Tides of the Titans Page 20

  Leaper tried to manoeuvre around the bed, but Yran leaped over it. Leaper heard the clunk as the sword hit the bedpost instead of continuing in its arc towards him.

  “You killed Queen Ilik,” he shouted back as Yran’s momentum carried them both into the alcove. They hit the opposite wall and went down together, hitting the floor hard, boards falling from nowhere on top of Yran, who was on top of Leaper.

  I can’t waste time with this. Ellin and Estehass could be untying that boat at this moment. He gripped Yran’s wrists, one in each hand. It was dark. Yran smelled like vomit.

  It made no sense to stay and try to kill a man he’d already killed. Leaper tried to get out from under Yran, but the boards turned out to be shelves rattled loose from the wall and as soon as he let go of Yran’s left hand to try and move the boards, Yran grabbed the closest item—a hardwood pestle—and cracked him in the temple with it, so hard that he saw stars.

  “I never killed any queens! I made it up, about your woman, Ilik. Yes, I know she was your woman, you talked in your sleep on the raft, all the way while your cursed wind blew us clear of the forest. You told me about the diamonds in her hair. You told me how her throat was cut. I just wanted them to think I was brave. I just wanted them to think I was strong!”

  I’m a fool. Of course he was lying. He never had any of the truth-fish. Only death-fish. I’ve murdered him for nothing.

  Leaper moaned at the realisation. It is like Orin’s Servants, after all. It’s exactly like them. His dizziness faded, but the little Crocodile-Rider was already hitting him repeatedly with something else.

  Something soft and malleable. Something that didn’t hurt.

  Something that changed colours to match the bleached driftwood walls whenever Yran raised it above his head. The only clearly resolved part of it was a leather thong at the neck, holding it closed.

  He’s found it for me.

  This innocent man that I’ve killed has found the Bag of the Winds for me.

  Leaper felt tears in his eyes as he seized Bag and sword, heaving both Yran and the boards off himself, finding his feet amid the dust and debris.

  “You are brave, Yran,” he said hoarsely. “You are strong. I’m so sorry.”

  Hunching his shoulders, he thrust through the hanging and out of the alcove.

  “Wait,” Yran called weakly after him. “Come back! We share the same liver!”

  Absurdly, as Leaper made his way down the spiral stair, taking them three at a time, holding his stolen treasures high, the minstrel’s song about Oniwak repeated over and over in his head. He knew the described event hadn’t happened, and yet he pictured it as the words washed over him.

  The demon claws were in his back!

  No lightning blood, no bow arm black

  Could bring it back, could bring it back

  The soul that served the god Airak

  After he emerged from the palace, he didn’t slow down. More than once, he was forced to stop and hide from the Master’s beaded men. In reed clumps. Under platforms with his legs braced wide apart to span the space between pilings. Or in the arms of the mangroves.

  His skill at impersonation had deserted him. There were no patterns here for him to take up and use. Even the languages the speaking-bone had given him were jumbled in his thoughts; he couldn’t be sure which tongue the minstrel had used or which words were the ones he’d been born with.

  All that mattered was finding the boat, the twenty-pace boat with its provisions and seagoing sails, and Leaper managed it, somehow.

  Somehow, Ellin and Estehass weren’t aboard. He freed the sails from their covers along mast and boom, not knowing what else to do with them, letting them hang like heavy, ugly flags.

  And he wondered, as he lashed his body, his carrysack, and Aurilon’s sword to the south-facing bowsprit shaped like an openmouthed embracer, what else the Rememberer siblings had said to Unsho or Mitimiti in their nakedly truthful moments. He wondered where the Blackpressers might have imprisoned the siblings. Perhaps Ellin and Estehass were tied to the thorny kapok tree in tribute or penitence, even as Leaper secured his much-abused climbing harness to the demon emblem of Cast.

  A light wind ruffled the mangrove leaves as Leaper hung there, working at the knots in the neck of the chimera-skin Bag. A single curlew screamed. Bats blundered by. High and faraway lanterns cast dim light on water rippling around platform pilings, trunks, and stilt-roots, the black shapes made twice their true lengths by their reflections. Leaper listened for a few minutes to distant unintelligible shouts, sounds of bodily scuffles, and crying children in houses being hushed by their elders.

