Echoes of Understorey Read online

  Imeris smelled eel and ginger on a stranger’s breath but squared her shoulders and did not recoil.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Gumblossom,” said a deep-voiced man whose mouth sounded about at the level of her eyes, a pace back from her. Though Oldest-Father tugged protectively at her, trying to turn the woven basket so that he was the one facing the stranger, she didn’t help him and it didn’t work.

  Imeris, mortified by her foolish imaginings and determined to quash her dread, put her hand out to touch the man. She touched feathers instead, startling the creature before her into a kek-kek-kek that threatened to burst her eardrums. She couldn’t let go of the rope with her other hand, so she wrapped her one loose arm around her head instead.

  “Do not boke her eye,” Gumblossom said when the animal was quiet.

  “Do you mean poke her eye?”

  Gumblossom laughed softly.

  “This sound! Bah! We do not use it. Bah! Bah!”

  Each time he tried it, he came closer to saying pah! without quite managing it.

  Imeris stifled a giggle.

  “Are all Floorian men named after flowers?” she asked. “Or just your leaders?”

  “All children are named for the first fallen flower their mother feels after the birth,” Gumblossom said. “But I am no leader. I talk with Treefolk because when my mother was bregnant with me, she ate some of the sbeaking-bone of an Old God. So I was born with some Treefolk words in me. Some Elephant-Driver words, Crocodile-Rider words, Rememberer words, Fig-Eater words, and words from the Bright Blain. Took me longer than other children to learn my own language, the language of the Steedfolk. But now, all these words, is useful to my beoble, correct?”

  Imeris was taken aback. She’d heard other languages spoken about in Loftfol as historical irritants in the translation of fighting technique texts, not as things that still existed. Words were words.

  “Correct,” Youngest-Father said, sounding amused.

  “You can be useful to my beoble, also. You hunt the sorceress, correct?”

  “Correct,” Oldest-Father said. “Will you take us to the tree, or will we stand here on this basket in the rain until dawn?”

  “Our bone woman asks that I remind you. No light.”

  “No light,” Oldest-Father agreed.

  “The lightest of you will ride with me. But out your hand again, Immimissimi.”

  This time, Imeris did laugh. When she reached out her hand, a man’s wide, muddy palm clasped hers and dragged her from the basket onto something broad, slick, and warm. She felt that she was seated in front of Gumblossom, that his chest and abdomen were naked and covered in mud. His eel and ginger breath tickled her ear.

  “She feels like a wet feather bed by a fire,” Imeris said.

  “She looks like a giant flowerfowl,” Gumblossom answered. “Her feathers are glorious, black and blue, and her toes are four body lengths long. It is a shame you are not bermitted to see her. She walks on the lily bads that float on the surface of the water. But we must move, so that your combanions may mount.”

  His knees pressed the great bird’s sides. It lurched forwards and back before coming to a halt again with its neck feathers brushing Imeris’s nose.

  “Her head bobs back and forth when she walks,” Gumblossom warned. “Do not get a bloody nose. Lean back.”

  Imeris leaned against him. He felt like a normal man, albeit with bulky muscles and a bushy beard. Not hideous and misshapen at all. Imeris wondered if he had green eyes. There was a special place in her heart for men with green eyes. And he ate eels with ginger, not blood.

  “You carry no weapons?” she asked.

  “My steed is my weabon,” Gumblossom replied as shuddering basket sounds and a close-by kek-kek-kek indicated that Imeris’s fathers were being helped onto their own giant birds. “Her beak and her claws and her sbeed. Do not feel shamed by the way I will hold you. If you fall off, you cannot rid us of our shared enemy.”

  FIVE

  THE GIANT bird raced through the dark.

  Imeris lay back at a sharp angle, eyes to the sky. Gumblossom’s burly arms were wrapped around her, and the steed’s feathered head brushed her breasts with every swift stride. It would have felt like a dream, if not for the thought that the battle with the sorceress lay ahead.

  An hour or so had gone by. Imeris had never seen a water clock outside of Loftfol, but her time in the school had given her a good sense of how the days and their divisions passed, even in pitch-blackness. If she’d been in Understorey, she might have hoped to see the first light of day, but here there wasn’t so much as the twinkle of false stars.

