You can have it back, Aforis had said ten years ago, on the condition that you immediately return the pocket-clock you stole to its rightful owner, the queen of Airakland.
When he’d returned the clock, Leaper had spied on its rightful owner, or at least her bouncing bottom and the dimples in the backs of her thighs as she scrabbled, half-naked, under the bed for a dropped sash. Once she was dressed, he’d been delighted by the sounds she’d made on discovering the lost pocket-clock, and struck by how she’d opened, checked, disassembled, and reassembled it, hypnotic in her earnest concern and proficiency. He wished he’d hidden something interesting inside for her to find.
A puzzle for her to solve.
I will find your killer, Ilik.
“He did it to make you grateful,” Ousos sneered as she seized Leaper by the harness, half turning, half lowering him onto the rungs, “when you get the use of them bone-stabbers back. Besides, you won’t need them when we get to Floor. A man needs legs when he finds dirt. A woman, too.”
“A man needs legs and also needs a woman?”
She slapped him on the back of the neck where he was bruised and burned.
“You know what I squeezing meant. Besides, this way you can’t climb back up without me. Won’t be no giving up and going home until I say it’s time to give up and go home. Holy One knows you’re a coward.”
* * *
HOURS LATER, Ousos seized his harness again.
She grunted as she lowered him, fastened him, lowered him, and fastened him again. She had to work twice as hard with rope and pulley, but they were rarely on a level, and after a while, in the dark, with her lanterns above him no brighter than a break in the foliage to sky, he could forget that she was there. He could examine his own confusion. Take a moment to catch his breath.
He gave himself permission to cry again, but when tears didn’t come, he forced himself to wallow in the memory of Ilik’s smell, in the sound of her laugh, to try to bring them back. He couldn’t possibly be done with tears already, could he?
How can it have been true love, if that’s it? Ilik’s husband had seemed completely incapacitated by the loss. No doubt King Icacis was still clutching the diamond-woven hair in his audience chamber. Something had to be fundamentally lacking in Leaper’s lowborn slave’s mind and body, after all. Maybe that was the jest of the wind goddess’s prophecy. Maybe he’d never been capable of a heart’s desire, because he was actually heartless.
Ousos bumped into him, scraping him against the bark. Wheezing, she unfastened him from the steel wedge she’d driven into the tree. Lowered him deeper into the black. He jerked when he reached the end of the rope.
He waited for her to remove the wedge and climb down to him. Without spines, because she was Canopian. They did not climb with spines, they climbed with ropes and knots and rings and bends and wedges of metal. That was how upright, gods-fearing, civilised citizens climbed, when they climbed at all.
If I find Ilik’s mangled corpse, Leaper wondered as they descended, no closer to untangling his emotions, will that make me cry? If I go from the roots of the tree, not to Gui, but to the roots of the king’s palace, will Ousos put her axe in me?
Maybe the Rememberers, like the Crocodile-Riders, considered dead flesh to be pollution and avoided it at all costs. Maybe they would be the ones to kill him if he approached the place where Ilik’s body had been flung. Maybe they buried their dead or boarded them up inside trees; maybe they ate them.
Airak doesn’t care who is down here. Nor does Ousos.
Nor do I.
Airakland and Odelland were separated by a vast, round grassland that bit into the side of the forest. At the level of Floor, Crocodile-Riders could be found on the northern edge of that grassland, while Rememberers could be found on the southern edge of it. Leaper knew very little about the Rememberers, who might or might not stand between him and his destination, Gui. Slehah had answered his request for a guide with the pointed reminder that it was only safe for her and her people to approach Airakland in the two weeks before the monsoon. That was when the Rememberers evacuated their ground dwellings and took to their floating boat-houses. That fortnight was when deliveries to Airak’s emergent were customarily arranged.
Cannot approach due to Rememberer presence, Slehah had written curtly. March west ten thousand steps, and I will meet you at the edge of the trees. You will be safe enough if you move in lantern light. Rememberers will not slay Servants of the lightning god.
