Echoes of Understorey Read online

  Bare feet, shuffling carefully, came to a halt beside the partway-open door.

  “Captain Oniwak,” Ingaget said. “It’s nocturnal animals, gliders and such, getting into the kitchen. The door’s stuck. They’ll go away when they’ve finished feeding.”

  When Imeris was sure the soldier and the old man were gone, she rolled over and fished around under the bed for her adze. She closed the door. Felt for the markings she’d made with her spines when she’d measured the frame. The first time she brought the adze down and a curl of pale, sinus-prickling tallowwood came away, she waited, holding her breath, to see if any of her fellow Hunters would come to investigate.

  They didn’t.

  By the time Daggad returned with a barrow full of turpentine blocks and a note from a smith with a copy of the specifications for the blades together with a promise they’d be done on the morrow, Imeris had the first set of parallel grooves completely hollowed out.

  “How did you get past Ibbin?” Imeris demanded.

  “Gave ’im some bia. ’E wentta sleep.”

  “Gave him some bia?” She set the adze down and looked up at Daggad incredulously. “He cannot be older than … How many monsoons has he?”

  “Would you rather I tied ’im to the other side of the tree?” Daggad slid the blocks under the bed. They squealed like rusty hinges. Imeris winced. “’E was tired anyway.”

  “Oniwak will be angry with him.”

  “There is no more room under the bed,” Daggad observed, fists on hips.

  “Too noisy,” Imeris muttered. “Everything is too noisy. How can we get the others out of here tomorrow so we can build the gods-cursed trap?”

  Daggad looked at her. He quirked an eyebrow.

  “I ’ave an idea,” he said.

  * * *

  IN THE morning, Oniwak hollered, “Up, woman!” and pounded on the door.

  Imeris rubbed the grit from her grainy eyes and propped herself up on one elbow in bed. Daggad, however, was awake and ready. Before the Captain could barge in and notice the long channels chipped out of the wall to either side of the entry, the hulking man from Gannak went out to meet him.

  Stark naked.

  “Do not wake ’er,” Daggad boomed.

  Silence. Perhaps Oniwak was taken aback.

  “You slaves behave like rutting animals,” he said at last. “There is no time to waste. I have a message from Odelland. The creature has been seen there by Odel’s emergent.”

  Daggad had sent that message himself at the crack of dawn. Imeris could foggily remember him sneaking back to the room with the lantern and enunciating Oniwak’s name in a desperate whisper.

  Imeris wondered if Daggad had his hands behind his back, hiding the charcoal smudges on his fingers.

  “You go on ahead,” he said. “We can follow after you.”

  “Don’t bother! We four can travel to Odelland and back before nightfall. If we find and slay the creature, the better for this one who walks in the grace of Airak and the worse for you! You are both disgraces to the great name of Hunter. I should have your names removed from the monument tree!”

  When Daggad came back into the room, Imeris expected to see a smirk on his face. Instead, he seemed lost in doubt, sitting absentmindedly on the bed where she lay. The great sword rested on the sheet alongside her, parallel to her body.

  “Your plan worked,” she whispered encouragingly.

  “What if they find it?” Daggad stared out the window.

  “They will not.”

  “But you said the creature might go to Odelland. What if they kill it?”

  “Then I will help you to escape from the House of Epatut,” Imeris promised. “Now I think you should put your clothes back on.”

  “Am I distractin’ you?” There was the smirk. Imeris sighed.

  “As soon as the others have gone, find the smith and redeem the receipt. After you get back you can—” Daggad stuck his tongue out at her, false childishness, and she was struck again by the odd familiarity of the sigil there. “Show me your slave-marking. Hold your tongue out like that.”

  She sat up, held his face between her hands and frowned at the interwoven wheel, cocoon, and loom burned into his tongue.

  “Theen enuth?” he asked with his tongue between his teeth.

  “This is not possible,” Imeris murmured. “My sister Ylly had a silk blanket. A baby blanket. The edge was patterned like that.”

  Her stomach swooped. There was only one explanation. The baby blanket so jealously guarded by Ylly and later turned into a dress for her had not been Ylly’s at all.

