The Hanging Mountains (20 page)

‘Not so fast, young lady. I can look quite well from here, but I can’t watch both of you at once.’

She resigned herself to spending longer in her half-crouch and leaned heavily on her stick as the elderly Panic male knelt down to examine Kemp.

‘Hmmm.’ Vehofnehu peeled back the dressing on Kemp’s stomach wound and tested the clear liquid issuing from it with one long finger. The same hand cupped the albino’s cheek and lifted one eyelid. Shilly gasped before she could stop herself at what lay beneath. Instead of Kemp’s pale blue iris and black pupil, she saw nothing at all. Not even the white of his eyeball. What lay behind was the same colour as his skin, which was itself looking very strange indeed.

‘All right,’ Vehofnehu said, backing up. ‘We’ll need to get him out of the cage. Can you help me with that?’

‘I can try.’

‘And do
you
have a name? Just one will do.’

‘Shilly,’ she said. ‘He’s Kemp.’

‘Not any more, I fear. You take his legs and I’ll carry his head.’

Awkwardly, and leaving her no energy for conversation, Shilly and Vehofnehu carried Kemp out of the cage, across the gangplank, and away from the elevator shaft. She glimpsed blue sky as she neared the windows. She blinked, dazzled, and almost tripped over a brass telescope lying on the floor.

‘Careful! That’s very valuable. Lay him down — here on this couch will do. I can see him much better now. Yes.’

Shilly let go of Kemp’s feet with relief, and staggered back on her good leg. Her injured thighbone ached from the exertion. She clutched her stick and waited impatiently for her eyes to adjust.

‘Where are you from, Shilly?’ Vehofnehu asked her. She could hear him rustling and fiddling as he examined Kemp, but she couldn’t quite make him cut. Again, the feeling that a powerful charm was at work nearby thrilled through her.

‘The Strand,’ she said, fighting the dizziness by concentrating on his words. ‘Kemp and I used to live in the same town, but he lives in the Interior now.’

‘And now you’re both here. That’s odd, isn’t it?’

She blinked the last of the glare from her eyes, and saw Vehofnehu hunched over Kemp’s broad, hairless chest. For a moment, she saw someone quite different: a younger version of him, perhaps, with straighter back and thick dark hair, his strong, straight fingers outspread as though feeling the warmth of a fire, not bent and arthritic. A faint red spark burned in the centre of each of his pupils.

Then she blinked, and he was old again. From somewhere — a pocket, maybe — he had produced a pair of wire-framed glass spectacles and placed them over his eyes.

‘I can think of odder things,’ she said.

He laughed and turned to face her. ‘I’m sure you can. You’ve seen a thing or two in your time, judging by the look of you.’

She glanced down at her dusty dress and plain leather sandals, all fraying around the edges. ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting to be kidnapped when I got up yesterday morning —’

‘No, Shilly. That’s not what I meant. Your eyes. Your face. Everything about you tells me you’ve experienced more of the world than most people. You’ve seen a glast, at the very least.’

This confused her. ‘A what?’

‘A glast.’ Vehofnehu indicated Kemp. ‘The thing afflicting your friend here.’

‘That’s what it was called?’ It was a relief to have a name for the creature, finally. ‘It came out of the water in the Divide and took us by surprise. Kemp was hit. The venom spread before we could stop it. Rosevear tried —’

Vehofnehu held up a hand for silence; again, the reminder of his non-human nature stopped her in her tracks. When he talked and moved, she could easily pretend that he was nothing but an old man, hunched and scrawny with age. But those long fingers, the oddly foreshortened thumbs, the lined, pink palms ...

‘Let me make something clear,’ he said. ‘The shape it possessed when you encountered it — that’s not the glast. That was just one of its victims. Where did you say it came from? From the water?’

She nodded. ‘A giant snake, eyeless, with whiskers.’

‘I’ve heard of such things. They live high in the mountains, in glacial lakes where the prey is plentiful and the competition light. They don’t usually come down to the plains. Was that where you encountered it?’

‘A short way into the foothills,’ she said. ‘A day or so from the forest’s edge.’

He clucked his tongue, making a surprisingly loud noise. ‘Very much out of their range. Not that it would have made much difference. Your snake wasn’t a snake any more. It was a glast, possibly infected during the flood, or before, or after. Am I making sense to you? Something poisoned the snake and turned it into a monster. Not a physical poison, but a chimerical poison. The snake in turn poisoned Kemp, and now he’s turning into a glast too.’

