Echoes of Understorey Read online

Imeris scrawled out a message in her untidy handwriting. She opened the glass pane in the side of the lantern, thrust the message inside and cried out her brother’s name.

  The lantern flared. The message vanished. Imeris bit through her lip in an attempt to hold in a scream of pain.

  Her right hand was badly burned. It hadn’t happened to Oniwak when he’d done it. There had to be some trick to it, or some power bestowed on the soldiers of Airakland.

  “Are you mad?” Daggad asked, swiping the lantern with the back of his hand so that it flew out the window. He seized her by the wrist of the injured hand. “That was a fire-startin’ lantern. Not a cold one for light. Now you cannot climb without first salving this burn, or lose the dexterity of this ’and.”

  Imeris snapped her spines out angrily, barely missing him; he let go of her in a hurry.

  “I can climb,” she said through gritted teeth. “Onto the window ledge!”

  “I ’ave no spines!”

  “This is a tallowwood tree. My brother and my blood. Climb onto the window ledge, I said. I will show you what to do.”

  She sprang out the window ahead of him, ivory sword, quiver, adze, and longbow strapped across her back. She had to remember they were not wings. She had to remember the others could neither stick into tree bark nor, once they were below the barrier, fly. They were like children. She had to care for them.

  You are the only chance they have to survive with the sorceress out there searching for all of us.

  “Give me your great sword,” she instructed, dangling by the spines of her right forearm, reaching up with her left hand for the sword. Daggad reluctantly unbuckled it. Holding it by the harness, he let it dangle into her palm.

  Imeris thrust the sword, scabbard and all, horizontally through the bark of the tallowwood tree like a tailor putting a needle through cloth.

  “Anahah must cling to you, Daggad, monkeyback style,” she said. “All you need to do is hold one end of your great sword in each hand and do not let go.” One-handed, Imeris secured one end of the single spliced rope to the harness of the great sword. The other end, she tied to one of the slanting support timbers of the protruding bathroom. “This coil is three hundred body lengths long. That is more than enough to get us below the barrier, yet not so long that you will come to Floor. Wait for me when you reach the end of it.”

  “What is down there?” Anahah’s voice inquired. “Is it Loftfol?”

  “It is the village of Het,” Imeris answered, using her shin spines to swing her body to one side, making way for Daggad and his invisible rider. “There will be spies from Loftfol there, no doubt. We must keep ahead of them, while also keeping you below the barrier for no more than five or six hours at a time, lest you lose your arcane aura.” She would have gained an aura herself in the course of the Hunt, and must not let it escape her.

  “Sounds easy,” Daggad said, laughing, taking hold of the great sword, one hand fractionally ahead of the other.

  Vertical cords of grey tallowwood bark pulled away from the tree. The fresh bark was reddish-brown beneath. The gap that opened as the sword took Daggad’s weight was only a hand’s breadth, enough for the sword and its passengers to begin a slow slide downwards.

  Imeris watched as their speed increased. She sucked her bleeding lip into her mouth, trying to feel confident. The strapleaf rope would hold. The splices were good. There would be no defects in the fibrous bark. The strip would be continuous to the base of the tree. And Daggad was strong.

  He shrank away into darkness.

  Doubt gnawed at her. She couldn’t help but remember the moment her trap had ended the old man Ingaget. Images flashed before her eyes: her arms dangling, ungainly, upside down while her fathers battled the sorceress. Horroh had told her to trust her body, but it had betrayed her when she’d needed it most; she should have flown more, used her sword less, left her armour behind; if she’d been more Understorian, she would have known that. Her failure at Odel’s emergent. The stupidity of her attempt to send a message to Leaper; if she’d been more Canopian, she would have known that.

  Would the blond man with the birds be waiting in the village of Het?

  Imeris shook her head. There was no choice but to go on. She could hear footsteps falling in the passages of the lodge, most likely those Servants of Ehkis investigating the incursion of Orin’s wild magic into their mistress’s niche.

  Ignoring the terrible pain and dangerous tightening in her right hand, not wanting to add her weight to the strapleaf rope that safeguarded her unspined companions, she began to climb carefully down after them.

