Echoes of Understorey Page 9

  Impact with the smooth, flat floor came a few seconds later. The trapdoor closed, cutting off the last light. Sealed inside, as Kirrik sealed Oldest-Father into the windowleaf tree. No. Focus. Imeris rolled backwards. Was the trapdoor mechanical or operated by hand? If Aurilon had waited near the ceiling and heard Imeris’s near-silent steps, the assumption would be that Imeris would roll forwards in the direction she’d been facing.

  She’d made a trapdoor herself, once, in preparation for their second duel. Now she’d fallen into one. Careless! Remember what has gone before!

  This was their fifth fight. For every move and countermove that Aurilon made and Imeris remembered, the reverse was also true.

  They hadn’t fought in the dark before, though. Who had the advantage? Aurilon might have assumed it would favour her slithering, constant-contact fighting style, but then again, Imeris was Understorian and she’d visited with the Bird-Riders.

  The clarity that reduced the enemy to moving parts instead of persons took over Imeris’s mind. She moved into the steps of the form called Floor, slashing the air with her spines. She felt for the shape of the chamber with her feet, finding its circumference. It would be deliberately deceiving. She must make out any obstacles quickly, before her opponent could drive her into them. Ropes. Nets. Stumbling blocks. Allowing the Bodyguard to choose the battleground was a serious mistake.

  No, she admonished the weaker self who wished to remind her of recent losses. There is no sorceress, no family defenceless in the dark. There is no past or future. Only here and now, and I am Imeris, a Heightsman of Loftfol.

  She heard a sound like splinters lifting behind her.

  Imeris spun and slashed again, pinning Aurilon’s fingers against the wooden wall with her spines.

  Not fingers. A shock ran through her. She’d hit something harder than a human hand. Chimera claws.

  She had time to realise Aurilon’s hand had escaped the climbing glove, time to calculate where the Bodyguard’s knees had hung and to guess where her opponent’s feet would fall. Shoulder to the wall, Imeris kicked out behind her with a leg that was sweeping, not cutting, interrupting what could have been a gracious recovery by the Bodyguard.

  Aurilon gave a whoof of emptied lungs as she landed, facedown, on the floor.

  This year, I will be the victor. Imeris dropped to one knee, following the sound of the exhalation with a driving fist, all her force behind it. Keep the fight short, Horroh had advised. Keep your secrets to yourself.

  The blow connected only with empty floor, splitting the skin over Imeris’s first two knuckles.

  Aurilon’s exhalation had been a decoy, and Imeris had fallen for it. Her second mistake. Aurilon’s huge hands which, every meeting, had sought a grip on Imeris’s clothes, now closed on spineless elbow joint and the back of her collar.

  Imeris flew through the air, away from the wall. But Aurilon had thrown her before. An attempt at locking Imeris’s extended arm was how the Bodyguard habitually followed through. Aurilon’s weight lay across Imeris’s hips, her hands at Imeris’s wrists, again seeking holds where there were no spines. Imeris curled her arm, spines withdrawn, against her body, to prevent the painful, immobilising hold.

  She kicked hard against the floor to turn over. Now the Bodyguard lay beneath her, naked and slippery, no softness where her breasts should have been, yet without the flayed-to-muscle feel of a fighting man of Loftfol.

  Imeris swung her right forearm, spines extended, at the Bodyguard’s face, and again Aurilon managed to unbalance her so the spines stuck in the wooden floor.

  As Imeris moved to withdraw them, Aurilon’s left shoulder wedged the spines against the grain. The seven snake fangs curved downwards. They were intended to hold Imeris’s full weight against the vertical trunk of a tree. Without raising her elbow, she couldn’t retract them. She struck towards the Bodyguard’s temple with her left elbow, but with her weight removed from Aurilon’s other shoulder, she felt both the Bodyguard’s arms snaking around hers like lianas.

  Like sorceress-possessed vines. Imeris imagined her eyes popping as Oldest-Father’s had. She smelled Temple incense and Aurilon’s sweat; she imagined the smell of windowleaf sap. In a single motion, Aurilon flipped them both again. Aurilon’s thighs now held Imeris’s neck and shoulders to the floor. Between them, Imeris’s arm extended from Aurilon’s crotch to her throat.

