Echoes of Understorey Read online

The jolt was uncomfortable and the elevation unsatisfactory, but the speed—the speed was good.

  Imeris flew through the rain. The lemon ironwood tree rushed at her. She tipped the frame. Began to fall. Reached out with her spines but caught loose bark and slid down the tree trunk. Sloughed fibre and splinters enveloped her.

  Gritting her teeth, Imeris retracted the spines in her forearms, but her upper body was being dragged back by the weight of her glider. She struck out with her arms again, but couldn’t reach the tree at all.

  Then her shin spines snagged in the thick, juicy body of a passionfruit vine, one that reached all the way from Floor into the sun-drenched arms of Canopy. Imeris hung by one knee gratefully, protecting her face with both arms until the broken bark and splinters fell away.

  Not a very graceful landing. Youngest-Father would have been ashamed.

  Tightening her stomach, Imeris pulled her body upright again. In the meagre glow of the almost-extinguished taper, she set her forearm spines more carefully into the solid sapwood of the tree. The strong, bitter-lemon smell that wafted down to her could have been the tree itself or a pot of ti-leaves brewing at Breeze.

  Imeris climbed as quickly as she dared.

  The path was more scarred than the magenta cherry trunk had been, evidence of the eagerness of decades of Breeze patrons. When she found one of the lower west-facing entrances, she admitted herself by an arched opening to the inside of the tree. The staircase was worn by many, many bare and booted feet. The establishment was lower down in Understorey and therefore that much warmer and more stifling than Imeris’s home, but fire was always wanted for light, and Breeze was famous for staying cool all year around. Most ti-houses were shuttered during the monsoon, but not Breeze, because its magic needed access to the open air.

  Imeris listened. Tried to be cautious. Heard a creak. A crackle. Whispered voices and the smell of cooking fish.

  She lifted her wings off the floor with both hands and moved soundlessly up the stairs. They were cut directly into the tree, and when she turned a corner, where two entry staircases merged into one, she felt the famous breeze blowing full into her face, cooling her sweat. It brought the smell of smoke from a gobletfruit bark fire and the lingering hints of fruit syrups and dried lemon ironwood leaves.

  She heard the voices clearly.

  “Will you put that away? We cannot wait for Zhamahz any longer. It is midday, and his wife said dawn. He has either been killed by the enemy or his own inept climbing, and if the former, this place may be a trap set for us.” The normally gentle voice of Imeris’s youngest-father, forced now to a strained whisper.

  “Fighting on an empty stomach,” answered the idle voice of Imeris’s oldest-father, “is worse than flying on one—that is to say, for burned ones and buffoons.”

  Imeris climbed the staircase and turned a second corner. The main sitting room of the ti-house was shaped like the interior of a bright, golden bell. The pace-long bone of the wind goddess, which imparted the continuous cool breeze, hung by the ceiling like the clapper of the bell. Multiple fireplaces, their chimneys bored sideways instead of upwards, were arranged around the wall, forming an outer circle. Low round tables formed an inner circle around the central stage below the magically hovering bone.

  Imeris’s fathers looked up at the same time from the single active hearth where Oldest-Father had laid lemon-ironwood-leaf-wrapped fish over the coals. They should have looked guilty, taking their ease in Breeze with neither the landlords’ permission nor remuneration, but Oldest-Father smirked while Youngest-Father sighed at the sight of her.

  Aside from the two men, the enormous chamber was empty. Out of season, none of the hallmarks of a renowned ti-house were there: no proprietors balancing wooden bowls of steaming beverages as they emerged from tunnels to the kitchens, and no customers playing checkers and sticks. The aisles hosted neither women selling moonflower nor men selling bia. The stage was empty of poets and prophets of the Old Gods sermonizing or actively enlisting warriors for raids into Canopy, claiming they’d had visions of when and where the barrier would open for them.

  Oldest-Father turned, silent and self-satisfied, back to his leaf-wrapped fish and prodded the blackening package with a poker deeper into the coals. His skinny shoulder blades touched each other in a hunch. He wore an olive-green woven-grass shirt and knee-length trousers. There were touches of grey in his short brown hair.

