Echoes of Understorey

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  For Mum, who prefers her heroes extra heroic

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Evan and Diana for all the championing they did in front of my eyes and also the extra championing they must have done while my back was turned. Thanks to Cat for sponsoring my book tour and being a shoulder to lean on. Everyone involved with these books’ editing, design, production, publicity, sales—you rock! Much gratitude for your patience with this baby writer, and baby writers everywhere. And as always, thank you, family, for being the immoveable roots of this tree.

  PROLOGUE

  IMERIS FEELS with little nine-year-old fingers high above her head for the smooth chimera skin. Youngest-Father has moved it to the top shelf, where he thinks she can’t climb.

  Frog song fills the fishing room, a room greenish lit by phosphorescent fungi. The growths make shapes like friendly pond ripples over the round wooden ceiling and walls. Imeris wrinkles her nose at the figgy stink of fruit bat guts. Middle-Father has hung a brace of the bats from a hook, his latest catch. A pitch-black, oval-shaped, floor-to-ceiling opening leads to the outside of the dwelling, to the nighttime winter forest. Smoke from smouldering leaves on the floor keeps the insects out.

  She can’t find the skin. Where is it? The top shelf is crowded with hooks and knives and traps with cogs and teeth, all the things made by Oldest-Father that he doesn’t want Imeris to touch.

  But she needs the wings.

  She’s old enough to fly. She is.

  Their house has three mothers, three fathers, and three children. Everyone tells her how lucky she is to have all her mothers and fathers still alive, but it isn’t that great! All they want is for Imeris to be exactly like them! A great hunter. A great healer. A great musician. A great mother. What’s so great about being great?

  Imeris will fly away from them. She will be great at being ordinary. Maybe she will keep salamanders, if she lives near the centre of the forest where it is darkest. Flowerfowl, if she lives near the edge. Oldest-Father, who is stupid and mean, says that Understorey is the best place to live. Youngest-Mother, who talks dreamily about sunshine and butterflies, is from Canopy. When Imeris is grown up, she will decide where to live. No time for that now.

  Her hooked pinkie finally catches the hem of the precious hide, just as her feet slip on the shelf below. She lands on her back. The supple folds of the tanned demon skin fall with her, covering her face and hands, blocking out the room’s green glow. Stunned slightly, she waits to recover without batting the skin or its light timber frame away, imagining for a moment that she’s fighting the chimera herself. In her mind, the blow Imeris is recovering from is one delivered by the demon. Colour-changing camouflage. Claws that can carve gap-axe wood.

  Then her nostrils catch the chimera’s musk, still there beneath the smell of oily preservative. This demon had been her protector, not her enemy. She should not be thinking of battles. Confused, hissing like the chimera-mother half remembered in her dreams, Imeris kicks the skin skywards.

  Emerald luminescence shows the baffled, round-cheeked face of Ylly, Imeris’s sister, before the skin falls back into place. Imeris scrambles to her knees and then her feet, pulling the skin defensively around her shoulders. Because Imeris was adopted by her three fathers and three mothers, neither Imeris nor Ylly can be sure which one of them is older, but the more she calls Ylly her little sister, the more it feels true.

  “Little sister,” Imeris says innocently.

  “I am telling Oldest-Father,” Ylly answers at once, arms folded.

  “If you do, I will tell Middle-Mother that you hate the new baby.”

  Middle-Mother is Ylly’s birth mother. Ylly tries to please Middle-Mother the most.

  “I do not!” Ylly clenches her fists at her sides. She’s wearing a threadbare silk nightdress made from her old baby blanket. It’s too short to cover her knees.

  “You hate a not-even-born-yet baby.” Imeris draws herself up like a goddess, lifting her chin, trying to disguise the fact that beneath the black folds of the hide, her restless fingers find the handles of the all-but-weightless wood frame that Youngest-Father has sewn into the skin.

  “Do not,” Ylly asserts.

  “Give the baby that yucky old thing you are wearing, then.”

  “No!”

  “Because you are a baby-hater.”

  “You are hopeless at keeping secrets, Issi.” Ylly grips the nightgown as though Imeris might try to take it right now. “I do not hate the baby. I hate you! What are you doing? You are not old enough to fly. You will crash and die.”

  Imeris wriggles her shoulders so that the seams of the skin settle there. The finger spaces of the handles are too wide for her, the grips too far along the frame, but the elbow rings are warm in her clenched palms even if the too-long hem drags on the floor.

  If only Ylly hadn’t found her. She could’ve practiced with the frame in the fishing room for a while. Perhaps not even tried to fly right away. Now she’s been seen.

  If Imeris doesn’t try to fly, Ylly will know she’s a coward.

  “If you hate me,” she says haughtily, “you will not care if I die. If the new baby is a girl, you can call her Imerissiremi, and I hope you will not be a tattletale on her like you are on me.”

  Imeris takes three big strides to the edge of the room, barely avoiding getting her legs tangled in the skin as she kicks the smouldering leaves to one side. They burn her big toe, but she ignores the pain.

