Echoes of Understorey Read online

  Behind her, the log thudded back into place. Daggad and the Hunter from Ilanland were trapped inside.

  Imeris used her spines to scale the archway, sinking them deep into the water-spouting serpent heads. At the apex, the log that the two men had lifted emerged from beneath the most ferocious-fanged gargoyle of all.

  Hanging from her left forearm and shin, Imeris drew her short sword again, hacking at the serpent head. Chips flew, and the lifelike sculpture shuddered, until it was weakened enough that the pressure of the flowing water came to her aid, blasting the head away and sending a much wider, forceful jet over the soldiers fighting on the road below.

  Imeris kept on cutting, towards the socket where the log was held. Her sword was blunt, ruined for flesh. Her right arm ached. Below, six or seven of Orin’s soldiers seized the Servant of Atwith and tossed him off the edge of the road, down to die in darkness.

  Captain Oniwak had been afraid their Hunt would have to do with only twelve. Thanks to their hostile reception in Orinland, they were down to eleven before they’d begun. Nine, if the two trapped in the cavern were torn apart by animals before Imeris could set them free. A crossbow bolt splintered the wood a pace away from her, but she couldn’t spare any energy to seek the shooter.

  “I’ll help,” Eeriez said, quick grin flashing his pointed canine teeth. He’d climbed up carefully on the other side of the arch, carrying the axe. The Ilanlander must have passed it to him through the gap between logs. “Hold this for a moment.”

  Imeris put her sword away. She took the axe, drawing it through the erupting water that separated Eeriez from her, almost losing her grip on it. It was heavy. Too heavy for her to swing. Eeriez roped himself swiftly to one of the other serpent heads.

  When he took the axe back from her, he had both hands free and room to swing it. Each blow drove deep towards the log-trap’s housing, and when he split the socket, the log toppled with a groan, pushed by the water towards the battling Hunters and soldiers.

  Eeriez didn’t pause to untie the ropes. He cut himself free using the reversed axe-blade. The weapon clattered down onto the road only slightly ahead of Daggad and the axe’s owner. They emerged, bloodied but not limping, into the melee, with half a dozen animals at their heels.

  “Form up,” Captain Oniwak screamed from somewhere in the midst of the fighting. Imeris slipped down from her perch to join a double column, her right elbow linked with Eeriez’s left. She couldn’t effectively use her sword to attack with her nondominant hand, and it was too blunt to be much use, anyway, but by holding it reversed, so that it lay along her sheathed spines, she was able to block steel blows that came driving towards her. The animals were fighting each other, or fleeing. “Proceed to alternate road!”

  Imeris understood his aims. The traditional method of retreat while in the double-column was to leave the front pair fending off the enemy while the rest shuffled back and then, when that pair became exhausted, for them to dash back and absorb themselves in the back of the column while the next pair took their turn. That would only work on a branch road that was one or two men wide, however.

  Defending themselves desperately, like a spider surrounded by ants, the Hunters and their escort of Airakland soldiers inched towards a smaller path leading off the processional highway.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ORIN’S BEASTS and her king’s men harried the Hunters all through the night, to the border of Orinland and Ilanland.

  Imeris’s whole body deflated and swayed with each drawn-out exhalation. She’d changed sides with Eeriez countless times to try to rest her left arm and Eeriez’s right hand, which wielded poisoned knives. He’d almost cut her five times, and she’d twice torn his tunic sleeve with a careless swipe of her spines.

  This cannot go on.

  Owls came, talons first, towards her eyes. Imeris sheared off a slew of flight feathers, and the birds spun away.

  I should climb down into Understorey.

  Snakes tried to coil around her legs. Her shin spines went through them as they tightened their grip, and bloody cubes of dead meat fell.

  Orin cannot touch me there. I will go home. I will tell them I have fled the Hunt.

  Eeriez pulled her down, saving her from a sword swing. She sank her spines into the trunk of a purpleheart tree, saving both of them from a fall.

  I will tell them I have fled Loftfol. That students may be searching for them to kill Middle-Father and Youngest-Father. That Loftfol will never accept that Oldest-Father died trying to rid Understorey of the sorceress. She kept some of their students asleep in her lair for years, until their families gave up hope of finding them. They should hunt her themselves.

