Echoes of Understorey Page 28

  “You did not warn us of that fact before,” Imeris said, frozen in her crouch.

  “You were headed below the barrier.”

  “We had to come up periodically to keep our auras from fading,” she cried. “We could have been ambushed or killed. What else have you not told us about them?”

  Anahah lifted his chin. The shadow of a beard lay along his jaw, and his irises glittered the darker shade of green.

  “When you fight the creature,” he said. “When it touches you. Ordinarily, you would have mere moments before transforming. Before becoming part of it. Holding the sword will give you resistance. More time to do what you must do. But beware the sword’s lure as you hold it. Orin’s wildness is in it. You must think only kind thoughts towards your fellow humans when you carry it, or find yourself compelled to slaughter them. What I told you about the sword being unable to harm the creature is true, so you will need to kill it with some other weapon in your other hand.”

  Not, Imeris thought angrily, such a great gift after all.

  “Are you not of the wild, Anahah?” she asked. “You gave me a sword that cannot harm the creature, but neither can it be turned against you. You always said you would not arm me against you. In case we fought against each other one day.”

  Anahah touched his abdomen.

  “The eagle that kills the monkey’s child,” he said, “is as of the wild as the eagle nurturing the eaglet in the eyrie.”

  That was a thing Youngest-Father could easily have said.

  “You have not been as open with me as I imagined,” Imeris said.

  “I am open.” His tone entreated. “To you, I am. That’s it. I’ve told you everything.”

  “Which animal, then,” Imeris countered, “do I resemble in battle?”

  “You fight like Imeris,” he said softly. “I’ve never seen another, animal or human, who adapts as many techniques that should be contradictory into their fighting style as you. That hunter’s trick with the mosquitoes, to locate a hidden sentry by his exhalation, could not be further from the fish-hips reversal made famous by the Fighting Slave of Scenting. You threw a short bolas by a wide, trunk-angled, underarm cast favoured by bee catchers in Irofland, but you switched knife hands like a net wrestler from Nessa.”

  Imeris was taken off guard. She responded to the last thing he had said.

  “Have you been to Nessa?”

  “No.”

  “Why will you not go to live in Understorey?”

  The intensity of his gaze, the set of his jaw, the curl of his elbow around the child he carried; she half knew his answer before he spoke.

  “Because you can’t go there. Loftfol will hunt you forever, the same way that Orin will hunt me forever. Here, though, even if I was unable to transform, you could be a Bodyguard to my child the likes of which Canopy has never seen—”

  “No!” Imeris wanted to slap him silly. She could not be a Bodyguard, not to Audblayin, not to Anahah’s child, not to anyone else. She had to find Kirrik. She had to kill Kirrik. If the creature didn’t kill her first. “When Canopy sees me, when it sees these”—she extruded the spines in both forearms—“it sees a slave, Anahah.”

  “You will change their minds! It will be as you hoped aloud just now. A great reconciliation, only it will be Canopian instead of Understorian. You will win their hearts and make peace between the two sides of the barrier.” Anahah framed an oval with his hands, inviting her to imagine with him the section of the monument tree where her likeness would rise above the lake. “The victorious Hunter, a flesh-and-blood mortal without the merest magical crutch, who saved the city from the mad goddess’s fury!”

  For an instant, she saw it. Her noble profile. The bow in her hands and the outline of spines curving down from her shins. She glimpsed herself as Anahah saw her, and it was wonderful and terrible. Who would not love that person, the person that Anahah saw?

  How could she not love Anahah, for seeing it?

  No student of Loftfol had been able to see her as more than one thing at a time. She had been either weapon or breeder to them with no possible resolution of the two. Even her mothers and fathers had assumed she would have to make a choice, one path or the other. Mother or fighter. Understorian or Canopian.

  Imeris convulsed silently with the realisation that the branch road leading to a future with a flowerfowl farm and few visitors now led, for her, to Anahah and a small green child.

  “No,” she said again.

