Echoes of Understorey Read online

  She drew a fish knife and tried to cut his throat. Her first kill. She had to grit her teeth to stop her own mouth from opening and closing, still in terrible sympathy. She could have been the one hanging there, an instant away from death. He blocked the knife. She sliced his palms. Hurry, her mind berated her. Do not make a commotion!

  Before she could stab him through the heart, Oldest-Father was blocking her way, pulling a brain-coated bore-knife out of the man’s skull.

  “Quickly,” Oldest-Father whispered. “She might have heard. Follow me.”

  Imeris swallowed with a dry mouth. The moment of sympathy was over; she was a woman on a branch who might have died; her flesh was vulnerable; there was no amulet to shield her from physical attacks. Yet her lifetime of training was as good as a magic amulet. Better, since it could not be taken away from her. The flicker of fear was overtaken by exultation, which was overtaken in turn by regret. For a moment she couldn’t look away from the blood, diluted by rain, dripping down the sliced, hanging hands of the dead sentry. His soul was winging its way through the trees even now, swiftly towards rebirth.

  Then, she put her fish knife away and climbed after Oldest-Father.

  SIX

  IMERIS CREPT with Oldest-Father along a broken lateral branch.

  The branch had no doubt been a strong and vital bough when the floodgum was young and growing. Shadowed by the canopy, though, and dragged on by the weight of windowleaf vines, it had long since cracked and fallen away. Most of her mud had washed away in the rain, and Imeris suppressed the urge to slap at insects.

  The side of the sorceress’s dovecote came into view.

  “You will never get past the lanterns,” Imeris breathed, “to reach the central vein.”

  The building took the shape of two enormous windowleaves, jutting out twenty paces or so from the side of the tree, connected by slender columns of equal lengths. Ceiling-leaf and floor-leaf were perfectly parallel, one about two body lengths above the other. The leaf-perforations that ate away a fifth of the edge of each dark green, leathery surface matched one other, too. Rainwater collecting on the ceiling-leaf fell through the upper holes in glittering, bluish streams and straight through the corresponding lower holes.

  It was beautiful.

  But the death-lanterns that shot lightning bolts into any body that blocked their light were hung strategically from the twisty, creamy-brown columns at the tip and both sides of the lower leaf. The lanterns’ blue glow defended not only the gaps between leaves where Oldest-Father might enter, but also the upper and lower perforations. There, the shafts of light looked like ghostly blue spears.

  Only the central leaf veins, where there were no perforations, were safe. The sorceress must sleep on the lower vein, sheltered from the monsoon by the upper one.

  “The leaves are tough,” Oldest-Father whispered, “but not like tallowwood. If I cut around the base of that column closest to us, column and lantern will both fall.”

  “Killing you on the way down,” Imeris said dolefully.

  “We still have enough rope between us. Give me yours.” His hand touched her arm. “I can swing out of the way.” Oldest-Father always carried more rope than anyone. He was afraid to glide, even in the dry season. If he had to cross the spaces between great trees, his preferred method was to tie one of his ropes to the belt of a person who did have a glider, and once they’d made the crossing and secured it for him, to swing across after them.

  Imeris looked down at his hand. They were close enough to the lantern light for her to see the spots and scars on the back of it. He was old, too old to be trying acrobatics, and she was a Heightsman of Loftfol.

  “Let me do it, Oldest-Father.”

  He scowled.

  “Did I summon you here to watch you die?”

  “Did you summon me,” she retorted, “to carry rope for you?”

  “The plan is not altered, Imeris. You will take Bernreb’s part. You will finish her off at the end. Not before.”

  I am my own woman, she thought angrily. You do not command my obedience anymore.

  When Imeris had made that forbidden visit to Nirrin’s home, aged twelve, she’d been known by everyone as Issi. Issi, did you know that women can be Heightsmen, too, if they beat all the men in the race to Loftfol? Nirrin had said. Issi, did you know that Loftfol is a school for training war leaders to raid Canopy?

  Usually it was Nirrin who enlightened Issi, but that day, the day they had tried on the wedding headdress, Issi had found herself able to contribute. Nirrin, did you know that if our people get captured in Canopy, they snap off their spines and make them slaves forever?

