Tides of the Titans

by Thoraiya Dyer

  Atwith said nothing, but the smell of supper indicated he hadn’t fallen far behind.

  I have a son. I can go back. She feared I’d do something rash? Like declare my love for her in front of her husband? Like reveal that I’m the father and get myself killed? Well, now Icacis thinks she’s dead, the same as I did!

  He wasn’t angry with her for lying to him. She must have been so afraid, recognising the signs of pregnancy in light of the prophecy that Ulellin had made about Icacis fathering no children. If she had confided in Leaper, what would he have done? Urged her to go into hiding with me. Shown her our home in Eshland. She could still have faked her death. I could have faked my grief. My whole life was fake. I spied for Airak, I lied to everybody.

  But Ilik hadn’t known about all that.

  Leaper moved his lips. Flared his nostrils. Opened and closed his eyelids. He tried to judge how much feeling he had in his face, his neck, his ears. Tried to tell the difference between the parts of his head that were touching the tapestry and the parts that weren’t.

  So, Ilik is free of her jailer, but what about me? A second time, I swore to Airak that I’d serve. That was before he tried to drown me. Before he did drown thousands of Rememberers. I won’t serve him again, but he knows I’m still alive.

  If he returned to Canopy, the lightning god would certainly sense it.

  Unar and Aforis. They sliced me and my gifts cleanly away from Audblayin. They can do the same again. I don’t care if I have to give up my magical abilities forever.

  From his arms and legs, there was still no information at all.

  Unar has to heal me. Her magic won’t work outside of Canopy.

  Not the faintest tingling. Not a welcome whisker of pain.

  I have to get back to my—my family. My body has to be healed. Think, Leaper!

  He pushed aside previous reconciliation to uselessness and helplessness. He had to use his mind. His mind was what he had sold to Airak, before his magical abilities had come to the fore. Quick wits were what had saved him, in the forest and outside of it.

  He had loved Ilik’s mind. How she would watch clock workings and take them apart, and how her face would light up with pleasure when she understood them.

  “Unar,” he said, “eat the bones. Eating bones makes magic work outside of Canopy.”

  “What was that?” Unar answered sharply. “Aforis, wait.”

  They came to an awkward halt.

  “What is it?” Aforis asked.

  “He said that—”

  “I heard what he said. We’re not safe here. Hunger could shake down the mountain again in another fit of rage. The parts of the city strong enough to survive squabbling titans are strong enough to—”

  “Leaper,” Unar interrupted. “Do you mean the bones of the Old Gods?”

  “Yes,” Leaper said.

  “That’s a relief,” Atwith said blithely, bone skirt clacking.

  “Eat Tyran’s bone to call lightning,” Leaper said, naming Airak in the language of the titans’ original human worshippers. “Aulla’s bone to call rain.”

  “You’re saying that if it’s to work, we’ve got to match the Old God’s bone to our intended action. If I’m to heal you, I need a bone of Audblayin, who was called Bria, is that what you mean?” Her tone turned reflective. “Just like in Understorey. Like how Frog and I were taught magic by—” Unar’s face twisted with revulsion.

  “Kirrik.” Leaper finished her sentence, shying away from a lightning jolt of Frog’s memory. A glimpse of the sorceress’s beautiful, imperious face. “Yes.”

  “None of us died here,” Atwith said. “No Old Gods, I mean. None of us died in the mountains. We all died on the plain, where the forest sprang up, growing over our remains. Except for Time.” His voice turned to a barely audible mutter. “Just as wood and the wild must be separated by justice, birth and death must be separated by time. With time missing, we can’t be united. We’ve been fighting each other since we left him behind.”

  “What did you just say?” Unar demanded, but Atwith’s face was already screwed up in confusion.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “We must go on,” Aforis insisted. Leaper couldn’t spare a thought for Atwith and his personality lapses. Unar had to heal him. Now. Soon.

  “Bria’s bone is in Hunger’s cave.” Leaper didn’t know how much more he could bear to say to them, but they had to know this much; they had to know what he’d seen. “Her claw broke off in the cliff edge. A small claw. No bigger than Tyran’s Talon. You remember, Aforis.”