  She managed to get up again, to continue down the branch path, but one of Airak’s lanterns seemed to leap up and catch her feet. Her hands and knees landed hard against the path again. Eeriez crouched beside her, his face a mask of blood turned tarry by blue lantern light. Daggad’s shield moved over them, appearing from nowhere, protecting her or perhaps Eeriez from the driving arc of a thrown javelin. It bounced away, bound for Understorey.

  Imeris smelled overpowering incense.

  A woman’s commanding voice rang out between the trees.

  “Stop!”

  Imeris struggled to rise and could not. She didn’t recognise the voice. It spoke again, louder.

  “Back to Orinland, soldiers of the Untamed King. Your Mistress of the Wilds does not rule here.”

  Sounds of clashing weapons slowed and ceased. Owls departed on silent wings. Snakes slithered away. Imeris stayed kneeling on the purpleheart branch road, gasping for breath. Daggad’s shield hovered above her.

  “Holy One,” came a man’s gruff shout in reply. “These intruders attacked the palace in Orinland. This is justice, Holy One.”

  “Don’t dare to tell me what is and isn’t justice.” Fury filled the voice this time. “Justice is my domain. Return to your own niche at once before I stop all your hearts as justice for one man’s insolence. Go!”

  Imeris sank further into a graceless sprawl on the edge of the branch road, raising her eyes to the sight of a short, slender woman of maybe thirty monsoons, wearing a purple silk tunic and long skirt painted to look like the armour of a king. Her hair made a black halo around her head.

  “Ilan,” Daggad said stupidly, lowering his shield. Crimson and brown-clad Orinland warriors retreated in the direction from which they’d come.

  “Can she do that?” Imeris asked Eeriez softly. “Stop the hearts of thirty men?”

  “She can do anything,” Eeriez whispered, shrugging, “so long as she believes justice is served. Bring the dead back to life, I’ve heard, if they haven’t been reborn already.”

  “Of those who are called to the Hunt,” Ilan intoned, and Imeris struggled to remain alert, “which of you represents Ilanland?”

  “I do, Holy One,” said the blood-smeared soldier with the double-headed axe, picking his way along the path towards her through his wounded and drained fellows. An even bigger man, who must have been Ilan’s Bodyguard, blocked his approach, and the Hunter sank to his knees, bowing his head instead. “My name is Erth.”

  “Erth,” Ilan said, “I charge you to keep your company out of Orinland. Clearly, you aren’t welcome in that niche.”

  “That’s no surprise, Holy One,” Erth said. “It’s Orin who unleashed the creature we hunt. Made it from bodies of her own Servants, they say, shaped to look like a panther with the head of a boar. She made it to sniff out and rip apart her one-time Bodyguard, a man called Anahah.”

  Imeris couldn’t control the tremor of powerful, unspecified emotion that coursed through her. The body of a panther. The head of a boar.

  Anahah. Green-skinned chimera-child. Where will you hide? Who will shelter you?

  “Tell me more, Hunter Erth.” The goddess Ilan sounded surprised and displeased.

  “As you wish, Holy One. The Queen of Birds and Beasts is so consumed by rage that she doesn’t care who else is killed by g
etting in the creature’s way. Reports say it killed an old woman, a crafter of wooden clocks, in Eshland. She lived not far from Esh’s emergent. The god, nettled by the beast’s intrusion, caused a bloodwood tree to cage the giant creature. The creature came apart into many smaller pieces and was able to escape.”

  “Esh could not capture it, you say.” Ilan’s eyes narrowed.

  It comes apart, Imeris thought dazedly. It cannot be caged.

  “Holy One, it was the king of Airakland who called the Hunt. The creature came to Airak’s niche not two days after killing the clockmaker. It may have killed an innkeeper in Ehkisland along the way. In Airakland it killed a farmer and fivescore flowerfowl.”

  “How do you mortals hope to proceed?” Ilan sounded incredulous. “Wouldn’t it be better for this matter to be resolved by diplomacy, among deities? It sounds as if only Orin can choose to end the beast’s rampage. Perhaps you should help it by searching out this Anahah, the sooner that the creature may be unmade.”

