Echoes of Understorey Read online

  “My room was searched,” Imeris said. “Did they find what they were looking for?”

  “I’m afraid not. I apologise. You must understand.” The landlady lowered the lantern as though correcting the impression that she, too, was searching for something. “The fugitive from Orinland. They say he turned on the very goddess he was supposed to protect. He planned not just to kill her but to trap her soul in between bodies, never to be incarnated again.”

  “Is that what they say?” Imeris tapped her lips with one finger. Had she kissed a man with no scruples at all? If she had, surely he would have left her marked as a slave and made himself comfortable in her lodging. Then again, perhaps to withdraw her protection, all she had to do was stop considering him to be her guest, and he would not wish to risk that. “All is well here. Though I do not quite feel safe going to the food markets with such a man on the loose. Could you bring me some supper?” Imeris handed over another of the Godfinder’s coins. She had no idea what the things were worth, but it seemed to please the landlady, who promised to return shortly with provisions.

  Imeris closed the door and sat back down on the bed.

  “She hoards her coin,” Anahah said from the empty air, “in a chest that she lowers on a chain down her private lavatory. They would’ve taken it, if they’d found it.”

  “That is fascinating,” Imeris said. “She is coming back soon. You had better stay there for now.”

  “I’ll tell you if I get tired,” his disembodied voice replied.

  Imeris snorted. She supposed Bodyguards did become tired, even if they didn’t need to sleep. Aurilon had never showed any sign of fatigue, however. And her middle-father would never admit his arms were aching, even if he’d spent a week hauling some heavy carcass back home.

  “Did you really plan to trap Orin’s soul? I did not know souls could be trapped in between bodies.”

  No reply.

  Imeris was not especially interested in the workings of souls, any more than she was interested in the working of magic outside what she needed to know to defeat her enemy. Fighting interested her. Killing Kirrik interested her, and then being able to get on with the rest of her life.

  “You must have killed many times in defence of Orin,” she said. “You must be an accomplished warrior. You could teach me—”

  “No,” Anahah interrupted, his soft voice sounding slightly sulky. “I couldn’t. Is that why you helped me? I change into animals when I need to fight. They have instincts you and I couldn’t hope to have.”

  “Oh.” Imeris glanced up at the ceiling, but even knowing exactly where he was, she still couldn’t see him at all. “What kind of animals?”

  “Mostly jaguars. To kill by swift ambush and a bite right through the assassin’s skull.”

  “That is a skill we practice. Dropping onto enemies. A bore-knife can go through a human eye socket or the base of the skull.” Imeris nodded. “A jaguar is an obvious choice.”

  “Ah,” Anahah said, “but the jaguar is easily beaten by a fiveways troupe. Four fiveways demons seize a limb each, while the fifth one holds the tail. Their arm and shoulder muscles are dense. Inexorable. They can pull a jaguar into pieces in moments.”

  “Can you change into five separate animals, then?”

  “No. But even one fiveways male, using his long arms as clubs, can smash a would-be killer from a high branch road.”

  “So the jaguar assumption was incorrect.” Imeris pulled her long legs up onto the bed, sitting cross-legged in the attitude of learning she assumed on the wood floors of Loftfol. “The fiveways is the best fighting form.”

  “The fiveways can easily be killed by the embracer,” Anahah said, naming the demon that took the form of a constrictor with the girth of a great tree. They were too heavy to hunt often in Understorey. Imeris had never seen one. “Yet young embracers are routinely snatched up and eaten by swamp harriers on the Bright Plain.”

  “What is a swamp harrier?”

  “A bird,” Anahah explained, “like a kite or a hawk. Long-legged, for grasping snakes in long grass or through dense canopy. Then again, I have heard that jaguars will sometimes make a meal of swamp harriers by twitching their tails in sunlight. When the bird drops down on what it supposes is a snake, it ends up between the jaguar’s jaws.”

  “Do you mean to say that all is cyclical?” Imeris asked, frowning. “Or that fighting is futile, for all die in the end?”

  “I mean to say that all have their weaknesses.”

  She smiled.