  Aforis was quiet for a moment.

  “I remember Tyran’s Talon,” he said eventually. Aforis is growing younger. Losing his recent memories because of the reverse ageing. Aforis nodded, as if his lost memories were firming. “The opportune time to reclaim this claw belonging to Bria is now, while the winged one is out of her lair, searching for the source of the smoke from the fire.” He nodded again. “I’ll go. The fork lies not far ahead of us. You two, take Leaper to the buried city.”

  “I must recover my Bodyguard’s remains, I’ll go with—” Atwith started to say.

  “I can’t carry Leaper by my—” Unar protested.

  “If you’re killed, Unar,” Aforis said loudly over them, “nobody can be healed and the claw is useless. If Atwith is killed, untold suffering could continue in Canopy. Right now, there are those in agony, unable to die. If his soul stays here, or dissipates, what will happen to the hapless mortals in his care? Besides that, who knows if he can bear to lay a hand on the bone of his opposite number? What if Audblayin and Atwith annihilate one another, like the paired bones that came through the thieves’ lantern?”

  “So you were listening,” Unar murmured, “to what he said about birth and death needing to stay separated.”

  “Did Audblayin herself not intimate so, at Nirrin’s restoration?”

  “We’ll take Leaper to the buried city,” Atwith said meekly. Leaper felt the poles jostle slightly as Atwith balanced the spitted goat on Leaper’s knees and took over Aforis’s end of the stretcher.

  “If I’m successful in locating the claw,” Aforis said, “I’ll look for you in the place where I found this tapestry hanging. The building which seemed a place of worship. All paths in the city led to it. Surely it was the dwelling place of a deity or a king.”

  “Or of death,” Atwith said.

  “You’ll see the graveyard. It lies at the bottom of a shaft narrow enough to prevent our escape, yet straight enough to admit sunlight. As I said, the spring flows from the gate. When you see the monuments, you’ll see the temple behind them.”

  Leaper, still tilted back at an angle, saw the soft glow of filtered light on the roof of the tunnel long before Atwith and Unar brought him into the comparatively open space of the ruined city.

  He saw a vast wedge of stone. It had probably once protected the city from snow and wind. Now it was sheared off the base of the neighbouring mountain and slammed over the rooftops, cutting them off from the sky, like a door off its hinges leaning over a once-bright room.

  Daylight and a trickle of melting snow leaked in at the edges. Where the sun penetrated, moss grew over broken stone and the cracked walls of more multistoreyed, wall-clinging houses with tapering walls. White, horned skulls and white tufts of desiccated skin and fur showed where goats had entered—or fallen into—the ruin but been unable to leave and starved to death.

  Black and white feathers, too, blown by the wind, were caught against flagstones in the street or the remaining railings of the wooden balconies. Crickets called in corners, were silenced when the human party of three passed, then started up again in their wake.

  Leaper smelled lichen, dust, and old, old wood fires.

  Atwith kicked at a goat skull.

  “How long do you think that’s been here?” he murmured, turning his head to the side.

  “I think the cold has slowed down decomposition,” Unar answered. “You’re the death god. You tel
l me.”

  “Do you see the graveyard? The temple that Aforis talked about?”

  “He said all roads would lead there. Let’s keep following this one.”

  The temple, when they reached it, was a circular building, also made of limestone blocks. It was difficult to tell whether it had once tapered at the top, like the cliff-hugging houses, since the sliding strata of the collapsed mountainside interrupted what might have been a white-painted plaster dome.

  “Let’s put Leaper down inside,” Unar suggested. “I can make a trip to the graveyard gate for water. You can find wood for a fire and get that goat cooked all the way through. We don’t know what parasites it could be carrying.”

  “The building looks completely dark inside,” Atwith replied, craning his neck to peer through the wide, arched entrance. “You want to leave him in the dark?”

  “I said to get a fire going, didn’t I?”

  Leaper said nothing as they lowered him, the top of his head touching cold slate tiles. There was an impression of open, airy space which reminded him uncomfortably of the winged one’s lair. He hoped Aforis was keeping out of sight in his search for the claw.

