Tides of the Titans Page 9

  The four of them were within the forest, and the sun was rising in the east.

  Perhaps there was some waterway they had to go around. Impossible; he knew from Slehah that there were no obstacles between Airak’s emergent and Gui aside from the barrier between Canopy and Understorey. Aside from the Rememberers themselves.

  Estehass and Ellin, brother and sister with the Weight of the Eastwood behind them.

  The Weight of the Eastwood.

  Rememberers from the east, to take us east, but why? If they mean to murder us, why take us east first?

  Slow breath in. Slow breath out. Think, Leaper. Cicadas increased their tempo, in time with the increased beat of his heart.

  Airak will feel our deaths if we die within the forest boundary. They don’t want him to feel it. They don’t want to anger him, but they are plotting something in the west that they don’t want his Servants to witness.

  Leaper flicked through his mental images of trees, the ones that represented all the castes of Canopy. He needed to act, now, as he’d never acted before, but which role would suit? Which performance would save them? He wasn’t fit to defend himself with weapons, and his magic, even if it somehow miraculously functioned, would be unlikely to overpower the superior local magic of the Floorian bone man, Estehass.

  He had to defend himself with words. A flash of inspiration saw the jumbled caste templates in his mind abandoned. He didn’t need them. All he needed to do was recall his jealousy while he’d hidden in the wardrobe the last time he’d seen Ilik alive.

  Leaper sat up, blinking. He struggled free of his carrysack and long silk sleeves. Estehass, also sitting up on the crown of the neighbouring tree fern, covered a yawn with his hand. Ellin slept in a sitting position beside him, sunlight licking yellow over her brown back, drowning out the glow of her sigil.

  Ousos snored, supine, at Leaper’s feet.

  He kicked her awake.

  “Pleased with yourself, are you?” he yelled.

  “Eh?” Ousos slurred, overbalancing as she rolled, catching at fronds to keep from falling out of the tree. “What’s that, now?”

  “I said you must be pleased with yourself. Look how soppily that dirt-swimmer’s looking at you.” He pointed accusingly at Estehass. “Did you break your oaths with him?”

  Ousos, gaping, tried to focus bloodshot eyes on his face. “Got spiders in your fruit-hole overnight, you squeezing imbecile? Of course I—”

  “I don’t care if you did. Do it again, right now, for all I care. Do it enough times so you don’t ever need to do it again after today, because we’re leaving them behind when we reach Gui, and you’ll never see him again.” Leaper had never spat in disgust before, but he borrowed her habit, even though his mouth was dry. Pathetically thin spittle flecked her cheek. “If you try to abandon our master, I’ll kill you.” He raised his voice even louder, hoping to wake Ellin, the one who could understand him when he spoke Canopian. “The lightning god will feel you die, but I won’t wait till we’re beyond the forest, I’ll do it anyway. Go on! Right now. Get all your disgusting urges finished with. Go purify some water with your lover, or whatever you want to pretend you’re up to!”

  Ousos’s eyes narrowed. One moment of hesitation was all he needed, to know that she had understood him. They glanced together across the open air between tree ferns.

  Estehass smirked. Ellin’s eyes were open, thinly lidded.

  “Get your big behind out of that tree,” Ousos called, beckoning to Estehass, “and bring me the squeezing ladder.” She stabbed a finger at it, her meaning clear despite the language barrier. “We need more water.” Then she smirked as well. Estehass looked questioningly to his sister, who nodded her assent before adding her own smirk to the general circle of mocking mirth. She lifted a bamboo container to her lips and drank, as if to remind Leaper that they had plenty of purified water.

  Leaper didn’t smirk. He put all the envy and contempt he’d ever felt for the king of Airakland into the looks he gave all three of them. Estehass dropped down from his tree, landing with his habitual lightness. He picked up the ladder that Ousos had pointed at, propping it against Leaper’s tree.

  Ousos climbed down without hesitation. She took Estehass’s hand. Led him into the forest. Leaper stared after them for as long as he could will himself to stay still and silent. He kept his back turned to Ellin, even though a rapid descent by her would ruin his plan.

