She stopped crying presently.
“Hate me,” she said raggedly, “but don’t hate the boy. He’s innocent. He’s done nothing.”
Leaper’s terror increased. Was he going to be sacrificed? Perhaps it would be worth throwing open the lid of the chest and running for it, even though he’d have to make it past both of them. And both of them wielders of magic.
No. Stay still. Stay quiet, he urged himself, heart racing.
“One who walks in the grace of Airak will not turn him away from taking the test at the Temple, when the time comes. One may even consent to tutor him until then.”
“He’s an adept, Aforis. Couldn’t you feel it?”
Aforis sighed.
“The boy is bonded to Audblayin. I suppose he grew up in Understorey below Audblayinland. Should the Temple teach him to call lightning no thicker than a pond reed, and all because the source he draws on lies in the furthest part of Canopy from this point? That seems cruel. One who walks in the grace of Airak is surprised to hear you ask it.”
Audblayin sent us here, Leaper recalled. Because Unar was a Gardener, but Unar disgraced herself, somehow.
“Audblayin rules new life,” Unar argued. “New shoots can be cut and grafted. They thrive where grown trees die from being transplanted.”
Aforis sighed again. His voice came closer.
“Why don’t you tell me more about the boy. Where he came from. How he ended up in your care. Why there is something familiar about his soul.”
He was so loud now that he could only be standing over the table beneath which the ti chest was kept.
Only then did it occur to Leaper that Unar would offer her guest a cup of ti.
The lid of the chest flew open.
Leaper’s body disintegrated.
* * *
LEAPER SAW again the battle of the titans, as he had seen it in the Rememberer temple of Dawnsight.
He saw how Audblayin’s guts like blood-rubbed ropes had spilled from her lurid, green-scaled skin. How, despite one undersized forelimb being ripped from its socket by Ulellin’s teeth, Audblayin snapped and clawed at the cliff edge, struggling to climb, shrinking all the time.
How her body, launched by her powerful hind limbs, had gone up headfirst into the hole.
And then come down again, her feeble remaining forelimb unable to draw her completely into the cavern.
Or was Hunger in there? Did Hunger drive her back?
That broken claw. It was left behind, while the thing that became Leaper’s sister splashed into the base of the falls, crushing already-fallen watchtowers and snapping what remained of her unbroken bones.
* * *
RUMBLINGS ECHOED around the cavern.
The rocky ground was shaking.
At least, Leaper thought it might have been shaking; his body still wasn’t there. It was dark, and the air tasted of dust, yet repetitive concussions rattled through his skull and he was either dizzy or his face was moving up and down.
Then all was still.
“Too great an impact,” Aforis’s voice speculated in a whisper, somewhere near his left ear. “In her rage, she’s brought the ceiling down and blocked the tunnel entrance. The breeze is still flowing through. We can breathe, but we can’t escape. Or can we? If you could wake, you might suggest how to activate the return passage. You always were full of suggestions.”
I’m dead, Leaper thought, and so is Aforis. At least I’ll have company until we all get reincarnated. That’s if there are any bodies for us to be born into out here. Besides Hunger’s hatchlings.
He started to laugh at that thought, but when he moved his tongue to swallow, a fierce prickling and stinging erupted in his lips, the lower half of his face, and the parts of the back of his head that still had sensation.
All of a sudden, it seemed the rearrangement of his throat had blocked his breath. Leaper had to stop focussing on the whispering and dust taste and bend all his concentration to the problem of how to open his lungs. Is this what it’s like to be born? Maybe this is the new me. That’s how I’ll build a great statue, even with a broken neck.
Maybe I’m Aforis’s child.
That was funny, too. He choked, feeling tears well in his eyes, even though he was dead. He thrashed his head. Managed to jerk his jaw until the dusty air entered his body again.
Hunger’s voice boomed about him, strangely flat and loud.
“YOU HAVE ONLY BOUGHT YOURSELF A SLOW DEATH.”
So she can speak the language of Canopy.
Leaper imagined her striking the walls of the cave, breaking the stone teeth with blows while sliding her wings and body over it, letting the sound echo down through the tunnel. It was nowhere near as good as having lips and a tongue. Most of the consonants were difficult to make out and those words had to be guessed by context.
