Fall behind and die, then, as our fourteenth part did, Orin said scathingly. Esh didn’t bleed where she’d bitten him, but splintered instead. The splinters re-formed into unbroken wood beneath bronze-coloured, bark-textured scales.
I will go to the sea, Audblayin said. We shall all go. There is new life in the sea.
Oxor’s blow turned Audblayin’s green head on its swanlike neck.
The sun is weak beneath the water.
There is no wind beneath the water, Ulellin put in. We should go to the mountain.
Audblayin was swift to reply. We gave that mountain away to the winged.
We can take it back, Ulellin countered. The winged aren’t our equals. They’re thieves. They steal my winds, and they steal my leaves. We should not have left even one alive to challenge us.
Ehkis twisted gracefully, conciliatory even as she clawed her companion.
The movement of the waves is like the wind, Ulellin.
It is not the wind! Ulellin snapped.
And what of those creatures, Audblayin, Oxor asked, who inhabit our tread? You care for them also, Odel. How will they live under the water? How will they breathe? How will they eat?
Leaper’s gaze followed Oxor’s along the path that the monsters had followed, and in following, it seemed he saw into the past. Though their shapes were ever-changing, the monsters wended their way, by foot or by sliding scale, over vast grasslands. When they fought and killed one another, or aged and died after decades of rage, their essences—what Canopians might have called their souls—sank into the soil.
There, those essences were watered by rain and worshippers’ tears before becoming corporeal and growing up to clothe their bones in flesh again. The Old Gods walked on, leaving fertile patches of fruit and grain crops behind for the humans to harvest, but these patches never lasted more than a few years. Starving human populations trailed in the titans’ wakes again, foraging desperately in hostile lands until their gods died to provide for them.
They must wait, Orin said carelessly. We will come again onto the land.
As the Old Gods, the titans, stood arguing at the edge of the puny forest, the humans who worshipped them lagged far behind. It would take the people a year, Leaper estimated, or two, to reach the edge of the sea. The worshippers carried colourful silk tents and bright pennants. They were black- or dark-brown-skinned, their bodies crowned and jewelled.
How long will you stay in the sea? Leaper wondered. I don’t actually think they can wait that long.
The forest people’s watchtowers were nowhere near the height of the great trees Leaper had been born into. These folk, alarmed by the arrival of the monsters, couldn’t see the titan-worshipping peoples coming.
Nor could the golden-skinned guardians of the plains, who surged into view as Oxor considered them. Finally, Oxor considered the pink-skinned sentries squatting in boulder-built fortresses in the foothills. These people used leather tubes and glass lenses to observe the invading titans in turn, and Leaper wondered if he saw what the sun goddess saw because the eye bone in the boat was Oxor’s eye.
Dawnsight, he thought. Oxor. The sun.
They must wait, Orin repeated with greater emphasis, cutting deeper into Ehkis’s skin. They will wait. They will do what they always do when they cannot find us. Sing songs. Write histories. Fashion our likenesses and make prophecies of our return.
What say you, Atwith? Ulellin cried. Will these things die without our leavings to feast on?
Tell us yourself, Orin said spitefully, her teeth bloody. Read the wind while you can, for the deep sea must be our next destination.
The beastlings will die, Ulellin said, many of them today, because you will not listen. I will not go to the sea. Atwith is silent, he will be fattened by slaughter and well pleased, but what of you, Airak? Say something. Ulellin appealed to the largest and most hideous of their company, who flared his nostrils and was silent. There was no need for him to say there was no lightning in the deep sea.
The water on the mountain is frozen, Ehkis said petulantly. I will not go there.
Lend me your power, Oxor urged, and I will melt the snow.
I will not serve you! The superficial wounds of Ehkis’s speech turned abruptly into something deadlier. A clear intent to kill. Let my teeth serve you!
Oxor—and Leaper, living through her—met the threat with her own teeth bared. The bone-bordered orange frill around her neck sprang open, skin folds turning to fans of open flame. Ehkis shied away from seizing Oxor by the neck, instead balancing on her tail and kicking at Oxor’s rib cage with webbed hind feet.