  He kept his back to her, despite the fact his life depended on reaching the ground before she did.

  At last, he turned.

  His hand went to the ladder.

  The carrysack was heavy on his back.

  He crossed his legs and jiggled ostentatiously like a little boy needing to pee. Cursed. Put one foot on the first bamboo rung.

  Climbing down the two-pace ladder was the slowest descent of his life. At the foot of it, he shuffled to the toilet-hole, uncovered the lid of loosely woven leaves, and emptied his bladder over all the rest. Retying his loincloth was an awkward affair, and all the time his ears were pricked for sounds of Ellin moving. Leaper crouched at the base of Ellin’s tree, grabbing handfuls of soil to scatter over the waste in the hole.

  He pretended to drop his carrysack. It slipped over his shoulders. He cursed again, louder, letting himself feel every split and jolt in his forearms.

  He imagined Ellin’s bird’s-eye gaze between his shoulder blades as he bent over his carrysack. When he straightened and slung the sack over his shoulders again, he left a squat, cloth-covered shape behind.

  One of Airak’s lanterns, shrouded in black.

  Leaper took five long, swift strides away from the base of Ellin’s tree, hunting for the forked stick she’d used to trap the snake, cursing himself for his overeagerness after all, wishing he’d thought to locate it from his place in the tree before coming down.

  “What are you looking for?” Ellin asked lazily. “The water is up here with me.”

  “Cut bamboo,” Leaper answered, hands closing around a reassuringly solid length of it. Five paces long.

  “Fool. I told you, no fires!”

  Agony shot through his injured arms as he made a spearing motion with the cut bamboo, snagging the cloth over the lantern, flicking the black fabric high above his own head.

  Except that the cloth was no longer black. It took on the green-and-gold slashed with brown of the bamboo thicket against the shadows of great trees.

  A blue-white circle of light sprang into being at the base of the tree fern’s trunk, brushing the underside of the leaves where Ellin knelt. The chimera-skin cloth drifted down, landing at Leaper’s feet. He threw the bamboo length like a spear in the direction of Ellin’s tree. Where it touched the circle of light, it exploded, struck by lightning that blazed from the heart of the death-lantern.

  “Do not move!” he commanded Ellin.

  She froze. Her nostrils flared with clench-jawed fury. Burnt bamboo shards fell in a light rain around her, but she obeyed.

  “What have you done?”

  “Stay in your tree. Don’t try to come down.” Leaper picked up the chimera cloth and brandished it at her, a trophy of war. “I don’t know what my fellow Servant and I have done to break your laws and earn a death sentence, but I’m going to Gui. You have enough water to last three days. If Estehass agrees to take us on the true path, I’ll give this cloth to him, so that he can return here and free you.”

  Ellin said nothing, but she sat back down in the tree fern heart, eyes blazing.

  ELEVEN

  ESTEHASS HAD no choice but to lead them west.

  He ran, light-footed, through the forest.

  Leaper and Ousos ran after him, less gracefully but both keeping pace. Neither openly carried a lantern. Nor did Leaper wear a shirt. Estehass had grudgingly explained that only by falsifying Ellin’s sigil on Leaper’s bare skin could the party pass safely through the Westwood. The siblings had permission to move freely. Without a sigil, Ousos would be invisible to the watchers. And
so Leaper had allowed himself to be marked, passing his carrysack to Ousos, ignoring the shivers creeping up his spine at the possibility the bone man would put some other, more deadly spell on him. Estehass had asked for a sliver of bone from one of his leather pockets and consumed it with a fierce grinding of teeth while tracing the pattern between Leaper’s shoulder blades.

  That was yesterday. Today they had passed the foot of Airak’s emergent, near where they had first met the Rememberers, and continued west in deeper daytime darkness. The glow of Leaper’s and Estehass’s sigils revealed a carpet of pink and white petals fallen from springtime Canopy. Butterfly corpses, too, made trails of brilliant blue.

  There was no visible path at all in this part of Floor. No thickets to pass through. From behind, Leaper could see Estehass veering close to the intermittent buttress roots of the great trees, fondling projections that turned out to be wood carvings smoothed by many generations of human hands.