  “Understorians? What are our weaknesses?”

  Anahah gave his distinctive, fluttering, interrupted laugh.

  “Tonight we are friends, but we might be enemies someday. Telling what I know of your weaknesses could armour you against me.”

  Imeris’s decision to learn the Canopian short sword silently firmed. She would literally armour herself once more. She would dig out the lovely bronze-scale breast- and back-plates, and even the neck piece and helmet that she hated. Sword slashes and thrusts with their longer reach would leave her lower abdomen and thighs vulnerable. Perhaps Vesev’s father in Gannak, Sorros the Silent Smith, could make her a split skirt piece as well. Sorros should have been retired but had been in demand since his son’s demise.

  The landlady returned with a platter of salamanders and bulrush roots boiled in oil, garnished with edible water-plant blossoms and the berries of swamp-loving bushes. Ehkisland boasted more lakes and ponds than any other niche. There was also an unstoppered gourd of jackfruit wine, which gave off a powerful pong. Imeris thanked her host and promised to put the platter outside the door when she was done.

  “You can come down now,” she said, munching on a blossom. “You do eat animals, not just become them?”

  “Yes.” The floor shuddered as he struck it, hands and feet first, like a cat. Anahah straightened as he became visible. He took a bulrush root from the platter and eyed it. His closeness made her hand jerk reflexively to her mouth. She lowered it and offered Anahah the jackfruit wine, which made him laugh mirthlessly. “I know a story about a jackfruit tree.”

  “Tell me.” Imeris picked up a bulrush root of her own, still hot enough to burn.

  “There was a border dispute between Orinland and Ehkisland. Orinland is a smaller territory, and its queen coveted a mighty and most productive jackfruit tree whose trunk straddled the two niches.”

  Imeris thought of the borders of Audblayinland, fairly certain that they were fixed.

  “How can there be disputes when those limits are set by goddesses’ power?”

  “The queen of Orinland didn’t care for that. She stationed her soldiers around the tree, evicted the Ehkislanders, and had a winter residence, not to mention a private jackfruit winery, built in the upper branches.” Anahah smiled. “Ehkisland soldiers came, of course, but quickly withdrew when they discovered the five-year-old son and heir to the throne of Ehkisland being held hostage in the winery. Orin knows how the kidnapping took place, but once it was done, the family was helpless to defend their rights.”

  “Did Ehkis not intervene?”

  “Ehkis was weak. Only a child, recently reborn.” He broke his bulrush root in half and blew on it to cool it. “Ilan was strong. The goddess of justice and kings might have intervened, had the Ehkisland royals paid her any tribute in recent times.” He shrugged, and bit into the white flesh of the root. “They hadn’t. The queen of Orinland threw extravagant parties in her winter residence. The revels increased in licentiousness and magnificence year after year, until she took a drunken fall from her own balcony. That was two monsoons ago.”

  “But what about the child? The hostage? The prince?”

  Anahah took the time to chew and swallow.

  “Oul went back to his family at last, five monsoons older, lonelier, and sadder.” He gestured with the other half of the root, in the direction of Ehkisland. “In exchange, Ehkisland ceded the jackfruit tree. Which turned out to be pointless. It was boarded up as a permanen
t memorial to the Wild Winter Queen.”

  “His name was Oul,” Imeris mused.

  “Poor little shadow wandered the servants’ passages of that place until they dumped him at the Temple for getting under their feet once too often.” Anahah shook his head. “He was small. Silent. Nobody spoke to him, except for me. Nobody played with him, except for me. He liked to make paperbark wind catchers and keep pet frogs.”

  “You speak about him as if he died.”

  “Orin numbered him among my friends and had him poisoned. A twelve-year-old boy.” He looked as woeful as a twelve-year-old boy in that moment. Imeris squeezed his shoulder.

  “I am sorry.”

  “So am I.” He reached for more food, breaking the contact between them. Imeris set the brittle skin of her bulrush root back on the platter.

  “Are you certain,” she asked, “you cannot teach me anything about fighting?”

  Anahah contemplated her darkly over his fried salamander.

  “I forget how to fight when I’m in human form.”