Leaper instinctively tried to grab his chest, to hold the wound closed, but he had no hands while trapped in the vision, only eyes.
Ehkis’s claws seemed to rake his own beating heart.
Red blood fountained over the forest.
Behind Oxor and Ehkis, Airak—Tyran—transformed into a shape more nebulous. His eyes shone silver. Forks of lightning lashed, tongue-like, from between his jaws as Orin, transformed into a flattened, wedge-headed serpent feathered with a thousand razor-sharp blades, coiled and struck.
Odel battled Atwith. Audblayin fought Esh. Not one stood aside from the battle. Teeth gnashed. Titans raged, silently singing their hatred through throatfuls of blood.
Oxor, choking, dying, fell heavily into the ankle-deep forest. The humans scattered, their towers destroyed, the course of the river changed forever. Oxor’s flames had been quenched by the liquefied body of Ehkis—of the aspect of Oxor’s own self that was aligned to the rains. Leaper understood for the first time that all thirteen of them were somehow separate, and yet whole. Thirteen titans, but also one titan.
The vision shuddered as Oxor trembled. It calmed as her body lay still.
Leaper knew she was dead, and yet he remained able to see through her wide, lifeless eyes. Events continued to unfold before her corpse. Audblayin and Ulellin were the last titans left standing. One had pursued the other across plains and plateau.
The blows they drove at one another turned the mountains around them to rubble. Audblayin, shrinking like ice melting in the sun, dangling entrails, missing an arm, made as if to wedge her mangled body inside the cave where the river ran. Wooden watchtowers fell there, too, and pink-skinned sentries crashed to their deaths in the froth at the bottom of the waterfall. One of the claws on Audblayin’s remaining forelimb snagged the edge of the cave, but broke off under her great weight as she tried to pull herself to safety, and she fell on top of the broken watchtowers.
Ulellin, equally injured, sides heaving and streaming with blood, seized one of her opponent’s hind legs in her jaws. She dragged Audblayin back towards the forest where the other aspects had fallen.
No, her furious footsteps read. You will not die alone on the mountain. You will die with the rest of us, that we all may rise!
Clutching one another, one monster with smooth, humanlike arms, the other with bird wings ending in strange curved hooks, Ulellin and Audblayin collapsed into the carnage along with all the others.
Night fell, and a small dark green conifer grew out of Audblayin’s mouth. Tiny white blossoms covered it, taking on the lustre of the moon.
The night-yew, Leaper thought.
The moon also showed the advanced decay of the flesh and exposure of the white bones of the titans. Slowly but surely, the separated sections of torn-apart skeletons moved through the trees into patterns of alignment.
Before the sun rose, however, an advanced party of worshippers from the dark-skinned peoples arrived. They rode on the backs of some kind of tame, striped plains creature that Leaper had never seen before. Two women and two men came to stand directly before the empty bone circle of what had been Oxor’s eye.
“Your dream was a true dream,” one woman murmured to the other. They were regal-postured. Richly robed. Leaper read her blue-painted lips, still unable to discern sounds.
“Your steeds carried us faithfully,” the other woman replied respectfully
. “As you promised that they would. I concede your aptitude with animals is equal to my ability to whisper with the wind.”
“Chimera souls,” a third woman whispered. “The souls of the winged. They are candles to this bonfire. We have our chance, at last. Our long journey is ended.”
Leaper realised there were thirteen of them gathered now, each standing in a muted silvery glow of human power. It was puny compared to that of the titans, yet visible as they delved into the bones of their dead idols with tendrils of timid strength. It was possible they said more to one another, but in the tightening circle, Leaper couldn’t see their mouths.
He could see forest people, wounded, terrified, peering at the magicians from interrupted hunting trails and the ruins of their story-paths. The newcomers erected a tent of peeled Godskin and bone, concealing their rites from the baleful eye of the moon, while in the forest, messages spread from palm to palm, in silence.
At length, one brown-faced, blue-lipped man emerged from the Godskin tent. Purple cloths were wrapped around his brow, and his belt-pouches brimmed with shiny black seeds. He walked to one of the striped steeds that had lingered, dozing, in the moon shadow of the night-yew.