Aforis sighed with all his habitual forbearance, and Leaper was shocked to realise he was really there. The old Skywatcher wasn’t left over from the dreams, he was kneeling there, in the tunnel, beside his injured and immobile pupil, sighing at the enemy.
Death god take me.
Aforis is really here, and I have no purpose anymore. I’m ready to leave this cave, this body, and all my failures. It must be Aforis who builds the statue of the queen. I’m a fool who read the vision wrong.
Aforis is the one who lives.
“One who walks in the grace of Airak can’t die,” Aforis shouted at the winged one in a high-pitched, fairly good impersonation of Leaper’s voice. He’s always had a much deeper voice than me. “Don’t you know anything about Canopy? At this distance from the death god, Atwith has no power over me.”
“I WILL FETCH ONE-FOURTEENTH OF A TITAN,” Hunger answered. “YOU WILL DIE.”
“You can’t fetch anybody without violating your agreement.” How does Aforis know about the agreement? “I can’t die, but you can. Even if you try to fetch him, he’ll kill you with a touch. His Servants will kill you.”
“ONE-FOURTEENTH OF A TITAN IS NOT MY GOD. HE IS NOT MY EQUAL. I WILL FETCH HIM, AND YOU WILL DIE.”
More rumblings.
More dust.
More floating up and down.
Leaper struggled to focus on breathing. On keeping his throat open, all his cartilages arranged. He didn’t dare try to speak again, or to swallow. His mouth was so dry, there was hardly anything to swallow, anyway. The blood on his face was dried, and a cold wind gusted down the tunnel.
“Well,” Aforis mused, “that worked. What should we do now?”
It was too dark for Leaper’s eyes being open or closed to make much of a difference, so he let his lids slide shut to keep the dust out. The winged one was right. Even with Aforis beside him, all he had done was buy himself a slow death.
He tried to make himself see the Dusksight vision again.
The one with the huge statue of Ilik.
If only he had that broken ring of bone with him. If only he hadn’t stuffed it all through the thieves’ lantern.
I really did steal it so that I could see her again, even as a poor substitute in stone.
The impulse to laugh this time was easily quashed.
Maybe I’ll dream of her. Of the things we did. Or could have done.
* * *
DESPERATE THIRST woke him. Brightness on the back of his eyelids turned his vision red, but he had no energy to open them.
“What is that?” Unar asked. Her voice hovered above him, imagined or real. Did it matter? I didn’t dream of Ilik. I didn’t dream of anything.
“A broken aqueduct,” answered a male voice. Not Aforis. The voice seemed familiar to Leaper, but he couldn’t quite place it. “Look. It used to run straight, carrying water from the spring at the centre of the city. The water then flowed into the channel that ran through the winged one’s lair.”
“You think that’s the remnant of the span, down there?” Unar sounded doubtful.
“I’m almost certain of it. I think that strata is continuous with the plateau
of the thousand lakes. The plateau I flew over. The whole city’s sunk down to that level.” The voice firmed even as it grew more distant, as though the crouched owner of it had straightened. “That’s the way we should go. We can hardly circle around to the plateau. It’s too exposed. The monster would pluck us like spiny plums.”
Real, Leaper thought drowsily. At least, he was either drowsy or at the edge of death. They are real, just like Aforis was real. But where is he? Where am I?
“What makes you think there’s water down there?”
“The snowmelt has to go somewhere,” the stranger answered. “Besides, plugging a spring just makes it spring up somewhere else. That’s why it’s called a spring. Just because it doesn’t run through the cave anymore doesn’t mean it doesn’t run.”
“What would you know about springs? Forgive me, but you said that the part of your soul holding the death god’s awareness fell silent when you were snatched from the forest.”
The death god. Was Hunger truly able to kidnap the death god? Is that how much she truly hates me?
Lizards lay so many eggs and sometimes eat the hatchlings themselves.
And yet. I knew it was a mistake to confuse the winged one with an animal. A human mother might go to such lengths for revenge against her children’s killer. And Wept cried a whole ocean of tears on account of her hatchlings, so Mitimiti said.
