Tides of the Titans Page 11

  All he could see was Estehass’s blue glow. All he could hear was panting and pounding footsteps.

  Then, above Estehass’s false star, he saw true stars.

  They were out of the forest. Grass to his shoulders. Starlight on a thin stream.

  “Stop,” Leaper gasped.

  When Estehass pulled up short and turned, obedient, Leaper put his hands on his knees and sucked at the cooler air like a drowning man finding a lake’s surface. Ousos, beside him, did likewise.

  “Go back,” Ousos wheezed, careless now of the volume of her voice. “We have to go back.”

  “We can rest here,” Leaper contended. “Shelter in the grasses. Formulate a plan in the morning.” He didn’t say what had been on his mind since seeing the digging and piecing together the Rememberers’ plan: that the ruin of the forest had been horrific to behold. That perhaps they were right to want to take Tyran’s skull far away. Perhaps Airakland’s size and influence would be reduced, but wasn’t that a fair price to pay?

  In payment, Airak had said, if you return, when you return, you, or another with gifts equal to yours, will serve me with your whole heart. You, or that other, will swear your oaths a second time and be more deeply and tightly bound by them than any of my Servants has ever been bound before. Had he known that Leaper would be tempted to betray him? I don’t have prescient dreams. I can’t make prophecies. All I can do is watch, and when I can’t watch, set a watch on people and places of great importance.

  “Formulate a plan in the morning,” Ousos repeated stonily. “Very well. I’ll take the first watch.”

  She took ropes from her harness. Trussed Estehass like a tapir for slaughter. He was still naked and horribly exposed, though his sigil protected him from insects. Leaper’s false sigil protected him likewise. He made a nest of sorts from the grasses. Closed his eyes, trusting Ousos to wake him at the zenith that marked the middle hours of the night.

  Instead, the sun woke him. It strained at the southern edge of Canopy through ominously gathering clouds. Leaper, clawing free of dreams about a giant, mobile stone Ilik tearing her own palace out by the roots, splashed his face with water from the little stream. Estehass remained tied beside it, throat uncut.

  But Ousos was gone. Along with her equipment and the bone man’s supplies.

  Leaper looked again, aghast, at the sky.

  A single raindrop slashed his cheek.

  THIRTEEN

  “TAKE THIS,” Leaper told Estehass.

  He held out the chimera-skin cloth despairingly.

  It was happening again. What, the monsoon or the betrayal? Purple storm clouds massed. Lightning streaked between them, and grey sheets touched the towering, sky-blotting silhouette of Canopy, indicating that the flooding rains had already begun over Ehkisland. The thin stream at his feet grew perceptibly deeper even as he watched. How had she done it? How had she betrayed him?

  Her lanterns. They were not death-lanterns. They were not thieves’ lanterns. Yet they were perfectly capable of sending messages back and forth. How did I forget that? How did I forget that my reluctant companion was the Shining One of the lightning god?

  And now the monsoon had arrived. Two months early, as Ousos had vengefully suggested.

  Meet Eliligras at the barrier, she had said, and also, Eliligras can let down a rope for us, not thinking she’d need to remind Leaper of the fact that they could send messages with the lantern.

  Estehass frowned. He looked up.

  “Is this a trap? Is the other Servant—”

  “This is the monsoon.” Leaper gestured impatiently around them. Wind tugged at his clothing, flattening the long grass into temporary tunnels and paths. Only the bamboo clacked together and didn’t lie down. The surface of the little stream reflected the silver sky and the black, monolithic-seeming forest, the patter of early raindrops shattering that surface into a thousand mirror shards. “Take the cloth for covering the death-lantern. Go and save Ellin before she drowns.”

  Estehass took the cloth.

  “My plants and powders,” he said, looking around again for Ousos. “My pieces of bone.”

  “She’s taken them, imbecile! I don’t know where she is! Go!”

  Estehass hesitated a moment longer. Then he vanished into the grass with the whisper a mouse might make, instead of the lumbering rustle of a hulking naked man holding a trailing length of cloth.

