Echoes of Understorey Page 20

  “‘Bird brought news of an attack in Audblayinland,’” Daggad read out again over Oniwak’s shoulder, and Imeris’s heart leaped. Audblayinland! Middle-Father! “‘Audblayin’s Bodyguard met the beast outside the Garden Gate. Wards repelled it. The Bodyguard escaped by droppin’ down inta Understorey. We go to interview the Bodyguard.’”

  “We might as well get comfortable, then,” Oniwak said, crumpling the message in disgust. “Seems we’ll be waiting here a few days or more.”

  Daggad’s eyes were bright.

  “It is as you guessed,” he told Imeris. “The creature cannot go below the barrier.”

  “Or it wasn’t really after Audblayin’s Bodyguard,” Oniwak snapped.

  “Who’s brave enough to sleep in the room where the innkeeper was killed?” Ibbin jeered.

  “Nobody needs to sleep there,” Ingaget said reprovingly. “We’ve the whole place to ourselves.”

  “I will sleep there,” Imeris said. Leave my family alone, beast. If you’re following me, come and find me. She wanted to laugh. Hunted below the barrier by Kirrik and the students of Loftfol. Hunted above the barrier by Orin’s monster.

  And they called her a Hunter.

  “I will sleep with you,” Daggad drawled. “You do not wanta be alone if the creature comes back.”

  Imeris stifled her immediate instinct, a scathing response. She really did want to be alone when the creature came back.

  But she might not be able to set her trap without Daggad.

  “We’ll set a watch for the creature,” Oniwak said. “Southeats might be the best vantage point. Any sign of the creature, put a handful of popping nuts into one of Airak’s lanterns and say my name. I’ll keep the lantern by my head. The noise will be sure to wake me. Boy, you can take first watch.”

  Ibbin shifted his feet guiltily. He pointed at Daggad.

  “He told me we were allowed to eat them.”

  Oniwak glared.

  “That wasn’t table salt they were coated in. It was signalling salt, to make coloured flames.”

  Ibbin gazed at the Captain for a long moment in wide-eyed uncertainty.

  Then he doubled over and vomited on the floor.

  “Now I really don’t want to sleep here,” Ay murmured, holding his robes away from the colourful bile, exiting the room in disgust. Ingaget and Oniwak followed him. Ibbin peeled a bit of bark from his shirt and used it to wipe his mouth. Daggad, struggling to contain his amusement, went for a bucket and mop.

  “How can a child be the greatest hunter in Irofland?” Imeris asked, at the same time as Ibbin asked, “How can a woman be the greatest hunter in Odelland?”

  They laughed together.

  “I’m a baker’s son, like I told you,” Ibbin said. “Got very good at catching feathertailed gliders in my hands for my mother to put in the pies. Lots of little gliders in Irofland. They drink the nectar. Real sweet, glider flesh, with plenty of fat.”

  Imeris was impressed. The fist-long gliders were extremely quick. It was a struggle to simply keep an eye on one, much less to catch it. Flowers were few enough in Understorey, but she couldn’t imagine catching a glider without a trap.

  Daggad came back with the mop and started cleaning the floor. His back was turned to Imeris, but a wheeze of laughter escaped him at the sight of the multihued spew.

  “I fell when I was a baby,” Imeris said to Ibbin. “My birth mother was bumped by a beewife in the silk market. A she-demon cared for me until three fierce hunters, brothers, found and raised me.”

  Daggad stared at her, mop abandoned.

  “Audblayin’s bones,” he swore.

  “I would rather,” Imeris said, “you did not use that expression. She is my sister, you see.”

  Ibbin and Daggad looked at each other. They looked back at Imeris.

  “So that’s how you can fight,” Ibbin said. “You’re half goddess yourself.”

  “No. A woman does not have to be a goddess to be a fighter. There is another woman fighter in Odelland who has beaten me many times.” Imeris went to the window and began measuring it as Oldest-Father had taught her, using the length between the base of her middle finger and elbow as one-third of one pace or one-sixth of one body length. “But Daggad tells me the Bodyguards all go into hiding when a Hunt is called. At least, that explains how he was chosen.”