A feeling of foreboding was growing in her belly. ‘Is there anything you can do for him?’

‘No.’ Vehofnehu straightened. ‘Shilly, your friend is already dead. It’s best you accept that. He will never return to you, as you knew him. Our only concern now is what to do with the glast. This is one occasion in which all my skills as a healer will be of no use whatsoever.’

Shilly backed away, every last hope for Kemp settling into dust. She didn’t doubt for a moment that Vehofnehu was telling the truth. The pallor of Kemp’s skin grew worse with every hour. The weeping of his wound continued unchecked. Either his hair had begun falling out, or it was losing even the little colour it had once possessed.

The brightness of the sky brought tears to her eyes. Kemp would never see the sun again.

Then something Vehofnehu had said came back to haunt her.

‘What do you mean:
as I knew him?’

* * * *

Ramal and the others took longer than an hour to climb the stairs. By the time they reached the top, Tom was red in the face, and Rosevear looked set to become one of his own patients. Even the Panic soldiers accompanying them seemed winded, stretching gratefully on reaching the summit and accepting Vehofnehu’s offer of a drink.

‘This is all terribly inconvenient,’ the empyricist muttered while bustling about, pumping water from a large brass tap near the elevator shaft and shifting rolls of charts and diagrams off seats. His mood had turned from friendly to irritable again, and he treated the soldiers with exaggerated, almost sarcastic deference The soldiers in return maintained a bored distance from the observatory and empyricist both. Only Ramal watched closely as Vehofnehu repeated the explanation he had given Shilly to Rosevear and the others.

‘Glasts, you see, don’t reproduce like other creatures. They don’t breed and have children. They don’t mate like us, or like other animals.’ The empyricist rummaged behind a stack of dusty books until he found an elaborate family tree, which he unrolled and placed on the ground. ‘Here is the lineage of the kingsfolk. At the top, the Handsome King. His children married and had children of their own; his grandchildren did the same, merging and mixing the bloodlines until they were inseparable. That’s the way the Panic work — and humans too, although they place more store in who begat who than we do. A glast, now —’ He pointed at the top of the family tree ‘— a glast starts off alone in the world, a creature that is neither body nor mind but something else entirely. How did it come into existence? What was the first begetting from which all glasts arise? I can’t answer that question. I
can
tell you, however, where
more
glasts come from. Not by finding another glast, oh no. By infecting an innocent host — a host with which the essence of the glast merges to create an entirely new glast. Not the old glast in a new shape, but a new being, one with the nature of a glast and something of the donor, too. Thus the lineage progresses. Water snake is infected, becomes a glast-snake. Glast-snake infects Kemp, and he becomes a glast-Kemp. The lineage could continue forever that way, if unchecked.’

Vehofnehu let the parchment roll shut with a snap.

‘Is that clear?’

Tom nodded. Rosevear looked slightly stunned. ‘But he still lives.’

‘Only after a fashion. Look.’ Vehofnehu stunned everyone by crossing to Kemp, removing the thick bandage placed over his weeping stomach wound, squeezing the moisture it contained into a small glass, and knocking back the thimbleful of clear liquid in one gulp. ‘Pure water, nothing more. What did you think it was?’

‘I — I wasn’t sure. That is —’ Rosevear had trouble finding words. ‘I didn’t know —’

‘You couldn’t have known unless you’d seen a glast in action before.’

‘And you have, I suppose?’ asked Ramal.

‘Not me personally, but someone I know well.’ Vehofnehu hurried to fill the guard’s pitcher with water from the tap, and managed to spill a small amount on Ramal’s armour.

‘I knew he was dead,’ said Tom.

That brought Shilly out of her daze. She had sunk into a seat, half-listening as she processed the information herself. ‘And that makes you happy?’ she snapped. ‘He was your friend. You coached him through School and the Novitiate. You knew him even longer than I, you —’ She stopped, seeing Tom recoil and turn away from her. He didn’t know why she was so angry at him, and she wasn’t entirely certain, either. Kemp hadn’t been her best friend in the whole world. She had actively hated him during his years of bullying in Fundelry. He had put that behind him, though; he had begun to make a life for himself in the Interior. The tattoos that Stone Mages placed such value in had begun to take shape across his skin. In time, perhaps, he might have become a Surveyor, like Skender’s mother, and unearthed all manner of mystery from Ruins across the world.

