The Hanging Mountains (35 page)

He shook his head, knowing that if he closed his eyes he’d only see Rattails’ face grimacing back at him.

‘I should make sure Mage Kelloman is okay,’ he said, conscious of a torrent of complaints going unnoticed by anyone else.

Banner, perhaps guessing the truth, didn’t push the point. She patted Skender on the shoulder and followed Marmion.

That left just Chu.

‘Listen, Skender —’

The sound of Heuve’s voice calling her name from the far side of the knoll cut her off.

‘Ignore him,’ Skender said. ‘What were you going to say?’

‘We’ll talk later. I promise.’ She turned and jogged over to where the bodyguard waited, glaring. Skender watched her go with an uncomfortable, full feeling in his chest, as though a bubble growing there for days was about to pop.

The feeling subsided. With a deep breath, he gathered his black robe about him and went to tend to the mage.

* * * *

The knoll never quite returned to the same state of poised expectancy as before. Heuve replaced the lookouts with patrols pacing up and down the perimeter, lit from above by the golden brands. Only the most hardened or exhausted managed to sleep; everyone else sat up working or whispering, whiling away the remaining hours until dawn.

Skender paced on, tired of feeling damp and half-frozen all the time, and wishing the fog would give him just a few minutes respite. No matter how he tried to distract himself, his attention constantly returned to where the golem had come from. Neither the golem nor the four people who had been sent to search for it had been seen or heard from since. He told himself not to read too much into their absence. Any number of explanations could account for it; but he didn’t like the sick churning feeling in his gut, and the way he couldn’t help but think the worst.

When the sky lightened, that feeling didn’t go away.

‘That’s it,’ muttered Kelloman, breaking the trance he had resumed with difficulty after the interruption and letting the Change he had harnessed drain away. ‘I’ve had quite enough of this farce. Wake me when someone decides to do something sensible, will you?’

The mage stretched out flat on the ground with his hands behind his head, no longer caring if the charm he had so painstakingly drawn was disturbed. The bilby tried to sleep next to him, but he brushed it away with an irritable swipe of one hand. It circled him once, then curled up at his feet.

Skender cleaned up the jars of sand and put them away. Marmion was doing the same in his section of the knoll, a puzzled and frustrated expression on his face. The plan hadn’t been a bad one and it should have worked. The fact that they had lured a golem out of hiding, instead of the wraiths, wasn’t much of a consolation.

The morning could have got off to a worse start, though, Skender told himself. The wraiths hadn’t attacked; no one had died. The worst thing he had to look forward to was the long walk back to Milang.

From the south came a loud bang, as of a light-sink exploding. A second and a third struck echoes off the mountainsides.

‘What is it?’ Chu asked Heuve.

‘A bad sign.’ The bodyguard shaded his eyes with one hand, as though trying to penetrate the mist. ‘Eminence?’

Lidia Delfine’s jaw worked as the sequence of three explosions was repeated. ‘The Guardian has recalled us. We must break camp without delay.’

‘What about those who went after the golem?’ Skender asked.

Heuve pointed at two people, one of them Chu, and jerked his thumb in the direction the search party had gone. ‘They’ll have heard the signal. Do your best to find them, but don’t take too long. If you’re not back by the time we’re ready to leave, we’re not waiting.’

Chu and the other guard dropped what they were doing and hurried into the forest. Skender watched her go with concern, wondering if he should follow.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Marmion. ‘Why have you been recalled?’

‘I don’t know,’ Delfine said. ‘It could only be something important. Mother — the Guardian — wouldn’t disturb us for anything trivial.’

‘Could the Panic have attacked?’ asked a forester.

‘Perhaps the war started while we were away,’ said another.

‘What
war?’ said Skender, wondering how rumours like this got started. ‘The Panic Heptarchy isn’t our enemy. The Swarm is.’