  Leaper felt the faint wet spit of the storm turn to a more insistent, cool drumming on his upturned face and shoulders. He held out his forearms, so that the rain could be a balm to his aching arms. The monsoon was normally warm, but it wasn’t yet summer.

  What should I do?

  His choices were two.

  Try to find his guide, Slehah, before the water rose too high. Take shelter in Gui. Seek Ilik’s murderer there. She could forgive anything, but Leaper could not forgive this. If the destruction of somebody so blameless could be without consequences, the entire notion of Canopians making their homes above demons, of being better than dark-dwelling animals, was meaningless. Leaper’s climb into sunlight was meaningless. As was his search for somebody who could see his true self without turning away.

  His other choice was to run home. Force his broken body through the thieves’ lantern for the last time, because leaving it here on the floodplain would mean never finding it again.

  And what waited for him in Airakland? Ousos, to name him traitor. King Icacis, to ask why he had failed. Aforis, to list all the ways in which he was inadequate. Ilik was not there.

  Ilik will never be there.

  Leaper made his way through the long grass to the closest stand of bamboo. There were a few different clumps of it there. One type had thin yellow-streaked canes. Another was a thick emerald green type with nodes close together. A third one was thick and greenish-black with nodes far apart.

  A skinning knife was the closest thing that he had to a proper cleaver, and he hacked at the emerald green bamboo for a few minutes without making much of an impression on it. All around him, birds sounded alarm calls, trying to find one another, trying to flock to safety, but there would be no safety. The birds hadn’t woven their floating monsoon nests any more than the Rememberers had provisioned their boat-houses. Insects hadn’t waterproofed their hives. Tree bears hadn’t fattened themselves. More than just a village or a whole society of people was going to be obliterated, and it wasn’t only Ousos who didn’t care. Ehkis didn’t care. Airak didn’t care.

  Leaper switched angrily to the greenish-black bamboo, and chips flew from his very first swing. The stalks were still as tall as five Floorians on one another’s shoulders, but their woody walls were, it seemed, quite a bit thinner.

  Hairlike prickles began itching his palms, and he realised he’d been chopping an immature stem. Cursing, scraping his palms against his robe, he paused to run to the stream, kneel, and drink with his hands behind his back.

  Then he started again, this time choosing mature stems with blooms of powdery mould over their smooth, greenish-black skin. He cut four long legs to drive into the marshy ground, each one with a v-shaped cleft in its upper end, to hold the horizontal poles that would form the four sides of the structure. Smaller notches in the four uprights of Leaper’s bamboo tower held rungs of the thinner, yellow-streaked bamboo, for him to climb up on. There wasn’t time to lash the poles into place, and he didn’t know which of the grasses were suitable for lashings, anyway.

  He topped his tower with a bed of split bamboo to sit on. Used his bore-knife and a dozen pins of split bamboo to reinforce the main supports.

  By then, the storm had completely obscured the blurry circle of the sun. The stream, liberated from its bed, swirled around his ankles.

  Leaper took one final stem of the yellow-streaked bamboo, to make a kind of fishing pole from which to suspend his lantern. Then he climbed to the top of his tower. Able to see over the top of the long grass at last, he hoped that his guide, somewhere between the forest’s edge and the rain-obs
cured western horizon, would similarly be able to see him. Or at least his lantern.

  The rain turned from droplets to heavy curtains. Water pattering on grass and bamboo became indistinguishable from water on water. In the eastern sky, by the black wall of trees, curling whips of dark grey clouds collided, connecting to Canopy with lightning-filled columns of rainwater.

  Although, Leaper noticed, the lightning was nowhere near as frequent as it should have been. It was bizarre to see it but not feel it.

  Leaper shivered.

  No humans emerged from the trees. Neither at the high levels of the forest, nor the level of Floor. Whatever the Rememberers were doing amongst the great trees, escaping to the grasslands was not it. No matter how he squinted, Leaper couldn’t see any movement of magical sigils.

  He heard only one scream. A woman’s scream. And then he wondered if it had been a demon. Or a tapir. The innocent stream he’d stepped over an hour ago frothed brown and white. One minute it surged towards the forest; the next minute it rushed away.

