Echoes of Understorey Page 15

  Aurilon bared her teeth.

  “I cannot allow you to lead a raid on Canopy, whether by design or by accident, student of Loftfol.”

  “No longer a student. I killed my teacher. That is why they come for me!”

  Odel’s Bodyguard held out the bone coin.

  “Take it,” she said, “or stay below the barrier where you belong. You were right. I do feel a bond with you, Imeris, but I serve the Protector of Children.”

  Imeris took the coin with unsteady fingers. She turned it over in her hand. So innocent-seeming. Like the effigy of Orin in the archery practice range at Loftfol. It seemed a clumsy straw thing, shaped by new students the same way the old students had shaped it, but what it really reflected was generational rage. This coin pretended to be a tiny thing of value, a wondrous instrument of magic; instead it represented all the cold, cruel indifference of Canopy to the lives of the less fortunate. Her fingers clenched around it, and she suppressed the urge to throw it away.

  “I could share it with the ones who pursue me,” Imeris said suddenly, savagely. “I could mark them all. Gently, you said, but over time, more powerful. We would have time to raze your Temple! Would that surprise you, Aurilon?”

  “Yes,” Aurilon said without blinking. “I would be surprised. But you would not do it, and if you did, I would kill you. The dead make poor pupils. Besides, I know truth when I hear it, and when you said the words I could, I heard I could never beneath them.”

  Aurilon tipped herself upright in her harness and shimmied up the rope, arcane aura permitting her through the invisible barrier that was solid as stone to Imeris, leaving the ex-student alone with a racing heart and jumbled thoughts.

  My master cannot free slaves that are not his own.

  She tried to remember what Anahah had said, how he had explained the process of his marking, but tiredness warred with urgency and everything was a fog. Had Anahah specified which sigil was to be used, or how he had gained authority to use it? Was it stolen and copied, the way that Anahah’s different animal forms were stolen and copied? Had a slave died in the marking and unmarking she’d endured?

  Once within those wards, you could not leave except by his orders.

  Who would come to save her, if she branded herself this way? The Godfinder? Middle-Father? Leaper? None of them would be her owners. None of them would have the power to free her. All her confidence from the earlier episode was eroded.

  “They will buy me somehow,” Imeris whispered, and pressed the bone coin to her tongue. She might argue with her family constantly, but she knew she could rely on them. Canopian or Understorian, they were one.

  It was agony, as it had been before.

  How will my family know I am there?

  She spat the coin into her palm and slipped it, slick with saliva, into her salt pouch. This time, when she raised her hand to the barrier, it passed through.

  To a Canopian, it is only empty air.

  Imeris glanced down. She couldn’t yet see the scouts she knew were in her wake. Her breath tasted suddenly foul. She panted with hope and with fear; she drove her spines into Odel’s emergent to continue climbing and wondered if someone would come to save her before her spines were snapped off and cast away.

  My wings. Youngest-Father’s beautiful wings, from the skin of the chimera who saved my life.

  She would never be allowed to keep them. They were hundreds of times more valuable than a slave. Only a king could buy them back for her. It would be better to hide them somewhere.

  Odel could use them to buy me back and then free me.

  She looked up and saw Odel’s Temple, tail of the leaping fish and the highest branches of the emergent licked by the lemon light of sunrise. Would Aurilon hide the wings for her in the secret room? Or perhaps stored with the skin of that other chimera, the one that had killed Odel’s previous incarnation?

  As if the marking on her tongue was sensitive to her plans to divert and delay its demands, the urge to find the palace rose irresistibly up in Imeris like the urge to vomit.

  She ran out along one branch until it crossed another, then ran back towards the entry to the Temple.

  Aurilon wasn’t inside. Or if she was, she was by the side of the sleeping god below. Imeris started to go to the trapdoor, but the urge tugged at her again, more insistently.

  There was no time.

  No!

  She couldn’t just shed the glider onto the floor. Anyone could take it. The bronze scale armour was valuable, too, but replaceable. In desperation, she placed Youngest-Father’s wings on the pile of tributes. He would understand. Even kill another chimera, take the curse onto himself, if that was what was required. He’d never sired his own offspring, but his dedication as a father was never in doubt.

