Echoes of Understorey Read online

  Sorros and Daggad would be hungry and thirsty. Imeris went to look for them at the market called Jewel of All Seasons, which lay in the temple-like embrace of the Falling Fig’s heart. She drank from the Stream of Fortune where it fell from a higher pool into one speckled with bright yellow fallen fig leaves. With a dripping mouth, she watched the surface of the broader pool, busy with ducks, spoonbills, and small children with baited twine trying to catch little red crayfish. When a pickpocket laid a hand on her sword, she whirled, ready to throw the thief headfirst into the water.

  It was no pickpocket. Daggad and Sorros had scratched and tired faces, but they appeared unharmed. They still carried the baskets of tools. Sorros tried not to stare at the mayhem and noise around him, but the way he kept trying to avoid touching other people made him look suspicious.

  “We should take a room at a lodge,” Imeris said, sighing. “Get some food. Rest. When we are ready, we will take the low roads to Ulellinland.”

  “I may be recognised ’ere,” Daggad said. “The House of Epatut trades at the Falling Fig in years of excess.”

  They would recognise a freed slave, a stolen belonging, Imeris thought, but not their own blood. Hooting sounds escaped her lips as she began walking towards the closest lodging.

  “Why,” Daggad asked, “are you laughing?”

  “Perhaps I am going mad,” Imeris replied, abruptly angry. “Too many plans, old and new, are jumbled up in my mind. I want too many things. Everything is complicated, and everything is hard. Kirrik. Orin’s creature. Captain Oniwak and the other Hunters. Loftfol. A child for Sorros. Gannak and my fathers. The House of Epatut and me. Why do the goddesses and gods not solve all these wretched problems? Why is it left to a pair of Hunters that most Canopians take for slaves?”

  “I am glad you no longer wish to tuck me into bed in Gannak,” Daggad said lightly, bouncing a green fig on his palm. “I am glad that you finally see you are not alone. What a shame that this is a fig tree! I hate the taste of figs. Maybe that is something the goddesses and gods can fix while we are doing those other things.”

  Imeris couldn’t suppress a smile at his forced cheer. She had thought the Hunt simply another obstacle in her path, but without it, she would not have Daggad on her side. Nor Sorros. Nor Anahah, wherever he was. Mere days, and she was beginning to forget the precise green of his eyes when he was angry or afraid; she felt a twinge in her chest at the thought that the creature might have caught up with him.

  She had to make sure that he—that all three of them—survived. She would need them.

  Once they had paid for a room, Sorros went to find a bathhouse, and Daggad was dispatched to bring back food from an eatery far away from any silk markets. In the cramped accommodation, Imeris stacked the furniture she found there, a low table and chocolate-preparing apparatus, on top of the bunks carved into the wall. She rolled up the carpet and evicted a snug brown tree-snake from the empty guest water jug.

  Then she began the movements as best as she was able in the limited space.

  Imeris sweated through the first six disciplines, allowing the plan to unfold in her mind as the sequences unfolded by rote in muscle and bone. A week. They needed a week for Sorros to make the wires. Perhaps as little as a day for Daggad to replace the Temple vines with copper, but what if the goddess sensed the tribute being taken away? What if there was no choice but for Sorros to work inside the Temple? Imeris would have to find some way to keep worshippers away.

  She frowned. Ideas flashed into her mind and were discarded.

  A chain saw would be suitable for cutting the main branch roads partway through and then letting them break under their own weight. Unless somebody examined the broken ends closely, it would seem natural, and how would anybody examine anything from the vantage point of another great tree? She could add the chain to Daggad’s acquisition list. Perhaps trade some of Sariras’s salt for it.

  She would have to make sure Orin’s creature was actually in Ulellin’s emergent before she cut the roads. Anahah, too. There seemed no way to locate or signal to him, except to trust that he would find her before the creature did.

  How to keep Daggad and Sorros safe from the creature while they worked? How to keep the goddess and her Bodyguard from coming down to investigate when she sensed her supply of tributes dwindling? Imeris shook her head. She began the final discipline.

  Perhaps Leaper would have some better ideas. Once she reached Ulellin’s emergent, Imeris would send him a message straightaway. Yet she did not know how long he could be away from Airak’s Temple before he got into just as much trouble as she had at Loftfol for her extended absences.