  Within another hour, the water had eaten half the height of Leaper’s tower. His hands, gripping the fishing pole with his thieves’ lantern dangling at the end, were numb and bloodless. There was no reason for him to keep holding it up. Slehah hadn’t seen it. Slehah hadn’t come. It was past time to squeeze himself inside the bronze frame.

  Yet even as he stared at the baleful blue-white light inside it, the lantern flickered and went out. Cutting off his retreat to Canopy.

  Leaper drew the lantern down to the top of the platform, hand over hand on the bamboo pole, arms shaking. What was happening? Had an enemy, Ousos perhaps, found the sister lantern in Leaper’s lair and smashed it? Or had he, Leaper, simply taken it too far from the city? Had Airak’s deal with Ehkis weakened the lightning god? Had tribute intended for Airak been paid to Ehkis instead?

  You fools, he thought, his lips as numb as his hands; he was going to drown here; he was going to die without ever speaking to another human. You were so desperate to keep the Rememberers from sapping Airak’s power that you went ahead and did it for them. Is the barrier open in Airakland? Have you murdered all those people for nothing?

  He would not drown. He would abandon the lantern and swim back to the forest, if he had to. Middle-Mother was a strong swimmer. Leaper was, too.

  The lantern flared back to life. Glass panes protected the interior from wind and rain, but the light dulled almost immediately, as though it was a naked candle in the monsoon. Leaper rattled it helplessly. It brightened for a count of ten. Died again.

  By its fading light, Leaper glimpsed an irregularly lumpy ridge in the rising water, not two paces below the split-bamboo bed where he sat.

  There was the swish of a spiny tail. Two reptilian eyes, facing away from one another, blinked barely above the swirling brown. The current was strong enough that the creature had to exert a reasonable amount of energy just to stay by Leaper’s side.

  A crocodile.

  The last time he’d seen one, he’d been sixteen years old and trying to find Aurilon’s sword in Crocodile-Rider territory.

  He curbed the urge to fling his lantern at it. Wondered, if he was quick, if the transporting light flared up again, whether he might reach over the edge of the platform and jam the open lantern over the crocodile’s toothy snout, sending it, claws and all, to a luxuriously appointed room in Eshland where it would either starve to death or fall terminally from the hidden door.

  That would be a wasted opportunity. I’ll be ready. The next time it lights up, I’ll dive straight into it myself.

  Holding the lantern in his numb hands, he gazed at it, willing it to come alive again.

  Nothing.

  Leaper’s teeth chattered, and the lantern stayed resolutely dark and cold. When he looked over the edge of the platform, he could see the crocodile waiting, wedged against the bamboo supports to save energy.

  “You think I don’t have the strength left to stick my bore-knife between your eyes?” he snarled.

  A moment’s notice was all he had. Behind the crocodile, a black, bulky shape loomed through the screens of rain. It was a generously proportioned log canoe. A thatched house squatted in the belly of it, and wide-eyed Floorians lined the gunwales, bark cloaks streaming from their shoulders.

  Glossy, oval calamander leaves and tiny white flowers littered the deck.

  Dawnsight.

  “Catch me,” Leaper cried in the language of the Rememberers, sticking his bamboo pole into the swirling water and vaulting towards the startled priestly passengers. The lantern blazed in the moment where he hung over the water, its blue-white light reddening the eyes of half a dozen crocodiles below.

  Leaping over them felt like leaping over Ilik’s sightless, bloody corpse. Her body would be washed away. Her murderer’s trail, washed away.

  Gui, and everyone in it, washed away. Or would some of them manage to survive, as these few desperate Rememberers had survived, by clinging to anything they could find that would float? What was he going to do now? What was the point of anything, now?

  Leaper, leaping into the dark. Lord of Lightning trying to drown me instead of showing the way.

  Then he was over the canoe’s rim, dumped on his behind in ankle-deep water that sloshed up his lower back as his weight, and the weight of those who ran to inspect him, tilted the craft. A woman lost her footing; she lost her bundle. It disappeared over the side, out of the circle of light, and her devastated eyes made white circles over the black circle of her mouth in the brown circle of her face.