  The last time this had happened in one of their duels, Imeris had tried to twist her thumb downwards, to roll backwards, bend her elbow safely, and slip away.

  This time, angrily, she tried to turn the blade of her hand downwards, prepared to sink her spines straight into Aurilon’s rib cage. To Floor with first blood. To Floor with duels to submission. I cannot lose again. I do not have another year to spare!

  Before she could do it, she felt her elbow joint pop. It was agony, but, impotence spurring her to a blind rage, she tried to ignore it, to keep turning the limb, to push out her spines.

  The bone in her forearm where her spines were embedded snapped.

  She screamed with pain and fury.

  Aurilon released her. Rolled away. Imeris lay there, still screaming. A few paces back from her, Aurilon struck a spark, blowing a taper to life.

  She stepped forwards, looking down at Imeris. Her face was wet with perspiration but relaxed and expressionless. Now the shape of the room was clear. It was gently curving and bare except for a rough ledge at head height around the room. No tricks. No traps, apart from the one that had brought her down from the Test. Just two women, a pair of chimera-claw gloves, and an ineffectual curse that was yet to afflict Odel’s victorious Bodyguard.

  “You should have stopped when it was only dislocated,” Aurilon said smoothly.

  “Did I surprise you?” Imeris managed to demand through gritted teeth.

  “No. You idiot. Did they teach you that at Loftfol? Sacrifice your arm, for what?” She shook her head. “Something a man would do. I am disappointed. But not surprised.”

  ELEVEN

  ODEL’S SLEEPLESS Bodyguard, like Audblayin’s, owned a rarely used bed.

  “Lie still,” Aurilon ordered, setting Imeris and her loosely splinted arm into a mattress that rustled with windgrass thatch stuffing. The secret hollow lay behind a false wall of the Temple, inside one fin of the fish. Two tiny bores were barely enough to keep the air fresh, and there was neither smoke nor fire. A single blue lantern hung from a brass chain in the centre of the domed ceiling, and a small, red-spotted gecko lingered there hopefully, waiting for tiny flies.

  Later, when night fell and a frog refrain relieved the choir of cicadas, Aurilon brought water and Imeris asked, “Are you sure she received your message?”

  “Quite certain,” Aurilon said. “But Airakland is far away. It may take some time for her to come.”

  “I thought I could outmatch you, in the dark,” Imeris said, distracted by pain, barely hearing Aurilon’s answer. “I am from Understorey. You are the Canopian, the one who relies on the light, or so I thought. But I suppose the ones who gave you your markings see no more sunshine than the Bird-Riders do. I finally figured out where they are from.”

  “Yes,” Aurilon said, taking the water gourd away.

  “You fell, the same as I did.”

  “Not quite the same. I was older. Maybe seven? The wealthy children dared each other to jump over a gap between branches.” Aurilon offered a bedpan. Imeris eyed it. Her legs were quite well. Apparently Aurilon, or her master, did not want a fully spined Understorian seen loitering about Odel’s Temple looking for a suitable place to toilet. The Bodyguard went on. “I was smaller than the other children. They had Odel’s protection and knew it. I did not. They goaded me anyway. That is how I fell.”

  Imeris could easily imagine it.

  “You want to teach me.” She took the pan. Used it. “Why else give me so many chances? You feel a kinship between us.”

  “Not enough of a kinship to teach you before you are ready.” Aurilon’s mouth firm
ed. Her black eyes flashed in the blue lantern light. “A fool speaks to one without ears.”

  Then she turned her scarred, bumpy, scale-like back to Imeris and opened the panel in the false wall, departing to empty the pan. Afterwards, Imeris guessed, she would lurk in some high place, defending Odel from dangers while he dreamed his horrible, prescient dreams.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS later, the Godfinder came.

  Unar didn’t need to stoop, as Aurilon did, to enter the hidden room. She was shorter, softer, plumper, and slightly lighter-skinned than the Bodyguard. Her hair was loosely woven into two shoulder-length braids tied with tallowwood twine. Permanent frown lines scored the spot between her bushy brows.