  “Have you ever seen the sun?” she asked Gumblossom.

  “When I was a child,” Gumblossom replied. “One of the great trees fell. That was when these lilies grew. They bloom in the sun after a giant dies. These ones likely will not bloom again for a hundred years. Life is very batient, here.”

  “We do not see much of the sun. But if I never saw it at all, I think I might go mad.”

  “And I would go mad if my feet did not touch the earth. Here is the tree that your friend the fruit cutter bade us bring you to the base of.”

  Imeris felt the steed’s pace falling, the feathers brushing her at lengthening intervals.

  “How can you see? How can you know?”

  “The steed knows,” Gumblossom answered. “She does not like to come close to trees. They bend her toes.” He had to help her to sit upright when they stopped, for Imeris’s lower back had seized up in the awkward angle she’d adopted while riding.

  There was no time for her stretching exercises, though. Gumblossom swung her out over the right side of the giant bird, and she had no choice but to trust him and let go of his hand. Her feet landed together on a tree root; her waving arms found the chunky, fibrous bark of a floodgum crisscrossed by the succulent stems of the parasitic windowleaf.

  “Imeris,” Youngest-Father said quietly beside her, and then Oldest-Father landed right on top of both of them. There was more laughter and splashing from the Floorians, and cursing from Oldest-Father, as they untangled themselves.

  “The mud at the foot of the tree,” Gumblossom called from a distance, “will brotect you from insect stings, but do not go deeb into the water. Bad things wait there. Good hunting to you, Treefolk.”

  “Thank you,” Youngest-Father called back to them.

  But the Bird-Riders were gone.

  Good, Imeris thought. Now Kirrik will not be able to use any of them.

  Obedient to Gumblossom’s suggestion, they smeared each other’s bodies with mud, wherever there was bare skin. Youngest-Father wore the fewest clothes, so carried the most mud, while Oldest-Father and Imeris only had necks, faces, arms, and lower legs to smear with the fine-grained, decay-smelling silt.

  “This is a fortune to a potter,” Imeris said.

  “Status symbols for half-wits,” Oldest-Father muttered. “Pottery.”

  “Is the water clean, I wonder?” Youngest-Father asked.

  “We should have asked the bone woman to purify some for us,” Imeris said. Long before she had gone to Loftfol, Middle-Father had taught her how to stay strong for a battle at the end of a long climb. Drink all the water you can hold. Piss it all against the trunk right before the attack, marking territory like a demon and lightening yourself for combat.

  And what of the warriors below? Imeris had asked him, giggling.

  You are marking them, too, was Middle-Father’s answer. Marking them as weaklings and cowards who did not reach the battleground before you.

  “This will have to do.” Youngest-Father sighed, sharing a leather water bottle and balls of cidergum sap between them.

  They began to climb.

  “At least it will be easy to see the lanterns in this,” Imeris whispered.

  “We can only hope,” Youngest-Father whispered back. He had taken the lead. Imeris climbed behind him, with Oldest-Father lowest down the trunk. Spines were
n’t necessary, with the windowleaf stems offering easy purchase, even without being able to see a thing. The occasional cool leaf blade slapped Imeris’s cheek; she had been warned that the windowleaf trees here had leaves all the way down.

  They didn’t need to speak of battle plans. Those were long ago made and many times practiced. The first time the three brothers had killed Kirrik, it had been by arrow. The second time by trap and ballista bolt. Both times, the sorceress had inhabited a body incapable of magic. Imeris had listened avidly to those tales by the fire, proud of her fathers, but it hadn’t been personal to her, then. Nirrin had still been herself.

  They feared that Nirrin’s body had been chosen because she was destined to be a spinewife. They feared that this time, Kirrik would be able to use the gods’ powers against them, the way she had once before.

  Middle-Father had formulated a plan whereby Youngest-Father, with his chimera-skin wings, would fly down right on top the sorceress while Oldest-Father distracted her with talk. Chimera skin blocked the use of magic. Middle-Father would reach under the edge of the hide and cut her throat while she was entangled in it. Perhaps the skin would hold her soul inside it, too.

