Echoes of Understorey Page 22

  At such short range, her first pace-long arrow passed all the way through the chest of one of the pieces. It struck the piece behind, sticking into the neck.

  “Hearts can regrow,” Anahah shouted. “But not minds.”

  Imeris put her next arrow between the eyes of the closest miscreation. As the first arrow had, it passed through, but this time, the thing fell to the floor. It didn’t move again.

  Imeris shot smoothly, one arrow after another, with the elbow of her drawing arm hard up against the door. The second trap blade hovered overhead, gleaming in Anahah’s glow just out of her field of vision. Daggad swore and dropped to the ground to avoid being hit by a pass-through.

  The meat pieces were all down. Imeris found herself with one final drawn arrow, searching for a target, finding none, the fletching soft against her ear.

  Behind her, the door flew open. It swung her elbow around. The nock of the arrow escaped her grip.

  “What is going on?” Oniwak shouted in sudden darkness.

  Imeris, knocked to her knees behind the door, clutched her longbow and tried not to replay in her mind what she’d seen before Anahah’s glow had gone out.

  Her last arrow had struck him. But where?

  Hearts can regrow. But not minds.

  Ibbin peered around Oniwak, holding a lantern. In the bright, blue-white light, Daggad and Imeris stared at one another in horror. Anahah was nowhere to be seen. He was invisible, somewhere.

  Which means he is alive. He is alive!

  “Is it dead?” Oniwak’s bark was imperative. Insistent. “How have you done this? Why was I not told of this?”

  “The creature’s body,” Imeris said hoarsely. “What has happened to the body? Did the Lakekeeper wash it away?”

  Oniwak only stared imperiously down at her until Ingaget squeezed past him, holding his gourd flask with the potion of the winds out to her.

  “The body,” the old man said with an expression of mild concern, “is—”

  But Imeris did not learn from him the fate of the monster’s body, for the second pin came silently loose from the wall. The beheading machine cut Ingaget and his parchment stole into two halves, sealing Oniwak and Ibbin outside the room.

  Imeris cried out involuntarily. She crawled to the still-trembling block and felt for Ingaget’s body. What she felt and smelled made her want to retch. There was no way for him to be revived; not even Unar’s skill could heal this.

  She, Daggad, and Anahah were alone in the dark again.

  “Anahah,” she shouted, and Orin’s ex-Bodyguard flickered to a lower grade of brightness like a half-crushed glowworm. Imeris looked quickly away from what remained of Ingaget, swallowing hard. Anahah lay on his back by the window. “Anahah, have I killed you, too?”

  “I’m here,” he whispered. There was no sign of the arrow. It must have passed through him. A wound in his chest slowly closed; the ability to change was even more useful than it seemed. “I’m not dying.”

  “Give me that potion-a winds,” Daggad croaked, crawling through the congealing blood to the place where the gourd had fallen from Ingaget’s papery hand. Imeris tried to pass it to him but found she couldn’t move. Her knees still shivered with the shock of the second blade falling. Her eyes skittered away from what was in front of her.

  “He did not know about the trap,” she said as Daggad swigged from the gourd. “We did not warn him. I thought they would try to stop me. They do not see a Hunter when they see me.”

  “Get up,” Daggad said, stoppering the gourd, shoving her shoulder. “Can you ’ear that? Somebody is fightin’ the monster’s body out there. We ’ave to help them.”

  “We cannot get out, Daggad,” Imeris said flatly. “That was the entire purpose of the trap, to keep the head and body from joining back together.”

  Daggad staggered around the fallen mounds of flesh over to the window. There, he picked up the adze and started chopping at the side of the groove that held the turpentine block. Chips of tallowwood flew. Daggad’s huge muscles bunched; his great arms swung. Water and blue-white lantern light started coming through the window at the side of the frame where he worked.

  Imeris crawled over to Anahah. She touched his cheek. There was blood on her hand, and it made a brown streak on the glowing greenish-gold. His eyes had been closed; they opened at her touch, the irises palest green.

  “Why did the creature ask you to help it?” she asked.

  “They were my fellow Servants,” Anahah said faintly. “Orin thought they should have predicted my so-called treachery. She punished them. She used them to form the beast.”