The Great One is slain, he carved into the steed’s hide with a dagger in his right hand. With his left hand, he brushed a faint blue light over the wound. It stopped the bleeding, and must have somehow numbed the pain, for the creature continued to graze contentedly. We, the Speakers, will keep the Great One’s soul quiet inside our human bodies. It will serve us, as we have served. It will abide by our laws for an age, as we have submitted to its chaos, and let the young never know the hardships endured by the old. Let them forget.
At the same time, Leaper glimpsed warnings being traced between Rememberer shoulder blades or on the backs of Rememberer hands.
We have never seen such destruction before. Our people must Remember.
The blue-lipped man slapped the grazing creature on the hindquarters, and it startled into a swift gait that carried it out of sight, into the west. Those small trees left standing were pushed up and out by the roots by something bigger growing out of the earth beneath them.
The great trees.
Leaper felt himself losing the vision, even as the night-yew erupted skyward, clinging to the terminal shoot of the biggest tallowwood tree the world had ever seen.
FIFTEEN
SOUNDS SHATTERED the silence around Leaper.
Vomiting acolytes. Wind screaming around the old man wedged in the open doorway, still bellowing at the top of his lungs. Leaper tried to understand him. Audible words were strange after the script-speech and lipreading of the vision. He shook his head, lantern still in one hand, the stone plinth at his back. His other hand, he lowered from his mouth, feeling his rib cage still intact. He was not Oxor. His beating heart had not been sliced open.
“Brace yourselves!” Yes, that was what the old man was shouting over his shoulder. “Hold on to one another!”
Beyond him, Leaper glimpsed a sharpened, patterned prow like none he’d seen before. No, wait. He had seen it. It was the vast canoe the Rememberers had carved from the remnants of Airak’s old Temple. Surging from between the trees like a swung axe.
The wind spun the craft where Leaper sprawled. Bodies tumbled away from him. A complete ring of bone, bigger and thicker than the shards from the other Temple, bounced off the wall and broke his nose. He brought both arms up to protect his face, but luckily the boat tilted again, the bone fell away at the last second, and his skull wasn’t crushed. The thieves’ lantern came to life.
Airak is going to save me after all, he thought wildly. My god is giving me one last chance.
Leaper fumbled to open the pane of the lantern just as the bigger boat smashed through the side of the cabin. Dawnsight flew apart. In the buzzing blue-white light, Leaper saw the whites of eyes and the crescents of teeth in howling mouths. Then he lost his grip on the lantern.
It fell, open, onto the curved edge of Oxor’s bone and swallowed it whole, as though forcing pieces through it at Dusksight had given the thieves’ lantern an appetite for Old God’s remains. Leaper snatched it up again before it could tumble further, wondering if it would swallow the whole monsoon, transporting it to Eshland in an endless loop; a fountain that would never stop flowing.
The two halves of the torn craft spun apart into the dark. Water entered everywhere. Leaper didn’t know if it was floodwater or rain. He rolled down the sharply tilted floor of the wreck and was caught by his harness on a carving of ravens.
One. Last. Chance.
He tried to force the hand not holding the lantern inside the open pane, but blasts of wind erupted impossibly from the heart of it.
Leaves came with the wind, too.
Windowleaves. Where no windowleaf trees grow.
At last, Leaper realised why he couldn’t squeeze himself through the lantern this time.
Ulellin’s curse. It’s her wind blowing, keeping me away from Canopy.
Still stuck on the carving, he rolled underwater as the canoe-section rolled. Surfaced as it surfaced. Choked and spluttered. He should have let go of the lantern, to use both hands to untie his harness, but as long as he held it, somebody might see him.
Somebody might save me!
The lantern went out.
A hand seized Leaper’s wrist where he held the upraised lantern in the dark. Somebody smaller than he was hauled him up and onto something ridged that felt like a bamboo raft.
“Ellin?” he gasped. “Ousos?” But no, that was wrong, they were bigger than this person. His oxygen-starved mind seized on impossibilities. “Youngest-Father? Anahah?”
