“On the contrary,” Mitimiti said with barely controlled glee. “Look how dark their bodies are. All the better to keep camouflaged in the deep lakes of Canopy.”
“Canopy? What are you talking about?”
“Most of these fish breed in our mangroves, but some that come from Canopy migrate back to Ilanland, where they were born. That’s where their tail spots begin to glow blue. This matter has been investigated by our physicians. Unsho has even been to Canopy, which is why she mistrusts you, yet I have heard mostly truth from your mouth, and now you know how my knowledge is possible.”
“The blue-spotted killifish.” Leaper relaxed as he realised why she was so excited. This is one of the special fish she was telling me about, the kind that pregnant women eat to make their babes turn out like her. Gifted, as she is. Able to tell truth reliably from lies.
A valuable gift in a city of traders. A city surrounded by enemies.
“Canopian citizens might catch and eat them in Ilanland and find themselves behaving strangely, spouting truths against their better judgement for an hour or two. Pregnant women might be lucky enough to find one in the market. Only a very few of these fish are washed back into the river by the following year’s monsoon, for us to find and to use. You’re extremely lucky, Lee. You’re my new good luck charm.” She splashed him abruptly with her free hand. “Who said you could stop? Find me more!”
“Mitimiti,” he said with such seriousness that her grin faded.
“Yes, Lee?”
“Tell me more about the Master and the city of Cast.”
She shrugged.
“What is there to know? Cast is the home of the marsh people of the Bright Plain. They are wealthier in wood and metals than we are, for they plunder trees from the edge of Canopy, remaining mobile so that your gods can’t strike in retribution. They take pacifist, moon-white Bird-Riders for their slaves and set them to rowing and tree-felling until they die.”
“So why save Cast from the sea, why let them tie up here?”
“Our customs of hospitality make us who we are, Lee. Did we turn you away?”
“In the queen’s palace, I heard Ellin speaking with the man you called the Master in her language. She told him you were hiding food from them. She told him she could find it.”
“We’re hiding nothing,” Mitimiti answered fiercely. “We have nothing.”
“Aren’t you frightened they’ll discover your fishermen aren’t returning after all, that the men of Cast outnumber you and can take anything they want by force? Aren’t you frightened of starving after they’ve rowed away with your precious Coin-of-the-Sea? What’s the queen planning to do to defend her people?”
Mitimiti picked the blue-spotted fish out of the bucket, planted a kiss on its rubbery little lips, and returned it carefully to the bottom of the bucket.
“The queen,” she said, unperturbed, “is planning a banquet. Now, hurry, or we’ll miss the afternoon worship, too.”
* * *
MITIMITI PULLED down a green bamboo pipe from its groove in the corner post of a house.
Freshwater streamed from the open end of it.
“From the distillery,” she told Leaper in between taking thirsty gulps directly from the flow. “It runs everywhere in the city except for the palace tower. I draw the buckets up to the queen’s rooms myself. At least”—she paused to grin at Leaper—“I used to. Before you came. I’d say you have four-bucket shoulders.”
She stripped off her diving suit under the partial cover of a windturner and rinsed the mud from her hands and feet. Her white soles were wrinkled from the seawater, contrasting against her brown knees as she balanced on one leg at a time.
Leaper followed suit, rinsing himself before popping his face through the head hole in the windturner, ripping the seams of his suit, and reaching for the bell-covered belt.
“Shouldn’t we wear something fancier, for a banquet?”
“Not yet. First we have to go to the Mooring for worship. Quickly!” She replaced the pipe, stopping the flow, and bounded ahead of him so quickly he could barely keep up. They passed Saltdeck, the palace precinct, and the beehive-covered edge of Blackpress before a sudden abundance of bead-covered warriors with woolly sashes and red-beaded caps warned him that they’d reached the Mooring, the precinct where the men of Cast were confined.
There was no sign of any women of Cast. Leaper felt safely invisible in his windturner, but kept his head down anyway. Through the corner of his eye, he saw tall masts tipping back and forth beyond a long series of warehouses. They could have been the masts of what remained of Wetwoodknee’s fishing fleet. Or else the mobile swamp city of Cast had sails.