  Leaper touched them, too, with wonder. They were a sharper, deeper, more violent-cornered style to the wood carvings found in Canopy, which made them easier to decipher even in pitch-blackness. Some might have been simple markers. The triple bamboo stem became the double bamboo stem, and then became a single stem before vanishing completely, an obvious-seeming indication that they were moving away from the Eastwood. Less obvious were two-headed embracers swallowing rafts of villagers, or spotted swarms turning titans into skeletons who, in a subsequent sequence, clothed their bones in the bodies of human women and men. These could have been warnings, or stories. Sometimes the carvings went on in a string thirty paces long or more.

  “Don’t,” Estehass snarled at Leaper when he noticed him touching the trees. “These aren’t for your hands. I agreed to show you the way west.”

  “You agreed that once before,” Leaper pointed out calmly, but he stopped touching the carvings, content to follow. They paused at around the time of the evening meal to eat snake meat and dried fruit from one of Estehass’s pockets, and to drink water from the stoppered bamboo that Ousos carried. She had no smiles for Estehass now, and would have bound his hands if he hadn’t said he needed them to find his way. His leather sash with its pouches of food and magical accessories, she’d examined with a grunt before adding to her already oversized burdens. Then she’d tossed his cloak, loincloth, and sandals into the bamboo and told him to run naked.

  As they ate, the sun crept below the level of Canopy, illuminating the mighty foundations of the great trees from one side like they were only half there. Pollen hung and danced in the light’s path, and the air was cooler and not so close.

  West. The sun is west. He is keeping his word, taking us west.

  A strange silhouette blocked the sun directly before them. Leaper squinted, trying to decide if it was the torn-out roots of a fallen tree, a branching human-built structure, or something else altogether.

  “What is that?” he asked Estehass around a mouthful of pointy snake bones. When he moved into the shade, he could make out a long, curving boat shape at the base of a maze of branches.

  “Dusksight” was the Rememberer’s reluctant reply. “Jewel of the Westwood and throne of the Westerman. Just as Dawnsight is the Jewel of the Eastwood and throne of the Easterman.”

  “It doesn’t look much like a throne. More like an enormous, ancient, and broken-down version of the village houses that your people build on top of your canoes.”

  The trio had skirted several such villages. All the season, Rememberer boat-houses had been empty and uninhabited, many tilted on their keeled sides. The Rememberers would not begin filling them with food until a month before the monsoon, and the monsoon was still some two or three months away.

  Estehass gnawed a slice of dried mango that Ousos had given him from his own rations and said nothing.

  “Are we going around that thing?” Ousos asked, waving an axe in Dusksight’s direction. She looked keenly at Leaper. “Is he telling you how many soldiers are inside it, or is he pretending it’s abandoned so they can swarm out like hornets when we get closer?”

  “I think it might be like a Temple,” Leaper said. “Give me my carrysack to cover my fake sigil. I’m going to sneak inside it and see what’s there. Don’t let Estehass escape.”

  Ousos rolled her eyes and spat, but she gave Leaper his carrysack.

  “Is the throne of the Easterman grander than that?” Leaper asked Estehass. “Or are your kings only truly happy when wallowing in mud? Did we turn west too early to appreciate its mosquito-infested majesty?”

  He didn’t expect the taunt to work; Estehass had displayed remarkable equanimity thus far. But the big man said, after a long silence, “In the dry days, Dawnsight customarily rests to the east, as far from Dusksight as it can travel. But I think today it is close by. East and West are here in numbers. Rouse them at your peril. Dead men have no need of guides to lead them to Gui.”

  Leaper took the length of chimera-skin cloth from around his waist and held it in his fist in front of Estehass’s face.

  “Is there anything I need to know,” he asked, “before I go to take a closer look at your ugly throne?”

  Tyran’s Talon had been kept in a temple-like clay structure before Leaper had paid for it to be stolen. The chances of finding Old God’s bones in this one seemed promising. Leaper’s magic wasn’t working for him below the barrier, but if there was some sort of weapon that the Rememberers didn’t want the lightning god’s Servants to see, he owed it to Airak to investigate.

  Estehass sighed.