“The death god’s voice has gone silent.” The man sounded cool. Sober. Reflective. “Other memories grow stronger. Before I died, before my drowned body became available to Atwith, I lived in Ehkisland. While I lived there, there was something between the rain goddess and me. I think I had the potential to be an adept. I think I should have gone to the Lake the moment I felt the water under the ground and in the sky.”
Leaper tried to imagine what a connection to water would be like. He wondered if Aforis’s magical surgery was capable of severing him from the lightning god as he’d been severed from the birth goddess, or whether the reduction in powers every time that he changed would leave him with no magic at all.
“You had an affinity for water,” Unar muttered. “That was the sign you were sent by Ehkis.”
“She wouldn’t have drowned me if I’d served her. Then the death god would have chosen a different corpse to inhabit.”
“If you’d served her, you would have had to watch Kirrik kill her twice. I’m the Godfinder. If I never have to find Ehkis again, it’ll be too soon.”
Better to ask why Ehkis didn’t serve you, Leaper thought, surprised to still be able to summon anger so strongly in his desperate state. Why she drowned you in the first place.
“Well,” Unar went on after a significant pause. “How are we going to get Leaper down there without breaking his neck worse than it’s already broken?”
“We need something to strap him to, to keep him straight,” Atwith said. “A cloth and poles, or a stiff board.”
The masts of my broken ship. The sails. The ladder I made from the ancient watchtowers.
“You’re very quiet, Aforis,” Unar said. “You look like a stiff board.”
There was another, longer silence.
“One of us will have to descend into the crevice,” Aforis said slowly, finally. “In advance of the others. To scout the way. That individual will need to explore the conduit of the aqueduct, if indeed it remains open, and find something in the ruined city suitable for transporting the patient. If not, water must be brought back here.”
“I’ll go,” Atwith said with a laugh. “I’ve already died once. I’m sure I can find water, and what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll drown a second time? When we get back to the forest and I’m host to the death god’s stronger soul, my small soul will drown again anyway.”
TWENTY-NINE
LEAPER THOUGHT he’d only faded out of consciousness for a moment.
Yet the sunlight on his eyelids was gone. Cool water dribbled over his parched lips, and when he opened his eyes, all around him had changed.
Aforis.
The dark brown hands tilting a gourd over his slack mouth were the same hands that had helped him out of Unar’s ti chest. The hands which, years later, had caught him the first time he’d forced himself through the thieves’ lantern.
Those hands had shaved Leaper’s head when he’d dyed his hair against the rules of the Temple. The first time Leaper had tried to call lightning to a stone bowl of black sand, lost concentration and called the white fire to himself instead, Aforis’s hands had pressed on his chest to get his heart started again.
Why did you take me into the Temple? You’re not my father. You never owed me anything.
He’d escaped the winged one’s lair. Somehow. Aforis was with him. He was alive. That was all he knew.
To Leaper’s left and right were a pair of high, parallel limestone ledges. Between them shone a jagged slash of pale blue sky. Their edges were softened by the silhouettes of tufty grasses.
Aforis is with me … at the bottom of a hole.
Leaper guessed that the grasses were a hundred paces above him. More cold wind howled down through the gash, but Leaper was snug in his windturner and Aforis was bundled in his black robes and bearskin.
Aforis’s head, which had been shaved since he’d started going bald and grey, with white hair being reserved for Airak’s Servants, showed short, very black growth beneath the dust. Leaper peered at it in confusion. He tried to see the triangle-shaped scar that Aforis had earned from walking into that sharp branch right before Leaper left Canopy, but it didn’t seem to be there. The dust must be covering it, or Leaper wasn’t able to focus properly.
Yet the ruined city behind Aforis leaped into perfect focus.
Houses of four and five storeys covered the sheer, pale walls of the crevice. Dark grey slate crowned the houses. They had inward-sloping walls, thinner at the top than at ground level. White paint peeled away from dressed stone, and small ferns grew in the cracks. Their brittle little balconies, with railings of wood carved in interlocking patterns of rectangles and squares, held rows of cracked white clay pots long emptied of their dead plantings and soil by the swirling wind.