Mitimiti slowed to navigate a crowded wooden walkway. Leaper bent over her closest ear and asked her about the masts.
“That’s Cast,” she whispered back, distracted. “You can examine it from the tower at your leisure, later on. Their women, children, and slaves stay there while the men wander. The queen’s been invited to Cast to inspect the damage, but she’s no desire to see it up close, nor to smell the desperation of prisoners chained in the dark.”
On the other side of the walkway, a broad platform encircled the trunk of a wide tree; at least, it was wide by Wetwoodknee standards. Even the biggest trees here looked too small to Leaper, like they were thousands of paces away.
Its buttress roots were submerged in the river waters. Leafless branches spread wide, and a thick trunk was covered in savage, thumb-sized thorns. A wooden carving of some sort of spiny animal, with steps and a small single-person-sized dais in front, had been built against the south face of the thorny trunk.
The queen stood on the dais in her pearl-weighted windturner, head held high, facing the crowd.
“The kapok loses its leaves in the dry,” Mitimiti told Leaper with ten or more rows of windturners still between them and the dais despite her best efforts to squeeze past. “It’s still confused by the weather and hasn’t budded yet. We pin the dead leaves to the carving of the winged.”
Leaper squinted at the carving. The leaves made its outline difficult to distinguish, but it definitely had wings folded along its back, a long neck, a tail, and two muscular legs tipped with long talons.
Then he turned his attention back to the queen. Her eyes seemed glazed, and there was a black smudge on her lower lip. Unsho stood at the foot of the stairs, empty bamboo cup in her hands.
“What’s that in the cup?” he whispered to Mitimiti.
“Nothing,” Mitimiti answered, scowling. “And if it was something, it would be no less than the queen deserves to calm her, considering the loss of her consort, her younger brothers, and their children. Her grief is more terrible than you can imagine. You don’t know what it means, to be unable to lay your consort’s bones in the hollow beneath the statue of the winged.”
“You speak as if you didn’t also lose a father.”
“She is everything to me,” came the curt reply. “I refuse to lose her.”
As the queen raised fists full of silver bells and called on Wept’s soul to open her ears to the salt winds that passed through Wetwoodknee, Mitimiti slipped past a few more rows of people. Leaper followed.
“I really don’t know what you meant about putting bones underneath the statue. Can’t you explain?”
“Before the great forest grew, our ancestors worshipped the winged and their cousins the chimeras. The souls of our dead always came back to us within a few days of their dying, as falling stars. Now they return infrequently, seemingly unrelated to the time that has passed since they departed. Unsho interprets whose soul has returned from the home of the winged, so that the relevant bones can be burned, but the queen doesn’t have my father’s bones to burn, even should his star fall.”
“That doesn’t make any sense to me.” Souls falling from the sky, returning from the home of the winged? That’s not right. Souls drift in the ether, seeking rebirth.
“As I knew it would not! Come, we must get closer, it’s
my duty to fill the clock as the tide turns.” She escaped past the flap of somebody’s windturner. The next rotund body she squeezed past was that of some sweaty, shirtless onlooker with long black hair.
Leaper stared and made no move to follow her. The long-haired, shirtless onlooker was Estehass. He’d come, with his sister, to try to recover their so-called temple washed out to sea. Ellin could have meant Dawnsight, when she’d begged the Master of Cast to help her fetch it back, but equally she could have meant the enormous canoe the Rememberers had built to try to get rid of Tyran’s skull. Without ships, the queen of Wetwoodknee was a waste of time to her, and so she’d allied herself with the Master, who commanded those masts at the edge of the mangroves.
Salt winds, which the queen hoped would carry her words to the winged, carried instead the words of Yran the Crocodile-Rider to Leaper’s ears.
“I am uncomfortable,” Yran was saying in the language of the Rememberers, clearly unafraid of being overheard, “and so should you be. This is bad. I know it in my liver.”
“Why should I be?” Estehass inquired complacently.
“Crocodile-Riders say that if you dream of the winged, something bad is coming. Like a sickness, or a war. This is more than a dream. The creature is their god.”
On the dais, the queen turned, a little unsteadily, to the statue.
