The Hanging Mountains (28 page)

To change the subject, he asked her what she had done that afternoon, while he had been with Stone Mage Kelloman. Nothing much, she told him, beyond more talking and arguing. Marmion and the Guardian had done most of it while she had stood around, waiting. Two guards had come to take her wing away, and that had caused a lively argument. In the end she had relented, having no real choice but to accept the word of the locals that her means of flight would not be damaged. They only wanted to move it to keep the Guardian’s open-air hall tidy. The Outcast’s baggage messed up the place.

By that time, they had been seated in a close triangle on delicately carved wooden seats brought in by underlings, with Lidia Delfine and Heuve standing apart but watching closely. As the cloud-obscured sun moved slowly across the framed sky, the discussion finally came to focus on what to do with the visitors, rather than what the visitors were doing in the forest.

‘That’s when the Guardian sent for you,’ she said. ‘I think she already knew what we’d decided, but needed to go through the motions for the people around her. They’re sad and angry people. They’ve lost loved ones and friends. They need an outlet. Hunting the wraiths will give them that.’

Skender still couldn’t quite accept the decision, although he could understand it. Putting all their problems in one basket made sense, especially when a small chance existed that the problems might actually cancel each other out.

The hunting party would be led by Lidia Delfine and include the visitors to the forest, Mage Kelloman being one of those. Skender didn’t know what he himself could offer, except to be someone to trip over and to have panic on demand.

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ Chu told him. ‘You have your moments.’

‘Like when?’

‘Well, when we crash-landed and everyone was giving us —
me
— a hard time, for instance. I could only stare at them, but you took them on. I was quite impressed. It makes a change to step back and let someone else fight for you, every now and again. I could get used to it.’

‘Well, that’s
my
usual modus operandi. Did you see me earlier, with the wraith?’

‘And I was right there beside you, rooting Marmion on.’ She tilted her head to one side. ‘I’m not going to agree with you when you say you’re hopeless or a coward. You wouldn’t be here if you were either.’

Wouldn‘t I?
he asked himself, unable to face the intensity of her brown eyes.
What if I didn’t have a choice about it? What if I’m just too stupid to know when something is more trouble than it’s worth?

‘I’m lucky to be here at all,’ he said, ‘after the snake-thing and the wraith almost got me.’

‘Exactly. That’s twice this week I’ve thought I was going to have to take you home to your parents in a box.’

‘Three times, if you count the crash in the mud.’

She threw an almond at him. He responded in kind, and that resulted in the sort of play fight he had occasionally had at the Keep with members of the opposite sex. Close physical contact with girls was something he never quite got the hang of. He either flushed and went quiet, or over-compensated, becoming boisterous and belligerent. He could hear it in his voice and see himself as though standing outside his body, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had once been too scared to approach a girl he had had a serious crush on. The thought of being close to her had made him pre-empt the possibility by fleeing before anything happened.

Not so with Chu. They were all over each other before he had time to become nervous of the possibility, scrabbling for grip and flinging their centres of gravity backwards and forwards, looking for leverage. Mindful of Banner, who slept through it all, they kept their battle as quiet as they could, but cries of outrage and victory still filled the room. Of about the same height and weight, both with short hair and trimmed fingernails, neither of them possessed a clear physical advantage over the other. But Chu was nastier than any schoolgirl Skender had fought, and Skender, unaccustomed to trousers, found his usual tricks didn’t work quite as well. Barely had he had time to work up a serious sweat when he found himself pinned beneath her, her hips pressing down on his waist and her hands forcing his wrists onto the floor.

‘Now what?’ she asked.

‘Shouldn’t I be saying that?’

‘Says who?’ She grinned wolfishly. ‘Tell me you’re sorry for forgetting that night in Laure.’

‘Tell me what happened and I’ll tell you if I’m sorry or not.’

‘What do you
think
happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think we had sex?’

He bucked and twisted but couldn’t get her off him. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘Because it’s fun.’

‘You might think so.’

‘Oh, I do.’ She laughed at another attempt to free himself. ‘I could keep this up for hours.’