  Imeris shook her head and said nothing.

  “I must leave Ehkisland, Imeris.” Anahah tried to sit up, but he looked dizzy and sick. Imeris helped him. “What the creature knows, Orin knows. She knows I’m here, that her creature’s between me and Ulellin’s emergent, my safe haven. I shouldn’t have come.”

  Imeris gripped his hands.

  “Below the barrier,” she said. “That is the way you must go back to Ulellin’s emergent.”

  Anahah tried to pull back.

  “My magic will not work below the barrier.”

  “Nor will the creature’s.”

  “No,” he admitted. “But I’ll fall.”

  “I will show you what to do. I will take you to the tree. I know it.”

  Close to Loftfol. Close to the last place the sorceress Kirrik was seen, by my fathers and me.

  Could it even be the same tree?

  “Imeris,” Daggad said, peering through the gap he’d made in the window frame. “Anahah. Come and see this.”

  Imeris didn’t want to go.

  “Any of that potion left?” Anahah asked.

  Imeris brought it to him. Moments later, revived, he pressed the gourd on her and she accepted a swallow of nothing, a memory of Ingaget’s gentle generosity. Somehow, she kept it down. Anahah eased himself to his feet and helped her up beside him. They squeezed beside Daggad to stare through the slit he’d made in the ruin of the arched window.

  Raindrops caught in the lantern light like stars falling from the sky. Oniwak perched on a lateral branch at Southeats, sending crossbow bolts into the headless body of the creature as quickly as he could reload.

  The headless, four-footed panther shape batted blindly at the men who stood before it on the branch road connecting Lodge and market. Water fell from nowhere, sheeting over the soggy monster’s sides but not dislodging it from the path. Imeris saw Irrfahath at the forefront, swinging his bronze sword, and the Hunter from Ilanland with his double-bladed axe, chopping at the creature’s neck.

  Eeriez and his company had arrived back from Audblayinland.

  “Eeriez poisoned one of the segments of it,” Imeris guessed. A chunk of flesh at the monster’s hindquarter spasmed uncontrollably. She couldn’t see the Hunter from Eshland, did not expect to see him, considering his expertise at camouflage. As she watched, though, the shivering section of flesh shrivelled and fell away from the whole. The two pieces on either side of it closed seamlessly up together.

  Yet the creature was made smaller.

  “I suppose they will finish it without us, after all,” Daggad said, sounding part relieved, part disappointed.

  Then Orin’s monster’s padded forepaw connected with the swordsman. Imeris’s breath caught, but Irrafahath was not swept into empty air. Instead, he stuck to the paw and was lifted, screaming, for the split instant it took for him to turn hairy and become absorbed.

  A new, tiny, human-like head sprouted from the stump of the monster’s neck.

  “No,” Daggad gasped.

  “A terrible fate,” Anahah said quietly.

  Imeris watched, sickened, as two swift blows by the monster earned it two more pairs of eyes on its bubbling, expanding skull. Erth, the Hunter from Ilanland, and Ay, the Lakekeeper, were no more.

  The rain stopped. Silence rang in Imeris’s ears. The air above the creature emptied, and the last streams of water fell
away from the hairy black hide. Ay was gone, his powers extinguished. He would drown neither the creature nor Kirrik.

  “You can save them, Anahah,” Imeris said, gripping his hand, pleading. “Just like you saved Daggad. You can bring them out again—”

  “I can’t, Imeris.”

  Omt, the soldier from Akkadland, was the final Hunter to be absorbed. His fine mace fell from his hand; it was the last part of him to remain recognisable. A mouth opened in the monster’s new head, speckled with the teeth of four men. It made a sound like a lake draining.

  Now that it could see, it lumbered all the way into Southeats. Finding Ibbin, lantern in hand, Oniwak, and Owun, the Hunter from Ukakland, out of reach, it scooped up a trio of howling shopkeepers who had been cowering behind their barrows.

  “We took seven from it,” Daggad said. “It took seven back. Will it come for you, now, traitor?”

  “I think,” Anahah said, “it’s more likely that the Servants of Ehkis will come to drive it away. It ate their Lakekeeper. The rain goddess will have felt that.”