  Good-bye, Chimera-Mother. Forgive me, Youngest-Father. Better to give the skin to the god than allow the Odelland king to keep it.

  “This tribute,” she said with tears in her eyes, “is for a child whose name I do not know. She is like me. She has a warrior self.” Imeris groped for more ways to describe the child she wished to protect, the one that Oldest-Mother had told her was out there, in the forest somewhere. “She yearns for a quiet life. She has a Canopian self. She has an Understorian self. Even—even a chimera self.”

  Blurting her last words, Imeris obeyed the urge and turned, retching, both hands over her mouth. She walked with as much dignity as she could manage from the open door of the Temple. Obeying did not lessen the urge, but seemed to make it stronger. Trying to avoid a misstep that might force her to reveal her unbroken spines, she descended the winding staircase and stepped out along the branch road that led to the king’s palace.

  It lay to the southwest, lower down in Canopy. Imeris kept her eyes downcast, still fighting the urge to vomit. She watched her feet, the feet of passing strangers, and the road. Her boots were given a blue cast by Airak’s lanterns.

  Each time she saw a blue quandong branch road, Imeris glanced up to check the signposts; she knew the palace was in one, and she knew blue quandong in Understorey by its hard, grey, moss-blotched bark. Blue quandong in Canopy meant something else; it meant javelin-bladed emerald foliage with scarlet leaves interspersed with green and brilliant blue fruit swollen to ripeness by the rain. The sun rose higher and the nausea grew more powerful, and still none of the signposts were marked with the king’s toucan crest.

  And then they were.

  Imeris sobbed with relief as she made the turning, cheeks wet and tongue burning. The road, widening all the time, had deep parallel ruts from the passage of barrows, and at the end of it the palace filled the quandong crown like an overweight ibis balanced in a sapling. Humankind made two types of dwelling in the arms of the forest; one was hollowed from and yet considerate of the great trees; the other was tacked on to the outside to boast mastery over branches. This palace was the second sort. To Imeris’s eyes, it was a larger and even more immodest version of a Headman’s house in Understorey.

  The road ran between paired, thatched wooden guardhouses connected by iron gates. It broadened again on the other side of the gates, forming a north-facing forecourt-cum-practice yard, which currently milled with soldiers.

  A stream ran over the road between practice yard and palace, with a lowered drawbridge across it. Then the branch road disappeared into the palace, a tall building of stacked red-and-white timbers. Its symmetrical towers and main hold were crowned with pointed roofs thatched with grey windgrass. The place where the branch road connected to the tree was hidden in the heart of the palace.

  Sweet-smelling smoke belched from every window, keeping the royal dwelling insect-free. The thatch was fresh and sweet-smelling, too. How could it stay so clean, the seat of a lineage so stained with blood?

  Imeris looked for the west-facing window that had belonged to a long-dead princess. It was the nephew of that murderous princess who now ruled Odelland.

  That nephew was also Middle-Mother’s nephew. Sawas was Oldest-Mother’s unwant
ed child by the old king.

  Middle-Mother, was the thought Imeris clung to as another wave of nausea doubled her over. Middle-Mother is descended from the royal family of Odelland. If she is, then my sister and brother are, too. They can free me. They own me!

  Soldiers in Odelland’s pale orange tunics and short, bloodred skirts caught her as she stumbled towards the guardhouse. She stuck her tongue out for them to see, and they cracked the iron gate open for her to pass, pushing her roughly through.

  She didn’t care what the commotion in the practice yard was. More and more soldiers seemed to be emerging from the thatched barracks building to the west. There, the stream that ran by the palace entry fell off the edge of the yard. Soldiers rinsed their mouths, scrubbed their hair, and pulled on armour by the edge of the stream.

  They had different armour—lighter, layered, and lacquered—to the armour of some other soldiers, who made loud demands in the yard. Those soldiers wore solid ebony plate edged with silver and studded with black glass.

  Soldiers from Airakland.