‘Please,’ he begged, giving in to his helplessness. ‘You got me. I give in. Let’s go back to talking about why I’m a loser. That seems to be the theme for the evening.’

‘You’re not a loser,’ she said, her face turning serious but her grip not letting up one iota. ‘Don’t say that, or I might start to believe it.’

She leaned down to kiss him and he arched up to meet her halfway, struck by the fresh fragrance of her skin and the heat of her lips. All other thought and sensation vanished. The universe consisted of her and nothing else. Even time stopped, and he didn’t quite notice when it started up again.

She leaned back and studied him with half-lidded eyes. ‘I know your heart-name, Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth.’

‘How?’ Of all the things he had expected her to say at that moment, that wasn’t one of them. ‘Who told you?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Sal or Shilly? Highson Sparre?’

‘Not even close.’

‘They shouldn’t give out things like that, whoever it is. My heart-name is private.’ An uneasy indignation rose up in him. Enough people already knew his heart-name: the golem that Sal and Shilly had fought in the Haunted City; the Homunculus; everyone who had been locked up with him in the Aad, including Mawson, Shorn Behenna, and Kemp. Too many by half. ‘It’s supposed to be a gift!’

‘Oh, I agree.’

‘I bet you don’t really know,’ he said. ‘You’re just making it up to taunt me.’

‘Why would I do that?’ Her fingers tightened around his wrists. ‘Is it really that big a deal to you?’

‘Of course it is! What if I knew yours and you didn’t want me to. How would that make you feel?’

‘Much like you seem to feel at the moment, I guess.’ All sense of play had vanished from the conversation. ‘I’d only tell mine to someone I really liked. Someone who liked me back. And even then, I’m not very trusting. You know that. I’ve been betrayed by men before. He’d have to give me his first, before I’d consider reciprocating. It’d have to
mean
something. Or I’d have to think so, anyway.’

‘You mean I —’ His mind tripped over the revelation. ‘But surely I’d remember!’

Her weight came off him. ‘Surely, yes. I would’ve thought you’d remember
thinking
about doing it, too. Or were you so drunk at the time you weren’t thinking at all? Was it just a spur-of-the-moment joke to you, something you didn’t mean?’

‘No, I — that is, I don’t know.’ He stared up at her in despair. ‘Are you
sure
you’re not having me on?’

She towered over him, impossibly distant.

‘If you really want me to believe you’re a loser, Galeus,’ she said, ‘you’re doing a bloody good job of it.’

She was gone before he could sit up. He didn’t call after her, knowing it would be useless. Knowing, at last, that it would be the wrong name.

* * * *

The cushioned chamber turned out to be a communal sleeping area. Banner slept on, undisturbed either by Skender and Chu, or by the others coming in, one by one, to rest. Marmion looked exhausted, and immediately collapsed in the nearest available spot, his wounded arm stretched before him as though appealing to someone in his dreams. His stump had been bandaged with fresh linen, but that was the only concession he had made to cleanliness.

Not long after Chu ran off, Skender had found a selection of robes in one of the other rooms and swapped them for his ridiculous pants. He didn’t care if they were meant for women or men, as long as he was comfortable. There was nothing in traditional Stone Mage colours, so he made do with black.

Chu hadn’t returned by the time the delicately carved brands dimmed. He considered going to look for her, but figured she would have come back had she wanted to see him. He had no doubt that she would be safe, wherever she was. Heuve wasn’t going to let her roam unchecked through the city, no matter how badly she might want to. He tried to put her out of his mind as best he could.

You’re not a loser. Don’t say that, or I might start to believe it.

Skender didn’t need to say anything. There was no hiding the truth of him. It shone through every clumsy attempt to be ... what? A Stone Mage? A hero? Himself? Somehow, he managed to fall asleep.

His dreams were full of Rattails — stalking him, mocking him, leering at him — but there was nothing he could do to make himself wake up. He was trapped.

Then, when Sal had woken him up by calling from the Panic city, Chu had been beside him. Not touching, but there, facing him, dressed in her old clothes and with a frown line between her eyebrows. Her eyelids were red.