  Daggad guffawed.

  “Seems the Bodyguard of Audblayin runs away to Understorey often.”

  “He is my middle-father,” Imeris said with disdain, “and no coward. He has killed a chimera.” She didn’t turn around to check, but she guessed from their silence that Daggad and Ibbin were sharing glances again.

  When the vomit was mopped up, Ibbin departed to take his place in Southeats. Imeris, alone with Daggad, her measuring complete, gave him the money she had remaining.

  “Before you get undressed,” she told him, “there are a few things you must find for me and bring back here, or at the very least put in orders for them to be made. I could not carry them myself. Two curved axe-blades, each two and one-third paces wide. Set into heavy hardwood blocks, a finger width short of two palm thicknesses deep, so they will fit into the grooves I will gouge tonight with the adze you will buy and bring me. A good sharpening stone also. And rope. I will need ten coils of palm-thickness strapleaf. Grease for the grooves. A block and tackle and two half-pace belaying pins with eye-bores. The money is not enough, I know. The landlady kept her coins in a chest dangling from a chain down her private lavatory. Steal them. If the beast is travelling from Audblayinland, we may have enough time.”

  “Enough time for what?” Daggad stood frozen in the act of unbuckling his sword harness and laying the monstrous weapon down on the bed. It was fairly loose, anyway, to aid in the necessary two-handed draw; only a sword shorter than the arm could be drawn single-handed from the back.

  “Setting a trap for the monster,” she said.

  “What do you mean? We are not trappers. We are trackers. Hunters.”

  “Yes, of course!” Imeris said, throwing her hands up in the air. “No plan is needed. When we find the beast, we will each rush at it with our various preferred methods. Oniwak will shoot it with his crossbow. You will swing your great sword. Ay will call the rain, and Ibbin will pounce on it with his bare hands. Irrafahath and Ingaget will stick it with their short swords, Eeriez will poison it, and I shall put a pace-long arrow through one of its twelve eyes. So what if it does not die? We can surely expect the goddess of justice to appear again to save our skins!”

  Daggad sat down on the bed.

  “We ’ave each worked alone,” he said. “We ’ave each laid our enemies low. Each of us believes our own method is best. Each of us believes we will be the one to kill the creature single-handed and bask in the glory. But not you.”

  “Not me.”

  He blinked.

  “I was there when the Godfinder spoke,” he said. “I was afraid when she told ’ow it broke apart and re-formed. You wanta build a trap with a blade two and one-third paces wide? You wanta cut off its head, knowin’ that it ’as parted head and shoulders before and survived?”

  Imeris put her fists together and pulled them apart.

  “I want to keep its head and shoulders parted. The wooden blocks will see to it. I want Ay waiting outside to bring the rain and send the body down below the barrier. I will speak to him about volunteering for the watch at Southeats.”

  “Captain Oniwak might not—”

  “To Floor with Captain Oniwak!” Imeris trembled with anger. “He is as stupid as he is blind. I am asking you to help me, not him.”

  “Sounds like tellin’, not askin’.” Daggad grinned. “I am usedta that. I am a slave. But I remember ’ow it was before.” He stood up. Moved closer. Reminding her of his physical strength. He was so tall. His shoulders were so wide. He blocked out the lantern light from the mistletoe window. Imeris stood her ground. “I was born in Gannak. It lies below Audblayinland, but you know that already. When I
was a barely a man, a Leader of Loftfol found a breach in the barrier and led two dozen villagers of Gannak through. Most of us died. The rest became captives of the king of Audblayinland.”

  “I am sorry.” Imeris lifted her chin, trying to stand taller.

  “I remember the Headman of our village,” Daggad went on, “goin’ to fetch the three grown sons of a woman called Moonoom. These three were famous hunters, and it was their obligation to raid Canopy.”

  “They were free,” Imeris said angrily. “They were under no such obligation!”

  “The Headman never returned. The rest of us went without ’im. Without those three famous brothers. I wondered what became of them. I wondered what happenedta my wife, havin’ lost me only weeks after we were wed. Slaves only get news from Understorey if someone else gets captured or they turn handy at trainin’ birds.”