  “So become a beast and show me. You said Orin could not take back her gifts. You said that while you were here, she could not feel it when you used those gifts. For fighting. That is why she gave them to you.”

  “Not just for fighting. To accompany her, too.” Anahah took a tidy swig of the jackfruit wine. “She spends at least an hour shaped like a human each day. That’s when she receives supplicants and orders her Servants about. Most of the time she’s a kite, though, or a spotted cat, or a boa. Her Bodyguard has to be able to keep up with her.”

  “A boa,” Imeris murmured. “Not so different from an embracer. I would win all my duels if I could do what you do.” She imagined tying Aurilon in knots with a strong, flexible snake’s body. Or diving on Kirrik in the form of a giant falcon.

  “There’s a price to be paid.” Anahah made a pile of salamander bones on the platter’s rim. “That’s why I won’t show you. Every time I take the life pattern of another creature, the closest creature to own that pattern dies. If I changed into a snake, here and now, somewhere in Ehkisland or below it, a scaly old matron would fall out of her tree, never to lay a clutch of eggs again.”

  Imeris tilted her head to one side.

  “What if you changed into a chimera?” It seemed like the power to exterminate demons from a distance might be a good thing. But killing chimeras also came with a cost. Anahah’s expression turned wry.

  “A real chimera would die. And the curse would fall on me, unless I used that form to save another’s life. Who wants a cursed Bodyguard?” He offered her the gourd, but Imeris wouldn’t drink wine in Canopy or anywhere outside the safety of her home. She shook her head, and he took another swig.

  “If you took my form?” she asked.

  “I can’t do that.” He seemed relieved that he could not. “This is how I look, now, when I’m human. I can’t disguise myself as another person.”

  “What about when you turn invisible, or grow panther claws?”

  “That’s different. That’s me imagining a change to myself. I don’t gain the instincts of a panther, or a chimera, when I do that. I’ve imagined all sorts of things, to find out what’s most useful. Growing extra arms, or thumbs. A tail. Even”—Anahah’s free hand alighted on Imeris’s forearm where it was braced beneath the platter—“spines.”

  Imeris narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Spines are awarded to Understorians who demonstrate they are worthy,” she said with disapproval. But then she couldn’t resist asking, “Did you find them useful?”

  Anahah smiled and set the wine gourd down on the far edge of the bed, propping it against the wall so it wouldn’t spill. Holding up his hands, he curled his fingers, making them into panther paws. The claws came silently out of their sheaths, every bit as deadly as hers.

  “Truthfully? Not as suited to me as these. To use Understorian spines, to climb with the elbow and shin, good strength and stamina in the shoulder blades and upper back will complement flexibility in the hips and power in the thigh. Long limbs are no disadvantage.” His smile deepened as he watched her face change, her eyes narrowing in concentration. He had tried to tell her this already, but she hadn’t been paying attention; she hadn’t made the link between her yearning to learn better techniques and his skirting the issue of weaknesses.

  He had lied when he said he’d forgotten how to fight in human form.

  “And your paws?”

  Anahah switched his focus back to them. The black toe pads elongated into fingers, the claws turning pale green and pressing flat into fingernails.

  “To climb with the hands and feet,” he said, “heavy muscles in the arms as well as shoulders and sides are needed. Men find some advantage over women, and smaller men over tall.” He met her curious gaze. “There is no secret to winning duels. No magic required. Only know yourself.”

  She pulled back from his strange perspective, his focus on fighting animals. People were not animals. He had admitted that humans didn’t have the instincts. Trying to fight like a bird or a demon was all wrong.

  “That is not true.” There are secrets. Aurilon knows them. She will tell me.

  Anahah shrugged and took up the gourd again.

  “Keep seeking a teacher who’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

  “I have one.” That is, I have found one that I wish would teach me. “She is a Bodyguard. And she has never been beaten. And she has only her own human form to fight with.”

