Echoes of Understorey Read online

  “You always have questions when you come back from Canopy or school. Last time, you had questions for your fathers, because you’d cut off an Understorian’s hand by accident. The time before, you’d hamstrung a man from Orinland. This time it seems it’s your mothers you need. Have you met a young person of interest to you, Issi?”

  Imeris thought of a green man with green eyes who could make himself invisible. She shrugged.

  “If I have, that is not the question I have for you or anyone, Oldest-Mother. It is slavery that concerns me, and the question of where I belong. If Canopians are cruel and wrong, leading a raid against them is not acting against my ancestry, but instead setting things to rights. Yet my sister is a goddess and to bring the Garden down is to betray her. Who is my family? Who are my people? How did you know, growing up in Canopy, that you were a person, the same as any Servant of the deity? How did you know you were an Understorian woman and not a collection of tradeable Canopian goods?”

  “My mother told me who I was,” Oldest-Mother murmured. “That’s how I knew.”

  “But I have three mothers, and they tell me different things.”

  “That is your curse and your good fortune, my Imerissiremi. I loved the one mother that I had, but she couldn’t always tell me what I needed to hear. She couldn’t speak to all my different selves, and I couldn’t speak to hers. She had a warrior self I couldn’t understand, and I had a nurturing self she couldn’t understand.”

  “Nurturing!” Imeris exclaimed. “That is not how Middle-Mother describes you. Killer of kittens, she calls you. You lived in a palace and were punished for throwing one of the king’s pet kittens down.”

  Oldest-Mother nodded.

  “I did live in a palace. We weren’t treated well. My mother did awful, desperate things to hoard food for me. When she found me feeding the bread she’d saved to baby birds with broken wings, she took them away from me and wrung their necks. She tossed them over the palace walls. Whatever wasn’t worth feeding went over those walls. Including my mother, eventually. I wanted the king’s family to hurt the way that I hurt. Otherwise I would have treasured that kitten. If I’d been allowed to keep Sawas close to me for longer than a few seasons, I would have treasured her, too.”

  “I don’t think I want to have children, Oldest-Mother.” Not even when she did discover where she belonged. Youngest-Father was right. She was not like Middle-Mother. Her first love was not children, but flight, and peace, and quiet. “If I have a child-nurturing self, she is a dwarf beside the titan that is my lone-warrior self.”

  “You don’t need to have them, my Imerissiremi. The world is full of children. Our many selves are renewed, without end, in the hearts of strangers we never meet and whose names we never know.”

  SEVENTEEN

  IMERIS, BORNE up by the chimera-skin wings, sped like an arrow towards the Doorstep.

  The Doorstep was a simple wooden platform. Loftfol’s masters had it built on the side of a river nut tree, a smaller one than the triple-trunked tree whose heart hosted the school itself. The smaller tree’s trunk was only a few paces across. The platform, with its flickering beacon of fish-fat-burning flame, was not much wider. Any visitors openly aimed at the Doorstep were allowed to approach Loftfol. The Doorstep could be reached by bridge or glider.

  Trespassers trying to surreptitiously approach from any other direction were caught by the school’s scouts and hanged. Their corpses were left to rot in wooden cages, which dangled from chains below the Doorstep platform.

  Imeris aimed her glider at the beacon, her mind already in the star-shaped Hall where the river ran through the school and the teachers stood in the corners, waiting for pupils to select their subjects. She might have missed the recognition ceremony, but she would not have missed the new year’s choosing. Her bronze armour weighed her down, but it was no longer monsoon and the lightness of the demon-hide glider bore her up. The short sword she’d traded for and had sharpened at a forge in Lit made her weapons belt lopsided, but the detour had been worth it.

  The short sword teacher, Dammammad, was the Litim. It felt right to carry a blade fashioned by the smith of his home village.

  Imeris judged the angle and speed of her approach. Shifted her weight. Arched her back. Ran a few steps along the platform as she shifted her shoulders to collapse the frame of the glider behind her.

  She came to a halt, panting. Her booted toes hung off the edge of the platform.