  It was mine.

  My blanket.

  A silk blanket from the House of Epatut.

  She felt like she was falling. There was no up. There was no down. She tried to push Daggad away. He was swinging her around and around; he must be. But she couldn’t make him stop and eventually the spinning room slowed down and stopped.

  “She dropped you off the edge of the silk market, eh?” Daggad said sympathetically.

  Imeris hunched over the edge of the bed and retched violently.

  It was the same spot where Ibbin had evacuated his gut the night before.

  TWENTY-SIX

  IMERIS SQUATTED on her heels in the gloom, guarding the greased pair of pins pushed into the wall.

  It was an hour past sunset. Oniwak and the others had arrived back from Odelland empty-handed, to Daggad’s great relief. Eeriez and his Audblayinland contingent remained a day’s travel away. Imeris imagined how their interrogation of Middle-Father would go, and hoped Youngest-Father was being as vigilant below the barrier as Middle-Father was above it. Had he gone to visit them while he was hiding from the Hunt? Had they discussed added defences against the sorceress, and secrecy to avoid Loftfol? Forbidden Middle-Mother her indulgent shopping trips to the villages, Oldest-Mother her healing jaunts, and Youngest-Mother her merry music-making in the ti-houses?

  Over the window and over the door, the trap-blades in their wooden blocks waited, held high in their running grooves by strapleaf ropes; those ropes were connected to the pins whose handles rested within Imeris’s reach. When the creature returned, when it stuck its monstrous head into either one of the room’s entrances, Imeris would be waiting to pull the appropriate pin free. Top pin for the window. Bottom pin for the door.

  Daggad had enlisted Ay, the reluctant Lakekeeper, in the scheme. A pair of beheadin’ machines, I suppose you could call them, Daggad had explained, scratching his stubble. One at each entrance. The disgruntled Servant of the rain goddess now stood watch at Southeats with the instruction not to alert Oniwak upon the monster’s arrival.

  Only at some good indication of the beast’s beheading was the Lakekeeper to summon a deluge and wash the body away.

  Imeris should have felt calm. She’d completed the seven disciplines and the six flowing forms. Left her room, washed her face, eaten and drunk her fill, made her toilet. All she could think about, though, was the way Daggad had described her birth father and mother, the silk merchant Epatut and his wife, once called Igish, now subsumed by her husband’s House and called Wife-of-Epatut.

  You should have told me immediately, Imeris had said.

  I only just figured it out, Daggad protested in an echo of their earlier conversation. You are tall and thin like ’e is, and you ’ave got the wife’s little round nose, and they did lose their firstborn, but I never imagined even someone like ’im would name ’is own daughter after a silkworm. I bet ’e gave tribute to the insect god instead of Odel, and that is why you fell.

  Someone like him? What does that mean?

  I mean, Daggad had said, grinning, someone who counts ’is coins like a starvin’ slave counts nuts. Someone who praises the beauty of rare dyes but never the charms of ’is mate. And ’e does not hear ’er praises.

  What, then, Imeris demanded, are his other children called?

  ’E has got no fruit of his own loins, that one. Daggad shrugged. Except you, obviously, bu
t ’e wanted a son. Adopted ’is nephew, Epi. Taught the lad to love money and fine fabrics. I doubt the boy ’as ever held a weapon in ’is life.

  That is why they needed you, she said, but she’d stopped imagining Daggad standing guard outside the house. Instead, she was seeing herself as she might have been, a daughter of the House of Epatut, vain and pampered, draped in colourful silks, helpless against the onslaught of enemies.

  What enemies, she wondered as she waited to spring her trap in the Mistletoe Lodge, would a silk merchant have? One battle twenty years ago hardly seemed a reason for ongoing paranoia. Canopy was a world of wealth and leisure. So infrequently was it threatened, so rare was the intrusion of any unpleasantness, that all the Hunters who had ever been summoned to defend it could fit their names on a single gods-cursed tree.

  She felt a terrible surge of gratitude and affection for her fathers below the barrier. Oldest-Father, who had taught her about planes and pulleys, scaffolds and springs. Middle-Father, who had put a knife in her hands and shown her how to use it. Youngest-Father, who had given her wings.