  “I’ve been cheating, all this time, haven’t I? I told you so.” He laughed, louder and less restrained, and Imeris realised the gourd was empty, that although he was not a large man, all the jackfruit wine was gone. His cheeks were flushed a deeper green. “I’m sorry it wasn’t Aurilon of Odelland that you were able to place in your debt. Perhaps I can repay you some other way.”

  Imeris was slow to catch his meaning.

  “I have no need of coin.”

  He dropped to the bed beside her and slung an arm over her shoulders, which she permitted.

  “Perhaps you should not have drunk all of that.” Her fingers rose to her lips.

  “You keep doing that.”

  “What?”

  “Touching your mouth.” His strange eyes were intent, an almost luminous green.

  “Have you kissed a lot of slaves?” Imeris asked behind her hand, not lowering it. “Is that how it has to be done?”

  “No, and, no. Would you like to try it again? Without the stinging intervention of the goddess?”

  Imeris lowered her hand.

  “No,” she said firmly. “You can share the bed, if you wish, but keep your hands—claws—paws—to yourself.” She remembered one of the Loftfol boys pretending to stumble in the dark so that he could grab her breasts. He’d laughed at her outrage until she’d pinned him to the wall by his spines and left him there. Her mothers had warned her to be wary.

  “Just as well,” Anahah said softly. “Winning duels can be difficult with a full womb. Running from your enemies, too.”

  “How would you know?” Imeris turned away. She thought of Middle-Mother, pregnant in the Garden, awaiting her masters’ ruling on her baby’s fate, and Oldest-Mother, raped by a king and ruined by a princess. Both of them marked with a Canopian owner’s glyph since birth.

  “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t know, of course.” Anahah shook his head ruefully. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have drunk all the wine, but you see, I can’t risk outstaying your ownership of this room. I’ll sleep beneath the open window. The need to piss will wake me. I’ll be gone before the sun rises. Safe travels, Imeris, and thank you.”

  SIXTEEN

  “YOU DIDN’T win,” Youngest-Mother guessed sympathetically.

  “I will next time,” Imeris said without real enthusiasm. Anahah hadn’t taught her much of anything, and the tutors at Loftfol would be angry enough over her going missing for so long that they’d send her back to white-cloth chores for weeks.

  “You’ve started th
is month’s bleed, too?” Youngest-Mother indicated with a lift of her chin and a pointed glance the stain in the crotch of Middle-Father’s too-big trousers.

  Imeris stared past her at the place by the blazing fire where Oldest-Father should have knelt, iron skewers bundled in his hands, spitting river fish. The hearth room was too empty. Oldest-Mother and Middle-Mother had gone in disguise as Nessans by a lower-down, temporary bridge to the new year market at Gannak.

  “Is Youngest-Father here?” Imeris asked.

  “Youngest-Father,” Youngest-Mother said, “is in Wissin, trying to discover where Kirrik might have gone after you three pulled down her new dovecote. I’m so sorry, Issi. Is there anything we can do to help before you go back to Loftfol?”

  “Just a place to rest. I will stay tonight and go tomorrow.” Imeris began unbuckling her harness. Home was the only place where she ever took it off. “My bleed lasts for only two days. When it is finished, I will be safer from demons.”

  Circling around the huge slab table back to Youngest-Mother, she shrugged out of the shoulder straps that secured the egg basket and handed it over.

  “These are for you. From Unar.”

  “Wonderful!” Youngest-Mother’s commiserating expression brightened. “Thank you for carrying them so carefully. Not a one is broken.”

  Imeris followed her into the comforting green gloom of the fishing room. There, the wall of water beating past the opening kept foodstuffs much cooler than by the side of the constantly roaring hearth. Imeris took off her trousers and washed her legs, helping herself to moonflower and a loincloth to stuff it in. Youngest-Mother set the eggs on a high shelf where the child Imeris had once felt about for Youngest-Father’s wings.

  Her own wings had been lost in the battle with Kirrik. She’d have to go back to Loftfol by the bridges, which meant travelling only in the middle of the day when the ballistae were in operation.

  “Wait,” Imeris begged when Youngest-Mother made as if to return to the hearth room.

  Youngest-Mother waited. She curled her fingertips in her long hair. Today it hung down in the Understorian style.