  “Not a bad landing,” said a deep, rich voice behind her. Imeris turned, wings dragging, to find the spine-fighting teacher, Horroh, leaning against the beacon post. His brawny arms were folded across an amethyst-studded purple silk vest; the stones, in clusters of thirteen, repeated the spearhead emblem of the school.

  Imeris’s first instinct was to smile at the sight of him, before it occurred to her that he should not be at the Doorstep. She showed her respect with right fist pressed into left palm, but she couldn’t help looking around nervously for the usual low-ranking sentry. Was she in trouble? Was Horroh here to warn her, as he had warned her once before to avoid the boys who followed Kishsik through the halls, the ones who had adopted him since his injury and muttered about Canopians bearing spines? Perhaps signs of her passing had been found in the dark temple, and she was to be scolded for disrespecting the dead.

  A rope ran from the beacon post into the darkness between trees. It led to Loftfol. The sentry should have sent a message in a cylinder across to the school, and the school should have rung its bells to let the sentry know that Imeris was permitted to pass.

  There was no sign of the cylinder. Or the sentry. Or the grips and metal clips that would send her skimming down along the rope herself.

  Be aware of your surroundings.

  Horroh did nothing to relieve her unease. His colourless eyebrows and pasty, creaseless face made his intentions difficult to read at the best of times. His shaved head, which had once reminded her of a flowerfowl egg, now bore a finger-thickness of bristling blond hair, as though he’d meant it to remind her how long she’d been away.

  Eliminate unknowns.

  “Horroh the Haakim, wise teacher of my past year,” she said, making the gesture a second time, “you must have known I was on my way. You must have given my name to the scouts. Am I to be reprimanded?”

  “Something like that,” Horroh said, moving slowly into a ready stance, which unnerved her even more. “It is two weeks since monsoon ended, Imerissiremi. Were you caring for your mother?”

  I could tell him everything. About Kirrik. About my sister being a goddess, and about Aurilon. He would understand.

  No, he wouldn’t. Telling him everything would only confirm what Lehhel said in the dark temple, that Canopians have eyes, they have mouths, they have beating hearts, but they speak only lies.

  “Her illness,” Imeris said, stepping forwards and away from the small platform’s edge, “is always the worst at the end of the monsoon.” Youngest-Father’s wings rustled, folding back along their pattern of seams and grooves.

  “Your mother is Canopian? From Ehkisland?” Horroh asked lightly, and Imeris, biting her lip, saw again in her mind’s eye the blond, brown-eyed slave who had released the messenger bird from the lodge.

  It had flown downwards.

  To Loftfol.

  She held out her empty hands. Tried to keep her voice steady.

  “My birth mother is Canopian, as you see from the colour of my skin. My foster mother is not.”

  “When a bird came from Canopy to report your presence there,” Horroh said, raising his forefinger, “I found your application in the archives. Despite all the sick mother excuses you have used over the years, her name is not the one written there. Your sponsor is Marram, a Heightsman and one-time student at Loftfol. His birthplace listed as Gannak. Until now, although you are a woman, you performed satisfactorily. We had no cause to send to Gannak for news of him.”

  Imeris’s hands trembled.

  “He is my youngest-fathe
r,” she said. “He killed a chimera. He made this glider from its hide.” She hadn’t meant for it to sound like a threat, but it came out that way.

  “Marram was not born in Gannak. He is the youngest of three brothers exiled from Gannak for murdering an innocent man.”

  “They did not want to raid Canopy.” Imeris wanted to pull her hands back, but feared Horroh would interpret it as reaching for a weapon.

  “Of course not. Your fathers are traitors.” He shook his head sadly. “So are you.”

  “What do you mean?” Her heart started pounding.

  “In the year that you were led on a practice raid through the dark temple, you lit the fire that destroyed it, did you not? That is why you did not hesitate to invade that sanctified space. The dark temple was too good. Too accurate a replica of the Canopian Temples that you are loyal to. You could not permit it to remain in use! Once it was ashes, you maimed the only other student who had shown an aptitude all but equal to your own, the boy Kishsik, who came second to you in the climbing race to become Heightsman. I am getting old. I have been blind.”

