“Whatever language she speaks,” Ilik said stubbornly, “I can learn it. And you’ll speak to your son even if you have to carve glyphs into the cliff side with your hind claws.”
She kissed him.
Maybe there will be a way to speak, but there won’t be a way to make love. Or to give Builder brothers and sisters. Not until the city is transformed, Hunger’s role in its rebuilding and defence is done, and Audblayin appoints another to be Bodyguard in the Garden.
When that day comes, if I escape Audblayin and Hunger both, I’ll be the luckiest man alive. But you’ll be too old for children, my love.
Leaper retrieved the thieves’ lantern. He handed it to her.
“You know what to do. Hang it from one of Hunger’s teeth. Go through the light, with Builder, Ylly, Bernreb, and Sawas. You’ll come out at Unar’s farm in Airakland. Aforis is in charge of the lantern there. Wait seven days before you go back through. By then I’ll have delivered this lantern to the mountains.”
“Seven days? I thought you said you flew between Canopy and Time in less than a day and a night.”
“I did. We did. But there’s something else I need to do first. In Wetwoodknee.” He kissed her again. One last time. “There’s much to prepare. Do what you want with Unar’s things. Butcher the flowerfowl or set them free. Take plant cuttings. Take fruit.” He gestured towards the leaf-plate she’d abandoned on her chair and guffawed. “Eat the rest of your fish. There might not be any in those cold-water lakes. I hope you like goat.”
Ilik laughed through her tears.
“I bought a goat once. Perhaps you remember. I bought it in secret, from a trader from Gui. It was expensive. Not as expensive as the crocodile-jaw knife I used to cut its throat. That poor goat. The knife was nowhere near as sharp as obsidian. I know, because one who walks in the grace of Airak had to use the bloody thing to saw through her hair.”
“After a week, she’ll walk in the grace of Airak no longer,” Leaper said softly, tracing her hairline with his fingertip. “She’ll walk the halls of Time, and make her own grace.”
* * *
MOONLIGHT BATHED the great Gates of the Garden.
Leaper had lost his spines, but the carvings, depicting Hunts and battles between niches that stretched from the founding of the Garden to mere centuries from the present, gave him purchase. Tiny lightning bolts were inlaid silver. Tiny spear points were real steel. Polished gems were the eyes of chimeras. Emeralds, deeply embedded, formed the tiny leaves of vines wreathing the sacred head of the depicted birth god or goddess. Leaper’s bare toes found every sharp edge and keen point.
Swearing under his breath, he climbed. One hand clutched Oos’s climbing harness. It was the same one she’d used in her ascent to Canopy.
Youngest-Mother was twenty-odd years older than him, after all. Even if Leaper himself, Bodyguard of Audblayin, couldn’t pass through the wards, he could help her to the top and steady her as she swung a leg over.
The platform lanterns were lit, adding to the inconvenient brightness. On an ordinary day, the adventurers might quickly have been spotted. Yet the Garden was noisy with newcomers, and the new Gatekeeper was unaccustomed to the natural sounds of her ward-securing rounds—much less the shouts and rustlings of children in bushes who should have been sleeping in the hammocks strung up for them everywhere, their supervising parents setting the bridges creaking and swaying, low conversation between elders with aching bones, the Servants in shifts trying to grow food for the refugees but frustrated by the slippery unavailability of their power, and the weary new mothers slapping soiled cloth napkins against rocks, washing their waste away in the many tinkling waterfalls and streams that fell from the Garden to Floor.
Leaper and Oos had both dressed in dark colours. Their clothes had been altered to resemble a fuel finder’s rags and a merchant daughter’s finery respectively, delivered via rope and pulley by Ylly the older. If Oos could successfully slip down to the ground on the other side of the wall, hidden by tree ferns, she’d assured Leaper she could find bone amulets, ink and parchments and return with them, disguised by the chaos.
They heard the hoots and splashes of delinquents swimming in the moat around the inner sanctum. Soon after, the wind carried the Gatekeeper’s bellowed threats to them.