And then the whirlpool carried them, spinning sickeningly, out of the forest again. In a dim grey gloom, through battering rain, a lightning strike showed him the bare back of his rescuer, someone golden-skinned with black hair in a tight, fist-sized bun.
There was no glowing Rememberer’s sigil between the little man’s shoulder blades. Instead, raised scars like firewheel tree bark covered him from neck to heels.
Not like bark. Like a crocodile’s ridged spine.
A Crocodile-Rider. A Crocodile-Rider has rescued me.
Water washed over the raft and tugged at Leaper’s torso. He wedged his fingers between the uneven poles of the raft, in the gaps where green lashings held it all together. Death seemed certain. If not by drowning, then by execution, when this man realised who he was.
He closed his eyes against the nauseating twisting of the raft and remembered how he had once told his oldest-father that he wished Airak were his father.
Airak is powerful, he’d shouted. Airak is never afraid!
Yet Oldest-Father had never drowned children. Leaper remembered the woman losing her bundle over the side of the boat only minutes ago. Had it been nut cakes and fruit, and her horror the horror of a woman staring into the future at her own starvation? Or had it been a baby? Had the death in her eyes been her own, or another’s?
Oldest-Father wasn’t perfect. He killed in self-defence. He killed Kirrik’s men. Airak is doing the same. Airak is doing this to defend himself. But Leaper couldn’t convince himself that it was equivalent. He couldn’t stop seeing the expression on the woman’s face, imagining it multiplied a thousand times.
I can’t serve you again, Airak. If I survive this, you’ll have to find another, of equivalent gifts, or whatever it was that you said, because I can never serve you again.
The raft shuddered and slowed. Leaper opened his eyes again. His end of the raft had struck something. Something heavy lay over the edge of it, stabilising it against the flow.
He had moments to realise that it was a crocodile. Huge head as long as Leaper was tall. Legs pressed to its sinuous sides. Jaws wide. Its gape was a pace from tip to tip. One more wriggle of that powerful tail, and the teeth would snap shut on Leaper’s head and shoulders.
And then the little man with the scars, giving a hoot of wild glee, dived with outstretched arms for the
crocodile’s gullet, as though the back of the reptile’s obscene yellow throat, akin to Leaper’s lantern, was a magical doorway to light and a long life.
PART II
The Bright Plain
SIXTEEN
LEAPER WOKE, sprawled on his back, to the sound of cheerful humming rising over the pattering rain.
Above him, the afternoon sky was empty. No branches. No leaves. Just clouds. Droplets aiming themselves at his eyes. Empty. Leaper turned his head. He’d imagined the sea to himself sometimes, but the frightening blankness of the flooded plain was nothing like what he’d imagined.
He’d imagined waves. The woodcarvers always depicted white wave crests so crowded with boats and masts they might as well have been a forest in miniature. This was nothingness.
He shivered.
“They keep me awake,” Yran confided from the far end of the raft when he spotted that his dazed companion was awake. “My little songs do. You know what happens if I can’t stay awake.”
“No,” Leaper said stiffly in the language of the Crocodile-Riders, sounding nasal to himself, sitting up and gingerly probing his broken nose. “Tell me.”
The little man who had saved him from the floodwaters that morning had already proven himself an inveterate liar by introducing himself as Yran of Gui. When Leaper answered that he recognised the raised ritual markings of the Crocodile-Riders, Yran said nonchalantly that he’d been sent as a spy from Gui to live among Crocodile-Riders in disguise.
What about the language we’re speaking? Leaper had asked sluggishly, rolling to regurgitate river water over the edge of the bamboo raft.
I learned it by studying, the same as you, Yran called back brightly.
What about the crocodile you wrestled, force-fed, and tied to our raft with flimsy little ropes? That crocodile right there?
The flat-headed, ten-pace-long menace floated, quiescent, on what Leaper considered an ineffectually puny tether. Eyes half lidded, scales speckled olive-green, yellow, and grey, it flicked its body every now and then for a course correction or to tug the raft on a jerky detour around trapped logs or protruding greenery.
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