But Tom had condemned him to death, or something even worse than that, by not warning him of the glast’s attack. Shilly didn’t care if the glast was important; she didn’t see the future as Tom did. She just knew that someone she cared about was gone, and Tom had allowed it to happen.

Her chain of thought suddenly skipped a link. Something had moved on Kemp’s strange skin. She stood up, pointing through a hot rush of tears.

‘His tattoos! Look!’

Vehofnehu bent over Kemp’s body. The black marks that had once stood out so strongly against the albino’s paleness were shimmering, shifting like reflections on milky water.

‘Fascinating. Truly fascinating.’

Shilly resisted an impulse to whack Vehofnehu across the bony shoulders. ‘Is there
nothing we
can do?’

‘Well, we can remember that to the glast this wasn’t an evil act. You might see it that way. Your friend undoubtedly would. But the glast is a creature in its own right, with the right to fight for its survival.’

‘The right to kill?’

Vehofnehu shrugged. ‘Do you eat meat?’

‘Yes, but that’s all I do with it. I don’t take it over and parade around in it.’

‘What about leather, soap, glue, perfume, wool, oil —?’

‘All right, all right.’ She conceded the point ungraciously. ‘I get it.’

‘And glasts only use one body at a time, so arguably this one here will kill less than you in your lifetime.’

‘Okay! So what will it be like? The glast-Kemp?’

‘There’s only one way to find out. Wait until it wakes up.’

Shilly turned away, not sure what she thought of this plan. If Kemp was truly dead, then perhaps it would be better to kill the glast that had killed him, to stop it infecting anyone else. But what if enough of him survived the transition and the glast remained recognisably Kemp? Would destroying it dishonour who he had been? Or would it just prevent the birth of a hideous, perhaps even dangerous, hybrid?

‘Can we stay here?’ Rosevear asked Ramal. ‘To wait it out?’

‘Here?’ spluttered Vehofnehu. ‘Impossible. I have work to do.’

‘What work?’ Ramal snorted derisively. ‘I’ve got better things to do than babysit all day.’

‘Such as?’

The soldier’s upper lip curled into a sneer. ‘You may not have noticed, old fool, but there’s a war brewing. Better out there in the thick of it than cowering in here, I say.’ The rest of the soldiers uttered an approving rumble. ‘You may stay,’ Ramal said to Shilly and the others. ‘Food and sleeping mats will be provided.’

‘And the others?’ Shilly pressed, thinking of Sal and Highson, and how she might need both of them to stop the glast-Kemp if it went on a rampage like the snake.

‘They will be brought to you in due course.’

Vehofnehu raised his hands in exasperation and muttered furiously under his breath. His ears turned red in the wild thickets of his hair as he wandered away to bang and clank in the depths of a wooden chest.

‘Thank you,’ said Shilly, although she was far from sure she was grateful. Sticking around to make sure that Kemp was, in fact, truly dead would be a grim and thankless task.

Vehofnehu rattled about in irritation, muttering with undisguised discourtesy. ‘Well, if that’s the way it has to be, go fight your stupid war. The sooner you win or lose it, the sooner I can be left in peace.’

Ramal sniffed through flared nostrils. ‘There will be guards at the bottom of the tower. Any attempt to escape will be harshly dealt with.’

‘I’m sure they understand.’ Vehofnehu shooed her and the soldiers toward the stairs, not letting them even suggest using the cage to descend. ‘I’ll explain it to them again, should they harbour any illusions as to their status.’

The sound of the Panic descending echoed through Vehofnehu’s chamber. He stood at the top of the stairs, waving every now and again, until the sound had faded very much into the background.

‘At last,’ he said, turning back to face Shilly, Tom and Rosevear. ‘I thought they’d never leave.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Rosevear began, obviously feeling it was his duty as eldest to apologise. ‘We don’t mean to be an inconvenience, but —’

‘It’s no trouble.’ Vehofnehu breezily waved away his concerns in a complete reversal of mood. ‘Now I know you’re not friends with
them,
I can relax. But I couldn’t let them know that, or they would’ve refused your request to stay here. Now, would you like some tea?’

‘Tea?’ Shilly echoed inanely.

‘Yes, tea. You did have tea in that village of yours, didn’t you? I can’t imagine a civilised place without it.’