  “No!” Imeris gaped at him.

  “You and your fathers are spies for Canopy.” He said it with the same grave calm in which he had confided, Your own Understorian body is all that you need. Trust it.

  “No!” She had trusted it. She had trusted him. Tears threatened. She had lost one father and now stood in peril of losing another. “How can you think that? Horroh, you know me.”

  “Unfortunately for you,” he went on inexorably, “we have our own spies.” He cannot be as certain as he seems. He has had more time to prepare himself for this confrontation, that is all. More time to stare at her footprints in the dark temple, to let the hate and fear of the other teachers breach his barricades, to wonder why she had wanted to evade the sentries upon departure. And she had not confided in him. Another terrible mistake. How many have I made, since the monsoon ended? “Now you will come to Loftfol, Imerissiremi, but not as a Heightsman. You will surrender your things and suffer the healing out of your spines.”

  Alarm electrified her. He was not indecisive, as she’d hoped. Loftfol’s decision was made. Her status as a warrior was forfeit. She would have to submit, or fight. Again. The healing out of your spines. It was what Unar had spared Imeris in Canopy. She could not let him do it.

  “Let me explain, Horroh.” Imeris glanced left and right, looking for other gliders or ropes descending. Horroh would not have expected to subdue her himself. Others must be coming. Or must they?

  “You!” Horroh thundered, egg-white face reddening, spittle in the corners of his mouth. “You will come in an iron cage worth more than your wretched traitor’s soul to tell us how you were able to breach the barrier and when it will be open again!”

  Where were the others? Did he really think he could capture her alone? His confidence belied skills he had not shown her, or anyone.

  Keep your secrets to yourself.

  It struck her, then. He was a spinehusband. Not just a spine-fighter. He had served, in Haak, as the seeder of viper teeth in teenaged girls and boys. He was confident because he had magic as his ally.

  “I cannot breach the barrier,” Imeris said truthfully, begging him with her gaze to believe her.

  “Is it the amulet?” Horroh demanded. “Does it do more than protect you from sorcery? Does it open the way to Canopy?” And her amulet grew warm on its woven cord, as did the long bones in her forearms and shins.

  The healing out of your spines. Physical contact was not necessary; she was within range of his magic. Yet he was too close for her to simply open the wings and drop away. The harness tip would clip him as it had clipped the leaves of the windowleaf. She would be completely vulnerable to his magic, as Oldest-Father had been vulnerable to Kirrik’s.

  No more mistakes.

  Imeris lured him closer with a bared throat. She pretended panic; she pretended to look up for sentries along the slender trunk of the Doorstep.

  There were no sentries. Climbing bodies on the daughter tree would have sent telltale vibrations through it. It was less stable than its counterpart. While Horroh thought her attention was diverted, predictably, he lunged. His spines did not extend. He wanted to knock her out, not draw blood.

  Imeris pivoted again, sharply, turning her torso safely away from the arc of his arm. Exploding with pain and rage at his betrayal. The teacher who had told her to trust herself had turned on her. Without even hearing her explanation. He thought she was a spy, that she had burned her former teacher Lehhel the Odarkim to death in the dark temple, that she had cut off Kishsik’s hand, all cold calculation, and then feigned her remorse. What breed of ruthless predator did he truly believe Canopians to be?

  Your own Understorian body is all that you need. Trust it.

  Imeris slammed the chimera cloth down over him while his upper body was overextended. Youngest-Father’s gift, to snuff out magic like water on a wick. Her action doused the burning in her bones immediately.

  Keep the fight short.

  Hardly knowing what she was doing, she twisted into the movement she had practiced so many times under Horroh’s idly curious gaze. Her left arm wrapped around his cloth-hooded head and jerked it back. Her right arm swept under the edge of the chimera skin. Spines extended.

  Spines cutting. Catching on cartilage. On bone.

  The resistance, the determination needed to follow through, the sweetly painful vibration of it ran through her whole body. It was nothing like she had expected. Nothing like her victorious reveries.