“Forgive our ancestors,” she implored. “Release them from the sky!”
She laid wreaths of bells over the statue’s snouted head, letting them hang from its elegant, sinuous throat and sing in the wind.
Estehass bent his head towards his smaller companion. Leaper saw the Rememberer’s furrowed brow in profile. The bone man shouted his reply over the sudden exultation of the crowd, loud enough for Leaper to hear clearly.
“Yran. Tamer of crocodiles. That so-called god is a wooden carving. The Master of Cast is your god now, and we are his servants. Take hold of your liver, will you? We are the bad thing. We are the war that is coming.”
TWENTY-TWO
THE QUEEN’S banquet table, spread under the open air at the base of her fabulous tower, branched and billowed around the plush sitting cushions. It was reminiscent of the way Wetwoodknee’s floating mats surrounded the mangroves, albeit this network was carved from hard, pale wood, each table section sturdy on three stumpy legs.
Seventy-seven dishes graced the sprawling table. Eleven dishes for each of the city’s seven precincts. Mangrove fruits and honey from Blackpress. Crabs and killifish from Diverdwelling. Spicy eels from the Boilers, and periwinkles in coconut milk from the palace precinct itself. Rock cods, coral trout, and flat-headed fish from the Mooring. Bulrush roots baked in red banana leaves from Reeds, and from Saltdeck, whole swans stuffed with berries and crusted in Coin-of-the-Sea.
Leaper had every opportunity to count and salivate over the dishes; he’d been clothed in a finer, thinner kind of windturner and put on food-serving duty by Mitimiti. The maid herself was doing plenty of running between the banquet and the kitchens—however, in the altogether more enviable position of tasting the queen’s food for poisons.
“Don’t eat any fish tonight,” she’d whispered to Leaper as they passed one another in the coral convolutions of the lower palace. Crisped, blue-spotted skin had been carefully carved and discarded, but the baked flesh of the killifish, he assumed, remained potent.
“No need to tell me twice,” he replied wryly, the leaf-covered wooden serving platter heavy on his scarred forearms. His broken nose didn’t seem to have dented his sense of smell.
“What I find odd about you,” the Master of Cast was expounding to a hunch-shouldered Yran, “is that you not only touch bones”—Yran dropped the swan leg bone back onto his woven plate immediately—“but you’ve eaten fish and snake. I had heard that among Crocodile-Riders, eating scaled animals and touching bones was forbidden.”
“It was, Great Master,” Yran babbled, taking a swig of fermented mangrove fruit. “It is. Of course it is. I pledged my life to your men on our very first encounter, yet it was only last night, when you accepted my oath of personal loyalty, in exchange for the sword-of-the-wild, that I completely became your man and left my old customs behind.”
His new overlord ignored him, single plump forefinger upraised with authority.
“Don’t mistake me, I’m pleased to find you so contrary to expectations. Everybody in Cast knows Crocodile-Riders are dirty, smelly, and stupid. Yet you—what is your name again?—are courageous, generous, and wise.”
Poor, stupid, swindled Yran. The Master of Cast had paid for Aurilon’s priceless sword with what? Words? Mutual loyalty? A sense of belonging?
I pity him, yet here I am, serving Wetwoodknee in exchange for that same sense of belonging.
“My name is Yran, Great Master.”
“Yran.” The Master laughed as he heaped an opened oyster with bamboo salt. “It sounds a little like ‘I ran,’ does it not? And that’s exactly what you did when the flood came early, didn’t you? I shan’t forget your name again. Tell us more of the prowess of this bony blade.”
“It makes animals obey, Master. That is how I reached the legendary city of Canopy. You see, I hid myself in the belly of an embracer. It slithered through a hole in the Canopian barrier.” The Master laughed harder, waving one hand disbelievingly in a gesture of derision, but Yran only spoke louder and more insistently in the language of the Bright Plain, which all but Ellin and Estehass, seated six table segments distant, understood. “The demon vomited me up into a magical palace, the likes of which you’ve never imagined, Great Master!”
Leaper could imagine it.