  Youngest-Father wore only a waist wrap, gliding harness, quiver, and longbow, his belt heavy with coils of rope. His unlined face was boyish, and his blond hair was stuck down by rain. He rubbed his bare chin, beard abraded away by the regular use of sandpaper fig leaves, and sighed a second time.

  “Issi,” he said resignedly. “I should have known that was why he wanted to wait. You look well.”

  Imeris, no longer keeping quiet, let her wings drop and drag on the floor behind her, freeing her arms to embrace Youngest-Father. It was many months since she’d seen him. The Loftfol school did not permit frequent home visits. She was slightly taller than he was, and she felt their two bone amulets press against one another, hers beneath her shirt and his resting on his bare chest.

  “So do you, Youngest-Father.”

  She went to Oldest-Father and hugged him from behind, wetting him, and he made a mock-disgusted noise and shook her off.

  “You came quickly,” he said. “The fish is not done.”

  “Who is Zhamahz?” she asked. “The informant?”

  “He is a windowleaf fruit cutter,” Youngest-Father explained. “He saw lanterns through a tangle of windowleaves.”

  “In Canopy? That is not unusual.”

  “Not in Canopy. We are below Ulellinland, the realm of the goddess of wind and leaves. Here, even Understorey is a labyrinth of tangled green growth. There are leaves on the windowleaf trees all the way down to Floor, but they are still windowleaves. They have holes in them. Lantern light shines through.”

  “Oldest-Father wrote that you had found Kirrik’s new dovecote.”

  Youngest-Father rolled his eyes at Oldest-Father’s turned back.

  “The lantern lights were blue,” he said, “and killed a bird that came too close. Who else in Understorey holds three of Airak’s death-lanterns?”

  Imeris was silent, recalling Youngest-Father’s heroics, the Great Deed of his lifetime. She’d grown up hearing the story of how he’d rescued Unar, the Godfinder, from Kirrik’s original dovecote beneath Airakland. Youngest-Father and the Godfinder together had used chimera skin to escape from the deadly ring of lanterns, bringing one of the lanterns along with them. Later they’d used it to escape a live chimera. The demon had not dared to enter the fatal blue glow.

  Middle-Father had accomplished a Great Deed, too. He’d killed a chimera, and now he was Bodyguard to a goddess.

  Oldest-Father pretended to scorn the notion of Great Deeds, yet he had killed Kirrik, or at least one form the sorceress had taken. She had worn the body of her son, Garrag. Oldest-Father had trapped her with a spring-loaded wooden cage and a ballista bolt through the heart.

  Imeris might have felt pressured to kill Kirrik for her Great Deed even if the sorceress hadn’t murdered her friends. Other families, she suspected, were not so keen on Great Deeds. If Imeris’s birth mother had never dropped her, she might have gone her whole life without anyone demanding to know what her Great Deed would be.

  Stop trying to keep her home, Youngest-Father had reprimanded Oldest-Father. Our Issi is gifted. She can accomplish anything.

  Imerissiremi, Middle-Father had told her, your Great Deed awaits. I took you from the maw of a chimera. It saved you so that you could save the world.

  Imeris had no intention of saving the world. Only, at first, of unmuddling her life, and now, achieving retribution. Revenge for Nirrin was why she’d overcome her reluctance to apply to Loftfol. It was why she’d gone to find Aurilon when her application to Loftfol had first failed.

  I will kill Kirrik so far from any available bodie
s that her soul will shrivel into the ether before it can find a replacement.

  “Which tree was it?” she asked Youngest-Father, tapping her foot. “Why are we waiting around for Oldest-Father’s fish to cook?”

  “The tale of the curious blue lanterns passed from household to household by no less than six messenger birds,” Youngest-Father explained, scrubbing his sodden fringe back from his forehead with the fingers of one hand. “From Zhamahz to his seamstress wife. From the wife to her brother. From the brother to his wife, the distiller. From the distiller to her mother, the bolt turner. And the bolt turner remembered my songs. She sent me a message.”

  “How long did all this take?” Imeris unbuckled her wings from her body harness and spread them over several stools beside the fire. She lit a torch and set it into a bracket on the wall.