  Without your magic wind, how will you get the intruders out, Unsho? Then again, after tonight’s conflict, they were never going to trust you far enough to drink your tea.

  He could just reach the water with his outstretched hand. Cupping some in his palm, he tipped the open mouth of the Bag of the Winds over it, mixing bone powder in with it. Half the water dribbled between his fingers and half the powder blew away in the breeze, but he managed to get some of it to his lips and swallow.

  It tasted strongly of salt. Either the tide is in, or I’ve stolen a bag of Coin-of-the-Sea. Leaper licked his palm, gazing hopefully in the direction of the Titan’s Forest. The Bag of the Winds would carry him back there, across the flooded plain. If it could carry the whole floating city of Cast, it could certainly carry him, a single man in a single craft, against the current of Ulellin’s curse.

  Then the manifested hand of the wind punched him in the back, knocking all the air out of him. Sails boomed as they filled and strained behind him.

  Too much?

  That swift, sudden wind lifted the top layer of water, squeezed it to pellets of white spray, and shot them at him from all directions, hard as fowling blunts. Leaper tried again to howl, but now there didn’t seem to be any available air for him to suck in; it parted over the sudden surge of the ship, and there was none left behind. He was choking in empty space.

  The boat had no wings, and yet it flew. It was heavy. Wooden. Made to cross water. Winds stronger than any natural wind had flung it into the sky.

  The figurehead pressed to his spine, biting like a living serpent instead of a wooden one. A glance back only rewarded Leaper at first with water knives slashing at the cheek he’d turned northwards, but eventually he could make out modest-sized trees bending into the water, the queen’s tower listing alarmingly and the Reeds precinct trembling as its foundation poles loosened. The Bag of the Winds violently left his hand.

  I’ve taken too much.

  The Master’s ship scraped the tops of some mangrove trees as Leaper turned his face back to the front, and he was finally able to take a horrified breath.

  Lost. The Bag is lost. The city may be lost, far behind me. An accident. How was I supposed to know how much would be too much?

  Within seconds, the ship’s underside had cleared a height comparable to that of Erta’s tower. Clumsy in shape and dimensions, it had nonetheless taken to the skies like a bird borne before a storm. It rose and plunged, bucked and spun.

  Leaper closed his eyes against a wave of nausea.

  When he opened them, the black mass of the forest in the distance grew larger as he watched. He tried to glance back a second time, but already the Old Gods’ gale had blown him so far, so fast, that Wetwoodknee was out of sight, tower and all, beyond a treeless, wave-ravaged horizon.

  PART III

  The Winged

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ON OTHER nights, when Leaper had looked down from great heights, he’d always had the solid safety of something, whether tree trunk or tower, keeping him separated from the ground.

  Now he sailed onward in the airborne ship. Through the dark, in a great, slow arc over the Titan’s Forest. Clouds kept him company.

  Also fear, and shame.

  He wanted to forget Yran, the City-by-the-Sea, and all else he’d left behind, but the bowsprit in his spine felt like the blade of the iv
ory sword, forcing him to remember.

  The magical salt wind from the north met and battled the curse of Ulellin, and his vessel rose higher, so high that the blue-on-black starscape of Canopy seemed more distant than the true stars, and in a moment of disorientation, he couldn’t be sure that the boat hadn’t turned upside down and that the forest wasn’t floating above him.

  Thirst found him as the hours passed, but he dared not untie himself to find the freshwater the Master had boasted of hiding on board. Light behind and around him seemed an artefact of exhaustion until he realised his thieves’ lantern had come to life in his salt-shrunken, ripped-at-the-seams carrysack. It blazed behind him at arm’s length, threatening to topple from the bag at any moment, until the boat at last sailed beyond the forest and Airak’s light left it once more.

  Beyond the forest.

  His chance was lost.

  Yet he couldn’t have stopped. Even with a death wish, he couldn’t have jumped, or dropped.