  TWENTY-NINE

  IN THE dimness of Understorey, Anahah lost his invisibility as well as his ability to glow.

  “Try to calm yourself, friend,” Imeris heard his soft voice saying, over and over, as she neared the end of the rope where he and Daggad dangled.

  “Is something wrong?” she called, her bottom lip scabbed and painful. Her arms and legs were covered in bark dust from the tallowwood tree. It was an hour or so since she’d last seen them on the other side of the barrier. She reached out to touch the rope with her left hand and found it jerking violently.

  Daggad’s body shook. His breathing stuttered, interrupted, as though his windpipe was being periodically squeezed by a huge fist, yet Anahah held him by the shoulders and not the throat.

  Daggad still held the sword in both hands.

  “Daggad,” Imeris said urgently. “Where is the pain? I can take you back up, but it will not be quick. What is happening to you?”

  As she spoke, she hung by her shin spines and freed the adze from her back. Less useful than an axe for splitting planks, she was nonetheless able to hack through the bark to the sapwood of the tree and bluntly batter until a piece resembling a plank splintered off into her raw and bloodied hands.

  She dropped the adze before she could make a wedge to stick the plank in.

  Careless. Hopeless. It seemed vital that he be able to sit or stand before the strength in his arms gave out and he fell down to Floor.

  “Daggad,” she said, trying to stay calm, “do you have a bore-knife? A skinning knife? Any kind of knife?”

  Daggad bucked and trembled and strained for breath.

  “Your arrowheads,” Anahah suggested. “I have nothing but my bare hands, and he can’t speak.”

  “Was he wounded on the way down? A branch? A sharp bit of bark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Imeris hung backwards from her shin spines, arching her back, loosening the cap that held her arrows in their quiver. It was a fool move—too impatient, but he is dying!—the arrows fell out of their upside-down leather cocoon, and she was lucky to snatch a single shaft out of the air before they were all lost.

  The point was less than a hand width long, its cutting edge quickly blunted against the bark. Imeris shouted with frustration, let it go when it stopped making headway, and finished the wedge with her aching forearm spines.

  At last, she was able to stick the splintered plank deep enough into the tree that it would bear Daggad’s weight. She and the ex-Bodyguard helped the huge Hunter into a sitting position, his legs dangling over the side of the plank. Anahah knelt beside him, but Imeris kept her weight on her spines.

  She put her bloody palms to his cheeks.

  “Daggad,” she said. “Look at me. Speak to me. What is happening to you?”

  “I cannot,” Daggad managed between gasps. “Be here.”

  “Why not?” Imeris loosened the straps holding his shield and cloth-wrapped bundle to his back. Her hands found no punctures in his chest or in his throat.

  “I am. The property. Of. The House of Epatut.”

  “No. Anahah lifted the sigil.”

  “There is. Other magic. Secret magic. They will. Not let. Me go!”

  “There’s no other magic,” Anahah said gently. “I promise you. You are free.”

  It was almost too dark for staring into people’s eyes, but Imeris took Daggad’s fa
ce between her hands again and tried it.

  “Look at me,” she repeated. “You are not theirs. You are no one’s but your own. Breathe in slowly. There is no magic to stop you. This is Understorey. Look at Anahah. Even a Servant of Orin has no power here.”

  Daggad exhaled a long, complete breath.

  He breathed in, normally.

  Out, and in.

  “It cannot be this easy,” he said, tears welling up. “It cannot be, or I could ’ave gone back to Nin twenty years ago.”

  “You are not weak,” Imeris said. “It is not your fault you did not have what you needed.”

  She peeled her bloody hands from his face, drawing all eyes to them.

  “We ’ad better find a spinewife or some other variety of ’ealer,” Daggad said, “to get you what you need, woman.”

  “I think there’s a bridge platform below us,” Anahah said. “My powers have abandoned me, but I can still see.”

  * * *

  THE SPINEWIFE of Het lived with three pet tree bears in a grey-barked poisonous milkwood tree.

  Imeris stood on the near end of the bridge. Its planks rattled as Daggad and Anahah crossed behind her. They had waited some hours for the Headman of Het to set the bridges, and then waited again for the trickle of busily visiting villagers to dwindle, so there would be no witnesses to their crossings.