  Imeris’s throat felt dry.

  “What was your wife’s name?”

  “Nin.”

  “She married again.” Poor Daggad. “She bore a daughter and called her Nirrin. Nirrin was my friend. She died.” Poor Nin. And poor Nirrin.

  At last, Imeris gave in to the urge to break away from him. She went to the window. Stared out at the lanterns. Kirrik was out there. The creature was out there. Students of Loftfol were out there.

  Anahah was out there.

  She wished she were the goddess of the winds, to search out with airy fingers all the ones she was so desperate to find. She wished she had killed Kirrik already, and everything was over with, and she could work out what it was she wished to do, and not simply what she had to do.

  “I saw her wedding headdress,” she said. “It had a sunburst carved in orange amber. Black and scarlet tail feathers, and the band was sky-blue silk.”

  When she turned her head, Daggad was sitting on the bed again, looking strangely loose, as if his legs had gone out from under him, his half-unbuckled sword forced high up above his head and tangled with his hair.

  “I made it for Nin,” he said. “Audblayin’s bones. It is an age since I was unmanned by this depth of feelin’.”

  Imeris twined her fingers in the hanging fronds of mistletoe and sighed deeply.

  “Feelings are not unmanly,” she said. “How did you leave the king’s service and become the property of the House of Epatut?”

  “They trained us to become warrior-slaves. We learned swordsmanship. Other path- and platform-based fightin’ styles unknown to the climbers and knife-wielders of Gannak. Some twenty years ago, there was a battle outside the gates of Audblayin’s Garden. I think you were not born. It was a raid led by the sorceress that Ay spoke of. His goddess, Ehkis, was killed.”

  “I was born,” Imeris said.

  “Anyway, the merchant’s house, the House of Epatut, was threatened by the fightin’. What hired guards it already ’ad turned out to be useless, somehow. Nobody told me exactly what ’appened, but the silk merchant wanted a stronger, more permanent presence outside ’is ’ome. Epatut bought me from ’is brother Otoyut, the king’s Master of Sword.”

  Imeris’s hands tightened into fists over the leaves and stems of the mistletoe, pulling slightly so that she could feel their connection to the host tree, the tallowwood, which was connected by its branch paths to other trees, and others.

  “Everything is connected,” she said. Then she laughed.

  The raid in which Daggad had become a captive was the one her three fathers had narrowly avoided. The threat to Audblayinland, which had seen Daggad sold to the merchant, was the very same sorceress, Kirrik, who had killed both the rain goddess and Nirrin, the daughter of Daggad’s wife.

  “What makes you so sure,” Daggad asked, “that the monster will return ’ere? To this room? What do you know that Oniwak does not?”

  “Orin’s creature is hunting me,” Imeris answered, pulling so hard that some of the mistletoe broke away in her hands. “That is why I will not risk spreading my smell further among innocent people. I sheltered the traitor Anahah in this very room. The creature has my scent. It has visited all the places I have been, except for Odelland. There, I trust that Odel’s Bodyguard, Aurilon, can turn it away. I pray that she can turn it away.” Imeris let go of the mistletoe.

  She turned to find Daggad on his feet again, bristling with fury.

  “You coulda spoken of this before.”

  “I only just figured it out!”

  “You coulda spoken of this before we went to Orinland! Before that poor Servant of Atwith fell!” Daggad drew his great sword over his shoulder, awkwardly, because the harness was half undone, and when his right and left hands went for the hilt and scabbard respectively, they found it at the wrong angle. “Tell me now ’ow to find the man Anahah. Let me slay ’im and ’ave this whole matter finished with.”

  Imeris’s eyes narrowed. Her spines tingled.

  “You heard Oniwak,” she said. “The Hunt does not end with Anahah’s death. It ends with the killing of the beast. It was Orin who killed the death god’s Servant, not I.”

  “Do you not know what I—” He clamped his jaw shut, but Imeris goaded him.

  “No, I do not know what you have been promised if you are the one to slay the beast,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Freedom.” Daggad’s face was white; his lips trembled. Fighting for his life against Orinland soldiers had not roused such emotion in him. “To see my wife again.”