No doubt, when he stood face-to-face with them, Rememberer language would come tumbling out of his mouth, but for now, Leaper knew essentially nothing of them besides the name, and he was not even curious about that. What did they remember, and why? Who cared? All he cared to know, if he even encountered any at all, was why they had let Ilik’s murderer pass through their territory and what they had done with her body, if they had done anything to it at all. If demons hadn’t ripped it apart. If bone women hadn’t taken her for a trophy.
None of his grim imaginings were enough.
Leaper looked up, dry-eyed.
Ousos’s lantern light, with the woman a ragged half-white, half-black shape within it, came slowly and steadily towards him. Soon they’d be level, and she’d lower him further down again.
His thoughts darted all over the place, like a blowfly unable to settle on just one pile of dung; he wondered who would cry the most if the Crocodile-Riders cut his throat with a jagged jawbone, too.
Oldest-Mother, who had crushed tallowwood leaves into a poultice for his chest when his nose was runny, who was his mother but also his grandmother, with her frightening white hair and terrifying tales of the slave keepers of Canopy? He could picture her face if she discovered he mourned a queen. Queens were all wicked, in her opinion. How could she have helped raise the kind of boy who would fall in love with a queen?
Yet she had fallen in love with Youngest-Mother, who was not far from being a queen. Daughter of a vizier. Beautiful enough to inspire a war. Complicit in slave-keeping. Vibrant with magic and music. Oh, the songs Youngest-Mother had sung over Leaper’s cradle. She would sing over the void if he fell, over his death chamber or grave or ashes. She had a soft heart. Surely she would cry the most.
But what of Middle-Mother, who was Leaper’s birth mother? She swam with him in the tree hollow, told him he had been a frog in a former life. He had loved that thought, until he found out that Frog was a girl’s name. Together they’d made up the names of all his future children: Tadpole, Snake Egg, Millipede, and Fishy.
Middle-Mother had kissed him far too often. He could clearly recall the slobber her loving lips left behind. Yes, she would miss him the most, despite all the messages over the years saying that if he didn’t have children soon, his testicles were going to shrivel up and fall off. She would cry, and she would blame Imeris and Middle-Father for encouraging him to go to Canopy in the first place.
How she would punish them, for a decision she’d made herself. Middle-Father would have to join Imeris in her travels. Imeris and Anahah had lived happily in Floor for eight years, before leaving to search for their disappeared daughter, but if anyone could find them, Middle-Father could.
They’d all have to hide from Middle-Mother for years. Decades, even.
Leaper chuckled.
If he died, the Godfinder would cry for him, too, in the secretive, tears-denying, blustery way that she had. Don’t call me Unar! I’m the Godfinder now, and that’s what you’ll call me, sprout. She’d been an impatient teacher. Quick to crow at his childish errors. As passionate in her dismay over his failings as she had been bursting with pride when Aforis accepted him, first as a student and secondly, into the Temple.
Aforis.
Aforis would not cry. Aforis had not cried since the murder of his lover some thirty years ago. I am fading, he had raged, I have sixty-two summers, I’ll expire presently, and then who will make excuses for you?
The murder of his lover. Why hadn’t Leaper gone to Aforis? Aforis
would have understood, could have told him what to do next, how to feel, how to make things right. How to fix them.
Look, that spring is broken in half. A simple matter!
Except that they couldn’t be fixed.
I’ll have the slaves wind the clock twice a day instead of once. You see? You’ve been crying over nothing.
EIGHT
OUSOS’S LANTERN light fell on one old stranger and one young one.
It was past sunset at this point. Leaper and the Shining One had slept a handful of hours in a bark fold at the base of the tree before taking the dangerous step of actually setting their feet to the soil.
He hadn’t slept deeply enough to dream. The pain in his forearms had lessened, though he still had difficulty forming a grip, and he’d needed help uncorking his water gourd and getting undressed when it came to necessary bodily functions.
Ousos allowed him to first search, not for Slehah and the forest’s edge, but for the base of the palace floodgum.