  She cried as her teacher’s blood fountained over the Doorstep. As he gurgled. As he grew still. If she was a ruthless Canopian predator, he had forced her to become one. He had trained her to kill.

  He was now her first kill.

  “Why?” she shouted, rolling him over the edge like a Canopian throwing down a slave. Not like an Understorian should treat the body of an enemy, sealing it into a great tree, but she didn’t want to see what she had done, to remember him as ruined meat. “Why did you want me to be a spy? Why did you want so badly for me to be Canopian?”

  She knew next to nothing about him. Their most intimate act had been his killing, and now she would never know.

  The bell began tolling at Loftfol, but it was not the welcome bell.

  It was the signal that the school was under attack.

  As Imeris tried to wipe Horroh’s blood off onto the knobbly grey trunk of the tree, she felt the vibration of approaching warriors under her stained hands. There was no time to think. There was nowhere to climb.

  She snapped the glider’s frame into extension. She had no choice but to fly.

  PART II

  The Slave & the Hunt

  EIGHTEEN

  IMERIS POUNDED on the invisible barrier below Odel’s emergent.

  “Aurilon!” she shouted until she was hoarse. “Aurilon!”

  It was all day and most of a night since she’d fled Loftfol. The blood on her spines had mingled with the sap of a hundred great trees but not worn away completely. She tried to tell herself Horroh had deserved to die, over and over again, but she couldn’t really make herself believe it.

  This is how it starts. One day a child dreaming of Great Deeds, the next day a killer with Understorian blood as well as Canopian on her conscience, with both the Garden of Audblayin and the great school of Loftfol closed to her forever. Who am I? Where do I belong?

  “This is beneath your dignity,” Aurilon’s smoky voice advised from slightly above her, and Imeris lifted bleary eyes to see Odel’s Bodyguard hanging upside down from rope and harness as she had the very first time Imeris had seen her. “You did not squeal this way as a child.”

  “Warriors from beneath Ehkisland are close behind me,” Imeris panted.

  “Then I can hardly advise my master to make a way through the barrier for you.”

  “Do something! Help me! I am so tired, Aurilon!” And I will never rest in my Loftfol bunkroom again. Never rise befor
e the sun to take a bow to hand and bend it in the Unrolled Room of Echoes, never glimpse my dark reflection in the pond under the bridge at the halfway mark or pull shafts from the straw god target on the far side.

  A place of safety from Kirrik, where I knew she could not come.

  Imeris tried to think what she might do if Odel refused to let her through. There had to be some other way. No ideas came. She gazed at the Bodyguard in mute appeal.

  Aurilon sighed. She plucked something, a coin or a counter, pale as shell or bone, from the dense weave of her bark-ornamented hair.

  “I could mark you with the sigil of the slaves of the king of Odelland. The barrier would recognise you as belonging to the world above and not the world below. It would let you through, as if you’d fallen only hours ago instead of decades.”

  “And then?” Imeris asked, waiting for Aurilon to reassure her that the mark would be removed. Anahah had reassured her. The mark he’d given her was gone before the fear had had time to really sink its teeth in. She couldn’t understand why Aurilon didn’t hurry up and say it. That it was all a trick to escape pursuit.

  “And then you would feel gently, but over time, ever more powerfully compelled to go to the palace of Odelland,” Aurilon said, “where your sister’s great-grandmother served and died. They might take you in and give you work to do, or they might throw you down to choke before breaking. I am no mighty magic wielder. My master cannot free slaves that are not his own. The bone coin that makes the mark was given ages ago, as a hint that I might send human gifts to the king.”

  “A hint,” Imeris repeated woodenly. “That you might send human gifts.”

  “Children have been given as tribute to save other children before.” Aurilon held the bone coin up between thumb and forefinger. “This has the power to admit you to Canopy, not I. It will also admit you within the wards of the king’s palace. Once within those wards, you could not leave except by his orders. Are you really being hunted?”

  “Yes, Aurilon. The pursuit is mere minutes behind me. Please! Ask Odel to open the way! You cannot mean for me to be a gift to the Odelland king.”