Leaper shivered, thinking of Orin’s beast and its ability to come apart and heal back together again. He’d slain that beast, trapped and wounded by the Hunt, with a forbidden wielding of Airak’s power in Ulellin’s niche.
He set the lantern on the wooden floor. The closest bone section was smooth under his fingertips. It felt like normal, nonmagical animal remains. Leaper sensed none of the gods’ power through it, nothing like what he’d felt when he was above the barrier holding Tyran’s Talon. There were no intense smells or temperature swings. No feelings of movement or dissolution of self.
Nothing.
Then his fingers found a rough spot on the lower rim of the arc. Leaper bent over, bringing his lantern to that side, raising it to sit on the plinth, and saw a place where bits of the bone had been subtly scraped away, presumably with a blade. The lantern crackled and spat, two magical objects in too-close proximity, but the lantern’s glass panes contained the errant lightning. Trace amounts of white bone powder showed up against the black glass of the plinth.
Leaper pictured Estehass crunching down on the bone hidden in his leather pouches. He remembered the ashy taste of the so-called speaking-bone in his mouth.
They can’t do magic here without eating the stuff of the Old Gods. Leaper swiped one forefinger through the dust on the plinth.
He raised it to his mouth. Touched it to his tongue.
The wooden room, door, clock, bone, and lantern vanished in a blaze of colour. Leaper’s mind came loose from his body. The last thing he felt was the back of his wide-flung hand knocking the lantern from the plinth. Visions seized him like raptor talons sinking into his skull. There were no smells. There were no sounds.
Only light.
Searing, blazing light.
He saw a dark-skinned man and woman, on foot, made tiny by distance. They followed a goat trail to a vast stone bowl sunk by weather and time into the heart of a snowcapped mountain range. Inside the bowl was a ruined stone city. On the rock wall that shadowed the city, a relief carving gleamed, as tall as Airak’s emergent, and as wide.
The carving unmistakeably depicted Leaper’s lost queen. Ilik. Her hair-crown was woven with diamonds. Miniature lanterns hung from her carved robes. Ilik, I will find your killer.
The scene shifted. Leaper saw a crimson fruit falling in slow motion from a child’s hand. Shiny red against the green. Rolling under the shade of a tree, at the edge of the Titan’s Forest, and as it rolled, tree roots erupted behind it, flinging black, worm-filled earth like rain.
The forest shrank into view, so that Leaper could see it all at once. He recognised the yellow-flowering northern edge of Oxorland, where it gave way to the Bright Plain. The charred, lightning-struck emergents of Airakland to the southwest. Those blackened arms bordered the bite of grasslands between the domains of Airak and Odel where Rememberers and Crocodile-Riders dwelled.
White animal bones, bigger than the emergents, erupted between the trees. Connected into monstrous shapes. Some looked more than half human. Others were more like two-legged lizards. Colours rippled across their new-formed scaly skins, as though their rejuvenated bodies would turn invisible. Like gigantic chimeras. The ripples camouflaged them against the greens and browns of the forest.
But the forest was dying. Great trees toppled like grass stalks under the onslaught of heavy rain. A final skull was rising, wet and filthy, from the ruins of Airakland. One side of the jaw was elongated and bristling with python-like teeth. The other was twisted and shortened, with flat, ape-like molars. On that second side, the eye socket was human, with no sclerotic ring. On the first side, the ring was a thick tunnel of bone ten times the size of the one in the Temple.
Leaper had never seen it before, but he knew whose skull it was.
Tyran’s skull.
Tyran’s Talon, the bone Leaper had been using to augment his power, was nothing. Not even visible. A deformed punctuation point at the end of a disproportionately tiny forelimb. Vertebrae flew upward to connect with the skull, forcing it higher and higher, making room for massive hind limbs and swinging tail beneath. The wood of the great trees shattered into jagged splinters that clothed the bones and turned to living flesh.
Leaper gagged and found himself back in the single-lantern safety of the wooden room, on all fours, vomit between his hands. The lantern hit the floor. All he’d witnessed he’d seen in the time it had taken for the lantern to fall.
