Tides of the Titans Read online

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  For Dad, who gave me the gift and the curse of travel and more than one place to belong

  Acknowledgments

  In addition to my formidable agent, editors, cover artist, layout and publicity people, publisher, reviewers, booksellers, readers, family, and friends, many thanks to the spec-fic community, to Australian and international fandom, and to my writer’s groups in Sydney and K-town (folks who this solitary, stubborn scribbler was convinced she didn’t need!). In the words of Sarah from Labyrinth: Every now and again in my life, for no reason at all, I need you. All of you! *cue “Magic Dance”*

  PROLOGUE

  THE MONSOON threatens.

  Leaper grins at the sky, gripping the rope with a gloved hand behind his harness to control his descent. He shouldn’t be headed this way. In a past life, and in this one, he’s vowed never to go down. Never to look back.

  He shouldn’t be headed anywhere. Yet it’s his only chance to get his hands on Aurilon’s sword.

  The mossy, ridged bark of the hundred-pace-wide sweet-fruit pine is fish-scale grey. It breaks away in brittle flakes with every brush of Leaper’s sandal soles.

  Airak’s teeth!

  Dangerous to go down when it’s raining. Dangerous to go down when it’s dry. If the bark’s not soggy and peeling, the pieces of it, falling through seven hundred human heights, are possibly giving him away to all sorts of people, high and low, when he’d much prefer the element of surprise, thank you very much.

  When I climb back up, he thinks as he lets the rope out a little more, I’ll choose a different tree. Perhaps the neighbouring spiny plum. Its brownish bark is hairy as tree bears but better than this one.

  Faint raindrops fleck his bare arms and face as he drops faster. Faster again. There’s no point looking down; there’s no light down there to see by, only the captured lightning that Leaper brings himself.

  It’s more than a month since Odel’s Bodyguard, Aurilon, fell from this tree. Deliberately. To her death. Leaper couldn’t escape the scrutiny of his master, Airak the lightning god, until now. With sixteen monsoons behind him, he’s reached his full growth; although the god has sent him on occasional political missions outside of Airakland, Airak’s favourite furtive emissary has been harshly disciplined since a certain incident at Ulellin’s Temple.

  The rules have changed, and Leaper resents now having to ask permission to leave the emergent.

  So, this time, he didn’t bother to ask. Let them discipline him again.

  He needs the sword. Aurilon’s sword. The one she was holding—and possessed by—when she threw herself down. Orin, goddess of beasts and birds, had intended the weapon to drink deeply of innocent blood. Aurilon had foiled that purpose.

  Leaper races the rain. He’ll have to search for the body in the black soil below before the floodwaters wash it away. Since he’s going all the way to Floor, he can’t rely on his usual trick, once he’s ready to return, of using a heavy, hacked-off, wooden counterweight to take him back up to the forest canopy in a hurry. A stolen pocket-clock, wound tight at daybreak, lies in the carrysack on his back, to help him keep track of time in the pitch-black sameness he expects to find.

  He must keep track of time to make sure he doesn’t lose the magical aura that allows him to pass freely through the gods-ordained and gods-maintained invisible barrier between Canopy and Understorey.

  There’s no magic barrier between Understorey and Floor. Floorian hostility, and the potential to be swept away by floods, are the only true barriers there.

  Leaper’s lantern lies in the sack, too, separated from the clock by chimera cloth to keep them from interfering with one another. Leaper made the magical, trapped-lightning lantern and its twin in secret. Yes, it gives light, they all give light, and some of them transport messages and some of them kill, but the pair made by Leaper transport all kinds of small, nonliving objects from one to the other. Leaper has used them for all his best thefts.

  Let the Servants of the lightning god search him upon his return. Let them suspect him. Let them shake out his bags. His grin widens just thinking about it.

  Then the sky rumbles and the storm rolls in and although he can’t sense his master’s terrible power below the barrier, he stops grinning. The monsoon has arrived.

  Just a few more hours. That’s all he needs. I hope that’s all I need.

  Purple clouds turn to purple specks hidden by silhouetted black, thrashing leaves and branches. Purple specks turn to distant pinpricks of light. Leaper has reached Understorey. He has no fear of the infamously barbarous Understorian warriors. If he didn’t already know they superstitiously avoided the emergents of goddesses and gods, he’d still feel safe; not only was he born an Understorian, but in Understorey, anyone but a fool hides safely away in their tree-trunk hollow at the first indication of the monsoon.

  Leaper reaches a level a thousand paces down. His feet don’t touch the ground. Odel’s emergent is ludicrously tall. The rope’s strong, and long enough. The knots tell him he’s reached twelve hundred paces. Sweat beads on his body. There’s no wind. Only oppressive heat.

  Fourteen hundred paces.

  He can’t feel the raindrops anymore, but individual drops aren’t the danger. Once the rain really gets started, the rivers running down the sides of the great trees will rage, turning a hundred winding ground-snakes of water nosing blindly towards the sea into a single, forest-wide flood.

  The sword will be lost.