  Nirrin had been horrified, clutching her arms. Issi had clutched her arms, too. Only for a moment. Her blood was Canopian, but her spines made her Understorian, or so she thought. But the idea of slavery was fresh in her thoughts. So when Oldest-Father punished her with a beating and by taking away her wings, she had tried to hurt him back by calling him a slave.

  Do you wish we lived in Canopy? Oldest-Father had asked her scathingly. That I truly was a slave, and you were not Imerissiremi, but Imeris? Imeris was your Canopian name, before your blood mother dropped you over the edge to be eaten by demons.

  He’d called her Imeris from that moment on, a constant reminder, and she had defiantly reclaimed it, though her other two fathers still called her Issi or Imerissiremi. And he’d taken away her knives, replacing them with chimney brushes, saying she would not hunt again until the chimneys were cleaner than her filthy mouth.

  She hadn’t known how to fight with her spines then.

  “At the end,” Imeris acceded. “Not before.”

  She gave him her rope. He whisked away.

  Imeris climbed after him, slowly and arrhythmically, trying to disguise the drag of her glider wings as leaves rustling in the rain. If Oldest-Father was able to cut any of the leaf-dwelling away, it would be because the sorceress was sleeping. In her head, as her fingers and toes found holds in between the fleshy stems, Imeris practiced the throat-cutting move.

  My Great Deed.

  The end of the sorceress Kirrik, and the end of my family’s ambition for me.

  She would not leave the fatal blow to others, as she had with the sentry. Her heart thumped.

  Then she flinched back, flattening herself between leaves, as the blue lantern fell. Abandoning silence, pushing her way up through the foliage to find a viewpoint, she glimpsed, through the hole he had cut, Oldest-Father climbing through the lower windowleaf of the dovecote.

  Imeris peered into darkness in the direction where Youngest-Father had glided, hoping he was in position and ready to begin his glide towards the dovecote. She clambered higher up the trunk, forced to go around several of the huge, flat leaves. Behind a clump of them, several paces higher than and around the trunk from the dovecote, she waited, hugging the stems, feeling her spines quiver, scanning for a second sentry, seeing no movement and smelling nothing but windowleaf fruit and the faint stink of panther musk.

  She rearranged several of the leaves so she could see.

  Oldest-Father knelt on the upper leaf of the dovecote, putting his head through one of the holes to peer inside it.

  Whatever he saw made him leap back. There were ten paces of safe space around him devoid of the direct, deadly light. Imeris unfolded her glider frame, snapping it into place, ready to launch in Youngest-Father’s place if Oldest-Father could not buy enough time.

  “Kirrik, who was once Rannar of Dul,” Oldest-Father shouted, “and the tanner Aaderredaa before her! I seek an audience.”

  His thin body was straight and unafraid.

  How can a man be afraid of heights but not of a body-snatching enchantress?

  A young, dark-haired woman pulled herself up through the hole where Oldest-Father had peered. Her back was half turned to Imeris, but her figure was achingly familiar. A huge bosom contrasted with a thin boy-bum and wide bare feet. The woman wore a sleeveless black shirt, a short olive-green spli
t skirt, and one leg brace with steel hooks.

  Nirrin.

  Nirrin’s spines had never taken in that leg, which had been broken when a dayhunter tried to snatch her out of her cradle. Imeris felt nauseated. Memories of the moment in the forge threatened to overwhelm her.

  No. It is not really her.

  “How,” the woman who was not Nirrin asked imperiously, lifting Nirrin’s chin, “do you know those names?”

  “I had a bird from one of your sons,” Oldest-Father said. “He is a slave in Canopy and seems to think it your fault. You never taught him to switch bodies. He says switching bodies is the only way he can rid himself of the mark upon his tongue.”

  “He has asked me to pay his ransom before,” Kirrik said, putting her fists to her hips. “Now he sends you. What can you offer that he could not?”

  “I am a problem solver.”

  “You would serve me?”

  “I am a machine maker.”

  “No machine is worth the loss of my lamp.” Her tone turned dangerous. “I shall have to risk the climb to Floor to recover it.”