“Now,” Oos whispered to Leaper. He hauled her up the final arm’s length of the way. Helped take her weight while she cleared the points on top of the wall. Lowered her gently over.
Accidentally, his arm brushed against the wards.
Have you stolen food? Aoun’s voice asked strongly in his head. Stolen the sovereignty of another’s body, or stolen human life?
Yes, Leaper replied to the wards, waiting for his arm to be thrown violently back. I stole food from the City-by-the-Sea. I stole the sovereignty of Hunger’s body. I stole from Orin’s beastly, transformed Servants when I struck them with the lightning god’s power, ending their lives.
The wards rifled through his memories. Leaper saw himself in Unar’s arms. Opening his eyes after her healing. Drinking water and eating roasted goat. Feasting at Wife-of-Epatut’s table.
Insisting to Ylly in a determined whisper that killing was not the way.
The wards didn’t throw him back, but parted under his hand. Without thinking, he followed Oos into the Garden, dropping to rich, dark soil beneath tree ferns that reminded him of how he’d trapped Ellin.
“Impossible,” Oos said, goggling at him. “How—?”
“Dying, I think,” Leaper guessed, holding his hands up in front of his face and gazing at them. “The wards only looked back as far as when my neck was broken. I should have died, then. My soul was free, for a while, I think. I heard Frog’s voice. Being at the brink of death must have erased my crime of slaying Orin’s creature. Or else…” He felt self-consciously at his neck. “Or else the creature was never considered human by Audblayin, despite its origins. And maybe since Hunger was never part of Canopy, stealing her body doesn’t count.” But what about Yran? I poisoned him. Even after he said we shared the same liver.
“This is extremely fortuitous, Leaper. Instead of Bernreb’s cottage, we can hide you in the Garden itself. Your connection to Audblayin will be even stronger.”
“But where?”
“Shhh! I think I know. Follow me. You’ll need to make the maps first.”
They crawled through a grotto of moss and myrtle trees. Tangled black branches were leafless in winter, and the moss was dry and cold under Leaper’s knees and the heels of his hands. When they came out by a small stand of persimmons, the late, sweet-smelling, dew-covered fruit dropping as Leaper and Oos brushed the laden branches, they slipped, smiling, through a gathering of older women who surrounded a grunting younger woman giving birth, and ran across one of the swinging bridges.
Another crossing took them to a hedged garden of grasses, where old men had abandoned their hammocks for the rustling tufts. From there, the pair of conspirators passed a cluster of cooking pots where bulrush roots were being boiled over carefully tended twig flames. She hasn’t lived here in my lifetime, but she still knows the way. At last they came to the edge of the moat. Leaper stabbed himself on the thorns of a pomegranate tree.
“Wait here,” Youngest-Mother whispered, shucking her tunic and layered skirts. Leaper looked politely away, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her, wearing loincloth and breast-wrap, diving smoothly between the water-lilies.
She didn’t surface until she was halfway across the moat. Middle-Mother was the best swimmer among them, but Youngest-Mother wasn’t bad. She climbed up, dripping, below a circular window in the egg-shaped inner sanctum, and didn’t hesitate to throw herself headfirst through the opening.
Leaper counted the stars while he waited, holding her discarded clothes.
Are they all winged ones, I wonder? Are any of them truly stolen lanterns, Airak’s creations, as we were taught?
The splash of a thrown oilcloth-wrapped bundle alerted him to Oos’s return.
Feeling very exposed, he crouched in the moon shadow of the pomegranate, urging her with his eyes to swim faster.
Nobody stumbled across them. Her grin as she tugged her resisting clothes on over wet limbs told him exactly what was in the bundle.
“You’ll make the maps under the eaves of the Gardener’s Gathering pavilion. Somebody’s hung lanterns there. I can see them.”
She led him to the delicate, flowerlike, open-sided tower, with pointed roofs as layered as her altered skirts. The lanterns were there so that children with nets could catch fat moths for frying. They ignored Leaper, who sat with his back to a pillar, while Oos held the pilfered inks.
The landscape between Canopy and Time came alive in his mind. Hours passed before he looked up from the thirteenth map.
