Echoes of Understorey Read online

  “No.” Imeris laughed at her assumption. “The slaves were not showing defiance but displaying their ownership marks for the louts to see. They had the protection of their rich, influential owners. When I made no such display, they tried to stop me.”

  “Did you kill them?”

  Imeris remembered her stroll with Audblayin through the Garden. The Garden, which did not admit killers.

  “I injured one of them. I took his scythe and cut his hamstring. The others soon dragged him away.”

  The Godfinder smiled darkly.

  “You taught them a lesson. Not all unowned women are defenceless. Not all those with spine-seams are slaves.”

  “They could have raised an alarm.” Imeris shrugged. “Brought the king’s soldiers down on me. An Understorian warrior, free and unfettered in Orinland? I was too complacent. I still am. I wear my own clothes and do not hide my seams as you and my brother do. Look at me.” She indicated the gliding harness over sleeveless Understorian tunic that she wore. “What have I learned?”

  “To travel during the daytime,” Unar said, kissing her cheek. “And not to take the low roads through the province of beasts.”

  * * *

  MISTLETOE LODGE at the southern edge of Ehkisland tunnelled through the sapwood of a tallowwood tree whose smell and feel reminded Imeris of home.

  Smaller than the emergent that hosted the Garden of Audblayin, it nonetheless provided two dozen small, tidy rooms in a trunk-encircling ring. Individually seeded mistletoe plants hung down over each wide, arched outer window. There were no lamps in the rooms, but light from the upper paths streamed in through the unshuttered openings. When snacking on the sweet, yellow-fleshed mistletoe berries, guests were cautioned to extract the poisonous, barbed seeds that caught on their tongues.

  It was just after sunset. Imeris paid for her room with one of the silver coins that the Godfinder had given her. She had no luggage to unpack besides the basket of eggs and, without clean clothes to put on, no real reason to bathe. The mirror showed her short-cut, fuzzy hair compressed at the back from sleeping in one of the Godfinder’s ridiculous hammocks, her sweaty brow smudged with bark and her neck speckled with bug bites. Not exactly a pretty picture.

  The whole of Loftfol can easily resist me!

  Imeris could not have cared less what she looked like. In a fight, short hair could not be grabbed. Functional clothing would not restrict her movement. Perfumes and unguents could warn enemies of her approach, and so she would not use them.

  When she leaned over the window’s edge to consider high and low escape routes in case of emergency, she spotted somebody else leaning out a window above and to the right of hers. A blond slave with broken spines and brown eyes.

  He stared at her with something like hostility.

  Then he was gone.

  Imeris pulled her head in the window. She was certain she’d never seen the man before. Peeked out again and found him peeking down at her, too.

  The next time she peeked, he wasn’t there. But a moment later, she heard a swish of wings and saw a bird leaving the lodge with a message tied to its foot.

  It flew down.

  She left her room and went to the upper balcony of the lodge. It was deserted. She supposed the other lodgers were dining. This tallowwood was no emergent, and she had to look up to see the two closest neighbour trees, Southeats and Northeats, both crowded food markets with public eateries open all day and night. Bartering voices were raised in mock outrage, enticing smells wafted down, dead-end roads were set aside for toileting, and Imeris spotted a row of bare arses. Gibbons and tree kangaroos lurked in the lower branches to catch and clean up bits of bread and fruit dropped by clumsy children.

  Her empty stomach rumbled.

  Perversely, she felt like eating fish. Not Canopian lake fish, crusted in nuts, stuffed with herbs, and smothered in decadent fruit syrups, but tough, smoked, bark-tasting, and bark-textured Understorian fish.

  Oldest-Father’s fish.

  Imeris checked that nobody was watching—the staring slave and the released bird had heightened her sense of caution—and tested her forearm spines in one of the rising branches of the crown. Bending her knees, she raised her feet from the balcony floor. The spines held her weight with only minimal hurt. Unar had done it. Healed Imeris as though the disastrous error of judgement with Aurilon had never happened.