It was history, he thought. They call themselves the Rememberers.
He’d seen the carving of the queen; it had to have been Ilik’s ancestor. Her ancestors must have lived in that mountain city.
Yet she was brown, and Estehass had said that the mountain people were pale. Besides, the destruction of the forest was not in the past. It was in the future. Not possible. The face on the mountainside couldn’t be one of Ilik’s descendants. She was dead.
Leaper heaved again. Sparks danced before his eyes.
Dusksight. It isn’t named for the last glimpse of the day, but for the last glimpse of our civilisation. Kirrik’s soul is trapped in the bottom of the rain goddess’s lake, but she, or somebody like her, will find a way to strike down all of the new gods at once. The Old Gods will rise again. It will be the end of Understorey and Floor.
It will be the end of Canopy. I must tell Ilik.
Leaper crawled to the wall. He used it to get to his feet.
No, she’s gone. His grief tasted like dry dirt from the uprooted trees of the vision. She’s gone, and I can’t tell her.
Rubbing his eyes, shaking his head, he turned slowly to look at the sclerotic ring bones. At the thieves’ lantern still sizzling and spitting on its side in response to it.
People of power must see this vision. Make sure it can’t happen. Kings and queens; queens other than Ilik. Unar. Imeris. Goddesses and gods.
Leaper crossed the floor. Picked up the lantern. Opened one of the glass panes in the side of it. Lightning bolts immediately escaped, curling wildly around the sclerotic ring bone, which began to glow a pale blue. Cringing back from the bolts, so near to the recent burns that still caused him so much pain, Leaper thrust the bronze casing of the lantern closer to one section of bone, trying to force the end inside the rectangular opening.
At first, the lantern resisted, as it had when Leaper himself had travelled through it. Yet after a few strenuous moments of straining and cursing, the bone began to elongate before his eyes. The wide broken edge became the thin end of a wedge. Leaper used all his weight to force the lantern down over his prize, the Rememberers’ sacred object. When one piece was mostly through, he started on the other.
I’m not really stealing anything vital. They’re not food. They’re not medicine. Just memories. Or visions—visions are only future memories anyway. They’re still intangible. Like Ilik, the day she was killed. The day she was turned into a memory by an assassin.
He wasn’t stealing it so that he could see her face again, carved into that mountainside, whenever he wanted. That was not the reason. It was in the service of his master. It was for the good of Canopy.
The Rememberers would have killed me. I don’t owe them anything.
The blue-white light in the heart of the lantern raged. The last of the broken ring of bone disappeared, and Leaper closed the pane behind it. Far overhead in Eshland, it would rest now, on a fine carpet in the hidden home he’d made for himself and for his lost queen.
Ellin would have killed me, and I’d be a memory, too.
TWELVE
THE OLD Temple of Airak had been destroyed before Leaper was born.
Yet here it is.
When the sorceress Kirrik cut down the tree, the cut had been at the level of lower Understorey, still four hundred paces from the ground. The Rememberers were making use of what was left. Glowing blue symbols moved in the shadows, teams of women and men carrying full baskets, wielding adzes, or pulling saws.
They’ve cut it again, Leaper thought, parting the ferns to better see. Twenty
paces from the ground, this time.
They had used the four-hundred-pace length of great tree, it seemed, to build the greatest canoe Floor had ever seen, or was likely to see. The log looked naturally hollow at its widest end, heartwood striated many shades of brown, insect-eaten and untouched by fire. The narrow end appeared human carved. Burnt out to finish the rough canoe shape and then made more symmetrical by sharpened steel.
“Are your people going somewhere?” Leaper whispered to a sullen, naked Estehass.
“Not my people,” Estehass murmured, and that was all he would say. He scratched his arse idly. The three of them were squatting behind the fern clump.
“Let me go see what they’re doing,” Ousos said with one side of her mouth, chewing furiously at her teeth.