  His lantern went out.

  “Throw him back,” shouted an angry voice in the uncertain light and shadow of Leaper’s eyes readjusting. “This flood is Canopy’s doing.”

  “He’s injured,” a young woman’s voice replied. “Struck by lightning. His god has cast him out for stealing the lantern. The enemy of our enemy—”

  “Our enemies are the Old Gods, not the new—”

  Leaper stared past them at the fast-approaching great trees. Their trunks were spaced widely. It didn’t seem that the floating temple would strike any of them. Especially since the craft was now slowing.

  A strange, strong wind whipped up at ground level out of nowhere, blasting the boat back towards the grasslands even as the ferocious flow of the floodwaters tried to drag it into the forest.

  “They battle one another,” a new voice said with awe. “Wind against water.” Bright afterimages had faded enough from Leaper’s rapidly blinking eyes that he actually could see this speaker; it was a bark-wrapped man crouched behind him, gripping the wooden wall and peering over the side. The wind strengthened and the boat tilted alarmingly. Everybody who was standing staggered. A door to the thatched building flew open.

  “Inside,” bellowed a grey-haired man, gripping the frame with swollen-knuckled fingers as the wind threw calamander leaves and twigs in his face. “We can reconsecrate the interior if we survive!”

  Everybody rushed to obey, lurching across the deck. The crouching man lifted Leaper by an elbow and helped shove him through the opening into a rectangular room remarkably similar to the room Leaper had visited in Dusksight. Except that this water clock was overturned and emptied, and Leaper could catch no glimpse of any giant sclerotic bone between the twenty or thirty sweating bodies present, some retching with the increasing spin of the canoe.

  Another unexpected tilt sent Leaper sprawling. His outflung right arm found the sharp edge of a fallen glass plinth. The lantern came to life, and Rememberers cringed away from it.

  Leaper lifted his forearm to shield his own eyes from the blinding light—is Airak fighting for his life? Is he dying? Is the lantern lighting when the water spins us closer to the forest and fading whenever the wind pushes us further away?—and saw a white powder dusting it. A residue from the plinth.

  Bone powder. There’s another Old God’s bone in here, somewhere.

  Impulsively, Leaper put the powder to his mouth.

  FOURTEEN


  LEAPER ENJOYED a high, clear view. As if from Airak’s emergent.

  He was seeing, in silence, down from a mountaintop. A wide, crystalline river frothed from a cave opening in a cliff. It meandered across a rocky plateau, fell down to a grassy plain, and headed for a northern coastline.

  A forest lay between plains and coast. It was a small forest. These trees were a mere four times a man’s height. The folk of an alarmed, brown-skinned tribe peered from rickety watchtowers. These trees were only ankle deep to thirteen monsters approaching the edge of the forest.

  The brutes slithered or walked on paired hind legs. Spiny whip-tails trailed from those that resembled upright iguanas. Some were laterally compressed. Others had forward-facing eyes. Some were spring green, some were charcoal black and some were covered in colour-changing scales—like chimeras—that made them invisible but for the shadows they cast over the frightened people.

  The monsters fought amongst themselves. No, they weren’t fighting. It was how they spoke to one another. Leaper could understand them, even in the absence of sound. The pictograms of the children’s graffiti at Dusksight were reproduced in the ribbon-flick of a tail or the carve of a claw. Their language was violence, whisked wind and wounds torn in scaly flesh. As they spoke, their signatures were stamped in every sentence.

  Leaper saw their true names, but his mind translated them into the language of Canopy, into the names by which they were known in the present.

  To the sea, next and nearest, Ehkis demanded, drawing blood from her neighbour, whose wounds healed quickly but not so quickly that Leaper couldn’t read the words. The sea! The rain goddess flickered a hundred different blues in her eagerness. Oh, to be beneath it!

  I crave the cold creatures it holds, Orin agreed.

  There are no woodlands beneath the sea, Esh argued. I will not go.