Echoes of Understorey Page 16

  “I am in no ’urry to confront the Queen of Birds,” Daggad drawled, but he moved into the double line that the black-clad Airakland soldiers began forming. Imeris joined the line by the side of the Eshland Hunter, Eeriez. They linked arms at the elbow; the intent was to balance one another while running along thin branches, weapons drawn on either side in case of aerial attack.

  She did it casually, as though she’d been trained in a Canopian barracks and not overheard Loftfol teachers speaking of how to counter Canopian tactics. The pair in front of her were not soldiers and didn’t manage so easily. One wore the foot-tangling sky-blue and storm-black robes of a Servant of the rain goddess. The other was a mere child, dirty-soled, dressed in a pauper’s drawstring trousers and woven bark shirt.

  “We aren’t going to confront the goddess, but to claim the thirteenth member owed to us by ancient accord,” Oniwak corrected Daggad, adjusting the crossbow slung over his shoulder.

  But the little boy whispered to the richly robed Servant, “Lakekeeper, when Orin hears that we mean to murder her pet beast, won’t she be angry? Maybe unleash it upon us?”

  “Maybe,” the Lakekeeper whispered back kindly. Beneath his jewelled and heavily embroidered costume, he had broad shoulders and a thick neck, but no weapons visible on his person. “If she does summon it to us, the Hunt will be over very quickly. Oniwak is very good with that crossbow. You’ll have wealth and fame without ever having lifted a hand.”

  And Imeris thought, Orin’s pet beast? I thought we were hunting a demon.

  Besides, there was no way, short of growing eagle’s wings and flying, that they could reach the palace of Orinland before dark.

  * * *

  THEY SET off, trotting along high roads cleared by the captain’s omnipresent scowl.

  Every two hours, the twelve Hunters and their escort of Airakland soldiers stopped at the edge of public markets to rest, share marching rations, and drink; a gourd-flask was passed around by a stumpy, bearded old man with a strange parchment stole covered in inked symbols hanging around his neck.

  “Are you a Servant to a deity?” Imeris asked the first time, taking a sip from the gourd when he insisted. It tasted of nothing. She held up the gourd, puzzled, weighing it with her hand, feeling the heft and the slosh of liquid inside.

  She tried to take another sip. More nothing. She’d made the motions of swallowing but couldn’t tell if she’d gotten any of the drink. The stumpy little man smiled impishly at her confusion.

  How she hated magic.

  “That’ll suffice,” he said. “It’s the potion of the winds. One who walks in the grace of Ulellin is no Servant, but it’s from Ulellin’s Temple that one acquired this rather valuable magically enhanced concoction. Speed can be advantageous in a hunt, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Imeris stared after him as he took the gourd to the next member of the party. She licked her lips, trying to taste the so-called potion.

  When she rose from her crouch to continue the march, her limbs jangled oddly. Her whole body felt lighter. Heat burned in her joints. The world seemed brighter, her vision less colourful yet keener.

  She linked arms with Eeriez and they did not run, but raced. Wind whipped past her as though she guided a glider. The giant slave, Daggad, moved to the front of the column. He kept up a warning bellow that barely reached the ears of citizens ahead of the river-quick party.

  “Make way for the Hunt!”

  When their pace slowed, breath threatening to burst Imeris’s armour-constricted chest and pinpricks of light exploding around her, they stopped for a rest and another sip of the intangible potion before hurtling onwards to Orinland. In fact, it seemed to work better each time.

  “We’re getting closer to Ulellinland,” the old man with the parchment stole told Imeris when she remarked on it. “Some deities’ magic won’t work at all outside their niche, but all of them are strongest in the seat of their own power. Our friend there, the Lakekeeper, could drown you in a deluge by his mistress’s lake. Here, he can’t even fill a cup with water.” The Lakekeeper didn’t look up from his seat on a kink in the branch two paces away, where he tended a blistered toe, but a rustle of his silks told Imeris he was listening. “We have a black-robed Servant of Atwith in our Hunting party also, though his death-touch here is but a tickle.” Imeris looked for the Servant and found him, folded patiently in on himself at a platform’s edge. “Yet the wind does not stop at the borders of Ulellinland, and if Esh could not shape wood outside his own domain, how would we live?”