  The upper reaches of the tree beckoned. Imeris climbed higher.

  She perched in a fork with a partially obscured view of Southeats and reviewed her duel with Aurilon. Fighting with spines was a centuries-old Understorian tradition. Maybe learning the old forms from Horroh was exactly what had made her predictable. She was going about it all wrong. Understorian methods might ultimately defeat Aurilon after decades of study had turned Imeris into a teacher herself, but defeat or displays of skill weren’t the true aim. Surprise was what she needed. The short sword was a Canopian weapon. Aurilon would surely be surprised if she pulled out one of those. Maybe she really should seek the oversight of the Litim.

  Next, she contemplated her failure with Kirrik. Gliding was something she excelled at. It was impatience at fault there. That could be cured. It must be. Oldest-Father had not died for nothing. She would use what she had learned. She would grow stronger.

  Finally, hair raised and skin prickling on the back of her neck, she considered the blond slave and the bird.

  He saw me, and he sent a message.

  The branch she was in, no thicker around than her thigh, shook as though something heavy had landed in it.

  Imeris came up into a crouch, left shin spines sunk in the branch, the sole of her right foot firm against the bark. Her right hand rested by the knife at her left hip, ready to slash or to spring away.

  The message could have been a coincidence.

  She heard shouts from Southeats. When she glanced across the gap between great trees, she saw soldiers on the branch roads and in the market. They were Ehkisland soldiers, wearing kingfisher-blue wrap skirts, their black bracers and breastplates strapped over sky-blue tunics. The men’s long hair was twisted into ropes that ran river-like down to their lower backs.

  They carried short spears with long blades and black feathers hanging from the hafts, threatening market customers with them. Seizing shirtfronts. Shaking women. Knocking food away. Smashing a stall.

  Searching for someone, or, at least, for information.

  It was no coincidence. That bird went to the king’s palace. But how could it? The palace is up. The bird went down.

  She would have to escape via Northeats.

  “Wait,” a man’s voice called softly as she turned and gathered herself to spring.

  Imeris froze. She searched the branches for the voice’s origin and saw nobody. Nothing. The branch shivered. Someone who weighed the same as she did approached along it.

  They were invisible.

  Someone else who has killed a chimera, she thought, heart racing. Has everyone killed one except for me? It was too late to leap. She prepared for a fight to the death with an enemy she could not see.

  He rippled into visibility right in front of her. A young man, sitting with one leg on either side of the branch, leaning on both arms for the purpose of inching forwards. He was small, thin, and light, with greenish-gold skin and hair. His eyes had no whites to them. He wore only a short brown wrap skirt over a loincloth.

  Where his hands and feet should have been were the black, padded paws of a panther and he smelled slightly of male panther musk.

  Imeris blinked. When she looked again, he had human hands and feet the same greenish-gold as the rest of him.

  Magic. Always magic.

  Her right hand lingered on her knife handle. But he had spoken to her and revealed himself, and she wasn’t sure that stabbing him through the heart was the politest response.

  “Are you a scout?” he asked in his soft voice, betraying no alarm. “The forerunner of a raid from Understorey? You’re disappointed to see
the soldiers, aren’t you? How could they know you were coming? Have you been betrayed? But if you have been betrayed, if they’re really waiting to kill you, why was your instinct to flee upwards and not downwards? That just makes no sense at all.”

  “You have so many questions,” Imeris said, keeping her eyes on him to make sure he didn’t change into something more dangerous while she noticed, despairingly, in the corner of her eye, that soldiers were coming along the branch path from Southeats to the lodge.

  “I ask questions when I’m nervous,” the man said.

  “Do I make you nervous?”

  “The soldiers do. They mean to use those weapons on me. The goddess Orin, Queen of Birds, gave them those black feathers for their spears. The feathers point the way to me, unless I’m invited into a human-made room. If I become a human guest in a human space, the Mistress of the Wild can’t find me.”

  He was an adept of some kind, there was no doubt of it. Imeris hated deities and all their Servants in that moment.

  “Who are you?” But she suspected she already knew.