  The spinewife’s home had a pair of painted wooden signs hammered outside the arched opening. One was the emblem of the viper, letting villagers and visitors alike know who lived there. The other read DO NOT FEED THE BEARS.

  “Seems safe,” Daggad said over Imeris’s shoulder.

  “My youngest-father has been here,” Imeris answered. “He told us stories about the bears.”

  “I don’t like standing here in the open,” Anahah said. “We don’t have long before our auras fade. Life in Understorey might be fine for you, but it would not suit one who, above the barrier, has true wings to fly.”

  The high entry to the tree dripped a constant patter of toxic white sap droplets. Below the two signs, a pair of folded umbrellas rested in a fixed wooden tray. A corresponding tray sat on the inside of the open arch.

  Imeris picked up an umbrella, opened it, and used it to keep the sap droplets off them for the few necessary strides. Then she folded it and set it in the second tray.

  She rapped with her knuckles on the inner door, a hinged panel of spiny plum carved in the shape of heliconia flowers. The empty track of a small stream ran beneath the door. Imeris supposed it flowed only in the monsoon.

  “Who is it?” a woman’s voice sang out.

  “A warrior. Bringing a candidate,” Imeris called back.

  “Eh?” Daggad spluttered behind her.

  Water rushed through the hand-wide channel at the bottom of the door. Impossibly, it flowed upwards over the surface of the wood panel, filling the places between the flowers. As the door swung back into the dwelling, the water continued running upwards, twisting into a thin silver stream and funnelling itself into the open tap of a barrel on a head-high shelf.

  A thin-faced old woman wearing silvery loincloth and breast bindings reached up and closed the tap. Then she closed her mouth, as though she had been singing, yet no sound had come out.

  “Fairly old for a candidate,” the spinewife said, eyeing Daggad, smiling a small, V-shaped smile at him before her eyes fixed on the leopard-carved hilt of the magical sword standing up over Imeris’s shoulder. “Let me wrap that in chimera skin before you go any deeper, my dear. It will interfere with my clocks, not to mention the implantation of spines. Oh.” Her gaze darted to Anahah’s burden. “You have more than one.”

  “Please,” Anahah said, offering her the bird-sword with a short bow. “I’d like to see those clocks. I knew a clockmaker, once.”

  “I knew a Canopian, once.” The spinewife’s pleasant tone stayed the same as she took the sword and wrapped it in precious, colour-changing cloth. “He’d been to visit a brothel in Het and stayed too long. He thought I could open the barrier for him and grew angry when I said that I could not. In the end, I had to kill him.”

  “Gentle healer,” Imeris said quickly. “Revered spinewife. The sword you hold is made from the ivory of an Old God. It is yours, if you will help us. This man”—she patted his arm—“Daggad, a former slave and warrior of Gannak, has broken spines and needs them implanted anew. He will also need steel spines for climbing until his arms and legs have healed. That is if we are to avoid the fading of Canopian magic, the fate of the man that you described.”

  The spinewife’s smile widened, and she tilted her head to one side.

  Imeris took a deep breath. She showed her burned, scabbed palm. “I have injuries. If you would see to them, I would be grateful. We need salt if you have any to give. Arrows, if you can tell me where they may be sold. Lastly, I would ask for a route to Gannak via Ulellin’s emergent. The bridges here are strange to me, and they say you have a copy of Eshland’s master map. I would avoid—”

  “Loftfol,” the spinewife said keenly. “You would avoid Loftfol.”

  Imeris licked her lips.

  “Yes.”

  “Items such as this”—she hefted the wrapped sword—“are in high demand at the Loftfol school. You would do better trading with them, unless you had some reason to avoid them. And you do have a reason, Imerissiremi, daughter of the man known here as Marram the Nightingale. Oh, yes. They search for you.”

  Imeris felt her spines quiver in their sheaths.

  She was exhausted, her hand felt on fire, and likely she would be unable to fight a spinewife’s magic. But she would try, rather than die here. She still carried the second, smaller, sword.

