The Hanging Mountains (49 page)

He gritted his teeth and pushed off with his right leg. Their combined weight, plus that of the wing, was considerable but not immoveable. All he had to do was pick up speed and then fall forward.

One step, two steps. He tried to keep the noise to a minimum. Three steps, four steps. The edge of the roof was before him. Five steps —

With a grunt, he hurled them out into the air.

Chu instantly took over, tipping the right corner of the wing up so the full face of it caught what little breeze there was. With a snap, the fabric filled with air and their downward plummet eased, becoming a downward glide instead. Skender glanced behind him to see if the guard had noticed, but everything had happened so quickly that the visitors’ compound was already out of sight.

Leaves and branches flashed by at disturbingly close range. Just one could tear the wing and send them to their deaths. He wanted to close his eyes, but didn’t dare.

The steep flank of the ridge on which the city had been built seemed to follow them as the wing’s path curved outwards. Chu grunted, exerting all her strength to force the wing away from the vertical. Wind and fog whipped at them, illuminated by the city lights.

Then suddenly all was dark. The sound of leaves rushing by vanished. Skender didn’t know what had happened for a heartbeat or two — and then realised that they had flown down past the base of the city and into the Versegi Chasm. He wondered how close they had come to crashing into the rope bridge crossing it — then told himself to be grateful for small mercies. At least now they didn’t have to worry about being seen or shot at. There were only the Chasm’s walls to watch out for.

‘You can see okay?’ he asked Chu, knowing that the licence charm saw the wind via means other than light.

‘Well enough, but I’m keen to get us out of here.’

‘How are you going to do that?’

‘The air is marginally warmer down here. It’ll give us altitude, eventually.’

The wing banked and followed a wide spiral upwards. ‘While we’re doing that, you can explain why on Earth we’re going after the Panic city. Are you
determined
to get us both killed?’

‘No more than usual. It just occurred to me last night that I joined this mission for a reason. I’m the scout, right? So why don’t I do my job? Instead of waiting around to hear from Highson or Rosevear — on whose word this entire plan of Marmion’s depends — it would be better to know in advance if the city is heading our way.’

‘That makes sense,’ he conceded. ‘Why not tell people what you had in mind? Why all this skulking around?’

‘I can’t imagine Marmion giving us permission,’ she said. ‘Let alone Heuve. The foresters don’t like flyers and they certainly don’t like me. I bet they won’t turn down the intelligence we can offer, though, if we just go ahead and get it.’

‘So you dragged me along for my memory.’

‘Partly, but don’t sound so disgruntled. It’s also for your company.’

He took some comfort from that as the wing kept turning clockwise, rising higher with each full circuit. His cheeks were numb with cold, and his eyes could see little in the darkness of the Chasm.

Several distant points of light gleamed in the murky depths. ‘Do you think the Eminent Delfine was right about people living down here? I think I can see torches. Real torches, not those brand things the foresters use.’

Chu shrugged: unimportant. ‘Let me know if you hear anything from Marmion and co. I don’t want our escape to cause a huge fuss.’

‘Not a thing so far,’ he said. ‘We might actually have got away with it.’

‘I told you they wouldn’t think of looking
up
...’ The smugness in her tone revealed more than just satisfaction at her plan having worked.

‘What’s going on, Chu? This isn’t just about looking for the city, is it?’

‘Of course not. Those pompous shits need to be taught a lesson or two. Flying may not be their thing, but that doesn’t give them the right to look down on those who love it. It doesn’t harm anyone and it’s actually rather useful.’

‘You’d risk an arrow in your back — in our backs — to prove a point?’

‘I think it’s a pretty important point. Don’t you?’

Skender didn’t want to disagree. ‘There might be safer ways to make it.’

Chu didn’t say anything for a while. He couldn’t tell if she was angry at him or just thinking. He decided that the safest course was to wait it out.

‘Shilly said something last night,’ she eventually told him. ‘Why did my family move to Laure? Because people there have a reason to fly and there’s no argument about the point of it. They weren’t kicked out of the forest because of something they did; they didn’t leave the forest because they didn’t like it. They simply didn’t fit in. I shouldn’t be punished for that.’