  He didn’t pray to anyone. What would Unsho, Mitimiti, and her beloved Guiding Tide of Wetwoodknee make of the great goddess Hunger, I wonder?

  After a while, surrounded by the far-off sound of dripping water and ubiquitous smells of lichen, snow, and long-dead fires, Leaper closed his eyes, drowsing.

  Footsteps and the low conversation of a returning Atwith and Unar brought him back into focus.

  “I don’t know,” Unar was saying softly. “I supposed I expected the death god to be … sad? Death isn’t exactly fun, is it?”

  “You’ll find as many sad lives as happy ones. Each kind of life only exists relative to others. For every happy, longed-for death that follows an unhappy life, there’s a feared death that follows a happy life. Then again, for each soul going to a worse life, there’s a soul headed for a better one. So even if I were still Atwith at this time, in this place, I’d have no reason to be sad, and if I were sad, the birth goddess should be as sad as me, since every life she begins that is destined to experience joy is balanced by one destined for misery.” Atwith drew a deep breath. “Is she sad?”

  “I don’t know.” Unar sounded wistful. “Maybe. She banished me so long ago. Sometimes I can’t remember what she looks like. I feel her, though, whenever I use her power. If this bizarre plan to eat bones and work Floorian magic turns out as Leaper hopes, I guess I’ll be feeling her soon enough.”

  A jolt heralded another flash of strange memory for Leaper: Adolescent Unar stood on the horizontal trunk of a yellowrain tree in the monsoon. Her hair and red leaf-shirt were sodden. She squinted in confusion at something over Leaper’s shoulder. Inexplicable disappointment filled him: Is that my sister? It cannot be. She looks slow. She looks stupid!

  Leaper took a measured breath in and a measured breath out, and found himself back in the ruined city of Time, wrapped in a tapestry, lying on the cold floor.

  There was the sound of sloshing. Then, of dry, hollow timbers dropping onto slate. A sharp warning from Unar was followed by a flare of light as Atwith lifted Leaper’s thieves’ lantern.

  For an instant Leaper was thunderstruck—how can the lantern be working, so far from Airakland, and after so long?—but then he realised the light from it was orange, not blue-white. The source of the glow was a pile of coals that had been shoved inside it; the still-hot remnant of some other fire.

  “How did you do that so quickly without magic?” Unar asked.

  Atwith tapped at one of the unbroken panes of the lantern.

  “Curved glass. Sunlight. Dried grass for tinder. Just don’t ask me to do it in the middle of the night.”

  As Atwith built up a fire, somewhere out of Leaper’s line of sight, leaping flames revealed the interior of the huge round room. Every part of the curved, plaster-covered, continuous interior wall was covered in intricate, colourful paintings.

  They were faded, but the story they told remained clear. Much of it was the same story Leaper had seen in the entry cave in the cliff, where reliefs had shown winged ones falling from the stars, planting themselves in the earth, and growing into leaf-covered creatures that then took to the skies.

  But here, in consecutive panels, some of what Leaper had seen in the Dawnsight vision was also depicted. Recurring frequently was a black, man-shaped giant with blazing orange eyes and no other facial features. The giant came out of a burning hole in a black mountain island surrounded by sea. Walking through the water made him turn brown and green, and when he reached a yellow sandy beach, he broke into fourteen pieces. Leaper recognised some of the pieces; Tyran, Aulla, and Bria, who would one day become Airak, Ehkis, and Audblayin.

  Others he didn’t recognise. Including a wrinkled, two-legged brown piece of titan without a head at all, yet with prominent genitals, who lagged behind the others. They deserted the headless one in a faded, bluish, three-toed impression that might have been a valley or might have been one of the lakes on the plateau. Apparently unable to see, hear, eat, or speak, the headless one nonetheless held a red fruit or large bauble in the palm of his wizened, fingerless paw.

  Near the apex of the ceiling, the titans and the winged ones all meshed into a detailed, complex painting that seemed to have been lost when the roof was ruined. Leaper tried to care that the once-thriving culture had been destroyed, but found only scorn.

  I’ve had enough of worshipping monsters. These people should have painted doves and flowers, not violence and death.