  “There is a bubble of poison air around Dusksight, contained by bone woman magic. Do not travel straight towards it. Find a sandpaper fig by the feel of its fallen leaves. Dawnsight must always be moored by a calamander tree, and Dusksight must always be moored by a sandpaper fig. The entrance will be shielded by its roots, an arch with an eye carved over it. You have until the sun is completely down. After that, the acolytes return from their ceremony to farewell the last light of the day.”

  “Acolytes?” Leaper asked. “Are they apprentices to the bone women? Male or female? Are they fighters or fisherfolk? Do they wield magic?”

  “They are from every gender and every rank, except for slave rank,” Estehass answered dourly. “Avoid them. You cannot survive an encounter with them, and if you die, Ellin dies as well.”

  * * *

  LEAPER DUCKED his head.

  The tunnel to the Rememberer temple hugged his shoulders with uncomfortably close earthen arms. The roots of the fig tree poked through the dirt like whiskers, larger sections forcing the tunnel to contort around them. In a way, the closeness of the air and the smell of smoke reminded him of the hollow-tree home he’d grown up in.

  When he uncovered his thieves’ lantern to keep from stumbling over roots, he discovered Rememberer children had scrawled untidy messages on some of those roots, most likely illicit. When the acolytes came through the tunnel, they probably made their way in darkness, as Estehass had made his way, quite comfortably, using the carvings on the trees.

  LOVE. PEACE. TREES. RIVER.

  CLAMS WITH PICKLE SAUCE.

  AMILTA WROTE THIS. NO I DID NOT.

  ORJOR IS A HUGE DIMWIT. HE ONLY HAS ONE NUT.

  Leaper grinned, reliving the moment when he, Imeris, and Ylly had engraved their names on the ceiling of Middle-Mother’s swimming hole. Then he realised he was reading not the alphabet of Canopy but glyphs of trees, animals, and human figures that he’d never seen before.

  A lump rose in his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut. It was only my voice. The speaking-bone only affected my tongue, my ability with spoken language! But when he opened them again, the pictographs were still there and he could still understand them, as he had not been able to understand the more sculpture-like markers his guide had fondled. Were those markers too much like art, too little like formalised ideograms?

  It didn’t matter. This language must be for the initiated only. Yet here Leaper was, violating another Floorian people with his ve
ry presence. Had he learned nothing? Who would he manage to get killed this time? Ousos?

  I’m here now. I might as well see what is hidden inside. It’s not like Orjor’s single nut is of sacred significance, and besides, Estehass didn’t seem too worried about my breaking or taking anything.

  The tunnel turned steep. In the final twenty paces, it was more like climbing a jagged chimney of roots and compressed earth than walking along a path. Leaper emerged into a rectangular wooden room with only one opening, and that opening covered by reed hangings at the distant end. He supposed that was the way to the poison gas. A water clock made of some green stone dripped ominously at the base of a calamander calendar covered in notches.

  At the close end of the room, Leaper’s lantern showed a broken ring of bleached white bone. When whole, it would have been five paces in diameter. At least one third of the bone ring was missing, eroded away somehow, but it obviously once had been perfectly round, a completed puzzle of overlapping, scale-like sections. The two remaining pieces rested on a black glass plinth, under a wooden arc engraved with the rays of the dying sun.

  No wonder he wasn’t worried. Even the broken pieces look too heavy for me to lift, and too awkward to get out the door, much less carry off down the confines of the tunnel.

  When he got closer, Leaper noted its resemblance to the sclerotic ring bones of leaf-tailed geckoes and peregrine falcons. These were the bones actually buried inside the tough white lining of the eyeballs. If this one was proportional, the Old God it had belonged to must have had a lizard- or birdlike head at least twenty paces across.

  Two eyes. Two bones like these, and this is one. Maybe they’re connected. Maybe this is a doorway. If the bone rings could transport people between Dusksight and Dawnsight, though, the same way that Leaper’s lanterns had once transported him, why wouldn’t this one be mounted in an approximation of its original shape? Or maybe it has some other, complex, specific purpose. Maybe bringing the broken pieces into alignment permits healing, or unleashes destruction.