Galeus.
He had given her his heart-name at some point during the missing night in Laure. She in turn had given him hers. And he had completely forgotten the transaction. No wonder she was angry with him. This was much more important than
sex.

But even as he saw her side of it, he wondered if she wasn’t being unfair. He had made the gift, even if he couldn’t remember it. Didn’t that count for something? She still knew his heart-name. He couldn’t — and wouldn’t — take that back.

If only he could remember
hers,
then perhaps everything would be all right.

Mute daylight, filtering through the clouds and the translucent paper screens that substituted for windows in that section of the city, painted patterns across the people sharing the room with him. The syncopated rhythms of their breathing marked time as implacably as the ticking of a roomful of clocks. He didn’t know even roughly what hour it was, or when they were expected to begin preparations for the hunt. He could only assume that someone would come for them when the foresters were ready.

Screw that,
he thought, getting up as quietly as he could and cleaning his teeth.

When he stuck his head out the common room door, he found two guards keeping watch.

‘Am I confined to quarters?’ he asked them. ‘No? Well, I need to see the Guardian about the hunt. It’s important.’

One of them took him through the accommodations of the Guardian and her staff. The citadel possessed a lean, elegant simplicity, even as it rambled up and down through the forest canopy, linked by ramp and platform from tree to tree. He couldn’t estimate the number of rooms in the building, since, like the city itself, its structure was determinedly organic. If the people who lived in it wanted a new wing, they would have to plant a tree and wait two hundred years for it to grow tall enough. So what space they had they used well.

He came at last to a smaller version of the Guardian’s citadel, a rectangular space defined by woven bamboo screens and open to the sky above. Instead of the dawnlit clouds, however, Skender saw only leaves. From elsewhere in the citadel came a harsh, constant ringing of metal hammering against metal. It contrasted sharply with the liquid night-time susurrus of the forest and he tried not to think about what the blacksmiths responsible were making.

The Guardian sat on a low, backless chair, dressed in a grey gown that stopped short of her bare feet. She looked as though she had been woken from sleep by her daughter, and Heuve, who stood opposite her stiffly at attention. A circular pendant, too large to be a bracelet but too small to be a crown, hung on a silver chain from her neck.

‘Where is he?’ she asked, continuing the conversation Skender had interrupted.

‘Changing into a fresh uniform,’ said Lidia Delfine. ‘He insisted.’

‘He would.’ The Guardian turned her tired gaze to Skender. ‘Yes? You said you wanted to see me?’

‘I — uh.’ His resolve faltered momentarily now that he was in front of her. ‘I’ve received a message from the others.’

‘So have we.’

‘You know, then?’ He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

‘The hunt will go ahead. They won’t intimidate us so easily.’

Intimidate?
he wondered as another man entered the room. That wasn’t the reaction he had expected.

‘Guardian.’ The new arrival knelt before the seated woman and inclined his head in deep respect. ‘Forgive me for being the bearer of such tidings.’

‘You don’t need my forgiveness, dear friend, and you should know better than to ask for it.’ The Guardian leaned forward and reached out a hand as though to touch him. It hung in the air for a moment, then returned, trembling, to her lap. ‘That you are alive is cause for celebration in my heart.’

‘I’m honoured.’

‘You’re welcome, you old fool. Now stand up and look at me.’

The man raised his head and stood, and Skender was astonished to recognise him as Seneschal Schuet.

‘But you’re —’ he stammered. ‘I thought —’

Schuet turned and frowned slightly. ‘Skender, isn’t it? Sal and Shilly’s friend?’

‘Yes, but — how did you get
here?’

‘He brought the message from the Panic,’ said Lidia Delfine. ‘They dropped him on the outskirts of Milang under cover of darkness. With his hands tied, he couldn’t climb. It took him three hours to attract attention.’

Schuet shifted uncomfortably on his feet. ‘There’s no denying it was a calculated insult,’ he said, ‘but let’s not dwell on the details. My pride is the least thing at stake here.’

‘What
is
at stake?’ asked Skender, becoming thoroughly confused.