  The blackness, the unknown, is terrifying.

  Imeris knows that Youngest-Father keeps a sap-collecting platform on the trunk of the cidergum, across the hundred-pace chasm between the great trees, below the level of their home. Too far away for her to see in the dark, but she knows it is there.

  I can fly to it. I will. Then I will fly back and climb up here again. That will give Ylly a fright. That will teach her not to tell me what I can and cannot do. It is only one short glide across.

  The frogs pulse noisily in the night. If a silly old frog can get from one tree to another, Imeris can, too.

  She spreads her chimera-skin wings.

  “Issi, no!” Ylly cries.

  Imeris’s heart pounds. Heat rushes to her face. The floor beneath her feet feels abruptly sticky, like it wants to hold on to her.

  She jumps.

  For a count of five, she glides. It’s the greatest feeling she’s ever known. Warm, still air turns to a cool rush. Spore scents and the sweet rot of night-blooming orchids fill her nostrils. Nothingness forces her spread arms upwards. She pushes her arms back down. The speed of her flight astonishes and exhilarates her.

  But there’s no cidergum tree trun
k in sight, and her strength cannot hold.

  Her wings fold like paper. Her wrists touch behind her head. The chimera cloth collapses along her spine.

  “Father!” she screams in a panic. None of them can help her. “Mother!”

  And the mother that she screams for is the chimera.

  Its smell comes back to her, strongly. Her three fathers took her from the gentle maw of the very demon they killed for this skin. The skin should protect her. It should somehow know her, even in death! The colours still change, don’t they? Doesn’t that mean the chimera’s spirit lingers nearby?

  Imeris feels herself slowing in the air.

  She can’t move her aching arms. They’ve tangled in the skin and frame behind her. Her feet begin to dangle downwards, and she feels desperately with them for the leaves and branches that must be striking her, that must be breaking her fall. She cannot have reached Floor. Floor is almost a thousand paces below, and she knows she has not fallen that far.

  There are no leaves or branches.

  There’s nothing.

  Has the chimera-spirit caught her after all?

  It must be the magic of sorceresses. Or the spells of bone women. Perhaps the power of the very goddesses and gods.

  Imeris hangs in nothingness, her panting filling the stillness and sudden silence.

  Something has frightened the frogs.

  She can’t see anything. She’s stuck between her home tallowwood tree and the cidergum, unable to swim through the nothingness that holds her, unable to move up or down. She considers stripping off the chimera skin to see if her wings fall, separated from the magic, but what if she’s the one who falls? Besides, the skin is Youngest-Father’s most prized possession.

  Guilt. Terror. Imeris cries and cries, but nobody answers. Nobody comes.

  She cries herself to sleep.

  * * *

  A WOMAN’S voice wakes her.

  “It is as he dreamed,” the low, smoky tones surmise. “So young. It is too early. My heart weeps for him.”

  Imeris lifts her head. The voice is somewhere above her. Then she screams, because an open-jawed monster with a glowing gullet hovers over her, a tailless crocodile dangling from a rope of spider silk.

  “God’s bones!” the monster exclaims, jerking its head.

  And Imeris sees it is an ordinary human head, after all. A hanging braid of black hair, woven with spiny fish fins, seemed a toothy snout before. The glowing gullet is a glass jar full of trapped blue lightning, such as Youngest-Mother once described to Imeris, a device of the lightning god, Airak. It dangles from the woman’s hand.

  Aside from a rope climbing harness, the woman isn’t wearing any clothes. She rotates slowly on the rope end, and Imeris sees that her dark brown skin has a raised, bumpy pattern like a scaly crocodile’s back from the nape of her neck all the way to her heels. Those scarred and tattooed heels, manipulating the rope, swing the woman up into sitting position, slightly above Imeris.

  More terrible scars show where her breasts have been cut off.

  “He sent me to find you,” she says, holding out the hand without the lantern. “Come with me.”

  Imeris shrinks back into her chimera skin.

  “I want to go home,” she bleats.

  Coward.

  The woman puts her fist to her chin and raises one eyebrow.

  “And where is that?”

  Imeris starts to point, but she’s gotten turned around.

  “I do not know.”

  “Do you know whose protective magic has saved you from falling, even here, so far from his seat of power?”

  The trapped lightning is the only clue Imeris has.

  “Airak,” she guesses.

  “God’s bones! It is not Airak that I serve!”

  “Who, then?” Imeris’s mouth is dry. Perhaps this crocodile-woman serves the old goddess of childbirth who once resided in the upper reaches of the tallowwood. A goddess of pain and blood, no matter what anyone says.

  “The god Odel,” the crocodile-woman says. “He who guards children from falling. Lucky for you, you are still a child. You fell once, but an offering was made so you would not fall twice. I will take you to Odel. Hold my hand.”

  That sort of god does not sound so bad.

  The monster-woman grips Imeris’s gingerly extended wrist and hauls her, still swaddled in chimera skin, to the level of her climbing harness, tucking Imeris’s arm around her neck and instructing her to hold on, monkeyback style, with both hands.