  Imeris dragged her hands away from her mouth and pressed them over her ears. It didn’t matter what they were saying. The turmoil was none of her doing. She had to climb inside the wards around the palace before the sickness of being newly marked made her insensible.

  One of the black-clad soldiers, an officer by the raven’s feathers in his hair, pointed straight at her.

  Imeris lowered her eyes and stumbled on.

  Of course I look odd. Out of place. There is another entrance. A slave’s entrance. Walking over the drawbridge like an honoured guest is not for scum like me, but what can I do?

  Both kinds of fighting men crowded around something that was in the officer’s hand. They looked at it. Then they crowded around Imeris.

  “This is the one!” somebody boomed. A hand caught her wrist. Bodies pressed against her.

  “’Ware the unbroken spines,” somebody else shouted, and her other wrist was seized. Her arms were pulled wide apart. She needed air. She couldn’t breathe. Her tongue was swelling.

  Choking her.

  “There is no mistake,” the officer growled, waving the thing in his hand in front of Imeris’s face just as the sun speared through the branches and blinded her.

  I can let the darkness take me, I suppose. She closed her eyes. Consciousness slipped from her grasp. Surely someone will carry me inside before I die.

  NINETEEN

  IMERIS OPENED her eyes to blue sky through the quandong crown overhead.

  She was still in the forecourt.

  The drive to move, to find the palace, was gone, and she was able to conceive the thought I have been seen by hundreds of people.

  Loftfol will hear from their enslaved ex-students that I am here. One Forest has spies in Canopy also. Kirrik will know that I am here. Neither can pass through the barrier, but both can call on their agents to act. I have to hide. I have to get out of sight.

  A neat-bearded man in a tall cylindrical hat crouched by her side. He wore loose silk robes patterned with a repeating toucan-pair motif, in colours that were nearly but not quite Odel’s, as was custom in Odelland. He took his broad, dark brown hand away from her chin. She felt her tongue. The slave’s mark was gone. He had used magic on her.

  “Who are you?” she asked faintly.

  “One who walks in the grace of Odel attends the court as king’s vizier. I am Ubehailis of the House of Ikkased, once a Servant of Odel. Nobody here knows you, slave, but the Hunt has been declared by the king of Airakland. The device points to the heart that beats beneath your weak woman’s breast, and by our law, you’re to be freed from the palace and given over to serve.” He shook his head, whether in dismay or puzzlement, Imeris couldn’t be sure.

  She sat up, the scales of her armour clinking. Beside the vizier stood a wrinkled, white-haired man. He wore metal-studded leather over rainbow-hued tunic and short skirt, and he could have been Middle-Mother’s brother; he had the same wide mouth, bright gap-filled teeth and crease-cornered, amused-seeming brown eyes. His were sunken with age, though.

  Soldiers of both coloured cloths whispered behind their hands. The scowling officer with the raven feathers shook the device as if he could force it to give a different answer.

  “Aurilon,” Imeris said woozily. “Aurilon is the greatest hunter in Odelland.”

  “Apparently not,” the Airakland officer said, still scowling.

  I am free again, Imeris thought. The mark is gone, and yet again my slavery has not lasted an hour. She felt humbled. Wretchedly relieved. It was hard to concentrate on what the soldiers around her were saying.

  “Kill her,” the vizier suggested, “and the device will point out another, sure enough.”

  That got her attention.

  “You should be content,” the king said sternly to his adviser, “that Aurilon is not called to the Hunt. Odel’s safety is imperative.”

  “I’m not sure how it works, Warmed One,” the officer admitted to the vizier. “It might choose another, or it might simply leave us one person short of a hunting party.”

  “You will be one short in any case,” the vizier said, straightening to his full height, pulling Imeris up after him. Their eyes were level. “Orinland will surely not supply a man to destroy the horror that its mistress has created.”

  “Perhaps not,” the officer said with a crooked half smile. “We go next, and lastly, to Orinland.” He bowed deeply before the king, an unnecessary courtesy to a monarch not his own. “We thank you for discharging this obligation in such a timely manner, your majesty of Odelland. May the thirteen protect you.”

  The Odelland king inclined his head. He withdrew in a stately fashion across the drawbridge into the palace, his vizier and several soldiers by his side.