  Imeris’s arms faltered. Trembled. The Discipline of Spines was interrupted in the moment before she would have half knelt and drawn her right arm in the motion that had ended the life of Horroh the Haakim.

  There was trouble and then there was trouble, she supposed.

  Leaper would never do to Airak what Imeris had done to Horroh.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS later, Leaper met them at the spiny plum tree on the other side of the emergent.

  In the bright noon blaze, Ulellin’s Temple looked less like Kirrik’s dovecote and more like the delicate weaving of a very large and gifted spider. Earlier in the morning, the goddess and her attendants had come down to refresh their spindly, wasted, wind-tossed bodies with what Imeris would have considered inadequate nourishment for a child.

  Now they prepared to return to the heights.

  Ulellin herself, from a distance, looked like a dark brown leaf pressed between the pages of a light green book. Two new, pale windowleaves, each as long as the goddess from neck to knees, adhered somehow to the front and back of her. She wore gauzy, pale green wrappings from her palms to her shoulders and from her knees to her ankles, leaving her feet and fingertips free. Her black hair streamed left and right in invisible breezes that Imeris could not feel.

  The Servants and Bodyguard wore robes of the same light, thin, gauzy material, probably the dyed inner bark of a tree, over shirts and skirt-wraps made of leaves joined at the edges. These were made from smaller leaves, more like the red tunics of Audblayin’s Gardeners, except that the smaller leaves also seemed magically adhered and not stitched together with thread.

  When Ulellin and her adepts climbed, it was not as Canopians, nor Understorians, climbed. The invisible wind about Ulellin that Imeris could not feel picked them up and dashed them in a spiral pattern upwards, like butterflies in a whirlwind. When the wind died, Goddess, Bodyguard, and Servants caught at branches closest to them, clinging, waiting for the next gust, as though the wind were an animal breathing and could not carry them continuously.

  “That’s a useful trick,” Leaper whispered to Imeris back from further around the spiny plum.

  There were no worshippers to watch the Holy One go. The emergent and all of its visible branch paths, both origin roads and arrivals, were unusually still. Only monkeys picking at the spiny plum fruit and the rustle of leaves as the party departed disturbed the hush.

  “Where is everyone?” Imeris wondered aloud.

  Leaper cackled, and she turned in her crouch to face him. When he saw her face, his eyes widened.

  “You haven’t heard? Of course not; you’ve been in Gannak and missed the commotion. Orin’s creature attacked a man on one of the high roads of Ulellin’s emergent.”

  “It killed one of her worshippers? Why did you not say so in your reply to my message?”

  Imeris’s heart sank. If somebody had died, Ulellin surely would have done something to expel the creature from her niche. She would have activated some magical defence to prevent its return. The trap was useless, her promises to Sorros given for nothing.

  “No,” Leaper said. “It ate a cage of flowerfowl the worshipper was bringing for tribute. Must’ve gotten a taste for them at Unar’s farm. Citizens have been scared off. They still send their slaves by the low roads if they’ve got them, but there’s nobody on the high roads.
One who walks in the grace of Airak is willing to wager that a bit of bird blood on the low roads will buy us the time we need.”

  “No sense in waitin’,” Daggad said, shifting from foot to foot behind Leaper. The big baskets of tools forced him to bend his back as he leaned away from the tree. “We must take our chances. Go ahead with the plan. Or”—he guffawed—“run away to Floor.”

  “Anahah is here somewhere,” Imeris murmured, putting her fingertips to her lips. “Orin’s creature, too.” She put one foot onto the branch road and hesitated, scanning the maze of huge, perforated windowleaf leaves and diamond-patterned branches crisscrossing the floodgum trunk.

  “Well concluded, genius,” Leaper said at her back. “Look, don’t just stand there at the edge of the platform. If she’s watching, she’s watching. If she’s not, the sooner we get started the better.”