Leaper had returned quickly to Ousos and Estehass with his thieves’ lantern safely stowed. They hadn’t gone more than a thousand paces before stumbling on the hive of Rememberer activity. In the last light of day, the cut buttress roots of the old emergent formed an elliptical caged arena some fifty paces across. Sunbeams travelled upward along crumbling wood spears streaked with livid green moss.
Leaf litter of quandong and satinash foliage was a poor match for the white sapwood and grey bark of the ancient floodgum, which had not produced its own leaves since that moment of Kirrik’s victory. The main focus of Rememberer commotion seemed to be within that caged arena.
“What are they doing in there?” Leaper asked Estehass, who grunted and shrugged.
“Don’t you leave me with him again,” Ousos warned Leaper in Canopian. “It’s my turn to go do a bit of squeezing exploring. True, I haven’t got as pretty a disguise as you two, but once the sun’s completely gone, I can find my way without making a noise in the dark.”
“Once the sun’s completely gone,” Leaper said, “we’ve got demons to worry about.”
“My people will soon go to their boat-houses and lock the doors,” Estehass said. “The bone women will expand the bubble of poisoned air to cover the whole village, so that embracers cannot come. We should leave. Keep moving west. It’s what you wanted.”
“I want to know what’s going on,” Leaper said, hands on hips, glowering at Estehass. “Or I’m sending Ousos to find out.”
“Sending her to die.”
“If she dies—”
“If she dies, Ellin dies. I know, boy, I know.” Estehass scratched his arse again and sighed. “They’re digging for bones of the Old Gods.”
“Something big?” Leaper guessed. “Dusksight was the size of a house, and it held a bone the size of a man. That canoe could fit twenty houses. Which bone are you—” His jaw clicked shut as he realised which bone they were digging for. Tyran’s skull.
And Tyran is the Old God who became my master, Airak.
Estehass must have seen the awareness in Leaper’s eyes, because sudden rage contorted his face.
“How dare you,” the Rememberer growled. “You tasted it, did you? How dare you partake of the holy—”
“What are you going to do with the skull once you have it on that boat? Worship it? Eat it? What will it do for you? Why is it worth this considerable effort?” His mind raced. They don’t like it when we have their bones, Imeris had told him once. The Rememberers had their reasons. Reasons for not wanting Airak’s Servants to see what they were doing. Reasons worth killing for, to avoid rousing the lightning god’s wrath. He stared at Estehass. “You’re moving it. You’re taking it away. Why?”
“You saw why,” Estehass said, glowering, leaping to his feet. Ousos reached around him from behind and put her axe to his throat, forcing him back down onto his haunches. “Only taking the skull to the other side of the sea can save us all from the fate you saw.”
“What’s he saying, Leaper?” Ousos asked urgently.
“They’re Rememberers—they remember,” Leaper told her bitterly. “But it’s not the glory of the Old Gods they remember. It’s the terror and destruction. They have a vision of the Old Gods rising again, crushing the forest to dust, and they want to prevent it. By taking Airak’s bones away. They’re going to put his skull on that raft and let the monsoon carry it out to sea.”
“But the bones make his trees grow,” Ousos said, her jaw dropping. “The bones give him the power to maintain the barrier. Without them, without the great trees, the worship of the people would mean nothing. We have to stop them.” The wrist of the hand holding the axe twitched. “How long have they been digging? How much longer before they bring up the skull?”
“I’ll ask him.”
But Estehass’s anger had cooled, and he would not reveal anything more.
“Kill me if you must,” he said, “and Ellin, too. I promised to take you west. No more and no less. The trail is that way.” He indicated with a lifted chin. “The workers grow quiet.”
Leaper peered through the fern clump. It was true. Fewer basket-bearing, glyph-lit bodies were emerging from the digging site. They trailed away into the gloom like dispersing fireflies.
“We’re going to get poisoned if we stay here,” Leaper told Ousos.
“Poison gas might be able to protect them from demons,” Ousos said, spitting. “Poison gas might be able to protect them from Canopian warriors or the Servants of Airak. It can’t protect them from the monsoon.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your squeezing sister won revenge for the rain goddess by capturing that sorceress, Kirrik. Ehkis owes you a favour, and the last monsoon we had was pathetic. Must be a lot of water waiting around up there in the clouds. Go and see Ehkis. Convince her to bring the monsoon early, right now, flood this part of Floor, and those squeezing dirt grubbers will drown like pinkie possums in a hole.”