They had walked around the tree. In a slow, expanding circle, they’d searched the ground for Ilik’s body. One hundred paces from the trunk. Three hundred paces. At six hundred paces, they started finding the trunks of other trees, and Leaper knew they wouldn’t find her. Her body had been concealed or moved. Either taken as a grisly trophy or hidden in the emergent.
Afterward, he’d watched in silence as Ousos had gathered up coils of rope and stowed their harnesses. Leaper had made no move to unpack either of his own lanterns from the carrysack strapped to his back, instead staying in the bright, blue-white circle provided by his Temple superior.
You will be safe enough if you move in lantern light. Rememberers will not slay Servants of the lightning god.
Ousos’s first magic lantern contained Airak’s cold fire; it was suitable for sending messages back to the Temple and for lighting the way. Her second would send out a spark when unshuttered, useful for starting cooking fires but not for keeping back demons. Leaper, in the emotion-filled muddle of his quarters, using his neck and shoulders as much as his elbows and hands to manipulate his belongings, had chosen a chimera-skin-wrapped death-lantern and his thieves’ lantern, connected invisibly to the one he’d left in his hidden house in Eshland, as the best tools for facing the threats of Floor.
But it was the blue-white light that had drawn the two men.
They were wide-shouldered and brown-skinned. Both stood solemn and unsmiling, dwarfed by the buttress of a gap-axe tree, barefooted and bare-chested, wearing identical short leather skirts. The young man’s waist-long, straight black hair was caught over his left shoulder in a braided leather cord. The old man, bald but for a white fringe over his ears, held a bark cloak, beautifully patterned, in his wrinkled arms. They were beardless, square-jawed.
Something in their stern serenity made Leaper feel a lump in his throat.
“Good evening to you,” Leaper said in no tongue he’d heard spoken before, and the lump vanished like a bird freed from the cage of his larynx. “We are only passing through.”
Ousos, wide-legged at his side, left hand holding the cold lantern and right hand lingering near an axe loop, fixed Leaper with a flabbergasted stare.
The man with the bark cloak shook it out gently and settled it over his shoulders.
“I am Wennel, with the Weight of the Westwood behind me,” he said in gravelly tones. “Who are you and how have you learned our language?”
The younger man lifted brown, empty, callused hands, to pull his black hair free of the constraining cord. He shook it out, loose, down his back, without his long-lashed, dark eyes ever leaving Ousos and her axe.
“I am Leaper,” Leaper answered, once again feeling the lump in his gullet, the lifelong-lingering translation magic he’d stolen from the Crocodile-Riders flowing over him, a river in flood, and, he’d thought when the queen was murdered, not without price. Yet it now seemed Ilik hadn’t paid that price with her life, after all.
“What are you saying?” Ousos hissed at him. The language of Canopy grated against Leaper’s ears, too trilling and birdlike for this calmer, quieter place of dangerous echoes. Did she want to draw demons to them?
“I am Leaper,” Leaper said again, ignoring her, “with the Weight of Airak behind me. I have some words of your language. My sister Imeris and her husband, Anahah, made their home in Floor.”
That was true enough, but deliberately misleading.
Imeris, Daggad, and Anahah were the gods knew where, two years into a self-appointed Hunt provoked by eight-monsoon-old Igish, who had transformed into a panther and, without explanation, absconded into the bamboo thickets of the Bright Plain.
“What are you telling him?” Ousos tried again.
A third stranger padded quietly through the soggy leaf litter into the circle of light from Ousos’s lanterns. She was taller than the two men. Her black hair was as long as the young man’s, braided over her left shoulder. In addition to the short leather skirt, she was covered by a pair of gourds; her breasts had been squeezed into them, and they seemed to stay against her chest of their own accord.
When she saw Leaper and Ousos, she nodded at the old man, then began to unbraid her hair.
“Does your sister dwell among the Rememberers?” Wennel asked.
“No,” Leaper admitted. “Gui is our destination. Will you show us the path?”
Wennel and his companions turned their backs on Leaper to confer quietly. It was only then that Leaper saw the glowing symbol burned into the skin between the woman’s shoulder blades.