  If not, the three brothers would be wearing amulets and there would be nobody else on the tree; nobody close enough for Kirrik to take over before her soul faded into the ether.

  It was a good plan.

  Middle-Father was in Canopy right now, being Bodyguard to Imeris’s sister, his amulet passed on to Imeris, but Imeris was more than willing to do the throat-cutting. She’d practiced the motion with her right-forearm spines, of cutting an imaginary throat from the other side of the edge of a demon hide. Horroh the Haakim had watched without asking why.

  Nirrin was your friend, Youngest-Father had said, before her body was stolen by the sorceress. I will be the one to kill her a final time, and with one of Vesev’s knives, too.

  Youngest-Father had been afraid of the village smith, Sorros, and his two children, Vesev and Nirrin. He’d agonized that Imeris would let slip the location of their dwelling, or her fathers’ real names. If anyone from the village learned the truth about her family, the people of Gannak would come for the three brothers, to force them to face their version of justice.

  Imeris hadn’t cared about her fathers’ so-called crimes in the days before they’d fled the village. She only wanted a friend who wasn’t her sister or brother. Someone to tell her secrets to, who could tell her what was going on in the wider world, and who was sympathetic to her desire to escape the expectations of her parents that she would carry out Great Deeds.

  When they were both about twelve, Imeris had dared to visit Nirrin at her house in Gannak. Nirrin’s mother had gone out to the ti-house to sell moonflowers, and Vesev had been at the forge with their father.

  The two girls, alone in the house, had made ti themselves, stealing honey from the pantry and luxuriating in the smooth sweetness it gave the ti. They’d put a tarantula in Vesev’s bed and tried on Nirrin’s mother’s wedding headdress, which she was keeping for Nirrin’s wedding. It had metal and gems in among the feathers and bright-dyed fibres, and they’d fought over who would hold it up to the firelight and coo over the glitter and gleam of it.

  Nirrin had wanted Imeris to try the dresses next, but Imeris hadn’t dared take off her wings and gliding frame.

  If I suddenly jump out the window, she’d said nervously, it will be because I see Oldest-Father coming along the bridges to find me.

  Of course, Oldest-Father hadn’t come. He rarely left the tallowwood tree trunk that was their home. It was Youngest-Father who rapped smartly on the door to interrupt Imeris’s illicit visit, and it was a Defender of Gannak who tried to detain them both. They’d managed to fly away that time, though Imeris hadn’t been able to fly away from the beating Oldest-Father gave her after, nor the confiscation of her wings.

  Now she wished she’d disobeyed Oldest-Father more often and visited Nirrin more while there had still been time.

  Remembering how strict he had been while she was growing up made her want to piss on him, right here and now, but this was no place for childishness. She was a Heightsman of Loftfol.

  “I see the lanterns,” Youngest-Father said, going utterly still against the trunk.

  Imeris froze, too, gazing upwards at the ghostly glow. Very faint, filtering through many layers of broad, black-silhouetted, hole-filled windowleaves, but the blue blush was unmistakeable. She wrinkled her nose. Smelled male sweat that belonged to neither of her fathers.

  “There must be a sentry,” she murmured. “Buried in leaves. Let me go ahead and find him. His body must not be made available to the sorceress.”

  “Wait,” Youngest-Father replied, “until I am away.”

  “Do you need help with your wings?” Imeris whispered. When he didn’t answer, she knew he had unwrapped them himself. The sound of him sliding them over his shoulders always took her back to the moment of her first flight, the smoothness of the too-big handles, and how the god of falling children had saved her from her own stupidity.

  Today there must be no mistakes. This was her chance to break free of her old segmented life and start anew, to truly find herself. Only Kirrik stood in the way. Kirrik, Imeris had heard that name whispered, a curse, a thousand times. From now on when anyone said it, they would look to her, admiringly, knowing she had rid the forest of a terrible scourge, but not knowing she’d had no choice, bred to the task and now led to the task. She must not fail.