  “She is a child,” Imeris said. She had let go of Anahah and was hugging herself. “The Lakekeeper said Ehkis was a child.”

  “Even a child goddess can deny water to the niche of Orinland if her anger is roused,” Anahah said. “Nothing enrages a goddess like the use of another deity’s power in her niche. You recall Ilan’s anger. The creature can’t stay.”

  As Anahah predicted, the monster didn’t turn back towards Mistletoe Lodge. Instead, it pushed deeper through the market, headed all the way through and out the other side. Oniwak daringly climbed down from his perch to continue firing as it retreated.

  A dozen crossbow bolts stuck in its backside. The monster ignored him, though Imeris’s last glimpse of it hinted at the loss of another dead component, defecated over the edge like the dung of a skittish tapir.

  “No use,” she called out to him, knowing Oniwak couldn’t hear her, suspecting he wouldn’t heed her even if he could. “It will only take another innocent to replace whatever parts of itself it loses.”

  Anahah turned to look pointedly at the tusks on the floor.

  “It can’t replace those,” he said. “This hasn’t been a complete disaster.”

  “’As it not?” Daggad said angrily. “The Hunt is over! Barely ’alf of us are left alive!”

  “What are they?” Imeris asked.

  “They’re Orin’s own bones,” Anahah said, “from a time when her shape was wilder and greater in size but much less mutable than it is now. They are valuable. Powerful. If we’re going below the barrier, we should take them; they’ll lose none of their potency there, and if nothing else, we can trade them.”

  “I cannot go below the barrier,” Daggad said. “I am a slave of the ’Ouse of Epatut. Though with the beast following you, if I wanta kill it, I shall clearly need to stick closeta you.”

  “You are a slave of the House,” Imeris said, “and I am a direct descendant of that House. Anahah, I am the owner of this slave, can you free him if I ask you to?”

  Anahah’s worn, frightened face brightened into a slow smile.

  “Yes.”

  He turned to Daggad, put his thumb to the taller, bulkier man’s lips, and pressed lightly. Daggad jerked back with a muffled cry. His eyes widened and he put out his tongue.

  It was no longer marked. He put his fingers to it to feel the sudden smoothness, but there was another change left behind by Anahah’s deceptively small movement.

  A black thumb-imprint stained Daggad’s lower lip.

  “What is that?” Imeris asked.

  “A reminder,” Anahah said. “Let me tell you a story.”

  “No time for stories!” Daggad objected, but Anahah went on.

  “When I was first made Orin’s Bodyguard, she locked herself in seclusion for three days, telling me to go, to discover the limits of my new abilities. I transformed into a swamp harrier. I climbed high into the sky, feeling the sun blaze across my feathers, and when I spotted a red bit of flesh in the branches of the trees, I dived down on it so fast that my blood sang.”

  “Was it a trap?” Daggad guessed, and Anahah’s smile widened.

  “A flowerfowl farmer,” he said. “My feet were caught by the snare. I thrashed around until he seized me by the neck. I was going to transform, to teach him a lesson, but then he whispered what a shame it was, that my chicks would starve to death in my absence, and that he would free me.”

  “Sentimental fool,” Daggad said.

  “I agree with you, Understorian. To protect himself and his interests, the farmer should’ve killed me, but he didn’t. And I remembered to send a handful of wild cock-birds his way the next monsoon to increase the vigour of his flock. They will ask you, in Gannak, to lead them back to Canopy for revenge.”

  “You want me to remember this acta generosity. As if one kindness could earn forgiveness for all I ’ave lost.”

  “Canopy no longer has a hold on you,” Anahah said, “just as the farmer no longer had a hold on me. He could only hope that I wouldn’t return to kill again. I can only hope you’ll leave the House that used you to its own devices.”

  Through the gap, Imeris watched Oniwak on the platform outside Southeats. Ibbin climbed down beside him, as did the Hunter from Ukakland.

  At last, she was able to pick out the poised, utterly still shape of the poisoner, Eeriez of Eshland. His armour and tunic were not even dirty.