  Imeris led them across the long, exposed road to the Temple. The back of her neck prickled. If the creature had taken some of Ulellin’s tribute, word would have reached Oniwak. If he was steadfast, if he continued to prosecute the Hunt, he would be along soon to investigate. Which lodging would he choose this time? Imeris eyed the thatched cottage stuck to the side of a purple-leafed penda tree on the other side of the emergent to the spiny plum tree and overlooking the approach from the north.

  Then she entered the Temple.

  Inside the funnel of golden-brown vines, through the gap between carved, enormous imitation leaves, there was no movement and no sound louder than the increasing wheeze of the wind. The goddess and her retinue had taken little of the abundant food given as tribute. Imeris wrinkled her nose. Some of it was spoiling in the heat. Meanwhile, not even the most starving slave would dare steal a single crumb, lest Ulellin make some awful prophesy about their imminent demise.

  Leaper found the barrow of metal-stone fruit inside the yawning mouth of the topiary woman. He stripped one fruit of its withering skin and rotting orange flesh, and held the fist-sized copper seed up to the sunlight filtering through the ceiling.

  “Still here,” he crowed.

  Daggad dumped his baskets onto the floor of the Temple with an aggrieved sigh and began rubbing his shoulders where the leather straps had reddened his skin.

  “Careful with those,” Sorros admonished him.

  “Where are you goin’?” Daggad asked Imeris.

  “To keep watch,” Imeris answered. “You had better stay. Sorros can use your strength.”

  “I shall get straight to work,” Sorros said, crouching to sort through the spilled objects. “Leave me the boy as well as the brute.”

  “Do not command me as you would a slave,” Daggad said.

  “Don’t call me boy,” Leaper said. “I’m a Skywatcher of Airakland.”

  Imeris ignored them and slipped out of the Temple, not by the funnel-shaped entryway but by jumping and catching her spines on the ceiling, swivelling her body until her feet found the perforations and her knees were able to hook out through the holes.

  She wriggled. Slithered out through gaps in the ceiling that would not have admitted Daggad. Windowleaves made a shady green roof over the wooden imitation-windowleaf roof. Imeris pushed them aside. Some predator, perhaps a snake or jaguar, had startled the monkeys. They abandoned the spiny plum, hooting.

  There were two dozen or so substantial floodgum branches higher than the Temple. Up there, hidden by the lacework of windowleaf stems and foliage, the goddess and her servants surely would not tolerate the presence of Orin’s creature. Where was it, then?

  The faint sound of hammers floated up to her ears.

  She moved a few body lengths upwards, deciding on a node where the windowleaves completely hid her yet she was able to monitor the southbound paths through their perforations.

  The smell of panther musk and banana leaves gave her warning.

  Anahah called out softly to her while she sat cross-legged, unmoving.

  “You still have the sword,” he observed. “And you’ve brought the smith. I can smell the copper.”

  “Come here,” Imeris replied. Moments later, he parted the leaves beside her. She made room for him, and he sat with one knee pressed against hers. His belly was noticeably more distended, after less than a week apart, and he had not been using his trick of invisibility. His hands were slim, green-skinned human hands.

  Not the paws of a panther.

  “You do not want Orin to know where you are,” Imeris guessed. “You will not use her magic to transform.”

  “It’s not that,” Anahah said uneasily. He tilted his head, so that light through one of the leaves fell on his left eye; he did not trust her to watch the roads, or else he was watching for something other than what Imeris watched for. “You asked me, when we first met, how my rift with Orin began. You haven’t asked again lately.”

  Imeris shrugged. “Lately I have not needed to know. You have been thoughtful. Helpful. You keep your promises. Does the Queen of Beasts need a reason to turn on those closest to her?”

  “She had one,” Anahah admitted. “A fairly good one. To turn on me, I mean. Not the others. They don’t deserve to be part of the creature, to suffer that way. Death will free them.”

  “Tell me your long tale, then, Anahah. We have time. Three days.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t have three days. My energy, my agility, which kept me ahead of the lumbering creature, is all used up. It’s coming after me, and I’m too tired to move. I’m staying here. You have until sunset.”

  Imeris twitched the leaves aside, rising to her feet. She had to tell the others. They had to change the plan.

  “Wait.” Anahah sighed. “Wait and hear my story. Please.”

  Imeris knelt back down beside him.

  “Your irises,” she observed. “They just went dark. What is the matter, Anahah?”