  “I am afraid I do not know your name, revered spinewife,” she said. “But I hope you can believe I am no traitor to Understorey. My father said that you found your bears as cubs in a trap and freed them. Perhaps you will allow the three of us to go free as well.”

  The spinewife stowed the sword in a drawer beneath a fine writing desk of purpleheart, completely unruffled.

  “I am Sariras,” she said. “You are safe from Loftfol here, Imerissiremi. Ten years ago, I heard your father play the thirteen-pipe flute. It was the sound of joy. A sound I will never forget.”

  * * *

  IMERIS, HER hand bandaged, examined the clocks while Sariras prepared Daggad’s new spines.

  The bears snuffled at her boots and bundles, their black-furred shoulders at Imeris’s hip-height. Their names were One-Eye, Stinky, and Nostrils, and their claws were filed so they wouldn’t splinter Sariras’s polished floor. When their bodies pressed against her, Imeris could feel their bones. It wasn’t long since the monsoon had ended, and they’d come out of hibernation. They’d starved for five months.

  The clocks dripped, downwards or upwards, according to the magic they’d been imbued with.

  “These slivers of bone,” Anahah said quietly, touching the inlay on a grey stone bowl, “must be from the Old God who became the rain goddess, Ehkis.”

  “You can sense that?”

  “I can’t sense anything.” He turned gloomy. “An adept going below the barrier is like a hunter going deaf or having his hands tied. Still, these clocks could only keep time like this by Ehkis’s power.”

  Some of the clocks were like ordinary water clocks, resin-sealed wooden bowls of water with measured leaks in the bottom and inscribed gradations down the sides: days, hours, even minutes. Water was plentiful in Ehkisland, and rich Canopian citizens would have slaves to fill their clocks for them. In Understorey, only a Headman or the master of a prosperous guild or family might own a clock, and these would be filled by the sons and daughters of the house or the lesser members of the guild.

  Other clocks refilled themselves. Water droplets running out the bottom of the bowl leaped like living things up through carvings in the wood or channels in natural crystal to reach a secondary bowl set slightly above the first one. That bowl had a much wider hole in the bottom as well, y
et no water escaped until the lower bowl was empty. Then, it all rushed through at once, resetting itself.

  Made of rarer, more valuable materials, glazed clay or hammered copper, the members of this second type of clock had the tiny pieces of inlaid bone in common.

  “The clockmaker you knew,” Imeris said, touching the amulet that her sister found so offensive. “Did she use fragments of Old Gods, too?”

  “Sometimes. Most of her clocks used the energy stored in metal springs, but the bodies and cogs were made of wood from Eshland, and in Eshland, the wood is the body of the god. By the time Esh comes into his full power, he hasn’t got white bones like the rest of us. His skeleton is gap-axe wood.”

  Imeris didn’t ask how he knew. As many attempts were made on the life of Esh as any other god.

  They left the clocks to watch Sariras renew Daggad’s broken spines. She strapped the hulking Hunter to a slab table and sang in a wild, startlingly loud voice that was dampened into silence almost as soon as it had begun.

  Daggad lay still, sweating in his loincloth, staring at the milkwood ceiling with a fixed grimace. Under Sariras’s hovering, empty palm, the seams in his forearms and shins peeled open, exposing bloodless bone.

  Opening her mouth even wider, vibrating her throat as though singing at full volume and yet still silent, Sariras gently plucked the broken spines from the seams like a grandmother removing splinters. Imeris watched without expression as the spinewife brought out a steel knife and a board layered in reptiles that were stunned senseless but not dead. Sariras cut off snake’s head after snake’s head, ripped out fanged jaw after fanged jaw. The bloodless nature of the implantation was over.

  Sariras dropped the knife onto the body-strewn board and sighed hoarsely when she was done.

  “I am tired,” she said. “I shall sit. Clean his skin, if you would, but do not disturb the spines.”

  Anahah filled a water bucket and found a cloth. They did as the old woman had said, Imeris trying to avoid wetting her bandages, using only the fingertips of her injured hand.

  “I can see stars,” Daggad said blearily.

  “No you can’t,” Anahah said. “Close your eyes.”