  The adepts of the Garden from which she’d been expelled didn’t permit her to wear the white robe of a Servant, nor the red robe, crimson shirt, and spinach-coloured trousers of a Gardener. Unar wore, instead, the rough brown woven shirt of an out-of-nicher; the ankle-length, split wrap skirt of a Bodyguard, in nobody’s colours; and her Godfinder’s cloak, a long, hooded brown robe patched with dried and preserved leaves of a hundred faded hues.

  All the niches of Canopy knew and respected that cloak. Since Unar had taken it up, the faithful bereft of their goddess or god no longer had to wander, naked and half-starved, from niche to niche, in hope of finding their deity.

  Imeris remembered her as the sleeping princess in their home, a mystery that her three mothers and three fathers refused to properly explain to her.

  Did you sneak into the roof, Issi? little Ylly, six years old, had whispered to Imeris one night, shivering with anxiety and awe. Did Oldest-Father stay sleeping? What is in there?

  A girl, Imeris answered, creeping under the blanket with Ylly, unable to shake the mental image of the round, sooty face with its wide nose and generous lips, nestled in a pillow of springy black hair, which Imeris had searched for its resemblance to her own. A girl is sleeping up there. I had to wait for ages before I felt her heart beat. She sleeps like a tree bear through the monsoon.

  Do you think she is a princess? Excitement replaced fear in Ylly’s voice. A cursed princess? Is she our sister, or your birth mother, Issi?

  Imeris had been irritated her sister had guessed her motive so easily. Her birth mother. No. The sleeping girl did not seem old enough. She had no stretch-stripes on her skin, and her breasts were too small.

  Maybe she is our sister. Maybe when she wakes, she will tell us.

  When Unar had woken, however, all she’d done was reveal Ylly as the goddess Audblayin and split their family forever between Canopy and Understorey. What she’d done was take Imeris’s little sister away, and her little brother, and her middle-father, and foreshadow the fact that Ylly-Audblayin would be the one that sagas spoke of, that Ylly-Audblayin was the one whose famous name would live forever.

  A child their three mothers and three fathers could truly be proud of. Yet the goddess had done nothing to stop Kirrik. Considered her an Understorian problem, like dayhunters and chimeras.

  “Fighting again, Imerissiremi?” the Godfinder asked wryly, and Imeris knew from the heat and reduction of pain in her broken arm that her injury was being magically appraised.

  “I did not break it on my own,” she answered peevishly.

  “You might have lost the use of your spines in this arm if I hadn’t been able to come.”

  “Can you heal me or not?”

  Unar’s smile transformed her unremarkable features.

  “The old Odel,” she said, sitting on the bed beside Imeris, “wouldn’t have allowed me to use Audblayin’s power in his niche. And the old Audblayin would have thrown me out of a tree years ago for my disobedience. But since we’re together at this particular crossroads in time, yes, I can heal you.”

  You might have lost the use of your spines. Imeris’s lip trembled. It wasn’t the pain. She had a high tolerance for pain. It was fear of never completing the task. Now that she had failed at earning Aurilon as a tutor, who in Loftfol should she learn from next? The Litim, Dammammad, who taught the short sword? What about Saliailas, the Huntingim, who was unmatched in the use of the javelin? Clearly, choosing Horroh had not helped. She could not tell him so. He knew nothing of her matches in Canopy. None of them did.

  When will it be over? When will I be free?

  “I am lucky you were able to come, Godfinder,” she said. “And grateful my sister is a goddess.”

  Unar closed her eyes. Her smile faded.

  “She knows I’m with you. She’s willing me to help you. But you should be more careful.”

  “I will be,” Imeris lied.

  The Godfinder’s lids flickered open again.

  “Daughter of a chimera,” she mused, “in the place where I once came to see a chimera skin.”

  “There was a chimera in Wissin. It knew my smell. It turned back from my tree. The villagers were amazed.”

  “They should have been horrified.” Unar scowled. “Chimeras turn back from the stench of sorceress’s souls.”

  “It knew my smell,” Imeris repeated. “I wonder if they have a language. I wonder if they speak to one another.”

  Healing magic was unspectacular. Nothing like when Leaper called lightning to his piles of black sand. Imeris’s arm became numb to the feeling of broken pieces of bone moving. The eerie shifting beneath her skin showed them fitting together and knitting.

  But when feeling flooded back, the seam remained bloody and raw. Her spines protruded like the red-smeared teeth of a rough-made saw.