‘So ... what? You’re going to reverse centuries of tradition by proving how useful you are? Is that your plan?’

‘No, I’m just going to piss them off even more.’ He felt her indignation evaporate. ‘I know this probably isn’t going to change anything, but I still need to do it, for my own sake. I’m a flyer. They need to see me as I am, not as an Outcast. If they still won’t accept me, then that’s their problem, not mine.’

Skender knew it wouldn’t be so easy. It
was
her problem. She had been dreaming about the Hanging Mountains all her life. To have that dream thrown back at her was a hard thing.

‘Is that another reason to go looking for the city — because they’re the flyers you’ve been looking for?’

‘Oh, I’m not planning to get so close,’ she said. ‘And landing is out. Jao seems nice enough, but I don’t think being human is going to count much in my favour at the moment.’

‘Or mine.’

‘Well, at least we’ve still got each other. Eh, Galeus?’

He couldn’t see her face, but he could
feel
her smiling. As the wing took one final turn around its imaginary corkscrew and ascended out of Versegi Chasm, he decided that, even though they were back where they had started, that was definitely an improvement.

* * * *

They flew for an hour, following terrain that he remembered and which she had noted from the ground in the previous three days. They didn’t run into any mountains or cities. It was, in fact, rather boring, and Skender had to fight the urge to nod off on several occasions. There was no way to tell the time. Dawn showed no sign of coming, leaving the sky uniformly dull and dark.

‘Do you have any idea where this city might be?’ ... after their third traverse of a particular valley.

‘Not in the slightest. I expect we’ll run into someone who does, soon enough, if the Panic are indeed on the move.’

‘That’s
your plan? To bump into a Panic patrol and have them lead us home? They’re more likely to shoot us out of the sky.’

‘No way. They’re big and slow. We’re small and fast. And I bet you anything they’re so accustomed to aiming at targets on the ground that they won’t look up either.’

‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’re already betting everything on that.’

‘I was being metaphorical.’

‘I’m not,’ he said.

‘Why are you always so gloomy? You should be glad. Here we are, out getting some fresh air while that stuffy lot back there does nothing but sleep.’

‘Sleep has its appeal.’

‘Not as far as I can see.’ She banked to avoid a landmark he could barely make out through the fog. ‘When I think about all those hours wasted when I could’ve been —’

He never found out what she could’ve been doing for at that moment a broad, rounded shape appeared out of the mist directly ahead of them.

‘Whoa!’ Chu wrenched the nose of the wing up, taking them over the balloon with bare centimetres to spare. Skender could have reached out and touched its leathery skin, it was so close.

‘Do you think they saw us?’

He didn’t know how to answer that. For a moment he couldn’t even talk. ‘I’ve no idea.’ He heard no cries of alarm from the vessel they had just flown by. It had already vanished into the mist behind them. ‘Crashing into them is certainly going to attract someone’s attention.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s not going to happen again.’ Skender’s limbs grew heavy as she took them upwards. ‘Here’s another bet. They’ve been flying a long time as a group, and have fixed ways of getting around. Familiar altitudes, usual flight paths, traditional formations. If we steer clear of those routes, we’re not going to hit anyone.’

‘How many other bets are you planning to make tonight?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but if you don’t take a chance, you’ll never get lucky.’

She looped back over the Panic ship they had passed, wing slipping smoothly through the cool night air. The balloon — a fat sausage shape that looked like three dark grey spheres squashed together in some kind of net — supported a long, blade-like gondola containing seven Panic soldiers. Skender held his breath as they flew over it, even though he knew any sound quieter than a shout had no chance of being heard through the fog.

Chu took note of which way the balloon was pointing, and changed their course to follow it.

‘See?’ she said. ‘Easy.’

‘We’re not there yet. If you can find the city without splatting us like a bug against it, then I’ll say you’ve won the bet.’

‘What will I win?’

‘The chance to live a little longer,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘There’s more to life than just living. I think so, anyway.’

‘And I’d agree with you. But death is death. There’s no way to dress it up as anything else. If things go badly, there goes our chance to live at all, let alone well.’