  I’m the one who ate the stuff from the Bag of the Winds. If I’d untied myself, the boat might have fallen, but I’d have carried on.

  South.

  It was too much.

  I took far too much.

  As the final dregs of night began dribbling away, as Leaper glided over expanses many times the length of the floodplain it’d taken him months to cover in Yran’s crocodile-powered raft, the Master’s boat began sinking in the sky. The power of both Ulellin’s curse and the Bag of the Winds waned with distance and time.

  Leaper felt tears in his eyes as the black unknown of the terrain, which he could only assume was as empty of humans as it was of human-made lights or fires, rose up to smash his vessel. He’d failed Ilik, himself, and everyone. Flies would soon drink from his eyes, as he’d drunk from the crocodile’s.

  Water slapped the boat’s underside. It rose up in unseen sheets of spray to either side. At least, Leaper thought it did. He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t died.

  Then the wooden frame of the boat rattled, hard. The last of the north wind drove it aground before falling mercifully away.

  All was still.

  All was cool and dark and silent. Leaper blinked his grainy, dry eyes and peeled apart his desiccated lips.

  I’m not being threatened by the men of Cast anymore, nor have I arrived back in Canopy. What is this place? Where am I now?

  The rising sun illuminated a landscape like none he had ever imagined. Between the beached boat and a line of snowcapped peaks standing in the middle distance, there were no real trees at all, nothing even as tall as Wetwoodknee’s thorny kapok. Certainly nothing taller than Mitimiti would have been while standing on Leaper’s shoulders. The thin, twisty white branches of these shrubs covered crevices in cracked grey stone, their small, green summer leaves halfway to turning yellow and bronze.

  Most of the ground was bare and grey. It was a far-flung field scattered with lichen—or moss-covered stones that Leaper supposed were boulders. He’d never seen a boulder before, outside of the carved depictions on the Garden Gates.

  Thirsty.

  I need water.

  When he cut himself free from the lashings with his spines, climbed unsteadily down from the tilted, perforated wreck, went involuntarily to his knees, and tried to lean his shoulder against one, he found there was no actual boulder beneath the moss. This closest lime-green egg, spongy to the touch, was some kind of freestanding plant, luminously lovely in its symmetry and speckled with minuscule white blossoms. Other, darker green boulder shapes proved to be bulging masses of telescoping, spiny stems topped with sprays of rust-coloured flowers.

  Leaper put his lips in the dew that spangled the closest one. It gave relief, but not enough; he stood up and turned back towards the water that had broken his boat’s fall.

  It wasn’t a single lake, but a string of them. Each was no more than twenty paces across. After he’d slaked his thirst and climbed for a better view onto a boulder that was truly a boulder, he saw the string of petite, mirror-clear lakes continuing in a relatively straight line back the way he’d come.

  Back towards the forest. From south to north.

  Only, the more he examined them, the more they looked like something he’d seen before. Weathered but still recognisable. Parallel to the string where he’d crashed were more lake-trails. There, the lakes were different shaped, and accompanied by S-shaped troughs, as though a heavy animal had dragged its tail through mulch.

  Titan’s footprints.

  In fact, the rain-filled depressions led from north to south. Straight to the mountains that the Old Gods had partially destroyed in their battle to the death that had produced the Titan’s Forest.

  The mountains were the same mountains the Old Gods claimed to have given to the winged, the mountains from which a mighty river had once flowed, where pink-skinned sentries had peered through spyglasses no different to the one the queen of Wetwoodknee kept in her tower.

  Leaper gazed northwards.

  The boat’s provisions. Some of them must be intact. I could follow the footprints to Canopy. Or could he? Wouldn’t the winds just push him south again? He was tired. So tired, and heart-sick.

  Or I could rest here. Fasting. I could die here.

  He turned back towards the south. It wasn’t only at Dawnsight that he had seen those mountains; he’d seen them at Dusksight as well. He’d seen the relief carving of Ilik, as tall as Airak’s emergent, stone gems adorning stone tresses, stone lanterns hanging from stone robes.