  Eeriez, the Eshland Hunter, broke into a toothy grin. He, too, lingered only a few paces away, but his teeth and the whites of his eyes were all that Imeris could see of him; he’d subtly arranged himself by a piece of bark which matched the colours and textures of his tunic and armour, assuming a petrified stillness that had made her forget he was there.

  I can see why he was chosen, she thought.

  Abandoning doubts that her own selection had been a mistake, she wondered which qualities she owned that made her suited, in this case, to victory. What kind of “pet beast” has Orin set against us, and why?

  “It would help if I knew what we were hunting,” she said to Captain Oniwak. “What to look for.”

  “When we have our thirteenth, woman,” Oniwak said, turning away.

  “When he came to our bakery,” the ragged boy confided in Imeris, “he shouted at my mother. No good reason. In the middle of the night, he shouted at a stranger that she was stopping me from being a soldier. As if I ever wanted to be a soldier! Would’ve broken his filthy fingers where they grabbed me. But mother’s mouth was all sucked in the way which means she’s too proud of me to speak. So Irof smile on me, I’ll make her even prouder.”

  They set off again.

  Orinland felt at once wilder and quieter than Odelland. Imeris saw no written signs or splashed deity’s colours, but pedestrians’ clothing changed from light, bold, and ornamented silks and seed-wool to dun-coloured linen and leather. Instead of grass screens and smoke guarding entrances to homes, Imeris observed glass or horn windows and metal grates. Washed clothes fluttering at the sills of open windows vanished in favour of closed-in, guarded, gourd-shaped market-hollows, workshops, and schools.

  Those on the roads spoke softly to one another behind raised hands.

  Imeris remembered hamstringing a man on the low roads of Orinland. He and his four companions were around here somewhere. And Horroh’s blood was on her spines.

  Are you proud of me, Oldest-Father? She shivered as she ran, though Canopy was warm and she was covered in a sheen of sweat. Will your memory rest when I have killed Orin’s beast with these others? Will I not have done better than any son? Will my work finally be done?

  She knew it would not be. Not until Kirrik was gone from the forest for good.

  TWENTY

  THE PALACE of the king of Orinland filled the crown of a firewheel tree.

  It was easily five times the size of the palace of the king of Odelland. No part of it was crafted by human hands. Not a timber was sawn; not a nail marred the hard, pale bark of the firewheel tree. It appeared as if the tree had simply chosen to split and grow in the form of five grey, identical, parallel towers. Fallen autumn leaves of previous years provided mulch for flat roofs fragrant with blue-flowered flax. Over all five towers spread a second roof of glossy, dark green firewheel leaves and flowers like flaming red wheel spokes in palm-sized circles, yellow-hearted and with the tip of each spoke graced by a tiny golden sphere.

  The façade of each tower crawled with realistic, high-relief representations of battling birds and beasts. Somewhere out of sight, screw-pumps must have turned by magic or the sweat of slaves; fountains frothed from the mouths of the wooden birds and animals, falling into a perfectly circular lake that ringed the tree in a level forty body lengths below.

  A huge processional road ran from the front of the palace towards Orin’s emergent, five hundred paces distant in a dimly glimpsed waratah tree. Th
e road was twenty paces wide, the biggest that Imeris had seen.

  The old man with the parchment stole saw her looking.

  “The king pays his respects at the Temple of Orin often,” he said. “The goddess, when she comes to bless the royal family or to watch the Games, travels along this road in a jaguar-drawn chariot.”

  The little boy in the bark shirt sniffed.

  “In Irofland, our high-ups have better things to do than praise each other in public and give out purses to naked, fake men in fancy poses.”

  “This palace,” Imeris said, ignoring the boy, “must have been built by Esh.” She glanced at Eeriez, who said nothing. “In Audblayinland, they mock the wood god for having neither Servants nor proper Temple, for wandering mute and friendless. I have seen Audblayin’s Garden Gate, which depicts with some skill historical instances of its defence. I never could have imagined anything like this, and this must be nothing compared to the palace in the labyrinth of the king of Eshland.”

  “Bet there’s people starving here,” the boy muttered. “Take care of us, our high-ups do, not just themselves.”