  The merchant Epatut was nothing. Imeris was determined to see him separated from his precious fighting slave once the Hunt was over, whether Daggad himself drew blood or not. And she would put her head together with that of Ay the Lakekeeper, who knew of Kirrik and longed for something to be done about her. He would have Canopian resources to call upon that Imeris’s own sister had denied her, but that would bring the enemy closer to her final doom; if the man could call a flood to a rogue creature, perhaps he could drown a sorceress in monsoon waters so deep that Kirrik’s soul would never find the surface.

  A snore wafted from under the bed.

  Shifting gingerly away from the wooden pins, which were sunk arm-deep into the most solid section of wall yet so greasy they should come free in an instant, Imeris knelt by the bed, leaned down, and felt the scabbard of Daggad’s great sword with her fingertips. She picked it up and prodded the sleeping lump under the bed with the pommel.

  “Stay awake,” she whispered.

  A thud. The bed shuddered. It had sounded like skull against wood, like he’d tried to sit up.

  “Ow,” Daggad said softly, pitifully.

  He crawled out from his hiding place.

  “Get back in there,” Imeris breathed. “You might scare it off.”

  “I ’ardly think one extra sword will frighten it.”

  “Not your stupid sword. Your smell. How is it supposed to know I am here when bia and onions ooze out of your every pore?”

  “Somethin’ is movin’ out there,” he murmured, and instead of returning to his hiding place, he went to the window. Imeris eyed the naked blade of the trap hovering barely a third of a pace over his head and bit her lip. It wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in her own calculations. It was not. Nor did she doubt the ropemaker. It simply was not necessary to take the risk of standing right under the trap.

  “Monkeys,” Imeris said, listening to the hoots and scuffles. “Gliders, too. Looking for more food.”

  Even as she said it, a small furry shape, black with two white stripes down its back, slipped in through the window and climbed up the ceiling. It hung from tiny claws, whiskered nose twitching.

  “Shoo,” Daggad said, waving his arms, moving back inside the room. Imeris sighed to see him out from under the gleaming steel. The glider didn’t move.

  “Daggad,” she said, standing up suddenly, every muscle tense, the hair bristling on the back of her neck. Daggad picked up the mop, which he’d used to clean up again after Imeris had been sick, and poked at the animal with the handle.

  It fell.

  Twisted in midair.

  When it reached the ground, it was human, lean green shoulders curved around the knees, fingers splayed on the floor to either side of the feet.

  Anahah’s eyes, when he raised them towards Imeris, were the darker green version. His greenish-gold hair was a little ragged, his previously hard-muscled abdomen looking fuller and flabbier.

  “Audblayin’s bones,” Daggad said, too loudly. “The traitor.”

  “Hush,” Imeris warned him, dragging Anahah by the arm over to the place by the pins where the lantern light from the window wouldn’t shine on them directly. There, they crouched together. “Where have you been? What are you doing here?”

  “Hello, Imeris,” Anahah said. “I’ve been in Ulellinland. There’s enough foliage covering Ulellin’s emergent that I can stay comfortably camouflaged there. When I realised the pattern of the attacks, I came to check on you, though it seems there was no need. You’ve been chosen as a Hunter. You’ve made a pretty good trap. I thought the least I could do was lead Orin’s beast into it.” Daggad came and crouched beside them, big hands opening and closing like he’d like to choke Anahah to death, glaring unhelpfully from one companion to the unexpected other.

  “So you think it will work?” Imeris asked.

  “No.” Anahah smiled apologetically.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like to say. I could be wrong. In any case, it’s not far behind me. We’ll soon find out together.”

  “There is no ‘together,’” Daggad said. “She and I are Hunters. You are a—Audblayin’s bones, I do not know what you are. What in the goddesses’ names are you?”

  “I’m what they made me to be,” Anahah replied coolly. “As is the creature. But when you’ve killed it and I’m free of her, I’ll be what I please.”

  “You really think that when the beast is dead, Orin will give up searchin’ for you?”

