“There’s more to the land than Sleeping Gods.” The girl was staring at her over the blade, no fear in her eyes.
“What do you know?”
“Some, but not enough.”
Hope shook her head and stepped away. “I don’tcare!” she said.
Alishia stood, and Hope saw how small she had become. She had the body and the height of a young teen, yet the attitude of someone with a whole world on her shoulders. Her eyes were those of someone ten times Hope’s age.
“Come on,” Hope said. “The longer we wait here, the more Kang Kang can plot against us.”
Alishia’s eyes drooped, she swayed, and Hope slapped her across the face. “Comeon!” she said. She grabbed the girl’s hand-it was hot, the skin of her palm bubbled as though burned-and pulled her up the slope.
THE GROUND CHANGED, as Hope knew it would, and she saw the first steam vent. It was the height of her knee, and emitting an opaque mist into the night. She veered away from it, walking across the slope for a while to avoid its exhaust. Alishia followed blindly behind her. The girl was stumbling and dragging her feet, but still she walked on, tripping now and then and sobbing.
Hope breathed in, felt the dry air turn warm and wet, and she had a brief, intense vision of a gigantic army marching toward a precipice a mile high. There were tens of thousands of soldiers there, many of them twice as tall as normal men, all wielding terrible weapons of death and destruction and illuminated from above by hovering globes of molten metal. She could smell the meat of them-rank and rotten, ready to be opened to the air-and hear their diseased breathing, and she had a very real sense that desperation drove them on. The cliff they approached was sheer, and she could see no way that they could climb it. From above, simmering through the night and making it suddenly daylight, great swathes of fire floated down and set the army alight.
Hope gasped and fell to her knees, spitting bitter saliva from her mouth and turning back to Alishia. “Did you see that?” she said. “Did youtaste that?”
Alishia was kneeling, drowsy and pale. “I saw something,” she said, looking around as though searching for a lost pet.
“It’s Kang Kang tricking us,” Hope said. “Trying to frighten us, kill our hope. Showing us what will never happen.”
“I think it’s already happened,” Alishia said.
Yes, Hope thought, it had a tang of memory to it. She looked across the hillside at the flow of steam rising from the vent, slick like oil. A breeze whispered down from the mountains and the steam changed direction, but it danced with the breeze as though playing with it. “Let’s go on.”
As they walked uphill they saw more of the vents. These were taller than the first, their bases thicker, the stream of substance pouring from their open necks wider. Hope kept as far away from the chimneys as possible, her breath so shallow that she became dizzy and disoriented. She waved the disc-sword around her head, shouting at phantoms, and she never let go of Alishia’s hand. If I let go she might blow away, she thought. She’s so small now, so shrunken. I can’t lose her. She’s my future.
The funnels venting from beneath Kang Kang-a gassy drug, poison, memories-became less frequent the higher they climbed. First line of defense, Hope thought, and she waited for the second to appear.
“What happened to your hand?” she asked. Alishia had gasped in pain whenever Hope grabbed harder to pull her on.
“I’m learning,” Alishia said. Or perhaps she said “burning.” Hope was unsure, and she thought that repeating the question might give Kang Kang another small victory.
THEY FOUND A ruin. It was a tower, upended and thrown back against a cliff of ragged stone. Its walls were cracked but still clung together, and its base sprouted into a tree of foundation; globes of footings, buds of ground piles. They defied gravity and threw a shambolic shadow against the cliff. Around the tower’s smashed head sat a jumble of giant rocks, as though the hillside had been impacted and shattered by something huge. One of the upside-down windows shone as the life moon reflected from some old thing inside.
“No one said it was always this way,” Hope said. She paused a few hundred steps from the ruin and stretched, hands on her hips and shoulders pulled back. Alishia stood by her side, breathing fast, swaying.
“This could be from before the Black,” Alishia said.
“Could be. Or it might have happened yesterday.” But Hope could smell the age of this place, and when the moons struck the tower, it reflected old light.
“I wonder who lived in there?”
Hope looked higher up the ravaged hillside, trying to see where the tower had tumbled from. But it all seemed wrong. It had not fallen here, it had been thrown.
“I wonder who died,” the witch said.
“We should go on.” Alishia aimed east to walk around the tower and the shattered ground before it. Hope watched her go and suddenly wondered what would happen if she did not follow. She could go up and into that tower, make a home in its upside-down world and spend the rest of her time exploring its inverted history. Perhaps she would find something of significance, perhaps not.
It’s of Kang Kang! she thought. Nothing good could have ever lived there. No calm hands laid those blocks, and no peaceful hand tore them down.
Hope closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, and as she exhaled she knew that there was something extra to the air of this place. Between blinks-when she thought her vision of the world was negated-she saw more than ever. Perhaps it was one of the legendary Children of Kang Kang, this giant shape stepping in and out of the fallen tower, in and out, as though unsure where it would find its final rest. Its outline was formed from a dozen bodies twisted together, arms waving and mouths gaping, eyes rolling and catching the reflection of an ancient death moon, as if the wraiths of whole families clung together for comfort.
Hope gasped and stepped back, keeping her eyes wide open. She hurried after Alishia, glancing at the uprooted tower as she went. When she eventually had to blink again, that shambling image was still there on the inside of her eyelid, weaker than before, fading with each successive blink, until those old wraiths were a memory once again.
SOMETIME LATER -Hope had no idea how long, because time here was skewed-they came to a wide crevasse in the land. It stretched along the skirt of the first of Kang Kang’s true mountains, a river of darkness. They would have to cross it to continue their journey. That, or walk east or west until the crack in the world ended. Hope thought that perhaps it would never end.
“It’s trying to stop us,” Hope said. She sank to her knees and dropped the disc-sword, pressing her hands to her face to make sure her tattoos had not entered into the betrayal. She felt them just below her skin, twisted into confusion and fear, and she could not deny them. “The whole of Kang Kang is after us.” She turned around and looked at Alishia where the girl stood behind her. Her eyes were hooded, their whites bloodshot and yellowed by the death moon. “Alishia?”
“We have to go on,” the girl said.
“Of course we do, but-”
“There’s no excuse not to go on,” she continued. “We have to get there, I have to get there, and a simple hole in the world can’t stop us.”
“I’ve been into one hole,” Hope said. She spat as far as she could, watching the spittle glint as it was carried into the ravine on the breeze.
“There’s more than shadows down there,” Alishia said, and her voice was suddenly filled with such fear that the hairs on the back of Hope’s neck bristled.
Alishia sank to her stomach behind Hope, pressing herself as flat to Kang Kang as she could. Hope followed her example. She tasted the grass of this place-bitter, as though its dew were blood-and smelled the ground, and she knew it was dying. Venting its memories. Giving them to the darkness as though it had no use of them anymore.
“What is it?” Hope whispered, and the question could have so many answers.
“Shade?” Alishia said. Hope turned around and looked at the girl, but she seemed to be unconscious again.