  “I have slain many demons.”

  “I have slain more. Also, many women and men.”

  “Yes,” Oldest-Father agreed, “many. Including Sikakis, who was a prince. Garrag, who was another of your sons. Nirrin, who would have been a spinewife of Gannak, if you had not sent her soul into the ether.”

  Silence between them. Stillness.

  Hurry, Youngest-Father, Imeris thought, her pulse racing, her spines vibrating with their need to spring from her forearm and shinbone crevices.

  “Those names,” Kirrik said at last, menacingly, “are not known to my son.”

  A bird made of chimera cloth swooped out of the darkness, covering Kirrik in a heartbeat with colour-changing wings.

  SEVEN

  IMERIS PREPARED to launch herself.

  The sorceress was trapped. Enfolded.

  No. Imeris hesitated.

  Something was wrong.

  Something was happening.

  The twisting, creamy-brown columns separating the two great leaves were coming alive. They were not wooden. Squeezing out from under the upper leaf through the perforations in it, they had the chimera skin in their mouths; they dragged Youngest-Father back. He was still strapped to the frame of the glider. Kirrik was revealed, her lips moving but not making any sound.

  Snakes.

  Nirrin was going to be a spinewife.

  These were the vipers that served as donors for the fangs, magically embedded in bone, which became an Understorian warrior’s climbing spines. Imeris’s spines had come from reptiles like these.

  Nirrin, fists stretched out to either side, had spines erupting from all sorts of places they shouldn’t. A crown of them stood up from her skull. Lines of them tore through her black shirt, emerging from every rib. They pushed out all along her spine, ripping her shirt and her olive-green skirt.

  The sorceress was out from under the chimera skin. She was escaping, all of Imeris’s hopes and plans escaping with her. She must not escape!

  In a panic, Imeris launched herself without first making sure she was clear. She cursed as her glider wing tip snagged on a leaf. Instead of plunging to her fathers’ aid, she careened in a half circle and slammed, upside down, into the tree trunk. All the breath was knocked out of her.

  “You should have let them sleep on, Core Kirrik,” Youngest-Father shouted. “They cannot maintain this structure without the coldness and rigidity of hibernation.”

  “You!” Kirrik shrieked. “I healed you. I spared you. I should never have kept you in hibernation!”

  Imeris wrenched her arms out of the straps of the frame and righted herself, still gasping. The blood had run to her head, suffusing her along with the sense of failure.

  Kirrik turned to face her, eyes blazing. It was not over. The enemy was still there. Imeris leaped, wingless, down onto the upper leaf, dodging away from the lantern beams. She skipped over a writhing carpet of snakes towards Kirrik, her spines out, heedless of the danger.

  Her weight collapsed the upper windowleaf around her. The dovecote sagged, threatening to spill all of them. It was nightmarish. Like being trapped in a vertical river, unable to go forwards or back. Imeris couldn’t see her fathers or Kirrik. She pushed the leathery leaf surface away from her, spines catching in it, only hoping that the sorceress, with her many added spines, was trapped in it, too.

  Oldest-Father’s bore-knife blade emerged from the leaf, a hand-span from Imeris’s face. It scored her shoulder in a downward curl; Oldest-Father’s hand, when it seized her harness, turned slick with her blood. The harness rope pressed into the wound, making her cry out.

  Her stomach lurched. Everything fell away. The huge pair of windowleaves, detached from the tree, drifted in slow motion, left behind in darkness by the two remaining, fast-falling lanterns. Imeris’s wings and their frame fell, too. Vipers fell, looping around nothing. Clothes and blankets, books and scrolls toppled. They must have been inside the dovecote.

  Imeris dangled by her harness from Oldest-Father’s hand. His other arm was caught by the spines in the trunk of the tree. Their eyes met. His tight expression softened with relief. Imeris lunged at the tree, sinking her own spines into the juicy windowleaf stems. Oldest-Father let go of her harness, letting her take her own weight.

  When she looked up, in the fading blue lantern light and the greyish daylight now reaching them from the distant sky, she saw Youngest-Father hanging from the floodgum bark by his spines. A few body lengths above him, the sorceress hung from a rope made of snakes.

