The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,103

not tell me everything he should have.” My high priest’s name sits a little easier on my lips, though my heart still thuds with pain when I speak. “The Graycloaks, the cultists. He did not want me to know how far our world had fallen.”

North shifts the pack on his shoulders. “Should we avoid the village, then?”

I shake my head. “No—the village, at least, will be safe. A guardian stone protects the people there, against dark magicians as well as mist.”

“So just avoid the mountains, I guess.” North’s gaze drifts to the side and up, where glimpses of the western mountains flicker through gaps in the trees. There’s a strange note in his voice, though, and I watch him for a time before I speak.

“What is it, North?”

“He said something else, the kid back there.”

“Yes?”

North’s troubled gaze swings back to fix on my face. “He said these hills are haunted, and the ghosts won’t let us leave.”

I try to ignore the little chill that trickles down my spine. Folk tales and stories, nothing more. But then, what drove these people from the safe refuge of their guardian stone?

TWENTY-FOUR

NORTH

The village we’re headed for is set into a narrow canyon at the edge of the mountains. A dry streambed runs along its bottom. We’ve been walking forever, tracing the path of small tributary rivers and streams. Then we climbed what felt like a thousand stairs to reach this place. We pause at the top of the hill to look back the way we came—at the rock-hewn ledges slowly descending until they’re lost in the forest-sea.

“They walked a long way,” Nimh says quietly.

“They? You mean we,” I tell her, resting my hands on my knees.

She shakes her head. “I mean the ones who live here. When I was young, they walked to the river to greet me as I arrived to tend their guardian stone.”

We push on, steep reddish-brown cliffs rising above us on either side, their tops jagged against the pale blue sky overhead. The first homes we encounter are carved into the rock itself, or perhaps into caves that were already there.

Their open windows gaze down at us, rising two, three, and sometimes four stories to the top of the cliffs. They’re dark and unblinking, like rows of empty eyes.

I shake the thought off with a twitch of my shoulders. Where did that come from? A soft rustle draws my attention, and for an instant I think it must be the cat, but no. There’s a scrap of fabric—perhaps an old curtain—flapping in one of the topmost windows, and somehow it’s worse than nothing there at all.

Where are the people?

There are rope bridges slung back and forth between both sides of the canyon like an intricate web above us, passing between and beneath one another in an impossible maze, all rickety planks and way-too-thin bits of rope in unreliable knots.

I mean, I live in the sky, and the very idea of trying to cross one of those things gives me vertigo.

We walk along the empty streambed down the center of the canyon, our footsteps the only sound. The unnatural silence grates on my nerves and sets off a twitch between my shoulder blades.

When I can’t take the silence any longer, I whisper, “Where is everyone?”

Nimh’s reply is just as quiet. “I—I do not know.”

I glance to my left as we round the bend, and startle—for a moment, I thought a person was standing there. But it’s a statue, and as I look ahead, a long row of them stretches out by the side of our path. They’re all about my height, with tall, conical bodies hewn from stone, heads set atop them. The bodies themselves are mostly plain—some broad-shouldered and heavyset, some smaller, more slender, but their real personalities live in their faces, which are carved with fierce, sharp features, black paint daubed around the eyes.

Nimh raises both her hands to her eyes in what’s unmistakably a gesture of respect. “They are the divinities that came before me,” she murmurs.

Seeing such a long row of them—seeing the history she’s a part of—is sobering. I walk past them quietly, only looking at them out of the corners of my eyes.

When we reach the last of the statues, the black paint becomes crisper and cleaner, more recent. The third to last is a barrel-chested man, half a head taller than any of the others.

And then comes the second to last. It’s about Nimh’s height, and it’s clearly a woman, its midsection swelling out