabbier flesh. Do you know what a crabbier is?’

He nodded, blanching. Crabblers were a species of giant spider that lived in the Divide walls.

‘The third —’

‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, putting the morsel of meat back on the plate and holding up both hands. ‘Really I don’t.’

The first inkling that Navi might be teasing him came when Chu laughed. ‘Nice one,’ she said. ‘Crabbier meat is black and bitter. What are we eating, really?’

Navi maintained a blank expression for a second, then broke into a wide smile. Skender felt himself flush deep red as she explained: ‘Game hen, possum, and fig bat.’

The last sounded only marginally more acceptable than frog to Skender’s suddenly restless stomach. Then a worse thought occurred to him.

‘Have you really tasted crabbier?’ he asked Chu.

She shrugged. ‘You’ve seen where I live. If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything.’

Skender sincerely doubted that he would ever be
that
hungry.

‘Where
do
you come from?’ asked Delfine, perhaps realising only then that Chu and Skender shared different origins.

‘Laure,’ Chu replied. ‘It’s literally a hole in the ground. The Divide cut it in half a thousand years ago. Things went downhill from there.’

Delfine looked from Chu to Skender, then to Marmion, Banner and Eitzen eating in silence to one side. ‘Such an odd mixture of people. I understand how recent events might have affected someone from Laure, but what difference do they make to the Haunted City? To the Nine Stars?’

Marmion avoided the question. ‘How has the flood affected you? May I ask that?’

She nodded, her face very serious. ‘You’ve come upstream, along the great fissure we call the Pass. For all you know, the flood follows its length right to its source. I tell you now that it does not. The flood joins the Pass in a valley not far from here. A community called Chiappin once thrived on the flanks of that valley, home to one thousand people, young and old. Chiappin is now gone, swept away by the terrible waters. Everyone who lived there is dead.’

‘And the trees, too,’ said Warden Banner, nodding. ‘If the flood was strong enough to threaten Laure, far downstream, here the effects must have been truly devastating.’

Delfine’s eyes shone. ‘Yes, they were. Where trees two centuries old once stood now lies nothing but dead earth and stone. The naked mountainside is scarred and hideous. I can’t bear to look at it.’

She pushed her plate away.

Skender reined in an automatic complaint at the description of exposed stone as ‘hideous’. Had it undoubtedly not been ghoulish to ask just then, he would have been curious to know more about the backbone of the mountain.

‘Let’s keep moving,’ said Delfine, standing smoothly. ‘We’re only an hour from the summit. There we’ll talk properly and consider what’s to be done with you.’

Skender resigned himself to more walking as the party gathered itself together and headed off. The promise of rest faded in the face of fear of the foresters deciding that Chu wasn’t welcome or that Marmion’s quest could not be tolerated. Their rest might be all too brief and conducted in a cell, followed by an enforced march back the way they had come.

He wondered if Sal and Shilly and the others were faring any better. That he was, at least, a captive of members of his own species was small comfort, but one to cling to during their long march.

* * * *

As the day wore on, the fog thinned slightly, allowing Skender to see further through. It became clear that Milang spread as far across the ridge’s face as it did upwards, woven through the trees as inseparably as the mist. From a great distance, the telltale signs of its presence — unnaturally straight lines and sharp angles; gleams of glazed ceramic or glass; moving shapes that couldn’t possibly belong to birds or ordinary tree creatures — would be effectively invisible, even without the fog to hide them. He wondered if that was deliberate, and then wondered what the foresters had to fear from the forest around them.

Without the fog, the arboreal city’s existence would have been decidedly uncertain. Everywhere he went, he saw sheets of charmed cloth artfully arrayed to catch the moisture in the air. Stately pyramids condensed mist in their cool hearts, channelling steady drips into containers or channels designed to collect every skerrick. In some places, the trickle of water was so loud it reminded him of rain.