  “Two weeks. The location of the windowleaf tree in question was lost along the way. But Zhamahz’s wife expects a bird from him today. He cuts fruit during the monsoon because it is fattest and richest while the great trees’ roots are underwater, and he has a trade arrangement with the Bird-Riders of Floor. They take one half of his harvest. In exchange, their bone women see him safely between the great trees where he makes his deliveries. Today, he is due to deliver here.”

  “And after the delivery, he will send a bird to his wife to let her know that he is well?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he might not be well at all.” Imeris kicked at a polished stool. The thought of Zhamahz, a helpless fruit cutter, being hunted by Kirrik enraged her. Kirrik should come to Loftfol if she wanted a true challenge; so many of the students had lost older siblings to her cause, voluntarily and involuntarily. “He might be dead. Or she might be in his body, coming to meet us. To see who we are and get rid of us.”

  “Yes.” Youngest-Father shrugged. “I think we should go.”

  There was the thud and shudder of a bridge hitting a platform outside the ti-house.

  Oldest-Father rose at once, the iron poker in his fist. He was a head taller than Youngest-Father, a decade older, but there remained swiftness and strength in his gangly limbs. Youngest-Father made a subtle, shrugging movement, disgorging the weapon that sat diagonally across his back, digging in his hip-pouch for a bowstring. Sliding his belt around his waist brought his quiver within reach. He stepped through the stave and strung the bow.

  Imeris, instinctively after her hard previous year specializing in spine-fighting under Horroh the Haakim, held her arms out slightly from her body, resting her spines in their sheaths, bending her knees and gripping the wooden floor lightly with her toes.

  Ugly, laboured breathing echoed in one of the entry tunnels.

  “Quickly,” a woman’s deep voice shouted. “Into the ti-house!”

  Imeris shared a glance with Youngest-Father. Their imminent visitor did not seem to be Zhamahz.

  THREE

  A FLOOD of villagers entered Breeze.

  The women wore not the elaborate layered skirts and leaf-mosaic blouses of the House of Wissin, but the rope-secured, paperbark wrap skirts and breast bindings of those who made such clothes but couldn’t afford them.

  “This is opposite to our aims,” Youngest-Father said quietly. “We need the sorceress isolated with no hope of fresh victims.”

  “Why have you loosed a bridge during the monsoon?” Imeris called to the closest villager. The boy, on the cusp of becoming a man, was rosy-cheeked and wide-eyed in the light from the torch on the wall.

  “A demon climbed into our paperbark tree. A chimera.”

  A ripple went through the crowd, and the same woman’s voice which had ordered the people into the ti-house shrieked, “Hurry! The wet bark is tearing! The bridge will not hold!”

  Imeris shared another glance with Youngest-Father, who took the torch from the bracket without a word. They turned as one to Oldest-Father, who prodded his fish with an irritated scowl.

  “Let it fall,” he murmured to his left shoulder, “or else we all know what is to follow,” but Imeris and Youngest-Father each seized him by an arm and bullied him towards the east-facing main entrance tunnel where the villagers kept arriving. At the far end of the tunnel stood a bulky, dimple-cheeked matron with a grey braid to her hip. The owner of the commanding voice.

  Imeris and Youngest-Father pointed Oldest-Father at the place where the great steel head of the bolt was beginning to ease back out of the tree, even as three distant, final stragglers pounded along the rope bridge.

  “Who are you?” the matron demanded.

  Every step that the stragglers took wobbled the bolt looser.

  “I am Imerissiremi of Loftfol,” Imeris said, seeking instant compliance by naming the school. “My father will save your people, but you must move deeper into the ti-house.”

  Without another word, the woman and the others around her obeyed. Imeris, Oldest-Father, and Youngest-Father now stood alone on the lip of the great entranceway, with its banisters made to look like the boughs of true lemon trees and the flower-laden branches of fabled camellias. The rope bridge was lit at this end by the taper at Imeris’s hip and the flaming torch that Youngest-Father carried.

  The other end of the bridge disappeared into the dark.

  “My fish is burning,” Oldest-Father said, but he took two chimera claw needles from his hip pouch. They were the span of his hand, curving and with eyes bored in the blunt ends of them, wide enough for him to thread the ends of his two thickest ropes through.