  “Find the nearest tree for me, brother,” Youngest-Father called softly down to Oldest-Father, who brought two hollow blocks out of the bundle on his back and clapped them together.

  They made a sound like a branch cracking, which was a normal enough sound in the forest and not bound to cause too much alarm, but the echoes of the sound told Oldest-Father, who had practiced with them, where the neighbouring tree trunks stood, and where there was only emptiness for thousands of paces and more.

  He climbed up past Imeris and, in the lantern light, she saw him lift Youngest-Father’s arm, chimera cloth hanging from it like a bat’s skin folds, and point it slightly to the left.

  “There,” Oldest-Father murmured, retreating out of the way.

  Youngest-Father launched himself with a crack of frame setting and a rush of air. Imeris couldn’t follow without a ballista, in the rain, with her inferior wings, but she didn’t need to. Youngest-Father would climb the neighbouring tree until he found a position suitable for gliding down to the level of the lanterns.

  Oldest-Father’s job would be to lure the enemy onto some nearby, obvious, clearly visible platform close to the death-lanterns, without being killed by them.

  Before Oldest-Father moved into the open, though, Imeris would have to make sure the sorceress was isolated. At least one sentry seemed likely. Above the dovecote if Kirrik was most concerned about discovery by Canopians. Below if she was most concerned about Understorians.

  Imeris was willing to bet the man she could smell was a guard stationed below.

  She pulled slightly ahead of Oldest-Father, motioning for him to be still. Without waiting to see if he’d obeyed, she used her spines to slice away a section of windowleaf between its long, stringy veins. It made a swishing noise, but single swishing noises could be ignored. Breaking twigs, falling fruit, and disagreements between birds could all make a single swish. Imeris had heard and ignored plenty in the last few minutes. It was sustained swishing that attracted attention.

  Ducking her head under several other of the leaves, she located a handful of mosquitoes on their undersides, captured them unharmed, made a leaf-tube from the cut section in her hand, and blew the insects into the air above her.

  They dispersed silently, wings catching the sparse light. Imeris watched them closely.

  At first they spread out in a random pattern. Then some of them seemed drawn to a particular gap between leaves above her head.

  Somebody is there. Breathing.

  Imeris listen
ed. Heard nothing. Saw nothing further. Manoeuvred with all the stealth she naturally possessed and had honed at the Loftfol school, contorting her limbs to avoid brushing leaves and branches, at times her entire body weight borne by one handhold as she strained to lift herself up and over some half-furled sheet of green.

  Then she peered through a slit in the leaves, spotted the underside of a boot and part of a knee, and felt all her mind and muscle focus to a killing point. She had to end whoever crouched there without alerting the sorceress to a struggle.

  Imeris reached overhead, forearm spines out. They slid easily between the windowleaf trunk and the rootlets that held it to the host tree. Immediately, the trunk segment sagged under the weight of the hidden sentry, leaving the person no choice but to stand up and scout out a safer perch.

  Imeris glimpsed the man’s startled, black-skinned Canopian face. His back to the tree, his arms went wide to steady himself. Imeris’s concentration was so absolute, she could almost feel herself in his place, thinking his thoughts. It was not magic. Only the total empathy possible in a one-on-one encounter.

  His eyes darted to his right. He was preparing to pivot on that foot, turning his front to the tree, stepping onto a secure trunk with rootlets intact.

  Imeris visualised where his neck would be when he pivoted. Felt the roughness of the weighted ropes in her hands. She would not have room to give the ropes the full turn she had been taught to add power to the throw, nor could she use her preferred length, in case the weights hit the tree and bounced off instead of wrapping around his throat. The wooden blocks were neither barbed nor poisoned.

  He shifted his centre of gravity. Imeris sank her shin spines into the tree and reared back, right arm pushing free of the foliage. She swung the cord. Loosed it. The throw was perfectly timed.

  Unable to shout his warning, the sentry wobbled at the brink of falling, hands instinctively coming to his throat instead of securing him to the tree. One shin managed to catch in a thick stem. Abruptly his head dangled level with hers, upside down, his back arched, eyes bulging and mouth opening and closing.