Their upward climb couldn’t last forever. The summit Delfine spoke of wasn’t the top of the mountain range itself, but the uppermost and westernmost point of the ridge the city clung to, hidden deep in the permanent cloud cover. The trees continued to grow over it, but the ground fell away beneath them. Skender noticed a change in ambience long before he worked out what had happened. The sound of creatures in the undergrowth faded as the trunks surrounding them grew steadily narrower.

The summit consisted of a broad structure built around the trees’ uppermost reaches, like a crown resting on spiky hair, not touching the head beneath. A vast wooden citadel with a tall belltower in one corner, surrounded by an immense skirt-like shelf that formed an approach on all sides, it would be the only building visible from outside the forest, although who could possibly see it through the fog and at such a great altitude, Skender couldn’t imagine. Inside the outer walls, a row of broad wooden steps led up to a boxy central building with a single square entrance and no apparent windows. Guards in ochre uniforms lined either side of the stairwell; six more stood at the entrance. Dark eyes watched them closely as they approached.

Here we go,
thought Skender, remembering the Magister of Laure and her cabal of sinister bloodworkers.
Why can’t the locals ever be friendly?

The guards at the entrance to the central building bowed as Lidia Delfine approached and opened the doors for her. She led the party inside through a series of skinny trunks that formed cloisters around the building’s heart. Skender looked up as they entered, startled by the lack of a roof. The cloud-swathed sky seemed brighter to his eyes simply because of the frame around it.

The walls were not painted or carved, but covered in a series of elegant mosaics. Artisans had fashioned many different shades of wood into slivers and placed them in patterns evoking images of wind and fog. The sunlight, even filtered through the clouds and fog, cast them into bright relief.

A sudden softness beneath his feet made him look down. The floor wasn’t wood, as he had expected. It was grass — real grass, growing in real dirt, high above the bases of the trees holding the citadel aloft.

‘Daughter.’

A deep woman’s voice echoed from the cloisters and the chamber’s delicate mosaics. In the centre of the chamber stood a woman of middle years wearing a long, many-folded robe in green and brown. Short-cropped silver hair matched the sky above so perfectly that for a moment Skender mistakenly assumed it to be a cap of some kind. Her features were broad and lined with care. Her arms opened to embrace Lidia Delfine as she approached.

‘Mother.’ Delfine returned the brief clasp of the older woman then knelt respectfully at her feet. ‘Forgive me. My quest was not successful.’

‘That I am given to understand.’ The woman nodded, not unkindly, and looked up at Marmion and the others, waiting uncertainly on the edge of the grassed area. Grief cut deep lines in the corners of her eyes. ‘Success comes in many guises, however. Sometimes we know it not, though it stands openly before us.’

Lidia Delfine glanced over her shoulder. ‘You believe these people are meant to be here?’

‘I don’t know, yet, what they are meant to be.’ The woman gestured that her daughter should stand. ‘You, Sky Warden,’ she said to Marmion. ‘My youngest child is dead. Can you tell me what killed him?’

Marmion stepped forward and executed a deep bow. ‘I fear that I cannot.’ His expression recounted the horror of their brief encounter with the wraith more eloquently than words. Skender would never forget the viciousness of that unprovoked attack. ‘I am an emissary of the Alcaide Braham of the Strand. Our mission has brought us here for very different reasons.’

‘Really? My people have been hunted every night for the past two weeks. Moai vanish from places they have rested for hundreds of years. And now you arrive on our doorstep, asking for help. All things are connected in the forest, whether you see the roots or not.’

Marmion bowed again. ‘Perhaps that is the case.’

‘Tell on. Why are you here?’

Skender couldn’t hide his restlessness as Marmion commenced another explanation of the Sky Warden’s quest. This time, though, the warden didn’t stop with just the flood and the man’kin migration. He touched on the odd readings of the seers, but still kept the runaway Homunculus and the twins to himself.

‘You didn’t mention this prophecy before,’ Lidia Delfine accused him, coming around her mother to confront him directly. Heuve scowled to one side, as though all his worst suspicions had been confirmed. ‘What else are you hiding?’