“Leave such imaginings for my minstrel. He’s performing later.” The Master of Cast belched, pushing a bowl of empty shells away from him, and Leaper moved like a man in a dream, silently scooping up the leavings, making room to set down the platter of killifish that he held in his other hand.
Yran’s lying. Again. He’s never been to Canopy.
Queen Erta sat across the table from the Master. Her eyelids didn’t so much as flicker at the appearance of the main course.
“Let me taste that for you, My Guiding Tide,” Mitimiti murmured, mincing a bit of white fish flesh from the edge of it with two fingers and pretending to put it into her mouth. Instead, while she chewed ostentatiously, she dropped the morsel into Leaper’s low-held load of oyster shells. “It is safe for eating, my queen.”
The Master of Cast eyed the platter.
“Wind’s teeth, I’m not sure I can fit much more in.”
“But you must sample this dish,” Erta said gently. “It’s a seasonal specialty, ordinarily reserved for royalty.”
At the mention of royalty, the Master’s countenance brightened, and he helped himself to half the fish. As soon as he’d taken a bite, the queen spoke again, still very gently.
“I wonder how long you intend to stay with us, Cast’s Master.”
“Forever, I think,” the Master boasted carelessly, intent on finishing his fish. “We’ll wait long enough to be certain that your drowned men aren’t returning, and then this rich city is ours for the plundering. I’ve loaded one of my twenty-pace seagoing ships with water and provisions that I’ve stolen from you. It’s hidden in mangroves off the southern end of Reeds.”
“Indeed?” Erta’s manner indicated neither surprise nor distaste, while Yran gaped, horrified, at the man he now owed his allegiance. Amidst the general hubbub, no others loyal to the Master were close enough to overhear him.
“Tonight,” the Master went on, “I’m sending the Rememberers out to recover a rather large temple-ship they lost in the flood. The bone man can find it with magic, he says. Something about using lightning to connect an artefact with its origin. The Rememberers think they’re keeping that temple-ship, but actually I’m taking it for my new palace, since it won’t have as many awful stairs as your tower. Floorian magic workers are slightly more difficult to kill than Canopian adepts, but it can still be done, once they are separated f
rom their hoards of bone. Canopian adepts, in contrast, are completely helpless below their barrier. Sometimes they try to flee their deities. I’ve killed hundreds of the filthy creatures, myself.”
Yran’s astonished stare went from his Master to Leaper, whose blood ran cold.
Yran isn’t fooled.
He knows who I am.
Leaper wanted to take the oyster shells to the kitchens but felt unable to move; unwilling to draw any more attention to himself.
Has he told anyone?
“But if you stay in one place,” the queen prompted, “Cast will surely be found by those same vengeful deities.”
“Wetwoodknee has a good distance from the forest.” The Master shrugged. “The City-by-the-Sea has always been far enough away to keep you comparatively safe. We never took it before because your fishing fleet was faster and more manoeuvrable. None of our spies were able to steal your shipbuilding secrets. But now your sailors are safely disposed of by the new gods of Canopy, our enemies, in a stroke of good fortune.” He licked his lips. “You know, I never liked the taste of fish. I like the taste of this one, though.”
“Lee,” Erta said, making Leaper jump, “please make sure our guests Ellin and Estehass also have an opportunity to try the killifish.”
“Yes, My Guiding Tide,” Leaper said, forcing his legs to take the first step, followed by the second, until he was all the way to the kitchens with the bowl of oyster shells in his shaking hands.
He’s killed hundreds of adepts? That can’t be true. He’s a liar, just like Yran. They’re made for one another.
But the killifish makes them tell the truth.
Leaper closed his eyes and rubbed at his temple, leaning heavily against the lumpy coral wall.
I can’t bring adepts here. It isn’t safe. Without their powers, they’d be helpless. Just as helpless as I am. He remembered the chest full of furs and leathers. Bribes and treasures, sent from Canopy to Cast and Wetwoodknee, the most obvious places for runaways to go. His brother-in-law, Anahah, was no fool. He’d hidden in Understorey to escape Orin’s wrath years ago. The Master’s logic explained why Anahah had stayed in proximity to goddesses and gods despite the danger from Orin’s beast; the danger of being powerless was even greater.
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