  When he’s at home in Airak’s Temple, Leaper loathes being reminded of what he truly is. Not the high-class child of Canopy reflected by his carefully cultivated accent, but an Understorian abomination: king’s blood mixed with slave’s blood, and his magical talent watered down by it. In the earliest days of his apprenticeship, he failed often, but now he borrows the power of Old Gods’ bones to make himself strong, and Floor is where the Old Gods’ bones can be found.

  His rump hits something hard. He swears, finds his feet, and rubs his bruised tailbone while rope coils tangle around his knees.

  Floor.

  Airak’s teeth.

  When he gets the lantern out of his sack and unshutters it, blue-white light bounces from the buttress-roots of the great tree, but shows little else. The neighbouring spiny plum, six hundred paces away, is a faint shape far to his left. Everything beneath his feet is black, feels sticky, and smells rotten. Leaper kicks at the mulch and jumps back at the horror of uncovered worms, white salamanders, and wriggling millipedes.

  Pieces of fallen bark begin brushing his shoulders. He’s the one whose descent disturbed them, yet he came down faster than they did. Now the pieces are catching up, making a mosaic of green and
grey against the black. Raising the lantern, he watches them fall for a moment.

  A pair of eyes gleam at the edge of the great tree trunk. No, it’s only a flutter of falling bark. The sound of a footfall is his imagination. If Floorians had seen his light, they’d be putting spears through him at this very moment. They don’t tolerate intruders, Leaper has heard, but they, too, must moor their floating villages in preparation for the monsoon.

  Leaper unwraps the pocket-clock and checks it. The hand has only passed one of the twelve markers, but he knows it runs slightly faster in the first hours than it does in the later ones. He stows it away. Begins sweeping the area, lantern in hand.

  There are footprints, but he can’t read them. Areas of disturbed dirt and pine needles, but no body. No clothes.

  No sword.

  “Aurilon,” he mutters angrily, “where are your gods-cursed bones?”

  “They are not to be found,” a woman’s voice says behind him. “And you ought not to look for them, lest you lose your hair for transgressing. By that, of course, I mean lose your life.”

  Leaper whirls. Two paces away, a slender arm whips up to shield dark eyes from the blinding brightness of the lantern. The owner of the voice is shorter than anyone Leaper has ever met, with white streaks in her straight black hair. Her brown skin is speckled with mud and sap patterns, which are intricate and must have been time-consuming; her arms are smooth and left bare of the patterns but sag in the muscles, giving her age.

  She seems to be alone. A woven string of dragonfly wings hangs, skirt-like but concealing nothing, from her hips. She wears no other clothes.

  For a moment Leaper is speechless—and he’s never speechless. In seven years spent navigating the great city of Canopy, he’s used many sets of selves to camouflage himself within the classes of people that surround him, recalling images of branching trees to help him slip into their inhabitants’ vocabulary and mannerisms, from the roots upward. A tallowwood represents, to him, the simple brusqueness of the hunter of Gannak, its branches ending in ritual rhymes where grunts won’t suffice, while a floodgum is the formalised secrecy of the Temple. The firewheel tree helps him to assume the smooth obsequiousness of court.

  He has no class association, no pattern of behaviour, to help him here. She doesn’t look like any goddess, queen, farmer, or slave he’s ever seen.

  “I am called Leaper.” He holds his empty hand out in surrender. “What are you called?”

  “Ootesh,” she says, motioning imperatively for him to lower the lantern. She carries a small carving of a crocodile.

  Not a spear. A carving.

  Leaper narrows the lantern shutter to a more tolerable width, looking to her face for approval.

  “Men must not meet the eyes of women,” she says, unsmiling. “Not even the eyes of a linker like me. No exceptions for ignorant outsiders. If they want to keep their hair.”

  Leaper stares at her bare feet, slathered in mud to the knees.

  “Aurilon was my—” He begins boldly, hesitating over the lie that she was his mother; his skin is not dark enough for that, he remembers that much about her. “My friend. Why shouldn’t I look for her? She deserves the proper ceremony.”

  In the corner of his eye, he sees Ootesh tilt her head in consideration.

  “We will give her the proper ceremony. She was one of us. We will celebrate her soul in the winged-warded way. Our ceremony has nothing to do with her body: That is pollution now, and washed into the Crocodile Spine in any case.”

  “Pollution?” Leaper clamps his lips over the question: What about the sword she carried? Is that pollution, too?

  “Certainly.” The woman waves her carved crocodile in some general direction over her shoulder. “Strong pollution. Our boats now avoid the west bank of the Spine where it meets the Hanging Leaf. We already had need to avoid the east bank, since the speech splinters came to rest there at the end of the last monsoon and all bones of the Old Gods are to be avoided.”

  Leaper licks suddenly dry lips. He should have suspected the Floorians beneath Odelland would have different traditions to the Floorians beneath Airakland. The Floorians from Gui—who had freely traded Old Gods’ bones with him yet threatened to kill him on sight if he ever came down to them—might have taken Aurilon’s sword, if they had seen it.

  These ones would not. They wouldn’t come near it to touch it. Nor would they move human bodies. If only I’d come to Floor right away, both sword and body would still be lying where they landed!