  “You ’ad better ’ope,” Daggad said, picking up the adze, “that this tool gets us out before newsa this night’s farce reaches the House of Epatut.”

  Oniwak spun at the sound of chopping. Across the gap between trees, Imeris could feel his stare.

  “Woman,” he bellowed. “Can you hear me, whore—you and the slave you permitted to use you? You’d better escape from there while I’m finding my Hunters a healer! Because if I see either of you again, I’ll kill you!”

  He loosed a crossbow bolt in their direction, but his weapon was much less accurate than a longbow.

  The missile spent itself aimlessly in the nothingness surrounding Southeats.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  WHILE DAGGAD chopped at the window frame, Imeris dozed.

  Not in the bed—that was taken up by half of Ingaget, whom she had set sliced side down and covered with the blanket. It was Canopian to roll corpses into the abyss; Understorian to seal them into tree hollows.

  Imeris suspected that after Orin’s creature had visited the lodge a second time, not only would nobody be in any hurry to return to it, but Southeats might also be abandoned. Ingaget and the slain, deformed remnants of Orin’s Servants were as good as sealed in.

  She slept in the sole unblooded corner.

  Horroh came into her dream, again.

  Whole.

  Eyes burning with displeasure.

  They stood in the training hall at Loftfol. The sound of falling water was the same as before. When he opened his mouth, Horroh spoke with Oldest-Father’s voice.

  You are the oldest child, Imeris. You have no choice but to look after your sister and brother when I am gone. They are dreamers. They do not like to work with their hands. You are the only chance they have to survive with the sorceress out there searching for all of us.

  Imeris jerked awake.

  Anahah knelt beside her, left hand on her shoulder, expression earnest.

  “It’s time to go.”

  The boar tusks in his right hand no longer looked like tusks.

  “You have changed them,” she said groggily, blinking. “By magic.” One ivory sword was longer than the other. Both were single-bladed and slightly curved. The longer sword had a hilt carved with birds. Leopards adorned the shorter sword. “But ivory does not cut, Anahah.”

  “These weapons will,” he answered earnestly, “but only when brandished by human hands. They won’t miss. Neither to parry nor to strike. And they can be used by adepts and nonadepts alike.”

  Daggad guffawed.

 
“If they are so great, why not take them yourself and slay the creature right now?”

  “They won’t work against the wild,” Anahah said. “Only against mortal men and women. Domesticated beasts, perhaps. We’ll barter the larger one for Understorian coin, weapons, ropes, food, whatever else we need. The shorter one is for you, Imeris.”

  Imeris took the white sword that had been a boar tusk.

  “Why give me a sword that will fail against my enemy?”

  “Don’t you have other enemies?”

  Imeris gazed into his glowing green eyes. Kirrik is my enemy, but even a sword that never misses cannot parry her magic power. Loftfol is my enemy, but I do not wish them ill; I will avoid them if I can.

  “A weapon like this,” she said, “would certainly surprise the Bodyguard of Odel. Yet I wonder if Aurilon is not too wild for the blade to become sharp against her crocodile skin.”

  Anahah smiled.

  “It wouldn’t do to seriously injure your future teacher, anyway,” he said. “Daggad’s made a hole big enough for us to get out. You said you’d show us the way.”

  When she poked her head out of the Mistletoe Lodge, Imeris saw two Servants of Ehkis on the platform outside Southeats. Sunrise was still several hours away.

  “You had better turn invisible,” she told Anahah, regathering the strong strapleaf ropes they had used for the trap and several other unused coils besides, taking a few moments while he transformed to expertly splice the ends together. She put the leather cap on her quiver to quiet the rustling of the fletches of her recovered arrows. “Daggad, follow as quietly as you can to the balcony below. The toilet will be the lowest part of the lodge, and it faces away from the food markets. We begin our descent there.”

  As the three of them slipped through the empty lodge, Imeris picked up one of Airak’s lanterns, some tally-paper, and charcoal from the hapless innkeeper’s study. She paused in the bathroom to set the lantern on the closed lid of the nearest toilet.

  “Servants of Ehkis are headed here,” Anahah reported, his disembodied voice issuing from just inside the arched window. “You have only moments before they enter the lodge.”