Some of the foresters looked less than convinced, and Lidia Delfine had more on her mind than countering anti-Panic rumblings. She had the camp to pack up and get back to Milang, and she had their failure to report to her mother.

The foresters hastily gathered their gear in orderly piles. Skender helped Kelloman prepare his litter and made sure all his accoutrements were safely stowed. As he was strapping down the cases, he saw the man who had left with Chu to look for the search party run onto the knoll and talk in hushed, urgent tones to Heuve.

The bodyguard nodded, then whispered in turn to Lidia Delfine, his face pale. When the three of them hurried into the forest, Skender wasn’t far behind and was able therefore to overhear part of their conversation.

‘... not far from the camp. We would have come for you straightaway, but we had to see to them first. See if anything could be done.’.

‘And?’ prompted Heuve.

‘They had been there at least an hour, sir. We think they were taken elsewhere and brought here ... afterwards.’

‘Why?’ asked Delfine, her tone aghast.

‘To taunt us, Eminence. I can think of no other reason.’

They came to a shadowy clearing and stopped so suddenly in their tracks that Skender almost ran into them. The first thing he saw was Chu standing in the middle of the clearing, her face streaked with tear tracks. Not thinking, just seeing her upset and responding with his heart rather than his head, he pushed past Heuve and Delfine and went to her.

She grabbed the front of his robe and buried her face in his neck. His arms automatically went around her. He felt her shaking against him and held her as tightly as he dared.

Only then did he look around and realise what she had found.

Blood
— on the ground at his feet, on the undergrowth where the bodies had been laid out, and on the four trees around the clearing where they had been discovered. The bodies themselves were barely recognisable as human. Their throats had been torn out and bellies opened. Eyes and tongues were gone, leaving sockets and mouths horribly empty. Naked, scored back to flesh, they looked butchered, not merely killed.

‘Who did this?’ he heard Lidia Delfine say as though through kilometres of fog.’
Who did this?’

‘We think — we assume it was the golem.’ The man who had accompanied Chu into the forest sounded shaken.
And no wonder,
Skender thought.

‘Alone?’

‘Well, it wasn’t the wraiths,’ said Heuve. ‘We’ve seen what the Swarm can do. Look here.’ Skender did the exact opposite. ‘Teeth marks. Tear wounds.’

‘The Swarm have teeth,’ said Delfine.

‘Not like these. And the Swarm don’t eat the flesh of what they kill. They just take the blood.’ Heuve circled the clearing, inspecting the bodies one by one. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d guess a large dog or a wolf had done this.’

‘The golem.’ Lidia Delfine’s normally deep voice had risen a fifth. ‘It knew we’d send someone. It waited until they were far away from camp, so we wouldn’t hear them screaming. Then it attacked them, maybe picked them off one by one. It killed them, then brought the bodies back here for us to find. While we thought they were tracking it, it was long gone and laughing at us.’

‘You didn’t see anything?’ Heuve asked Chu.

‘No, but —’

‘What about tracks? It must have left some trace, after doing this.’

‘There
are
tracks, Eminence.’ The pinched, pale look on the face of the man who had found the site with Chu said more clearly than words what he thought of following them, after what had happened to the last group.

‘Eminence —’

‘If you’re going to say that I shouldn’t blame myself, Heuve —’

‘No, Eminence. I was simply going to point out that the golem might not be long gone at all. It might still be in the area, waiting to see what we do next.’

A dreadful stillness filled the clearing as that thought settled in.

‘I can live with that,’ said Delfine. ‘Our first priority is to get the bodies back to camp and prepare them for transport. I’m not leaving them here for scavengers, or worse. We’re taking them home with us. Skender?’

He stirred from shock at the mention of his name and looked directly at the woman. Not left, not right, and definitely not down. Keeping the red a blur at the corners of his eyes, he grated, ‘Mage Kelloman will be glad to volunteer his litter for this duty.’ And if he wasn’t, bad luck.

Chu’s shaking had eased. She stepped away and stood at arm’s length.