  The green-skinned man licked his full lips, looked left and right, and shifted his grip on the branch ever so slightly.

  “I’m Anahah. I was Orin’s Bodyguard, though she now names me traitor.”

  “Soldiers searched for you in Airakland, too.” It popped out of her mouth before she remembered not to give anything away about who she was or where she had been. Keep the fight short. Keep your secrets to yourself.

  Anahah smiled sadly.

  “Orin sent messages to all the kings saying that whoever had a hand in my slaying would receive tribute in her stead for a full year.”

  “What did you do to make her so angry?”

  “That’s a long tale. The soldiers will be here soon. Won’t you make way for me, warrior? I wish you no harm. The soldiers will go when I’m gone. If you’ve come to slaughter gods, though, you might want to choose a different day.”

  His eyes flashed, perhaps in anger, perhaps with a sense of urgency. Imeris stared into them. The irises had turned a darker shade of green. A thin black rim separated them from the paler green where the whites should have been. Was he preparing to use Orin’s power on her?

  “The king of Orinland threatened to call a Hunt,” she said. “As though you were a demon. Are you a demon? Does that green skin of yours change colour because you are a chimera’s child?”

  I am a chimera’s child, she thought.

  “No,” Anahah replied, unblinking. “I am what I am. No Hunt can be called on my account, though one might argue that this Canopy-wide search is worse than a Hunt. Orin can’t revoke the gift to transform that she bestowed on me when I was her most trusted adept. I’ll use that gift to elude her forever.”

  “Come into the lodge,” Imeris said. “To my human-made room. Be my human guest, for tonight, in a human space paid for with Canopian silver.”

  He arched one eyebrow. “They’ll search the lodge.”

  Imeris could not let the opportunity escape her. This man had been Bodyguard to a goddess. All the kings of Canopy were after him, and yet he remained free. He could teach her new fighting techniques. She would surprise Aurilon and destroy Kirrik.

  All she had to do was put him in her debt.

  “You are an adept,” she said. Her temporary ownership of the room could protect him, but only if she was not dragged away by the soldiers for being Understorian. “Mark my tongue. Make me a rich merchant’s slave. Make yourself invisible against the room’s ceiling. Then remove the mark when they go.”

  He looked shocked, his irises reverting to their lighter green hue.

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll kill me and you’ll be a slave forever? Children are taught in Canopian classrooms that Understorians are slinking cowards.”

  “I am not as brave as you think,” Imeris said. He couldn’t know that her sister was Audblayin, or that Imeris could think of at least two other Canopian adepts who would remove slave marks from her tongue if she asked.

  “Quickly, then, warrior,” he agreed, and they both climbed down and slipped back inside her window. “While I’m here, not only can the feathers not point to me, but she can’t sense what I do with her power. I’ll give you the slave master’s kiss.”

  Anahah lifted her chin with one hand. Imeris forced herself not to pull back as their mouths met. She felt a searing on her tongue like the press of a hot poker.

  She clenched her teeth and did not scream.

  FIFTEEN

  THE SOLDIERS went.

  Anahah dropped down from the ceiling of the room.

  Imeris rose from her genuflection by the side of the bed, closing the door after the king’s men. She watched her guest ripple from empty air into a greenish-gold-skinned man in a brown skirt once more. Standing on the same level surface as she, he was a head shorter. She stared, fascinated, as his clawed cat-feet faded into slim, bare fingers and toes. Her clothes needed straightening after her subservient crouch on the floor in the soldiers’ presence, but his skirt was either part of him or he was able to transform it, too.

  Her tongue throbbed painfully.

  “They could’ve snapped off your climbing spines,” Anahah said quietly. “They could’ve raped you. They could’ve killed you for fun.”

  “You do not have a high opinion of soldiers,” Imeris said. “Nor of me, if you think I would have let them do any of those things.”