  “What are you called, slave?” the Airakland officer asked. He put the device away in a leather satchel, removed and unrolled a parchment, and waited, poised with a stick of charcoal, to record her name for posterity.

  Only then did Imeris feel nausea returning, deeper than the relief that she’d escaped whatever fate waited for her within the walls of the palace of the king of Odelland.

  I am to kill a chimera, after all. I am to join the Hunt and track a demon through Canopy.

  She made a decision quickly.

  If am to kill my fourth mother, I will do it swiftly and with dignity. I will take these other Hunters for the teachers that Loftfol will no longer supply me, and in the meantime, surrounded by the greatest fighters in all of Canopy, I will be safe from both Loftfol and Kirrik. There will be time to think. Time to plan my reconciliation with the school. They must listen to me. I am not the enemy. The sorceress is. She threw her shoulders back. Stood tall.

  And I will teach these Canopians a thing or two, no doubt.

  “I am—” Abruptly, words failed her.

  Was she Imerissiremi, of the wilds near Gannak, or was she Imeris of Audblayinland? Was she Issi, daughter of Marram, Heightsman of Loftfol, or a nameless fallen child returned to win honours in the city of her birth?

  “Yes?” the officer said impatiently.

  “I am Imeris,” she said simply. She’d chosen. The Canopian form of her name. It didn’t sound the same forwards and back, was not auspicious for travelling in both directions. The officer scribbled it down on the parchment.

  “Really?” a man’s voice boomed. “You are named after a children’s story about a giant silkworm?” He guffawed. The sound of Gannak was in his speech. A white-skinned, bare-chested brute pushed through the black-clad, black-skinned soldiers. Imeris looked up into an unfamiliar blue-eyed face even as she instinctively shifted her weight and edged back, making room for combat.

  The brute had snapped-off spines: definitely a slave. He had a kite-shaped head with a short, heavy jaw, high forehead, and bow-shaped mouth. Thin, tented brows quirked as he turned side-on to her, matching her aggressive stance. Both hands went up and over his shoulder, hovering near the hilt of the longest swo
rd Imeris had ever seen. Leather strips between his massive shoulder blades held back his long, straight, black hair.

  “Who are you?” Imeris asked, feeling her spines in their sheaths. If he drew that beast of a weapon, she’d be out of his way before the blow could land, adding his blood to Horroh’s in her spine’s serrations before he could swing again.

  “These are your fellow Hunters,” the Airakland officer said in a bored voice, tucking the parchment away. Imeris’s quick glances revealed even more non-black-uniformed types oozing to the fore. “I’m Captain Oniwak of Airakland, leader of the Hunt.” He slapped the back of a thin, hungry-looking fighter in red and grey with a shaved head and prominent canine teeth. “I’ve named this man my second, to take the lead in the event of my death, but I doubt the Hunt will last long. He is Eeriez of Eshland. You’ll want to seek the company of your own kind, though. Your fellow slave is Daggad, a fighting captive Understorian chosen by the device from the niche of Audblayinland. He remains the property of one of their merchants. The House of Epatut has no wards, and so it wasn’t necessary to free him.”

  The brute lowered his hands and put out his tongue. Imeris eyed the loom symbol burnt into the wet pink flesh. He waggled it suggestively before he put it back in his head.

  “He,” Imeris said, relaxing her stance, “is not my own kind.”

  Daggad’s enormous fists went to his hips. There, hung over the short skirt and leather loincloth, he carried a round shield with a cloth-wrapped bundle stuffed into the back of it. His studded sandals looked expensive. Ugly red scars crisscrossed his fishmeat skin. He was perhaps twenty years older than she was, a survivor of many battles.

  “Maybe we do not look alike, little sister,” he said, “but you talk like a child of the dark. ’Ow else did such a sweet citizen’s face get a slave’s song stuck down ’er throat?”

  “Later,” Captain Oniwak barked. “Fall in, Daggad. Proper introductions come later, at the monument tree. There, the full company will receive detailed instructions on the boundaries of our mission. For now, if we march all day, we can be at the border of Orinland by nightfall.”