  Too late. The Crocodile Spine is the name of the main artery of Floor-flowing water. If Aurilon’s body and weapons are in it, he’ll never find them.

  “This journey is wasted,” he realises aloud. The journey for the sword is, anyway. What had she said about speech splinters? “Thank you for not killing me.”

  “Wasted?” Ootesh answers with apparent surprise. “Did you not understand me? Aurilon lived with you in the trees for the greater part of her life. You should eat her flesh and speak for her at the boat-building.”

  “Eat her flesh? But you said—” Her eyes narrow at him, and he remembers to lower his gaze. And he’d thought the absence of a spear in the woman’s hand was comforting. “You said her body was pollution, but you’re going to eat it?” He should leave. She can’t stop him from leaving. She’s a woman alone without Understorian spines for climbing.

  Ootesh sighs. She steps forward, holding out the crocodile carving.

  “My words are not perfect,” she says. “The flesh you will eat is the flesh of honey kiss fruit. We suspected that any who loved Aurilon would anticipate the preparations to release her soul and come to the cutting-place. Instead, you blundered about here. The Greatmother was wise to send me to wait for you as close to the pollution as I dared go.” She shakes her head. “I was chosen late to be a linker. As I told you, we of the Crocodile-Rider clans do not use the speech splinters that the sorcerers and their slaves use. Our previous linker was killed. Unfortunately, I am proof that old women do not learn languages as easily as young men. But I try my best.” She waggles the carving. “Take this, for protection. Do not touch my hand. Do not touch any women or look into their eyes when we reach the village. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise I’ll lose my hair. Understood.”

  Leaper takes the carving. He grips it tight. Ootesh the Crocodile-Rider turns to lead him into the dark. He should leave her and climb back into Canopy. The sword isn’t here. But what about the so-called speech splinters? The thought of their potential tantalises him.

  And he’s being welcomed to a Floorian death ritual. What Canopian has ever had that chance? What else might he learn?

  “Are there any other bones of the Old Gods along the way?” he asks, lengthening his stride to catch up with her, careful not to touch her, untying the rope from his harness as he walks. “Strictly so that I can avoid them, of course.”

  In his head, the words of Orin’s prophecy rattle and crash insistently against one another. They should be fresh in his mind, but already he’s had an argument with his sister Imeris about exactly what was said.

  I doom you—they agree on that part.

  by my power—also agreed.

  to wander far from home—Leaper remembers the wandering, but he doesn’t remember the far-from-home part.

  until your mate—surely it wasn’t mate; surely that’s a thing only animals have?

  your true love

  your heart’s desire—yes, there was definitely specific mention of his heart’s desire.

  grows to love another more than you.

  Only then will you be permitted to return.

  But the wind goddess isn’t the deity to whom Leaper owes his allegiance. His faith is in the lightning god. Besides, he has no true love. No heart’s desire. He’s never spoken to a woman he wanted to bed who didn’t want to bed him, too, and he’s never bedded anyone he wanted to bed twice.

  Although he hasn’t yet spoken to—no.

  It is one thing to y
earn for the heights of the forest. Another thing to reach too high. Even for perfection as described by a poet.

  He straightens his shoulders as he walks.

  “Listen to that song,” Ootesh says, ignoring his question, and Leaper supposes it’s the whisper of a nearby stream that she means. “It is the flow of one of the blossomcarriers. Hundreds of them course from the seat of your rain goddess into the Crocodile Spine.” She shoots him an angry glance. “Once, the rains came all over. They were not concentrated all in one place, all in one season.” Leaper can’t help but roll his eyes. “We lived in the sun. There were no shadewomen and no demons. We did not battle the deep waters for our very lives.”

  “Your personal memories of those carefree days must be painful.” Leaper has heard plenty of whining about the supposed good old days from grandmothers seven or ten generations removed from the founding of the forest. They still manage to make the fall of the Old Gods sound like a fresh grievance.

  “I could keep you in a cage to learn your language better,” Ootesh muses. “You fear pain more than the other one, I think. You would not cut out—”

  “I’m sorry about the demons,” Leaper interrupts. “But magic’s the only thing that really works to keep them at bay, the chimeras in particular, and magic doesn’t work down here. Well, my kind of magic doesn’t work.” He stumbles over a fallen branch, skinning his shins, and stops to unshutter the lantern again. He needs more light. The sound of the stream is closer. Unlike the rivers that run down the sides of trees, ground-rivers are known to be filthy, full of dirt and disease, and infested with snakes and piranhas. He hopes Ootesh doesn’t intend for them to wade through one.

  “Do not!” she instructs sharply, glaring at the lantern. “You will blind him with your cursed light! I left him behind at a distance when I saw it.”

  “Who will I blind with my cursed light?” Leaper asks, his shins smarting, but as he juggles the lantern, he sees it. A fat, spiny reptile with its heavy neck in some kind of wood-and-straw collar. Its front legs lie on dry leaves. Hind legs and scaly tail vanish into the fast-running stream. The animal is at least eight paces long.