  Anahah reached for her face, but Imeris brought her extended spines between them. The instinct shocked her, but she thought that if he touched her, she would agree with whatever he said.

  Now that she knew that she loved him, any physical interaction would be overwhelming; it would be painful in its intensity, and she would not allow it.

  He took it for rejection. His expression turned crestfallen. What must he be thinking? How did he imagine that she was seeing him? Not a warrior emblazoned on a wooden wall, but something repulsive, weak, stunted, and unnatural? But she could not find the words to tell him that he was a wonder, an extraordinary counterbalance to Orin’s far uglier creations.

  “I have to kill the sorceress,” she said. “I should have killed her already.”

  “If you had killed her that day, you would be battling me now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Battling her in me, is what I mean,” Anahah answered, his gaze steady, his self-possession recovered, and Imeris stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment until his earlier words about the mosquitoes, throwing her weighted cords, and switching knife hands came back to haunt her. Those motions, drawn from the Disciplines of Balance, the Knife, and Administering Poison, were not ones she had used in her fight against Orin’s creature.

  Anahah had seen her fight the sentry. He had been on Ulellin’s emergent the day that Oldest-Father had died.

  What he meant was, if Imeris had succeeded in destroying Nirrin’s body, Kirrik would simply have taken over Anahah’s body, gaining his gift with beasts and birds in place of Nirrin’s gifts.

  “What were you doing there?” Imeris cried.

  “Hiding from the monster in the foliage, of course. You know I’ve spent most of my time confined to this tree since Orin turned on me. Now you’re acting surprised that the sorceress’s activity, weaving a house out of leaves and snakes, drew my attention?”

  “You could have—”

  “What? What could I have done? I was below the barrier. I had no power. Not even my claws. I had a rope. I had my hiding place in the leaves. You didn’t find me because I didn’t smell like that sentry smelled or breathe the way he breathed.”

  She had no answer for him. Bit her lip. Tried to control the rush of anger.

  Abruptly turning her back, she whisked away. Through the windowleaves. Found the hole that led into the Temple.

  There, Daggad, Leaper, and Sorros had organised themselves into a production line, hammering the copper into thin sheets, cutting it into lengths, and drawing it through the dies.

  Imeris breathed deeply and slowly. She waited until the flare of fury had died.

  “We have a problem,” she said.

  Leaper looked up. He had mango juice and orange fibres stuck to his face. His hands were ruddy with rust from an iron shield he was using as an anvil. All of his fancy airs had fallen by the wayside. He looked like he’d never left Oldest-Father’s workshop.

  “The creature’s coming now,” he guessed cheerily. “The goddess Ulellin is coming as well. The goddess Orin is outside at the head of a horde of angry beasts. Aforis is coming to drag me back to Airakland. The barrier is down, Loftfol is attacking, and—”

  “Will you stop?” Imeris folded her arms, scowling. “The first one that you said, and you do not need to sound so excited.”

  “’Ow long?” Sorros asked, halting with both hands wrapped around a piece of wire. It protruded from a die hung between two of the overhead vines that formed the funnel.

  �
��We have until sunset, according to Anahah,” Imeris said.

  “So we’ve got six hours, maybe less, before the monster sticks its ugly head in here,” Leaper said. He wiped his sticky, mango-spattered forehead with the back of his forearm. “That’s not long enough. We’ll have to abandon this design for the trap and think up some other plan.”

  “I wish Oldest-Father were here,” Imeris said, thinking, Oldest-Father would be here, if not for Anahah watching and doing nothing!

  Leaper laughed.

  “But the old man is here.” He tapped his temple with one rusty finger. Then he pointed it at Imeris. “Look at you. Look at me. We’ve brought him here. His strategies. His ways of thinking. You wouldn’t catch Middle-Father building a trap, not if there were some direct way to wrestle the monster. And Youngest-Father would give it a smug little smile right before flying past its face and away.”

  “There is nowhere to fly to.”

  “I’m not actually suggesting flight.”

  “Maybe wrestling,” Daggad said, one eyebrow raised, fists on hips.