  “We passed through the labyrinth of the king of Eshland,” murmured a middle-sized, crop-haired Hunter, “on our way to fetch Eeriez. They have no soldiers, it’s said, but Eeriez was in there selling skins. I would rather hunt a hundred beasts than die in that place.” The neck of the fiddle he carried ended in a roaring bear’s head, and the back of the instrument was carved with swarms of bees. Imeris supposed he hailed from Ukakland. If he had any weapons to hand, they were well hidden in his silks, or perhaps in the leather case across his back.

  A young woman in a brown shirt and trousers and a crimson cloak, carrying a lyre, approached Captain Oniwak and asked him if he’d like her to sing him the songs of the beasts portrayed on the palace walls. He waved her impatiently away.

  “It’s a common misconception,” the old man with the parchment stole told Imeris, “that Audblayin and Atwith are the mother and father of this Titan’s Forest. Birth and death are the moments when life is weakest. Orin and Esh represent animal life in its prime and tree life at its greatest strength. Orin and Esh are the true mother and father of Canopy. That’s why we find Ilanland between Orinland and Eshland. Justice must always temper strength. The Hunt can’t be called against the innocent. It can only be called after a demon draws human blood.”

  The boy sniffed again. “Just ignore old Ingaget’s teacher talk, slave. He’ll fill your head with dung when what you need is hunting smarts.”

  The old man, Ingaget, clapped his hand on the hilt of a short sword hanging from a belt at his waist.

  “Don’t I have hunting smarts, whelp?”

  A small, sharp, steel dagger appeared in the boy’s grip by impressive sleight of hand.

  “Fall in!” Captain Oniwak barked, and both child and elder put their weapons away. Imeris linked arms again with the Eshland Hunter, guarding the left side of the column as they progressed down the processional road, ready to slash wide at a moment’s notice with the spines of her left forearm.

  For the cavernous mouth of the central tower offered no hospitality. It presented only the open jaws of wooden serpents, wasting jets of water in wide, decorative arcs. This extravagance, outside of monsoon season, boasted of power and excess. Imeris stepped over a line of regularly spaced holes bored knee-deep into the wooden floor.

  Deeper inside the cave-like entrance, a pair of inner doors covered in carved demons, everything from fiveways to chimeras in the act of terrorising wide-eyed humans, remained resolutely shut. Again, nobody appeared to receive them, or even to turn them away.

  “This is an insult, Captain,” Eeriez called to Oniwak at the head of the halted column. His voice echoed.

  “I have a mandate,” Oniwak replied, leaving his crossbow in place but removing the artefact of Ilanland from his satchel. He bent his head to study it. “The compass points deeper inside this tower.”

  “Many women and men have met their deaths here,” the Servant of Atwith said softly from his place at the front beside Oniwak. Imeris hardly heard him. In the dim light, she’d noticed wooden gratings at ground level all around them.

  Maybe the gratings were for ventilation. If so, why were they large enough to admit a person? Surely that was a flaw in the tower’s defences.

  Then she saw a pair of animal eyes glittering in one of them.

  “Retreat,” she cried, extruding her spines, “or be trapped here with wild animals.”

  Instead of ordering the withdrawal, Oniwak clapped his hands over his ears.

  “Slave,” he hissed. “Silence your shrill woman’s voice.”

  Imeris could have gone by herself, saved herself. She didn’t owe them anything. Their silly Hunt was for fools. Yet she had been chosen. A thing of the gods had sought her out. She must meet whatever fate it promised her.

  I am one of them.

  In the gratings, the points of wooden stakes withdrew silently into the walls, as if the palace yawned with two dozen deadly mouths. In the high archway behind the Hunters, sharpened logs thundered from the fountain-edged opening down into the hollows that Imeris had stepped over, caging them in the confined space.

  “As you wish,” she said to Oniwak, furious. “I will be silent.”

  A slat-ribbed tree bear, as tall at the shoulder as Imeris was, emerged first. Its black-and-yellow face was scarred, long lips drooping, black nose twitching. Imeris had never known a tree bear to attack a man except in self-defence. Their teeth were for grinding tough shoots and cracking beehives, their claws for opening wood and bark in search of grubs.