  He stared, grimacing, into some unpleasant past.

  “Orin didn’t give me permission to grow a womb,” he said. “I grew one anyway.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IMERIS BLINKED. She looked at his belly, then back at his face.

  “What about permission to fornicate?” she asked, touching her mouth, remembering the kiss of slavery and the kiss of freedom he had given her.

  “She didn’t give permission for that, either.” Anahah blinked, too, focusing on Imeris once again. “Adepts aren’t allowed to touch one another. That’s true of all Servants of goddesses and gods. It not only keeps them focused, but it keeps them from angling to capture deities’ or Servants’ souls for their unborn children.” He lowered his lashes. “If our power was hereditary, we would be worse than royals. I never set out to entice anyone else to help me break that decree. Yet once I’d tried on the form of a chimera, I realised I could do it alone. Have a child. Love it. Raise it. Protect it, as I’d protected Orin for fifteen years, without a word of thanks. I was wrong, though. I failed to protect the boy hostage, Oul. I’ve made a mistake, but I can’t go back. Fate must take its course.”

  Imeris reached towards his stomach, hesitated and caught his eye with her hand hovering over his skin. Only when he gave her a faint nod did she press her palm against the bulge in his abdomen.

  Something rolled over underneath, and she drew her hand back, startled.

  “It grows faster than a normal child,” Anahah said. “Orin must have found out about it a month before she said anything to me. That’s when the killing of my family and friends began. I heard about Oul from gossipy palace servants, and mourned, yet never suspected. When the goddess confronted me at last, she said she would feed it to the eagles. My child. My daughter.”

  “A daughter?” Imeris abruptly saw aspects of Youngest-Father in Anahah. Except that Anahah was not expecting another to watch his child while he retained the freedom to fly. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” Anahah’s mouth twisted wryly. “I am both mother and father to this child. My daughter is a pulled-apart and reassembled version of me, the fruit of a self-pollinating tree. I fled Orinl
and to save her. I visited, in secret, the workshop of a clockmaker I’d heard malicious rumours about.”

  “In Eshland,” Imeris said, nodding. It was all making sense.

  “Yes. At first I thought I’d simply kill Orin and trap her soul forever.” Anahah closed one fist as though he held the goddess’s essence trapped there. “That way she’d be helpless to harm my child. To Floor with the needs of the forest and its people. I didn’t tell the clockmaker what I wanted the soul trap for, though, and when I returned with payment, she revealed that a deity’s soul could not be contained by a trap for very long. She said that Orin, of all deities, would be far too powerful! I realised my only chance would be to take that temporarily trapped spirit to some distant tree-branch, give birth there, open the trap, and ensure that Orin’s soul entered my daughter’s body.”

  “The sort of crazed grab for power that the decrees, the Bodyguards, and the Temple spells upon the adepts, are supposed to prevent,” Imeris said with a snort of laughter.

  Anahah opened his hand sadly, as though releasing some part of a sweet dream.

  “It’s no use,” he said. “I didn’t know that carrying a child would be so draining. In this state, I’ve no chance of getting close to Orin. Even if you Hunters kill the creature before my daughter is born, she’ll never be safe.”

  “You could always let her fall,” Imeris said lightly. “There are worse fates than being raised in Understorey. You can fly. We can, too.”

  “When I first saw you, I thought you were here on a raid.” His face creased in sympathy. “You don’t have a peaceful life, Imeris. You aren’t safe.”

  “Nobody is safe,” she said. “And I will have a peaceful life. When my duty is done. When the sorceress is gone. When Loftfol and I, and Gannak and my fathers, are reconciled.”

  Wind fluttered the foliage. In the dappled light, green on green, Anahah looked like a reflection in a pond. Like she could put her hand right through him if she reached for him again.

  “You’d better go and tell your friends,” he said, “that Orin’s creature is coming.” Imeris shifted her weight from her knees to the soles of her feet. “And listen, Imeris. I can’t be the bait. I don’t think I can transform anymore without harming the child. You must be the bait. Indeed, you have no choice, because the swords that I made for you from the tusks of the creature, whenever they appear above the barrier, will draw it more powerfully than even I ever could.”