No, not burned. Embedded. Slivers of bone, pressed into the skin like a work of fine marquetry, formed a stylised tree bear.
“Airak’s bones,” Ousos swore, and that was exactly what was causing the blue glow on the woman’s back.
When the stranger finished loosening the braid and threw her hair back, the glow was extinguished, just as it was on the backs of the men.
A signal, to summon others without sound. Or are they all bone men and women, with the god’s powers at their command? Leaper shifted uneasily. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told them that he served Airak, despite what Slehah had advised.
The Rememberers turned once again towards the intruders. Leaper realised there were two new arrivals. One was a tall, long-necked yet square-headed young woman. She had acne scars on her cheeks, short hair that stuck out in all directions, a suspicious squint, and a weapons belt loaded with one short horn bow and two long, trapezoidal grass-cutting knives.
Her fellow new arrival shared her square head, but there the resemblance ended. A short, pointed beard and sparse moustaches framed a thick-lipped, laughing mouth. His ample bare gut overflowed the ties of his loincloth, and the cloak in his arms looked as though it had been fought over by rival piranha schools. He was the only one shod, in flat-soled sandals with straps that crossed at the calves and tied at the knee.
A leather sash hung over the big man’s shoulder. It had seven or ten laced pockets sewn into it; Leaper couldn’t be sure if all were pockets; some of them could have been patches, for the sash was as tattered as the cloak. Thank goodness the loincloth isn’t full of holes, Leaper thought. Unless the pockets were full of tiny throwing knives, the man was unarmed.
“There is one path you may take to Gui,” Wennel said. “Estehass and Ellin, brother and sister with the Weight of the Eastwood behind them, will show you the way.”
“Many thanks,” Leaper said, nodding to the square-headed pair, “for providing us with guides. We are not well acquainted with the customs of Floor, nor its natural dangers.”
“What’s going on?” Ousos all but shouted, hands on hips, her axe drawn.
“What’s wrong with you?” Leaper shouted back, exploding with rage he hadn’t realised was simmering inside him. She would not stop talking. Canopian discourse was offensive and unsafe. Translating for her was a waste of time. She didn’t need to know what Leaper was saying. She was only there in case the exchange with the enemy came to blows, despite what S
lehah had said about Rememberers being reluctant to slay Servants of the lightning god.
“What’s wrong with y—”
Leaper bent and drove his shoulder into her midriff. All the breath went out of Ousos. He saw her axe blade gleaming by his eye. She could have used it on him.
He wanted her to use it on him.
No, he didn’t want her to use it on him. He had to live. To find Ilik’s killer.
A knee in his face jarred his eyeballs in their sockets. Blood filled his nose and mouth. Hands held his arms spread-eagled. Pulling him back. Restraining him.
Rememberers.
The enemy had him.
Why wasn’t Ousos helping him? He saw her shocked, green-toothed grimace in the lantern light.
“You’re not my sister,” he bawled, falling to his knees, feeling tears track through the thicker smears of blood on his cheeks. Here they are, but why now? “You’re not Imeris, and you never will be. Too stupid and slow to be a Hunter. You can’t even find animal prey, forget about human. I wish she was here now. She’s worth a hundred of you!”
“That’s as may be,” Ousos said huskily, staring at him, “but your squeezing sister isn’t here, so you’d best get used to it. What did them dick-flea dirt-swimmers say to you, to make you crazy all of a sudden?”
Leaper slumped in defeat. His injured arms burned from being stretched. When he met the eyes of Estehass and Ellin in turn, the siblings reluctantly released him.
He scrubbed his wet cheek against one shrugged shoulder and swallowed his sweet-salty blood.
“These two are taking us to Gui,” he mumbled contritely. “Try not to do anything in front of them that would reflect poorly on Airak’s dignity.”
NINE
“SO,” OUSOS said to Leaper as they thrust through a thicket.
Unlike the branch-paths of Canopy or the bridges of Understorey, the trail along the wet dirt of Floor was a mere suggestion of compression. The freedom to step in any direction, the inability to fall, was uncomfortable. Unnatural.
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