‘We’re not going to die.’

‘You saying that doesn’t make it any less likely.’

‘Do you want to go back?’

He thought about it, even though there was no possibility of doing that. She was more likely to undo his harness and let him drop than try to land him back on Milang. ‘Actually, I don’t. I just want you to cut the bullshit and be straight with me —
and
yourself, for that matter. We’re taking a risk that could end badly. Pretending otherwise is just... well, asking for trouble. Or disappointment.’

To his surprise, she chuckled. ‘You know, Mage Van Haasteren, I think you have something else on your mind than our little night flight.’

He flushed. ‘That knife has two edges.’

‘True. Too true.’

They flew in a straight line for so long that Skender wondered if Chu had fallen asleep. Acutely alert as he was, waiting for any sign at all from her, he could feel her breathing against the back of his neck but nothing more than that. When she wasn’t making light of their situation, she was utterly closed to him. Yet he sensed her calling to him, hammering on the doors she had locked around herself. If
she
couldn’t open them, how could he?

Don’t stop now,
he told himself.
Would anyone ever get what they wanted if they turned back at the first obstacle? Would Sal have made it back to Fundelry? Would Shilly have found Lodo? Would those two ever have got together?

‘Did you really give me your heart-name, back in Laure?’ he said, hearing his own voice as though through ears blocked by altitude.

Finally, she moved. A quick nudge to tip the wing slightly to port, but it was something.

‘Does it make any difference?’ she asked.

‘Of course it does. I hate myself for not remembering it, and I can understand why you hate me too.’

‘I don’t hate you.’

‘Do you wish you hadn’t told me your name? Do you wish I hadn’t told you mine? I can’t take that back — but you can. We can pretend it never happened. We can try to be friends, if that’s all you want to be. I can live with that.’

‘Can you?’

‘Well ...’ He wanted her to be honest with him, so he supposed he should be honest in return. ‘I’d be alive, but I might not be
living.’

Her right arm let go of the wing’s control surfaces, just for a moment. Not for more than a second or two, but long enough to snake around him and press them together. For one warm, charged moment their differences were forgotten. Words were unimportant. And neither the past nor the future mattered at all.

By the time he had reached up to take her hand in return, it had slipped away and resumed control of the wing.

‘There’s something coming,’ she said. ‘I can feel it through the licence.’

‘Where?’ he asked, taking a deep breath of cold night air to clear his mind. ‘Is it the city?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s right ahead of us and getting closer.’

She flew on, gripping the controls tightly. He could feel her tension growing as she concentrated on the wind, looking for any sign at all, any hint that she should pitch the wing left or right, up or down, to avoid a collision.

Skender noticed three things almost simultaneously: a tremor in the air, as of a note so low he felt it more than heard it; a smattering of lights ahead, uncannily like the stars on a cloudy night; and a deadening of the background potential. The last bore no resemblance to that caused by the Homunculus or the Caduceus in the Aad. This felt more as though every last drop of the Change had been sucked out of the world, out of the
fog.

‘I think you’re bang on target,’ he said, staring in a mixture of awe and curiosity at the clump of fake stars coalescing out of the darkness. His voice sounded strange in the vibrating air. ‘The question is: what now?’

‘Now we work out where the thing is headed.’ She tugged the nose of the wing up. It moved sluggishly but obeyed. ‘Then we call the gang back home and let them know.’

Skender resigned himself to a closer approach than he would have preferred. Inexorably, the lights ahead grew brighter, resolving into the angular shapes of the city. Skender made out dozens of odd-shaped ‘buildings’ hanging from a dense mass of balloons. There were spheres, cubes, pyramids, and combinations of all three, all connected by walkways, ladders and cables. Chimneys, doorways, windows — every aspect of ordinary architecture was present despite its unusual location, hundreds of metres above the Earth. The structure seemed both rigid and haphazard at the same time, as though it had been cobbled together more or less at random in its early days, but somehow became fixed during its evolution, locked into one particular configuration by necessity or tradition, or some other factor Skender couldn’t imagine.