“What I don’t understand is,” he said brashly, “if Aoun grew up in Ehkisland, what adept severed him from Ehkis so that he could serve Audblayin? You know, like the pair of you severed me?”
Both Aforis and Unar stared at him for several silent seconds.
“I think I know how,” Unar said. “I think Aoun’s hatred for Ehkis, who drowned his twin brother, was powerful enough that he was able to sever himself from the rain goddess.”
Without warning, Atwith stood beside Unar. His stare joined the stares of the others.
“Aoun? My brother, Aoun? Did you say that my brother, Aoun, serves Audblayin?”
Unar took Atwith briskly by the shoulder and turned him.
“Come on. We can’t stop. We have to get into that cavern before the bone Leaper ate wears off.”
When they resumed shifting the rubble, Leaper thought some of the rocks were thrown with unnecessary force.
At last, the way was cleared, and sunlight from the cavern showed through. The wintry wind entered keenly and immediately, as if reuniting with a friend.
“Can you see her?” Unar hissed at Atwith’s feet.
Atwith wriggled backwards until he was able to stand up, his body grey with all the silt stuck to him.
“I see her,” he whispered back. “In the nest. Maybe sleeping.”
Leaper took a deep breath. Instead of the cave surrounds, he smelled the burrow of some small, subterranean animal with mint and lichen on its breath.
“Let’s swap clothes,” he said to Atwith, securing the tapestry-padded, goat-skull mask over his face, peering through eyeholes in the musty, torn tapestry and the sockets of the skull. Atwith took off his bronze knife in its belt and his skirt of clacking bone-tree stems. In exchange, Leaper handed him the windturner. He put his various straps and harnesses inside the carrysack, which he also relinquished. The bronze knife seemed a poor substitute for Leaper’s lost spines, but if all went well, the winged one’s scaly back wouldn’t be his place, anyway.
It has to go well. Everybody’s counting on me.
Canopy’s nearly dead are counting on me.
Ilik doesn’t even know I’m coming back to her, but I am. Even though she pretended she was dead.
Unar was watching Atwith while he dressed, trying to seem like she wasn’t watching him.
“Better choke down the rest of Bria’s claw,” Leaper told her brightly, knotting the skirt into place. His voice was muffled through the mask. “I won’t want to be kept waiting for healing long after she spills my liver on the floor.”
Without the windturner on, his exposed midriff felt cold and vulnerable.
“Just don’t let her bite your head off,” Unar said. “I don’t think I can heal that.”
She forced the lump of bone paste down her throat, gagging but keeping it down. Leaper hefted his own, much larger lump in one hand. Atwith deliberately cut his arm on a sharp piece of glass and used the brief well of blood to paint patterns on Leaper’s chest and face. At last, he gave a satisfied nod.
Here we go.
Leaper shimmied through the tight channel Atwith and Unar had reopened. The bone skirt gently clacked about his thighs as he straightened and took his first few strides. He was halfway across the cavern to the winged one’s nest before she stirred. The long snake of her neck arched and her folded wings shifted.
He waited to be sure her eyes were focused on him before leaping in the air and twisting as he advanced. His fingers were hooked like claws. He was carving the skin of imaginary enemies. Speaking the silent language he had seen in the visions.
Speaking the language of the titans.
THERE YOU ARE, he danced. DID YOU THINK THAT BY SHAKING DOWN THE WALLS YOU COULD DEFEND YOURSELF FROM MY RETRIBUTION?
Hunger’s nostrils flared.
“What retribution?” She answered in her own language of hot and cold breezes, the language of the winged. “I took you when you were alone, where nobody could see besides your Bodyguard, and she is dead, as the bargain requires. You are no mortal, one-fourteenth of a titan, and so it’s of no importance what you see. Retribution. The bargain. It’s by your own law that the mortal had to die. Retribution!” Her neck arched higher, and her mouth opened, revealing the oozing, reddish-brown teeth. “Your soul proper has stayed behind in the forest. I don’t sense death. Only an angry wildness. Perhaps you could not quench the life of that other one. Perhaps it was his fire I smelled. But you can still be a meal for me.”
Leaper raised his arms as if they were wings. He ran at Hunger, bounding over the empty riverbed, feet pounding the floor of the cave, contorting his body as he closed in on the nest.
SEE IF YOU CAN SWALLOW ME, OATHBREAKER! He kicked aside the hatchling’s pathetically outstretched paw. I SEE THE CORPSE OF YOUR CHILD AT YOUR FEET. YOU HAVE BROKEN THE AGREEMENT, AND YOU WILL CARRY ME TO CANOPY. THERE YOU WILL BE JUDGED!
He ran straight up the side of the bowl of old bones and other refuse, ready to keep running up the scaly skin of her chest and the curve of her neck. If she was to prevent him from scaling her person as if she were a fallen tree, she had no choice but to swallow him head first.
Her head plunged. Her jaws snapped shut. Leaper was pierced, front and back, by her wooden fangs, and he screamed.
Hunger opened her jaws again as she curled her snout towards the ceiling. Leaper’s feet pointed to the sky. He felt the wave of her tongue carrying him down, the bright burn of Unar’s healing, and the emptiness of his dangling fingers where the bolus of bone paste had gone ahead of him into Hunger’s gullet.
Their minds were abruptly connected.
Like cloud and Canopy joined by lightning.
Leaper felt the crushing mountain of her grief, all but snuffing out the white-hot star that smouldered at the heart of her. Her yearning for the darkest part of the heavens and the loss of her hatchlings, each one a stain of darker darkness in a world already utterly dark.
Those inky silhouettes wavered. Resolved into a human child in a cradle.