  “You know how it goes,” the Godfinder said grimly. “I can’t heal a spine-seam completely, or you’ll lose your climbing hooks. Wrap them up in the dressing and come with me. Aurilon has had enough of coddling you. You can stay with me in Airakland until you’re ready to climb back down. And you can see your brother while you’re there. You’re very lucky to have a brother. To have your family looking out for you.”

  “Yes,” Imeris murmured. They used to tell me how lucky I was to have all my mothers and fathers still alive. “I know.”

  A great hunter. A great healer. A great musician. A great mother. A great Bodyguard. A great goddess. A great Godfinder.

  There’s nothing great about being great. I just want it all to be over.

  TWELVE

  AIRAK’S EMERGENT fanned up and out of the canopy like a charred, skeletal bat wing.

  Of the thirteen Temples in the teeming treetop city, Airak’s was the only one that was dead. Even the death god, Atwith, was connected to the soil of Floor through the living body of a great bone tree. The fingers of this blackened hand were floodgum branches which had once been white and covered in long, leathery leaves, now hollowed spears where lightning bolts entered through the open culminations at the command of unseen adepts wielding magic within.

  “Leaper will be sleeping now,” Imeris said, stopping on the twisting gobletfruit road. “Does he know about Oldest-Father? Has somebody told him?”

  Sunlight flooded the stretch of Airakland ahead of them. Many homes and workshops were in other, lesser floodgums just as blackened and scarred as the emergent. Glassmaking was not confined to the Temple. The king of Airakland’s palace was similarly visible, its pale, magic-sculpted wood roundly cloud-shaped with windows shaped like jagged bolts to let the blue lantern light shine through. It, too, was hosted by a floodgum, but that tree was alive, draped in wet, gleaming foliage of dark grey-green. Tree and palace were turned rowdy by yellow-tailed black cockatoos ripping up the bark for beetle larvae and screaming at each other over territorial incursions.

  Imeris noted the way the birds dropped underneath the branches, holding on by a single foot or clawed toe, then opened their wings to catch the air and sail away. It was so effortless.

  She remembered pushing off the tangle of windowleaf stems, in so much of a hurry to join her fathers she’d felt like she was already standing with them against Kirrik. Then the swish and jerk of the tangled wing tip. The pendulum swing. The crunch and judder as
she hit the trunk.

  Disgrace. Death.

  “I told him about Esse,” the Godfinder said, a deepening of her frown, quickly smoothed away, the only sign of her own feelings. “I passed on to Leaper what your sister said, which was that she was pleased to announce his glorious rebirth, in any case. You Understorians don’t take it very hard when warriors die, do you? Everybody seems to expect it. You’ll see Leaper after dark. Come on. I’m not as fit as I used to be. I can’t run around Canopy all day like you young things.” It was a joke. Imeris and the Godfinder were physically about the same age, early in their third decades of life.

  Imeris followed Unar again along the gobletfruit path. They took two turnings along floodgum paths, then skipped along the prickly, seldom-used branch path of a false palm heavy with huge, head-sized nuts.

  That branch ended at the hollowed node of a scented satinwood tree. An arch in the horizontally striped bark admitted them to a sheltered crossroads where paths radiated out in two dozen directions. Traders, eager faces lit by the omnipresent blue lanterns, had sprung up around the edges, and one old woman, perched on a pyramid of grain-filled sacks, called out to Unar.

  “Your ugly little children need a feed, then, Godfinder?”

  Unar laughed and shook her head as they passed. The old woman frowned at Imeris’s bandage-wrapped arm and Understorian tunic and said no more. The satinwood branch they walked out on from the crossroads, ten paces wide and flattened on top by the power of the wood god, Esh, led in a straight, level line to the innocuous-looking gate of Unar’s flowerfowl farm.

  Imeris couldn’t hear any of the two hundred birds clucking, pecking, or fussing. That was because they flew down to Floor during the day, a drop of some six hundred human body lengths, to gorge on mineral-rich mud and mate with the heavy, Floor-bound, mature male birds.

  When evening came, the hens returned to the farm to eat grain and roost for the night in their woven wicker pens. Unar had made the pens to protect them from owls, pythons, and spotted cats. The birds soon learned to be grateful when the Godfinder locked the gate.