  Imeris put her fingers to her mouth. Captain Oniwak came forwards, crossbow dragging awkwardly behind him, to kneel beside Erth.

  “Holy One,” he said, “you’ve seen how open Orin is to diplomacy at this time. Her disregard for casualties has raised Airak’s ire. Once the Hunt is called, it can’t be called off, as you know. We mortals hope to proceed by showing faith in the Hunt’s compass, ourselves, and your power and grace.” He dug in his leather satchel, holding up the device that had led him to Imeris. “The lightning god set us in motion, and we must follow the path to its end. The Hunt is complete only when we die or the creature is destroyed.”

  Ilan moved into her Bodyguard’s lantern shadow, close enough to take the compass. She turned it over in her fingers.

  “So,” she said. “You’ll take the list of names to the monument tree.”

  “That is my intention, Holy One,” Oniwak said.

  “I charge you, as I charged your companion Erth, to track and kill the beast only outside the borders of Orinland. If you agree, if you keep to the course of justice, which demands that a deity’s demesne is respected, I’ll be able to keep Orin’s human and nonhuman allies from tracking and killing you.”

  “We would be grateful for such protection, Holy One.”

  “You’d best find shelter.” The goddess of justice turned away, her Bodyguard by her side. The cloud of incense which had enveloped them faded, leaving the smell of insect-repelling smoke from some houses on the next tree.

  “You heard her,” Oniwak said, returning to the main cluster of Hunters and soldiers by the trunk of the purpleheart. “We’ll find an inn. I’ll see what I can find nearby, and if there’s nothing, we’ll have to evict some of these out-of-nichers from their hovels.”

  Daggad, Imeris, and the boy, Ibbin, watched him lope off along a branch road. Feeling no inclination whatsoever to evict anyone from any hovels, Imeris found a handful of leaves for cleaning her sword.

  “Evict out-of-nichers?” the boy repeated incredulously. “In Irofland—”

  “Spare us any more talk of Irofland,” Daggad groaned, and Ibbin glared at him and slunk away.

  “I am interested,” Imeris called after him, “in Irofland.”

  “You should have heard Captain Oniwak when we went to Eshland,” the fiddle player said. He stood behind them, and when Imeris turned, she found him turning a screw in the bow to loosen the tension on the dried, stretched tree bear tendons. “Insulting the god. Insulting the king. I thought he was going to start a war, just the two of us against the Thousand Wooden Soul-Eaters of Esh.”

  “There are no Thousand Wooden Soul-Eaters,” Eeriez corrected him. “The king of Eshland relies on his labyrinth for protection. Speak only what you have seen, Servant of Ukak.”

  “Very well,” the fiddler agreed, bemused, unlacing the leather case he’d had stowed across his back, which turned out to be empty. But his music and bees had served him well enough as a weapon, despite his being out of niche. “One who walks in the grace of Ukak saw not only the king of Eshland’s labyrinth but also the hatred on Captain Oniwak’s face as the device led us safely through it to the palace. What a shock to a man who walks in the grace of Ukak, one who cooperates in a kind and neighbourly fashion with his neighbours of Irofland, to hear Captain Oniwak brazenly brand his own neighbour’s monarch a coward and a thief in his own halls.”

  “Irofland and Ukakland are indeed the best of neighbours, their deities the best of friends,” advised Ingaget, the old man who had given them the potion of the winds, leaning wearily on the fiddler’s shoulder, “but over the past hundred years, the niches of wood god and lightning god have fought intense, bloody battles.”

  “The Battle of the Labyrinth,” murmured the adept from Ukakland, rubbing blood from the back of his bee-and-bear-carved fiddle with a square of felt. “I heard Captain Oniwak say his father fought there.”

  “And died there?” Imeris guessed, thinking with despair of how many inherited enmities swirled around her; it was a wonder the air wasn’t thick enough to choke them all.

  “No. Apparently he lost his sire when Understorians brought down the Temple of Airak.” The fiddler’s glance flicked briefly from Imeris to Daggad. “Many a wise, experienced commander was lost in that traitorous blow, sorely missed by junior recruits along the branch roads of Airakland. Captain Oniwak was the best of what they had left. He commands his own men well because his prejudices do not come into play.” The fiddler stowed his now-full instrument case, with no need to finish his thought. Imeris could finish it for him: Oniwak does not cooperate well with any but soldiers from his own niche.