  “What do you mean?” Imeris asked.

  Daggad shrugged. He gestured around at the setup for wire making.

  “Suppose Anahah spoke truth and we cannot finish enough wire ta replace all the vines of the Temple. Maybe we do not need to. One good wire, wrapped many times around the creature’s body to encompass all the different parts of it, might carry the lightnin’ in a satisfactory way.” He glanced at Leaper.

  “Sure,” Leaper said. “But who’s going to volunteer to wrestle the monster and tie it into a neat package with a bow on top? Even if the volunteer doesn’t get bitten in half or shredded to pieces, didn’t you say, Daggad, that you started to turn into the thing as soon as you touched it?”

  “Should I keep makin’ the wire?” Sorros asked simply as the three others looked helplessly at one another.

  “If you would, Sorros, please,” Imeris said. She squared her shoulders. Tossed her head. Middle-Father is my father, too. Why should I not bring him with me to the battle? “I have studied weighted ropes and wire strangulation under Yolmoloy the Scentingim.” Anahah said holding the sword would give me the ability to resist. “I have an idea of how the wire may be secured to the beast’s body.”

  But I wish I still had Youngest-Father’s chimera wings.

  Just in case.

  Anahah.

  You were the Bodyguard of Orin. You could have done something.

  THIRTY-SIX

  AN HOUR before sunset, men’s arguing voices on the northern high roads prompted Imeris to climb around the circumference of the emergent.

  As stealthily as she could, trying not to make the windowleaves rustle or shake, she selected windowleaf trunks with plenty of rootlets that would bear her weight without pulling away from the floodgum host.

  On a smooth, grey branch road arriving from the penda tree, a dozen rangy soldiers stood. Their leather armour was stained Ulellin’s green and blue, and they contended with a stockier, black-clad soldier with feathers in his hair and a crossbow over his shoulder who suspiciously resembled Captain Oniwak.

  Behind Oniwak stood a little boy, head cocked attentively. At the boy’s side hovered a man of middle height in mulberry silks carrying a fiddle. Ibbin and Owun. Imeris systematically searched the other paths and platforms. After several long minutes of scrutiny, in which Oniwak’s voice grew louder and began to carry enough for her to decipher his words, she finally located Eeriez against the penda tree trunk, armour and tunic smeared convincingly in ash and perfectly still, as always.

  “It’s lovely that you’re defending the Temple,” Oniwak argued, “but understand, king’s men are no deterrent to the creature. I’m a king’s officer. The thing did not hesitate to attack me. I just told you that my company has lost both a Servant of Atwith and the gods-protected Bodyguard of Oxor!”

  “Our charge is to keep this road safe for worshippers of Ulellin,” the leader of the Ulellinland soldiers answered. “You are not here to pay tribute to the Speaker of Truth.”

  “How observant are the keen-eyed knives of the wind,” Oniwak sneered. “Our charge is to hunt the beast and kill it no matter where it goes!”

  Besides Orinland, Imeris thought.

  She climbed down into the Temple, avoiding the node where Anahah lay curled and quiet; she’d brought him food from the Temple only to find him sleeping. Which worried her, since Bodyguards didn’t need sleep, and why hadn’t she realised something was sapping his strength when he’d slept in her room at the Mistletoe Lodge?

  “Come to tell us of another problem, have you?” Leaper whispered. He, Sorros, and Daggad were taking a break from their labour in the mouth of the face-shaped topiary.

  Imeris looked at the wire coiled on the floor. She was a good judge of rope lengths from their bundled size. What they had in copper looked to be forty paces or twenty body lengths, no more, which would barely be enough to wrap Orin’s monster three times around. She’d have no spare lengths for binding the legs. That would leave at least four sections of the monster free to re-form.

  “Soldiers,” she said. “Ulellinland soldiers. They are arguing with Oniwak on one of the north roads, but when they get here, they will want to put a pair of guards on every path leading to the Temple. Once they put someone on the south road, that person will only have to turn around to see straight through the funnel and discover exactly what we are doing.”