  This one swung a paw at the Servant of Atwith, knocking him down. The column of Hunters and soldiers closed into a circle with bear and Servant at its heart. Imeris saw, in the corner of her eye, Oniwak putting a crossbow bolt between the bear’s ribs.

  Then she was in the outer ring, staring into the face of an approaching, half-starved jaguar. Beside her, the fiddler made no move to abandon the musical instrument and draw weapons. Instead, he set bow to strings, eliciting a low hum reminiscent of a hive of bees, and out of the curling holes in the soundboard came the very insects depicted on the back, making for the black viper emerging at the jaguar’s heels.

  Magic, again, but this time on her side.

  “Towards the fountainheads,” Oniwak ordered, and the circle, fending off bears, cats, and raptors as it moved, crept back towards the archway where the regularly spaced logs blocked the way. Stripes of light showed more and more animals coming through the open tunnels. Crocodiles. Yellow-furred apes. Smaller, grey tree bears. Flightless birds with bladed heads and taloned toes. Beasts like the goats she’d seen in the Garden but with horns as long as swords.

  Imeris could focus only on the creature closest to her.

  Mostly jaguars, Anahah had said. To kill by swift ambush and a bite right through the assassin’s skull.

  Imeris ducked as the animal sprang at her. Front legs enfolded her. Front claws tried to shred her shoulders, hind claws her abdomen, carving her bronze scales instead. Imeris allowed its weight to collapse them both. Rolling backwards beneath it, forearms raised, she couldn’t cut upwards, because her spines were blunt on their distant edges, but when she pulled her spines back down towards her chest, they opened both of the jaguar’s carotid arteries and made parallel splits down either side of its rib cage. It felt like killing Horroh all over again.

  Imeris lay under it, stifling a sob, washed with blood, waiting for it to die. She heard the sounds of an axe biting into wood. When the jaguar gurgled its last and shuddered to stillness, she heaved it off her and saw that the disciplined circle had broken apart. Amidst the chaos, the Hunter from Ilanland, wearing purple-stained, iron-studded leather armour, had chopped handholds in one of the logs with a double-bladed axe not designed to be used on wood. As Imeris scrambled to her feet to face the next frenzied animal, a kind of hard-hoofed tapir with tusks, the black-skinned Hunter returned his axe to its loop and
seized the log, lifting.

  The pair of them, Hunter from Ilanland and Daggad the white-skinned slave, were matched in hulking size and strength. After a long moment of struggling and swearing, they heaved the log by its fresh-cut handholds, out of the hole that had received it, high enough for a human to escape through.

  “Send Ibbin through to scout the surrounds,” Captain Oniwak bellowed. The boy in the bark shirt pulled his dagger from the white breast of a harpy eagle and looked up towards the light. The bird’s talons had scored his hands and face, barely missing an eye. Before he could obey and tumble towards the hole, the old man, Ingaget, garbled some objection and pushed his way ahead of the child.

  “Soldiers,” Daggad panted in explanation. “Orinland soldiers waitin’ out there.”

  Oniwak ordered the Airakland soldiers to go after the old man. Oniwak put a bolt through the neck of the tusked creature as it charged Imeris. She dodged it as it rushed anyway, hoping it would go down, but she was forced to draw her short sword at the last, slashing at its face to keep it back while it bled out. She glanced at the hole to see how many of her allies were out into the open and how many there were still to go.

  “You’ll go last, coward,” Oniwak shouted at her. Imeris cut the head off a constrictor that struck at him while he reloaded his crossbow. The impact jarred both her shoulders in their sockets. He gave her no thanks, but turned to fire at another tree bear.

  The bolt missed. Imeris’s sword was too short for her to want to close with the heavy, thick-furred, long-armed animal. She danced around it, trying to confuse it, trying to give Oniwak time to reload, but he was gone through the opening.

  Imeris was the only one remaining in the dim space.

  “Out, woman,” Daggad cried, his arms straining and the sweat standing out on every inch of him. “Go!”

  “How will you follow?” Imeris demanded, sheathing her sword and lunging for the sunlit gap. Blinking in the brightness outside, she was forced to duck by the swinging blade of a curved spear wielded by one of her companions. Hunters fought the crimson and brown-clad soldiers of Orinland on the grand Temple road.