‘We need to tell Marmion,’ she said. ‘Warden Eitzen —’ She stopped, swallowed, and pointed at one of the bodies. ‘I think that’s him.’

‘Okay,’ he said, trying not to think about who they had been. One of the bodies belonged to Navi, too. ‘Let’s go do that.’ He took her hand and held it in both of his. ‘Is that okay?’ he asked Heuve. ‘Can we go back?’

The bodyguard nodded and waved them up the trail. As Skender passed by, he thought he saw a glimpse of something new in Heuve’s black stare. Guilt, perhaps?

Skender had more important things to worry about. There was blood on his shoes and on his black robes where Chu had clutched him. Her hands were stained red-brown, and her clothes, too. The two of them looked fresh from a slaughterhouse.

He felt Chu’s need to talk: it radiated from her like heat. But her lips were sealed so tight it looked like she was trying not to vomit, and he didn’t break the silence.

The knoll was abuzz when they arrived. That threw him for a second. How could they possibly have known? No one had said anything.

But the reason for the excitement wasn’t the discovery in the forest. It was a messenger who had arrived during their absence and who immediately sought directions from Skender and Chu on how to reach Lidia Delfine. Skender gave them, and the messenger — a red-faced, breathless teenage girl — hurried off.

‘Who was that?’ he asked Warden Banner.

‘Ymani, a runner from Milang. It was she who sounded the warning signals before.’

‘It can’t have taken her that long to get here, surely.’

‘She was held up on the way, apparently, by someone needing help on the road.’

‘Did you hear her message?’

‘No, but Marmion did.’

As a group they confronted the warden. His expression was grim.

‘Milang was attacked last night while we were away. At least twenty people are dead and many more have been wounded.’

‘Who?’ asked Skender. ‘Who did this?’

‘The Swarm,’ Marmion said bluntly.

Skender felt awful for adding to the man’s worries. ‘You need to follow the runner to the others. You need to see what happened.’

Immediate concerns replaced those more distant. Marmion noticed the blood on their clothes for the first time. ‘Are you all right? Is anyone hurt?’

‘Don’t waste time talking about it,’ Chu said. ‘Just go.’

Marmion did, with Banner close behind. Skender and Chu were suddenly alone again. The knoll had fallen restlessly silent, as preparations to move out ground to a halt. Too much was happening to concentrate on ordinary chores. People clumped in curious groups, speculating worriedly about what was going on.

‘I — I need to be alone for a bit,’ said Chu to him.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’ He looked down at the ground. She wasn’t meeting his gaze. ‘Don’t go anywhere. Don’t go off on your own.’

‘I won’t. I’ll stay right here. Just give me a minute or two, and I’ll try to be all right.’

The rawness in her voice matched the redness of her eyes. ‘You don’t have to be okay,’ he said. ‘Not for my sake.’

‘I know. It’s not for you, or me. It’s —’ She stopped and turned away, shoulders shaking.

He understood, then, and let her be. She was not just trying to be stalwart in the face of death. The uniform she was wearing; the work she was doing; leaving her wing behind in Milang ... everything fell into place. The people of the forest were the closest thing to family that she had. She was trying to fit in. She was trying to be
worthy.

His mind full of death and foreboding, he went to give Mage Kelloman the bad news about his litter.

* * * *

For the next two days, Kail woke up certain he would have to set the camel free.

After bathing and gingerly changing the dressing on his wound, replacing the sticky brown bandages with ones he had boiled the previous night and hung out to dry, he ate breakfast and contemplated which supplies he could most afford to lose. Without knowing how great a distance stretched ahead of them, it was impossible to calculate how much food they would need. Similarly with clothes — if their destination lay high in the mountains, he would need protective garb to avoid freezing — and medicine. The extra precautions he had taken had already proved invaluable. A wound such as the one he had received from the Swarm would have killed him had he not had the camel to supplement what he and the Homunculus could carry on their own backs.