“I’m going to Gui to find Ilik’s killer.”
“Look, I hate those Gui traders as much as you do. I can’t wait to open up their fruit-holes through their bloody throats, but this is more important! If you wait till these Rememberers have got the skull onto that squeezing canoe—”
“We’ve got time to go to Gui first,” Leaper argued. He blinked, and the stone image of Ilik seemed to swim before his eyes. “The monsoon isn’t for two months, and think about what you’re suggesting. These people are not prepared. It’s not just the workers you’d drown, but families. Children. Even if they manage to get to their boats, they won’t have food to last them. Not to mention all the other Floorian societies, which have nothing to do with the Rememberers but rely on animal signs to know when the rains are coming. Besides all that, any clues in the grasslands will be washed away if—”
“Those squeezing Rememberers could get the skull out tomorrow! All you know is it’s not there right now. You don’t know how close they are to getting it out, and he’s not about to squeezing tell you!” She was waving her axe in Leaper’s direction now, ignoring Estehass. “The monsoon coming in two months is what they’re counting on, to wash that canoe all the way through the forest and into that northern sea, under the tree-killing salt, where lightning can’t follow.”
Memories of the monsoon flood chasing him through the grasslands of the Crocodile-Riders. Himself stealing the speaking-bone. Being trapped below the barrier.
“My aura’s faded,” Leaper said, knowing full well he could force himself through his thieves’ lantern if he had to. Ousos didn’t care how many Floorians died. Did she think they were animals? Was that how she’d justified sleeping with Estehass to herself, that she wasn’t really breaking her oaths because he wasn’t really human? “I can’t go through the barrier.”
“Eliligras can meet you at the barrier,” Ousos said at once. “She’ll ask the master to let you through. Remind Ehkis that it was the king of Airakland who called the Hunt that saved her people from Orin’s monster. Promise her a fortune in lanterns and glass. Tell her whatever you have to tell her to bring the monsoon now, right now.”
“We have to move,” Estehass interrupted in the Rememberer’s tongue. “We have to go.”
“Show us the trail,” Leaper told him. He switched languages. “Let him lead the way, Ousos.” The trick of focusing on which person he needed to communicate with became easier each time. “We can decide what to do when we’re away from the poison gas.”
“The decision’s made already! I’ll cut this traitor’s throat, and we’ll start climbing the closest tree!”
No throat cutting. I am not a killer. I am not Frog.
Leaper wordlessly held out his arms.
Scar tissue was beginning to form in the fissures that crisscrossed his skin. It looked like pale rivers running through a mudflat, as seen from the high platform of an emergent. Purple ridges lined the seams where his snake-tooth spines should have slid easily out and in. Instead, the swelling and weeping meant that if he tried to extrude them, he’d slice his own flesh.
“We were supposed to climb back up with these. They’re not healed. I’m not healed.”
Ousos touched the bone man’s leather pouches, which hung from her harness.
“Let him heal you,” she said. “I bet he can.”
“I bet if he tries, my spines will fall out.”
“Eliligras can let down a rope for us.”
“No more talking!” Estehass cried softly. It was abruptly too dark to see his expression. When Leaper looked towards the diggings, he couldn’t see a single glowing sigil. He couldn’t see anything, including his scarred forearms.
“Let him lead the way,” he told Ousos again. He saw the flash of her axe blade as she removed it from proximity to Estehass; she was standing behind the big man, the light from his sigil falling on her face, the only thing he could still see.
“Quickly,” Estehass urged, turning his back to Leaper. “Run!”
They followed his snake and star through the eerily quiet blackness. It was like running with his eyes closed, a thing no Canopian could do. Leaper’s feet tried to stick in the muck. He almost slipped once, twice, three times. Heavy breathing echoed in his head like the rhythmic thrashing of treetops in a storm.
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