  Fat sizzled. The spitted goat threw its shadow over the walls. Smoke escaped the room through round holes near the ceiling’s circumference. Glass shards dangled from hanging dried straw whose ends were still stuck in the plaster. Atwith walked over to one of the shards, tapping it, setting it to swinging and glittering like a cradle decoration.

  “I think mirrors were used to bring light into this room,” he said, “before the shafts were driven out of alignment. There’s writing here, but I can’t read it.”

  Leaper could read it. It was the same language as in the cave, where the carvings had spelled the words: THE SOURCE.

  Here in the house of worship, they were less ambiguous.

  BENEVOLENCE WATCH OVER ME.

  Benevolence must have been the name of their local winged one.

  BENEVOLENCE GUIDE MY STYLUS.

  Back when there were more than one.

  BENEVOLENCE GUARD TIME AND THE CHILDREN OF TIME.

  More than just Hunger and her soft-skinned hatchling.

  Unar brought him torn, charred goat flesh, steaming hot and juggled between her hands.

  “Leaper. Are you awake? Do you think you can eat this without dying?”

  “Yes,” Leaper said.

  “Be careful.”

  Chewing felt like driving an adze into his own head, but he was so hungry he took one careful bite, followed by another.

  “I can chew it for you,” Unar suggested.

  “No,” Leaper said vehemently after he’d swallowed.

  He couldn’t feel whether his belly was full, but he judged he was somewhere close to sated when saliva stopped filling his mouth in a kind of ravenous slavering. Aforis hadn’t returned, and Leaper tried to sleep again, rather than worry about what might be happening in the cave above, or who was fetching food for Ilik and the baby with Unar mysteriously disappeared from the flowerfowl farm, or whether he should smash the lantern even more than it was already smashed to keep her from accidentally coming through and finding herself in worse peril, trapped in the ruins of Time beside her badly injured ex-lover.

  At some point, Unar and Atwith’s conversation reached him again. Leaper couldn’t help but listen with his eyes closed.

  “You’re a pretty thing, Godfinder,” Atwith murmured, “but once we reach the forest, Atwith would forget you. Only the dead and dying hold his attention.”

  “What about his Bod
yguard?” Unar whispered angrily. “The one who died. The one whose body you wanted to take from the monster, fearing its desecration. The goddesses and gods are hypocrites. You loved that body, or I’m an eyeless salamander.”

  “You answered your own question, didn’t you? She was dying. Now she’s dead. You don’t understand. I wanted to make a memory for him to look back on, so that he would know what happened to her. So he’d see her sacred remains. Atwith is most tender at the very end.”

  “That’s Atwith, the hypocrite.” A pause. “What about you?”

  “I could enjoy physical release with you, Godfinder, but it’s love that you want, isn’t it?”

  “Am I unlovable?”

  “I can’t answer that, but can you answer this? Could Atwith, an immortal, fall in love with a soul he’d known for only one human lifetime, which is less than a day for him? He has affection for the dying, it’s true. But it took fifty years of approaching death for him to fall in love with his Bodyguard, and he’ll still forget her.”

  “I thought you couldn’t access his memories anymore.”

  “They are faint. Faded.” Atwith sighed. “If I try to focus on them, they vanish altogether, but they seem to still occasionally slip into my mind sideways when I’m not paying attention.”

  “So you can’t remember how he did it.” Unar sounded strangely hungry. It wasn’t a tone of voice Leaper had heard her use before. Or had he? “You can’t recall whatever dark rite he used. How he bound Atwith’s perishable knowledge and memories to that freshly captured, imperishable, one-fourteenth of a titan.”

  “No. If we ever get home, you could ask him.”

  “If we ever get home.” Unar laughed darkly. “I could ask him. I’m asking you. Let me know if it comes to you. If it slips into your mind sideways. I could ask you to do the same thing to my soul. To make me immortal, too. Then we’d have time. To know one another, and love.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  AFORIS’S ARRIVAL came well after nightfall.

  He breathed hard, like forge fire bellows, but held a curved, yellowed bone the length of his forearm out in front of his body.