  “Your eyesight is getting worse,” Youngest-Father said calmly, holding the torch closer, as the bolt slipped another inch and the bark of the lemon ironwood tree began deeply splitting in multiple directions.

  “Gods’ bones, do not set my sleeves on fire!”

  Then Oldest-Father hooked his knees around the banister, swinging upside down so his outstretched arms were level with the place where the bolt had struck. Imeris couldn’t see him, but she waited for his instructions. She was prepared to hook her own legs around the banister and hold his ankles, to lower him down and give him more room to work.

  “I can reach it,” came his gasp, however, and she caught the needle ends of the ropes instead, pulling the chimera claws free and knotting the rope ends around the bases of the banisters. Oldest-Father hauled himself back up a moment later, securing the other ends of the ropes as well. He took his needles back from her, sitting with his back against the banister as he tucked them away.

  “The end is fixed to solid wood,” Youngest-Father called to the two men helping a small child along the final section of the rope bridge. He held the oil-impregnated torch out towards them. It sizzled in the rain but kept burning. “Go slowly and safely, if you would.”

  “Behind them,” Imeris said. She sucked in a sharp breath. “They cannot go slowly.”

  For she had glimpsed the glittering eyes of the chimera in pursuit. The rest of its body, with the sleek, scaly, colour-changing skin, was invisible.

  Before her fathers could stop her, she dashed out onto the bridge. Her added weight eased the bolt completely free of the tree in a shower of loose bark, but Oldest-Father had secured it well. His smaller, stronger ropes pierced the weave of the looser, thicker bridge ropes right behind the eye of the ballista bolt, and the bridge sagged and swagged but didn’t fall.

  Imeris put her arms out for balance. She didn’t have her wings, but she had her training. On her toes, she danced along a single rope, past the men and the crying child, only dropping to the bark-lined bed of the bridge when she was between the villagers and the eerie glow of the chimera’s eyes. Imeris knew from seeing stretched-out skins that chimeras were twice bear-sized, four-footed, long-tailed, and all but earless with a toothy, face-splitting maw. Yet the lamp-like gaze was the only part clearly visible, its body covered in colour-changing scales, a magical creature bearing the ultimate camouflage in the dark depths of the forest where it hunted humankind.

  “Stop,” she told the demon. Three paces separated them.

  T
he chimera’s glowing eyes rose to the level of hers, evidence that it had sat back on its haunches. Aside from the eyes, only a heaviness, a localized stability to the bridge, and a slight flicker over the pale bark and greenish-brown ropes betrayed the creature’s powerful bulk.

  Imeris stretched out her hand and took three steps forwards.

  Hot breath warmed the back of it, but she didn’t flinch. Her Great Deed would not be to kill a chimera. Bad enough the demon who had fostered her after her long fall from Canopy had been killed out of necessity by Middle-Father. He—all her fathers—had promised never to take the life of a chimera again.

  “My mother was one of you,” she whispered.

  The forked tongue that touched her cheek was not invisible, like the rest of the creature, but pink streaked with black and blue. Imeris didn’t flinch from it, either. She felt lost in half-true, half-dreamed memories of the metallic smell, milky taste, and blood-warm aura of the chimera. Though it was beyond impossible as a grown woman, part of her wanted to crawl past its teeth into its distensible throat pouch and go to sleep.

  The golden eyes blinked and were gone. It had turned and was returning to the paperbark tree.

  Imeris turned, too, reluctantly, returning to the ti-house. In the entranceway, beside her torch-bearing Youngest-Father, the two men whose lives she had saved stared at her in amazement.

  “Are you a goddess of Canopy?” one of them gasped.

  Imeris was often accused of being Canopian. Her dark brown skin, hair, and eyes were evidence of high origin, but her spines said otherwise. Perhaps that was one reason she now preferred her spines to any other weapon, why she preferred Horroh to her other teachers, for seeing only her spines when he looked at her.

  “No,” Imeris said. “My sister is a goddess of Canopy. I am just another warrior from the wilds.” Not actually just another warrior. She was the youngest competitor ever to be crowned Heightsman at Loftfol. Only a necessity: They wouldn’t take her otherwise. She’d needed them to take her. “That chimera will not go hungry. By saving you, I have doomed others.”