  Anahah shrugged glumly and didn’t answer.

  The lamplight streaming through the window went out.

  Darkness doused all three of them. It covered everything inside the room. Imeris shuddered, reminded of the room where Aurilon had enticed her, where they had fought in utter blackness.

  “Do not move,” she breathed, meaning Daggad, but she could sense from the movement of air and the slight sound of scabbard being scratched across tallowwood that he was already gone. The arms of the tree groaned. Mistletoe twigs swished and crackled at the window.

  Hot breath, fouler than a mountain of onions, filled the guest room.

  There was a sound. A snarl, a snort, a grunt. It sounded like the room itself was grunting. Like they were already inside the mouth of a wooden monster that had only to close its jaws to crush them.

  No, Imeris thought, her hands on the pins. The jaws are metal, and they are mine.

  But she could not tell if the thing had put its head inside the room; she needed light. Her hands left the pins and fumbled through the small pile of her things beside the bed. There was a taper there, and flint. Why hadn’t she thought to keep a covered lantern with her?

  Before she could find her fire-starting tools, there came the sound of Daggad’s scabbard hitting the floor. Another, louder grumble. Daggad’s blade clattered on the wood. Daggad himself howled.

  Anahah’s green-gold skin began to glow. He stood between Imeris and the creature, facing away from her, drawing himself to his full, diminutive height. Daggad seemed to have been thrown back against the wall to one side.

  “Aaaagghh!” Daggad shrieked, holding both his hands up in front of his face. Something was wrong with them. They were fused together. Thick, black bristles sprouted from them.

  It was the same coarse hair that unevenly coated the grotesque face of the monster.

  The two long tusks almost touched the wall opposite the window. The snouted face was fractured like broken pottery, the way that Unar, the crossroads folk, and the crab-stick man had described. Each fleshy section of it bore a tiny pair of human eyes.

  Orin’s monster closed its stinking maw. It swallowed strings of drool. All of its eyes rested on Anahah. Little human noses and mouths began growing beneath each pair of eyes. Within seconds, the new mouths had opened.

  “Help us, Anahah!” they implored as one.

  “I can’t help you,” Anahah said, sounding heartbroken. />
  Imeris pulled out the upper pin.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE FREED trap-blade slammed down. The entire tree shuddered.

  For a horrible moment, Imeris feared she hadn’t made the blade heavy enough. That it would rest on the monster’s neck but not go all the way through.

  Then she saw a glint of metal. The blade had embedded itself, as designed, in the window ledge. Now the light from outside was blocked by the trap-blade, not by the creature’s bulk. The horrible head lay on the floor, gushing black blood in the golden-green light.

  “Don’t touch it,” Anahah shouted, pushing Imeris back as the head rolled to one side, the tusks now one above the other instead of side by side. He skirted the enormous obstacle, pulling Daggad back as well. His golden glow spread into Daggad’s transformed hands, reversing the magical change, allowing Daggad’s palms and forearms to come apart.

  The head stopped rolling, but the movement in the room didn’t stop. Six semihuman faces in their semiseparate lumps of meat wriggled and screamed. A sudden rainstorm roared outside the window, beyond the blocking fallen blade. Oniwak’s voice raised itself in the hallway. Imeris wondered how long it would take for the head to die.

  Then six lumps of meat separated themselves from the inert ivory of the tusks. The upper tusk clattered down onto the lower one. Imeris shouted a warning to Daggad. Bulging in places and shrinking in others, the meat lumps flailed until they were upright, rough human shapes. Garbled speech issued from mouths choked by black tongues. The left or right sides of their bodies still covered in boar-bristles, they lurched, their other halves naked, skinless muscle and sinew. Imeris couldn’t tell if they had been Canopians or Understorians.

  Daggad’s sword was lost. Imeris felt her spines tremble in their sheaths, but she feared closing with it in the face of its power to absorb and transform.

  Clarity. The yellowrain longbow she had bought was in her hand. Without taking her eyes from the pieces of head that stumbled towards her on malformed feet, she stepped through the bow and strung it. She snatched a handful of arrows from the bed.