  “I don’t know you.” Anahah gave his small, sad smile again. “But I can see you’re fit and trained to fight. That harness you’re wearing is for gliding. The rope is of excellent quality, and you carry a great deal to spare. I’ve heard of a warrior school that lies below Ehkisland where men and women are trained to kill deities. It’s called Loftfol.”

  “Loftfol,” Imeris repeated, sighing. She should have been there days ago. Her absence would be remarked on. It seemed she would have to tell the former Bodyguard something about herself, to stop his guessing. She sat down on the bed. “Listen, Anahah. My name is Imeris. I was born in Canopy, though I fell and lost my arcane aura decades ago, and I have no interest in killing deities. I came to test my skills in a duel. I lost the duel. Now I am going home.”

  Her stomach grumbled again, but she did not dare go to find the proprietor and ask for food. When she’d paid for the stay, she’d presented herself as an out-of-nicher. She hadn’t identified as a slave. What would they say if they saw a bleeding mark on her tongue that hadn’t been there before?

  “Your home is Understorey?” Anahah asked, coming to sit beside her. “How do you find living in darkness?”

  “I am hungry, and it hurts to talk,” Imeris said, leaning indignantly away from him so their bare arms didn’t touch. “You are the one who promised a long tale.”

  “Did I promise? Here.” He leaned after her and kissed her a second time. Pain and the sensation of the ridges of the glyph dissolved away as effortlessly as his panther paws had dissolved. Imeris had been too distracted by the soldiers to be aware of his closeness before. He had no detectable human odour, but the panther smell and a hint of crushed banana leaves hung around him. The lips he briefly pressed to hers were soft and cool like the velvet bracts of a banana flower. “Is that better? Please tell me about Understorey.” He shifted back, allowing her the hand-span of space between them that she’d sought.

  She sighed again. Pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She hadn’t liked having the marking there and felt soiled somehow, though she’d been a slave for less than an hour.

  “How do I find Understorey? Let me think,” she said, closing her eyes. “In Understorey, when you lie on your back on a branch or a platform and look directly upwards, it is no different to seeing true stars in the night sky. The foliage is so far away. It heaves and shifts like clouds, letting through only tiny flares of blue or orange or white light. When these lights touch your skin, they are like weightless rain. Light is a treasure the leaves of Canopy try to hoard, but some of it always escape
s, even if there is no extra warmth to it.”

  “Is it cold where you live?” Anahah sounded surprised.

  “No. Hotter than here. The smells are so thick you feel you are pushing through them, like pushing through a river. Water is louder.” Imeris thought of the river that ran down the side of the tallowwood, Audblayin’s emergent, her home, and also of the one that frothed through the heart of Loftfol, the split-trunked river nut tree. “Here, rain strikes the leaves in a thousand separate blows. There, it roars. One single angry creature. There are few human sounds.”

  “How old were you when you fell?”

  “I do not remember it.” She opened her eyes. Met his strange ones.

  “Have you a blood family here?” he asked.

  But Imeris had had enough of answering his questions. It was his turn to answer.

  “Have you no family or friends, Anahah, to invite you into their homes and keep you safe?”

  He lowered his gaze to the floor.

  “Orin killed every living member of my family. All my friends. Anyone she remotely suspected might provide me with shelter.”

  Imeris felt a lump in her throat.

  “Could you not have defended them?”

  He laughed a quiet, stuttering laugh, like a child dragging a stick along a paling rail.

  “I didn’t know. I was busy defending Orin. She left me unsuspecting until the end so there’d be nowhere for me to go.”

  “But how did you wrong her?”

  Anahah did not reply and would not meet her eyes.

  A footstep sounded in the corridor outside the door. He looked at her, and his irises had gone the darker green. His body twisted, turning invisible as he leaped for the ceiling. Somebody knocked on the door.

  Imeris strode calmly to answer it. The landlady stood there in a robe embroidered with keys and falling rain. She had a sculpted, conical tower of hair, silk shoes with curled toes peeping out from the hem, and a blue-blazing lantern in her hand.

  “Good evening,” she said. “One who walks in the grace of Ehkis is simply checking that all of our esteemed guests are unharmed.”