  “We are worshipping!” Leaper said, raising a gourd of magenta cherry wine.

  “Put that down and help me get the wire closer to the entrance.”

  She’d barely arranged it the way she wanted before scraping sounds and shouts came close by. Motioning for Leaper to get out of sight, she strung her bow and moved her quiver to her hip, keeping one eye on the entrance the whole time.

  Something moved in the open air, but it wasn’t Ulellinland soldiers, or even Captain Oniwak.

  Orin’s creature, grunting and snuffling, stuck its face into the funnel. Imeris had not yet expected it. At the very least, Oniwak should have seen it and raised a cry. She lost her grip on the arrow as she took a few paces back. Leaper and Daggad shouted a warning to Sorros. Imeris smelled spilled wine and heard blades sliding free as the whole building shuddered.

  The grotesque new head, empty of tusks, too tight in some places, like a poorly felted blanket, and too loose in others, like the abdominal skin of a gutted carcass, filled the opening. All of its tiny human eyes were as wide as they would go, gathering the paltry available light. Daggad, Sorros, and Leaper had not lit any candles to replace the fading sun, and Leaper had removed those of Airak’s lanterns that might flicker to life as the day dwindled.

  Imeris found another arrow. Nocked it and went to full draw. Loosed. Allowed the motion of her fingers falling away from the string to turn into a reach for her next arrow.

  She didn’t aim for the eyes. She did not want to kill the component pieces until they were all snugly trussed together. Instead, she sank her shafts up to the feathers into nonvital joints and folds.

  They would be her anchor points.

  Seven of them, and the creature snarled and clawed at the shafts. Several snapped off close to the skin. The protruding splinters were still long enough for her to use.

  Imeris tossed the bow aside. She heaved a coil of copper over her shoulder, taking to hand the stiff, bladed end of the metal sheet where Sorros had run out of time to draw the wire; he had unhinged the die to set free the unfinished section.

  The creature reached for her with the one foreleg it had managed to stuff into the funnel-shaped Temple entrance. Sorros, moving past Imeris, bravely swung one of his hammers at the scrabbling, clawed cat toes, making the animal roar. Oniwak must have heard that. He and the other Hunters must be on their way. Imeris focused hard.

  Under the tongue and between the jawbones. That was where her huge copper darning needle and thread must pass, if she was to keep the monster from withdrawing from the Temple b
efore her work was done. Yet who was to say that its skeleton was built in the usual way? She hesitated, holding the copper blade in her right hand, the hilt of the sheathed boar-tusk sword in her left.

  Sorros swung his hammer. The creature roared again. Imeris charged forwards, head down, a human arrow with a head of copper. The wind of its breath brought back her failure at Mistletoe Lodge; it mingled with the magic wind of Ulellin that had once helped cook Oldest-Father’s fish.

  She speared the copper blade through the floor of the monster’s mouth. It felt like pushing her arms into wet padded armour; like upholstering a chair. Imeris dropped the coil of copper rope into a pool of frothing saliva. Jerked backwards before the mouth could snap shut. Dropped to the floor and rolled under its chin. There, she pulled the copper blade free.

  She needed both hands to pull the bloodied wire through. As soon as she let go of the sword hilt, she felt a wrinkling heaviness in her skin, like she’d fallen into water wearing quilted clothes. Pausing to pick up the sword again, she stuck the crossguard between her teeth, letting the blunt edge of the blade lie along her breastbone, and immediately felt lighter.

  More time to do what you must do.

  In the corner of her eye, Sorros rolled and moaned on the floor, sprouting fur from hands that had dropped the hammer. She could spare no thought for him. Imeris used her spines to climb. She sank them in the creature’s fur and face, climbing through sagging gore so unlike the solid purchase of a tree, until she swung one arm and her spines connected with a satisfying thunk to the Temple’s wooden, perforated roof.

  She went up through one hole, carrying the copper blade, and down through another. She stabbed the monster through the snout a second time and secured the blade to the loose end of the copper wire.