“There,” he said, stoppering the ink gourd. “One map for each Understorian village.”
“Marram will no doubt make copies,” Oos said. She secured the rolls inside her waterproof bundle before drawing Leaper to his feet. His hips and back were stiff from sitting under the lanterns for so long. They were alone. The moth-catching children had succumbed to sleep. “Come this way. To the loquat grove.”
Moonlight glinted from serrated dark green leaves. Snoring rose from hammocks. Sleepy lorikeets complained. Oos stopped to dig for something under a certain tree. A small, delighted whine escaped her upon unearthing some greenish tarnished object whose segments barely held together.
“Your jewellery?” Leaper asked. He knew she’d come from a high-ranking family. Her father had been a king’s vizier.
“My bells,” Oos murmured, taking his hand again, leading him on.
They came to a pair of squat, fat-bellied, leafless trees, painted with lichens whose colours in the moonlight were indeterminate. From the loquat grove, the bulging trees looked like useless, fruitless, tradition-honoured sentinels standing to either side of the path. Yet when Oos circled to the side of one, he saw there was a door of sorts in the hollow trunk.
“Here’s where I’ll sleep?” he predicted.
“The prison trees,” Oos agreed softly. “Once the nightmare of disobedient slaves. The fallen leaves inside stay dry. They’ll make a perfect bed for you.”
Leaper pointed at her bundle.
“How will you smuggle stolen goods out of the garden? Won’t the wards stop you?”
“The wards,” she said, following him inside the hollow, rolling up a layer of her skirts for his pillow, “are weakest in one direction, and that direction is down. Just the direction in which I was planning to go.”
There was room for him to lie down, fully stretched out, though his feet touched the inside of the trunk of the tree.
Youngest-Mother kissed him on the forehead, as she’d done when he was a child.
“Enjoy the wind under your wings, little one,” she said. “Enjoy the sun.”
Leaper closed his eyes. He felt himself floating somewhere lightless.
Then the stars burst into being above him
Below, he saw the platform in front of the Garden. A winged one was coiled there. The thieves’ lantern, glowing blue, dangled from the wooden cage of her teeth.
Let me stay with you, Hunger entreated, an abrupt presence beside him. We can share my solid form. Let me speak; let me help you. Since my fall, I have seen it all.
Leaper fought to wall her away in his wake with the weak magic of Audblayinland and the distant, still active, magic of Orin. Tallowwood smell surrounded them.
The trees grew tall, Hunger said, watered by their blood. Germinated in iron-rich rivers, mighty and strong grew the great trees, but one-fourteenth was missing. Let me stay with you, Leaper, and I shall show you where he lies. I will take you to the Birdfoot Valley. You will not need my body, when you have his bones. His spirit. In my body, you are still mortal, but you can become immortal if you devour him. If one fourteenth is not enough for you, there are other, whole titans upon the earth! I can deliver you to the places where they walk. Or, we could merge our souls, right here and now, as the dead woman suggested.
That wasn’t a suggestion, it was a warning! Leaper pushed at her with a brusquely formed image of both hands. Like a boy trying to push a bear out of his kitchen. She was bigger. She was stronger. Any offer to merge souls was a lie; his smaller self would be consumed by her.
I can take you into the sky. So high that we need never touch the ground again. Don’t you want to find out what is up there, to live forever in the sun?
No, Leaper insisted. I want to be with Ilik.
As before, calling up the image of Ilik’s face banished the winged one’s resistance. She became smaller. Angrier, but smaller. Not a bear anymore. A hornet.
And then she was gone.
He opened Hunger’s eyes—his eyes—and saw the top of the Garden Gate level with the low point of his shoulder. When he arched his neck, so that his head was higher than the wall, he found he could see the whole Garden at once. His vision and smell were more acute, but his hearing seemed more muffled than it had been when he had human ears. Oos stood by the sealed, seamless prison tree, tying bark rope to her climbing harness.
Leaper lashed his long tail. Exquisite sensation thrilled through the leaf-scales that covered him. He lifted his wings, and made a breeze that set the prison tree’s branches clattering together.
Oos didn’t look up.