  “You musta done somethin’ amazin’,” Daggad told Eeriez as Oniwak became distantly visible again, returning to the group, “to impress our Eshland-loathing captain. He picked you for his second.”

  “I stayed still,” Eeriez said silkily.

  “You stayed still.” The fiddler chortled. “He couldn’t see you. That little bone needle pointing right at you, and he couldn’t see you. And then you saluted him and told him he had the look of an ancient, worthy foe, and all of a sudden, he desperately needed you at his right hand.”

  Daggad nudged Ingaget with his knee. “What about you, old man? Any grudges I should know about? Any of your relatives killed off by Understorians?”

  “None that I know of. Stop that. You’ll bounce me off the branch, you exuberant man-child.”

  “What do you mean, none that you know of?”

  “I was a Servant of Odel.” The old man lifted his chin. He was still shorter than Daggad by a head. “Odel’s Servants don’t live in his Temple, mind. He sends them all over Canopy, to brighten the lives of children he knows will die, or to comfort the grieving left behind. I met a leaf cutter in Ulellinland whose child had fallen and comforted her rather more than either of us were expecting. It was all in the timing, see? Odel’s Servants lose their magic powers when they grow too old. I felt myself released from Temple service, and happily remained with my leaf cutter in Ulellinland.”

  “You cannot ’ave been so old, if you were doin’ all that comfortin’.” Daggad made a crude gesture for crowd approval before turning away from Oniwak’s approach. Ingaget was oblivious, gazing into the past with a brief, blissful smile.

  “Her name was Ettuf. She became my wife. I became a teacher. She loved to harvest in the rain. She tempted the monsoon, and one day the winds took her. Understorey took her. Perhaps Floor did, too. Who can say whether my leaf cutter lived or died? Who can say whether her son, who fell before her, lived or died?”

  “You could ask the wind goddess,” the fiddler said wryly. He flicked his gaze at the flask on Ingaget’s belt. “Her fortune-telling would’ve cost less than that priceless potion you share around with strangers.”

  “I don’t really want to know.” Ingaget rubbed his right eye with one blood-spattered fist. “They live merry and colourful lives in my head, in my sorry imagination. I’m certain they’re dead, and yet. If I have enemies
in the dark depths, I’d rather not know them.”

  “I have found a suitable inn,” Oniwak announced, coming to a halt in front of them.

  But Eeriez snored already in a heap by the side of the road, his back propped against the trunk of the tree. Daggad, sitting beside him, turned his shield so that he could stuff his bundle back inside. Then he held it, soft side upwards, and patted it like a pillow.

  “This spot looks good,” he said, picking flaking blood off his face and rummaging through the items on his belt for a water gourd, which turned out to be empty. “I vote we sleep ’ere.”

  “Take mine,” the Lakekeeper said, offering his gourd to Daggad. He was already curled up with the boy, Ibbin, at Eeriez’s other flank.

  “We’ll be murdered while we sleep,” Oniwak growled. “Robbed at the very least.” Imeris imagined she could still see the reflection of the comfortable and expensive inn in his eyes.

  Daggad slaked his thirst and returned the water gourd to the Lakekeeper. He yawned.

  “Dawn is almost ’ere. Oxor watches over us. Ilan as well.” He beckoned to Imeris. “Turn your backta mine, woman, if you want it protected. Your virtue is all you ’ave got worth stealin’. That sword is the shoddiest work I ’ave seen. From Understorey, is it?”

  Imeris told herself that the small rebellion against Oniwak’s authority was enough to satisfy her; she did not need to rise to Daggad’s taunts. She sank down beside the hulking slave, faster than intended as her muscles gave out.

  “She’s still got her spines,” Oniwak snapped. “At the very least they should be broken before we let down our guard with her in our midst.”

  “Do not be more of a fool than the fool that led us inta Orin’s trap, Oniwak,” Daggad said. “Those spines helped get me outta the palace. We might need them again. Better than the sword, as I said.”