Leaper looked at Aforis again.
A jolt like lightning went through him. For an instant, it seemed he looked down on a younger, kneeling, bare-chested Aforis. A leash better suited to an animal connected Leaper’s wrist to Aforis’s throat.
He wondered how he could be seeing this, a memory that wasn’t his, before he remembered the way Frog’s memories had seized him twice in the past.
I’m seeing the day Frog tried to use Aforis, her captive, to destroy the Garden.
Wood rested beneath Aforis’s bloodied knees. Not stone. The enhanced smell of magic use surrounded them—tallowwood, fresh blood, sap on spines—and a pure and righteous hatred allowed Leaper—Frog—to act as a conduit for Aforis’s magic, somehow. It was as if he held Tyran’s Talon in his hand.
Wrathfully, he brought lightning down on a baby in a woman’s arms.
Not a baby. A goddess. A goddess of Canopy. I hate ’er! I hate ’er!
The instant passed.
Leaper lay on his back, looking up at old Aforis again. Why that memory? Why here and now? He tried to raise a hand to press his temples, to rub his eyes, but his hand was a stranger. His hand was useless.
It was Aforis’s hand tilting the water gourd again into his mouth. He mustn’t gasp. He mustn’t breathe it in. He had to concentrate, or he’d drown the way Atwith said he had drowned, except in a mouthful of water instead of a flood.
Atwith. Where is he?
A man stood behind Aforis, much taller and thinner, with a heavy brow, a long, black-bearded jaw, and inscrutable, deep-set brown eyes. He wore nothing but a skirt of stems from a bone tree, which resembled tree bear rib bones, over a loincloth, and he shivered in the frigid wind.
Leaper, mouth wet, encouraged by the success of his swallow, ventured a single word.
“Aoun?” Pressing his tongue to the roof of his
mouth felt like a hot knife had been stuck there. He wanted to cry, but he thought that might be painful, too, so he distracted himself by calling to mind the first time he’d seen Aoun.
Leaper remembered panting with exhaustion from the climb up to Canopy. He remembered peering past his older sister in her scale armour. He’d seen the Gatekeeper of the Garden embracing Unar, in the house they’d freshly built for Middle-Father. Unar and Aoun had been friends. Served the goddess Audblayin together. Only, Unar had perhaps clung to Aoun a little too tightly for just friends.
The jolt like lightning passed through Leaper again, showing him one of Frog’s memories. He glimpsed the Gatekeeper in the heat of battle, white-robed. At Aoun’s side stood an old Servant, who reached for the baby that Leaper had been trying to kill.
The glimpse faded. Leaper lay at the bottom of the limestone crevice with Aforis again. He smelled meat cooking over a peat fire.
Two of Frog’s memories in as many minutes, when I’ve only ever experienced them twice before. What’s going on?
“I’m his dead brother,” the man who looked like a weirdly young Aoun said calmly with Atwith’s voice. “I didn’t go to the Lake when I should have, because I didn’t want to leave him, but in the end the Lake rose up and came to me. Mere moments after I died, before my human soul even knew it was supposed to go into the ether, my lungs were emptied of water by a god’s soul eager to possess me, and my legs carried me to my new niche without a single backward glance. Now I’m—”
“Atwith,” Leaper croaked.
“Yes.” His smile was modest. Reticent. Distinctly ungodly. “The last winged one, made mad and stupid by grief, brought me here between her teeth in the hopes my mere presence would end you.”
“Didn’t.”
The smile faded.
“I tried to end her, but she wouldn’t die. Her death, it seems, isn’t Atwith’s to bestow.” Atwith shrugged. “It’s been a long time since I needed weapons to kill, but my Bodyguard carried one, for skinning game. When she found she couldn’t pierce Hunger’s hardened hide, she wrapped her arms around Hunger’s ankle and stayed clinging on until we reached the cave.” He shook his head ruefully. “She distracted Hunger with an attack on the hatchling, whose hide is still soft; I think she managed to stick the knife in its underbelly right before Hunger killed her.”
Tides of the Titans Page 23