  Imeris smelled the same sap she had smelled before, but it had smelled like hope before, and now it smelled like catastrophe. Kirrik had the height advantage, and they had lost the element of surprise. As the sorceress climbed higher and the lowest snake became superfluous, it detached itself from the chain and fell onto Youngest-Father’s upturned face. He slashed it with the spines of his other arm, just in time for another viper to drop onto him, and another. Kirrik’s lips moved, again in silence, and Youngest-Father’s movements slowed. His eyes closed, and his body went limp.

  “What’s happening?” Imeris cried, lunging upwards, wanting to climb to Youngest-Father’s rescue, but Oldest-Father jerked her wrist painfully.

  “No, Imeris,” he hissed. “Keep this distance, or she’ll put you to sleep, too. She must be silenced before she kills him. Use your throwing rope.”

  Childish instinct to obey him kicked in. Youngest-Father’s slumbering form slackened, and his spines loosened from the tree. Imeris ducked her head, feeling around herself to find the weighted rope, and while she was distracted, Oldest-Father slipped upwards, past her.

  “Wait,” she cried, but he was already halfway to the sorceress, a bore-knife in each clenched fist.

  Nirrin—Kirrik—stared down at him with contempt. The windowleaf stems around him shuddered to life, sending new, green shoots wriggling into the open air. The tree itself was betraying Oldest-Father, joining the fight on the side of the sorceress.

  Vines lashed his body and limbs to the trunk. Imeris heard the crack of his neck breaking. She wanted to believe she had imagined it. When his body turned in the grip of the writhing shoots, she wanted to believe that he was struggling.

  Escaping.

  Instead, he was pulled in between the trunks of windowleaf and host tree. Imeris saw his dead, glazed eyes popping in the moment before every part of him was covered, sealed into the titanic trunk of the tree.

  She screamed her denial, and Kirrik’s predatory glare left the place where Oldest-Father had vanished, settling on her instead.

  Imeris didn’t pause to aim. Once she had the weights swinging at speed, they left her hand and connected almost instantly, across five body lengths, to the sorceress’s mouth. The hardwood bloodied Nirrin’s lips. Perhaps broke a few teeth. Imeris’s spines sprang from her forearms. She climbed rapidly towards the injured sorceress, but when she stopped, halfway,
to raise her head above the tangle of leaves and sight her prey a second time, she saw Youngest-Father’s slumbering form about to fall, between her and the escaping sorceress.

  She set her shin spines and prepared to catch him. Nirrin’s steel brace made a characteristic sticking sound in the tree. Its spines were neither as slender nor sharp as snake-teeth spines, and in the time since Vesev had made them, tree sap and rain had rusted them. Imeris raised her voice so that the fleeing Kirrik could hear her. “I will find you again! You are an abomination! Every part of the forest you corrupt will point the way to you!”

  The tree shuddered. Youngest-Father fell. Imeris’s joints jolted as she caught him.

  She pressed his limp form against the same fleshy stems that had murdered Oldest-Father, having no choice but to trust that these ones would not open and envelop them both. She planted her forearm spines to create a cradle for him.

  A windowleaf stem grew impossibly fast over their heads, blocking the feeble daylight. It stretched across the chasm between great trees, vanishing into darkness, carrying Kirrik with it.

  Youngest-Father had spoken of seeing such horrors before, when Kirrik wielded the Godfinder’s power. How could she have forgotten?

  Imeris felt paralysed by Oldest-Father’s loss. A storm of unbearable shame and fury filled her.

  I was not quick enough. I was not strong enough.

  There is no greatness in me. My mothers and fathers were wrong.

  Oldest-Father is dead. My Great Deed. I can never meet their eyes again.

  EIGHT

  IMERIS SHIVERED in the doorway, holding Youngest-Father’s body before her.

  It was Oldest-Mother, Ylly the elder, whose wrinkled hands urged her inside, closer to the fire. Imeris shuffled into brightness and warmth. She put her father on the enormous slab of quandong wood that comprised, with ironbark frame and pegs, the central table.

  “Where is Esse?” Oldest-Mother asked.