  Is that my future? My atonement for breaking my oath?

  Is that carving my work?

  He looked down at his hands. There was blood in his palms from the unsheathing of his spines.

  I could follow the footprints to the mountains.

  Prophecies had seemed like so many wasted words to him so far, and yet who else remembered the perfect shape and proportions of her? Who else knew and loved her enough to fashion such a tribute to her memory? It had to be him. It would be him.

  Whatever revenge he was going to have on the goddesses and gods, however he was going to get back to Canopy, he had to do this first for her, whether it took him a year, ten years, or the rest of his life.

  * * *

  TEN DAYS later, Leaper stood with his back to the setting sun.

  His shadow stretched along the empty riverbed. The cave opening, above and beyond him, faced the day’s end, seeming to drink its rays.

  It was a rough black mouth in the two-hundred-pace-high limestone bluff, the focal point of an enormous amphitheatre that reminded Leaper of the curving trunk wall of the monument tree, where his sister Imeris’s name was set for posterity.

  It was the long-dry waterfall he’d seen in the Rememberers’ visions, he was sure of it. Rocks at the bottom of the cliff, below the cave opening, were worn in patterns consistent with a fall and rapid flow. An arched bridge, twenty paces in span, made of hewn granite blocks, crossed a ledge of dusty, lichen-covered rubble where the west-flowing river had twisted sharply, turning north.

  The cave will lead me to the ruined city.

  If the curving wall had been wood and not stone, he could have scaled it with his spines. As it was, he had no clue how to get up to that black mouth.

  That’s where I’ll carve the statue of Ilik.

  His supplies, all but exhausted over the duration of his trek across the stony plain, had been supplemented with grass seeds ground between rocks, mixed with water into a paste, and cooked over a fire. He’d spotted creatures in the foothills, hairy versions of the rare goats the rich gave as gifts to the Garden, but he had no way of catching or killing one.

  I’ve no weapons but the ivory sword. I’ve nothing of value but the thieves’ lantern, and this far from the forest its only value is in metal and glass.

  He’d taken ropes from the ruined rigging of the crashed ship, but the smooth cliff face had few protrusions, and no apparent place to anchor a pick even if he’d had one to throw.

  Somehow, I build it. I�
�ve seen the completed statue, so the tools must be waiting for me. Help must be waiting for me. It’s not my fate to starve here, or fall from that cliff in my attempt to climb it.

  I’ve seen it.

  Seeing it was different to finding a means to get there, however.

  Leaper sat down, cross-legged, by a heap of more tumbled mossy blocks and columns, the remnants of a dwelling or temple at the edge of the final small, titan’s-footprint-shaped lake. He should have been building himself a fire, since each night of his journey had been colder than the last, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the limestone cliff.

  No bat shapes left the cave mouth with the fading of the light. Leaper supposed this place was too far away from any feeding grounds for them to be able to survive here. No birds flew to roost in the cave’s shelter, either.

  Leaper frowned.

  Wooden watchtowers fell there, too, and pink-skinned sentries crashed to their deaths in the froth at the bottom of the waterfall.

  He got up, stretched his aching legs, left his belongings behind in the ruined temple, and picked his way along the dry bed to the place where he’d seen the towers fall in the vision.

  It was a thousand years ago, he reminded himself as he lifted granite blocks, ripping the dead root and lichen bridges between them, out of the depression directly beneath the cave mouth. Any timbers will have rotted away by now.

  Shifting the stones was hard work, and at length it was too dark to see what he was doing. Tracing his steps back to the rubble in blackness by memory and touch, he took a tiny bow drill and some shavings he’d looted from the ship out of his carrysack and kindled a small flame. The fire was too feeble to throw any light on the cliff face, but Leaper imagined he felt the cold breeze of passage of some kind of large flying beast overhead.

  It could have been a natural wind, channelled through the high passes, funnelled through the hidden city and out through the cave mouth.

  Yet it had been a long time since Leaper had been touched by a natural wind. A spring and a monsoon summer since he’d taken Ilik’s broken clock part and promised to replace it.