  “Lies,” Imeris snapped. “A fighting slave who slays a demon becomes even more valuable. You are an investment to them.”

  “You are a—I do not even know what you are. Friendta those who enslave the folk who were good enoughta raise you when you fell. I do not know the word for that, but it is repulsive.”

  Imeris felt the blood draining from her own face. She tried to speak, but no words came out. For a long moment, they stared at one another, breathing hard.

  “I cannot give you back your broken spines, Daggad,” she said at last. “I would not supply you with Anahah’s whereabouts even if I knew them. I can give you the beast’s head, if you will go into Ehkisland and find the items I have described.”

  Daggad swallowed. He shrugged his harness off the rest of the way and sheathed his sword. Then he slung it back over his shoulder again and began tightening the buckles.

  “You ’ad better be right about the trap,” he said.

  “There is something else I may be right about, and that is the creature’s intelligence. Do not let the others see you.”

  “Are you mad? How can I bring a couple of man-sized blades—”

  “In a barrow. Or lowered in a net from an overhanging branch. In a fruit basket full of sex slaves. I do not—”

  “What is so wrong with the others knowin’ about the trap? With being prepared? We are all Hunters together—”

  “You said it yourself,” Imeris said flatly. “Each Hunter seeks glory for himself. I cannot risk this chance. The adze first, Daggad. So that I can start preparing the window and the doorway.”

  Daggad shook his head with something like awe.

  “Very well, Imeris. Or should I call you Imerissiremi? The adze first.”

  He swaggered back out into the night.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  DROWSING BY the door, Imeris dreamed of Horroh.

  They faced one another in one of the training halls at Loftfol, darkness and the sounds of the monsoon all around, the floor beneath them polished by generations of students’ bare feet. The river that ran through the school roared. Rain punched at flat leaves. It gurgled as it drained through bark crevices. One side of Horroh’s grub-white, shaved head was lit. One doughy cheek. The iris of one eye, such a pale grey that it was almost white, around a pupil dilated by the dark.

  Do not let them tell you that your skin decides what you are, Horroh said. He gripped her right palm in his, holding her forearm up so that her extended spines shone yellow in the light of the tallow candle. This is what you are. An Understorian warrior. A student of Loftfol. My student. If you
ever forget, let your spines remind you.

  Imeris blinked; found her spines smeared with blood. She looked up at Horroh, but his grip was loosening. His throat gaped open, striped red and white and black where the windpipe still held the memory of his last words.

  The tallow candle flickered and went out.

  Imeris’s dream went with it.

  She sat up on the floor in the Mistletoe Lodge, sweating and shaking. Daggad crouched beside her, an adze in his hand.

  “No time for sleepin’,” he whispered, grinning. “Make sure not to wake the others.”

  Imeris clutched the curved cooper’s adze with both hands. It was heavy, made of floodgum and steel. The noise would be terrible. She would have to mask it somehow. If only she were the Godfinder and could carve the channels by the sides of the door and window with magic.

  Imeris pulled off her boots and armour. On quiet feet, she crept past the other rooms into the dead innkeeper’s kitchen, sighing with relief as she sized it up.

  The kitchen window faced away from Southeats, where the watch was being kept.

  Imeris found a clothesline. A cupboard full of wooden cutting boards and pots. Sealed gourds of magenta cherry jam. She tied the pots and boards to the end of the clothesline, smeared everything with jam, and dangled it out the window.

  Shoving several wedges under the kitchen door so it was effectively locked from the inside, she then used her spines to climb out the kitchen window and into the closest empty guest room.

  She’d been back in her own room only a few minutes when the first crash of boards and bowls against the tree sounded. Imeris hid the adze under the bed. She curled up on top of it, turning her back to the door, hiding her small satisfied smile.

  The boards clacked and rattled again.

  More. Louder.

  Monkeys and gliders screamed, fighting over the jam-smeared boards. Every time an animal tried to make off with the treasure, the clothesline brought them up short and the utensils banged back into the side of the tree.

  “What is that racket?” Oniwak grumbled from the hallway. Imeris heard her door creak open a hand-span. “Useless woman. Sound asleep.”