  “But the god Odel lives in Canopy,” Imeris says. “We cannot go to Canopy. There is a barrier.” In all her whimsical wondering about where she would like to live when she is grown, she has never articulated this fact.

  “It will be no barrier to me. Do as I say.”

  Imeris, who had hoped to see the next tree but never expected a whole other country, thrills with excitement and holds on with both hands. She grips Monster-Woman’s waist with her knees. The chimera skin’s wooden handles hang below them like the hooked thumbs of a broken-winged bat.

  Monster-Woman climbs quickly, as though she carries no burden. Imeris has been taught that ropes are for children and helpless, spineless Canopians, but the woman shows no shame at the smoothness of her forearms and shins.

  Hours go by, and Imeris looks up at what she thinks are the fabled stars. They grow brighter, and bluer, and she realises they are more jars of trapped lightning, shining on a network of snaking branch paths that connect the great trees in all directions. She hears human sounds over the frog chorus and the trickle of vertical rivers; drunken shouts, barrow bells announcing the movements of sellers and traders, children running and laughing, monkeys hooting, tapirs whistling, and the axes of fuel finders and chimney borers biting into trees.

  “Is it morning?” she asks with wonder. The air is sweeter and colder.

  “Not yet,” the monster-woman says, “but the city of Canopy sleeps only in the monsoon. There is a platform. We wait here.”

  She swings them roughly out of empty air, a long way to the left, until they crash into the bark of a spiny plum tree. There is a platform there, narrow but solid, partially formed from a sealed-off stump of petiole. The stump was left behind when one of the young tree’s fronds lost the light, shrivelled, detached, and fell.

  “What are we waiting for?” Imeris asks.

  “For my master,” says the monster-woman. “He is not supposed to leave his niche once his visions begin, but he does not yet know that this was a true vision.” She unties her harness from the rope that has held them suspended, simply releasing it. It falls back in the direction they swung from until Imeris can’t see it anymore; she supposes the monster-woman will collect it later.

  I cannot keep thinking of her as the monster-woman. I am not afraid of her anymore.

  “What is your name?” Imeris asks, hugging the chimera skin around herself, abruptly needing its familiarity even though it betrayed her.

  The woman, standing beside her on the tiny platform, looks down at Imeris with black eyes full of amused complacency.

  “I am Aurilon, Bodyguard of Odel. You have not heard of me? I have never lost a duel. I am the greatest fighter the forest has ever seen.”

  “You are not,” Imeris argues at once. “My middle-father, Bernreb, could beat you in a fight. He killed this chimera whose skin I am holding!”

  Aurilon smiles and says nothing. She takes a waterproof, leaf-wrapped package from a hidden hollow in the tree, and there are leather climbing gloves with wrist straps inside the package. They are tipped with ferocious, curving obsidian-black claws.

  And Imeris realises that Aurilon has killed a chimera, too.

  PART I

  The Dovecote & the Duel

  ONE

  IMERIS DUCKED her head under the room’s carved lintel.

  At twenty-one, having reached her full height some monsoons before, Imeris was no taller than the average student at the renowned fighting school of Loftfol. Yet she ducked like
everyone else. The entrance to the bow store was lowered on purpose. All who wished take up weapons were forced to first show respect to the long-dead founders of the school.

  Braziers in six small hearths provided a low orange glow and helped drive monsoon moisture from the air. Familiar smells of flowerfowl feathers, used for fletching, beeswax for the strings, and oils for the long wooden limbs surrounded Imeris, but the sight of a messenger bird with a tiny tube tied to one leg, perched on an empty bow rack by the seventh, unlit hearth, brought her to a sudden halt.

  She stared at it. Loftfol used lorikeets for its messages, birds bred in the hollows of the school’s own boughs, but this was a blue-eyed bowerbreaker, near-blind, grey-feathered and brown-barred. These birds hunted flowerfowl in the utter blackness of Floor.

  By smell.

  It has found this room by smell, Imeris thought.

  This room, where Imeris always arrived first, before the break of each day, lest she be forced to share the archery practice range with Kishsik and his cronies.

  The bowerbreaker was only half tame, its hooked beak well capable of ripping out flowerfowl throats. When Imeris tried to take the message, it turned, wings raised, as if to escape back up the chimney. She seized it by the back of the neck and stuffed it into her armpit, trapping it long enough to take the tube.

  Inside, a message.

  Addressed to her in Oldest-Father’s crude hand.

  Youngest-Father must have told Oldest-Father about Kishsik, whom Imeris had injured during training. About the guilt that led her to avoid him, and how Kishsik’s friends interpreted this as a weakness and fear of reprisal. Oldest-Father or his courier must be close by, or else the bowerbreaker would have found itself a real live flowerfowl to feast on, instead of following the scent of old feathers into the bow store.

  The message was a summons. A summons, when she should stay. She had demonstrated her proficiency in spine-fighting to Horroh the Haakim only yesterday, and today custom demanded her presence in the hall, to be recognised before the other teachers and students.