FORTY
LEAPER SOARED.
The wetlands north of the forest, now that the floodwaters had receded, were covered in vast flocks of nesting or resting swamp birds whose alarm cries filled the skies when Leaper’s moon shadow passed over them.
He couldn’t see them taking flight, but he felt them in the minute movements of his leaf-scales, as if he were running human hands over the surface of water and land, touching every reed and bamboo island with his fingertips.
Wetwoodknee looked like a toy, seen from the heights. Something rickety, built by children from twigs and twine and then abandoned to the monsoon, toy boats and barges bunched up against it by the growing flow.
Yet presumably with her spyglass, from her tower, the queen of the City-by-the-Sea had seen him coming. With Mitimiti at her side, the one-eyed maid copying her movements clumsily as if learning the dance for the first time, Erta spun before the kapok tree. She’d lit a fire on the dais and was not chanting this time, but waving the fanlike fronds of the cabbage palm tree.
Paying homage in the language of the winged. Leaper felt the hot and cold breezes of her words, even at a distance.
“Under the eyes of the stars,” she cried, “protect your own true people.”
The Master of Cast and his dishevelled men, beads glittering coldly in the moonlight, wavelets lapping at the underside of their mobile invading city, watched Leaper wheel above them with fear and indecision. They called their own back to the slave-powered ships, presuming their fortifications somehow defensible.
Erta whirled on, jarring the boards, her words smelling of exhilarated sweat and the killifish on her ragged breath.
“By the salt tears you shed, for the sake of the name we remember you by!”
Emerging from their homes, the people of Wetwoodknee pointed and gasped. Mothers fell to their knees, clutching terrified children, until their parents in turn could clasp their trembling hands and turn them to clapping, in a rhythm of four swift beats and two slow ones. Leaper quickly realised it was the rhythm of his heart.
Absurdly, it pleased him to hear it.
Then he was distracted by the sight of one of the blackpressers. Clad in a windturner. Carrying buckets of water, sniffing for the smoke of a fire. It was Yran. Impossible; Leaper dived dangerously closer, needing a better look. A different angle. There they were. The black bun. The horrified grimace showing perfect, gleaming white teeth. Unsho’s work.
“Wept,” the queen danced. Her layered pearl necklaces jangled against her crocodile-leather windturner. The bells on the wooden carving vibrated each time she landed. “Throw back our enemies!”<
br />
Obligingly, Leaper threw her enemies back.
Catching the air in great scoops of clean flow, which obeyed his will, he broke Cast free of the Mooring precinct. He sent the city spinning up the coast, away from the river mouth.
Seeking altitude, prepared to go after the drifting buildings and buffet them a second time, he was startled by the wind whispering through his leaves in yet another language he was easily able to understand.
They will drift to a pair of islands connected by a sand bridge, the wind promised. Islands with no trees, and the ships with their masts broken. Hungry, they will dive for oysters, and be dived on in turn by duck-beaked water lizards. The slaves will take one island, and their keepers will take another, and the sand will be washed away for fifty years, until a storm reunites them.
He couldn’t whisper back to the wind. It had no mind. Only hands to feel the currents of the future, as Leaper had felt the water and the land.
Satisfied, he turned away from Wetwoodknee. Towards the mountains.
And now the wind sang a different song.
It sang to him while he stayed over the horizon, away from Canopy, so that he couldn’t be seen by the pieces of titan who thought the last of the winged was gone for good. It sang as the sun rose and his real shadow skimmed across scattered grey boulders, glowing green moss-cushions and the mirror lakes with three toes that were the footprints of Old Gods.
By the time the cave that had served as Hunger’s lair came within the range of his sharpened sight, he knew a hundred things he hadn’t known before.
He knew that Imeris and Anahah would find the Birdfoot Valley and restore their leopard-child.
He knew that the queen’s statue wouldn’t be built in the mountains because she was a queen, arbitrary child of an arbitrary line, but because she would become the famed clockmaker of Time, restoring the flow of the spring and the waterfall, harnessing that flow for the grinding of grain, and feeding those who had fled the forest.
Tides of the Titans Page 34