Unar’s old cradle. The one she kept at the farm. The brown-faced, bawling child Leaper saw was his own child, summoning him across a terrible emptiness. Yet the bargain chained him in the cave. He couldn’t go to the forest. Must not go to the forest. If I go to the forest, thirteen-fourteenths of a titan will kill us both.
Leaper wrestled, in his mind, to keep their awarenesses apart, but all of a sudden he couldn’t see any difference between the hatchlings and the human child. The same confusion which had sometimes rendered the speaking-bone impotent paralysed him. He was a parent, he would do anything for his child, he would tear apart any who harmed his offspring, he would make them suffer, he would—Ilik. Her face blossomed in his thoughts. The other parent of my child.
Two parents.
Two hearts beating.
Leaper found himself, smeared with blood and sap, standing on the floor of Hunger’s lair, his human body healed again by Unar, the winged one’s huge head bowed before him in apparent submission.
That’s it. That’s how I can tell the difference between her thoughts and mine. One parent or two.
While he was savouring his victory, Hunger struck with her mind, taking back control. Quick as a viper, she seized his throat, as he had seized her moments ago, turning him to face the three Canopian companions who stood not far behind him.
She appealed to them in the language they understood.
The language of Canopy.
“Unar,” Hunger said with Leaper’s voice. Unar’s eyes were as wide as they would go. “Unar, it is Hunger who speaks to you through this mortal boy. Hunger is my name, and I know what you hunger for. You want him, the one-fourteenth of a titan who stands beside you.”
The glance Unar gave the real Atwith was not in the least hungry. It was terrified. She looked back at Leaper.
“No,” she said.
“Help me,” Hunger entreated. “Kill the boy, and I will tell you how to become immortal. How to live with him in your forest,
forever, as equals. I will tell you how to find the Birdfoot Valley, where the bones of the lost one-fourteenth of a titan lie. You will take his soul for your own and become the fourteenth deity of the forest! All you have to do is slay this one, by whose ignorance my hatchlings were slain!”
Unar trembled uncontrollably.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve killed him one too many times already.”
Before her sentence was finished, Hunger had already turned to Atwith.
“You kill him,” she babbled through Leaper’s lips. “Kill us both! Bringing death is your only task, and here you have failed! Kill, death god! Here! Now!”
“No,” Atwith said grimly. “Not here. Not yet.”
“Then you,” Hunger shouted, using Leaper’s hands to seize both of Aforis’s forearms, “must make a new bargain with me. You need the bones of Time even more than the others. They are the only cure for your curse. The only stepping-stones for you to reenter the forward flow. Save me, and I will take you to the valley myself.”
Aforis pulled his arms free and took a step to the side.
“You’re not going to any valley,” he said. “You’re going home.”
“To your son,” Atwith said.
“To Ilik,” Unar added.
To Ilik, Leaper thought, and raised his hands to the goat skull mask as if he could hold himself together; his vision showed him both Unar’s brown eyes and his own stick-legged self as seen from behind, and the two halves felt as if they were sliding apart.
But it was only Hunger’s mind sliding back into her body. Into a little ball in her belly. There, the bone pellet rested against the slowly digesting carcass which had once been Atwith’s Bodyguard. It was heavy in his stomach, but he knew that he could still fly.
Leaper unfolded his wings, and they brushed the corners of the cavern.
“Climb into my mouth,” he told the frightened Godfinder. “It’s a long way, and I can only control this body until my human body falls asleep.”
THIRTY-FOUR
THEY FLEW all morning; all day; all evening without stopping.
Leaper’s human body was so fatigued he could hardly sit upright in the winged one’s maw. He slouched against his friends, relying on them to keep him upright.
“Water?” Unar shouted in his human ear. One of her arms gripped him tightly about his human waist, while the other held the near-empty gourd. They rode amongst the rootlike tangles of Hunger’s teeth.
“In my mouth,” Leaper shouted back at her with his human mouth, rigidly holding his jaw open as he spoke even though it made him hard to understand. He had to keep it open, just as Hunger’s mouth hung open. Dried to leather by the wind, as Hunger’s mouth was, he dared not close it. Not and get the two mouths confused, and end up killing himself and his companions. “Hold on to her teeth while I swallow!”
The forest bulked black and deep on the horizon, smudged orange by the sunset in the west. It looked misleadingly smooth on top, where every locked-together leaf and branch strained for light, except where interrupted by emergents, which strained higher.
It looked deceptively open at the sides, where the first trunks of great trees seemed planted so far apart that wind and the winged alike could avoid them without even trying, so vast were the spaces between. Yet the sunlight directed horizontally through, as keenly as the beam of a lens-focused lantern, torched the sides of a mere two dozen layers before being swallowed by the forest’s dark heart.
They passed the point over the plain where the curse had turned Leaper, Hunger, and the hatchlings back the last time.
This time, there was no resistance from Ulellin’s winds. Only the wind of their passage. The beat of Hunger’s wings.
The curse really did end when my son was born.
My son.
“We have to go to Audblayinland,” Unar shouted after she’d sloshed the last of the water into his mouth. “To the Garden.”
“Why?” Atwith hollered into Leaper’s other ear. “Atwith can’t go there. The death god and the birth goddess can’t meet.”
“Even though I was banished,” Unar shouted, “I was never severed from Audblayin. When Leaper falls asleep, the winged one will try to kill him again. She still wants revenge. My powers are strongest in Audblayinland. I can turn the trees against Hunger. Try to cage her. It’s the only chance we have. It’s where we have to go.”
“What about Aforis?” Atwith demanded. “He’s strongest in Airakland. Why not go there?”
“He’s asleep. When he wakes, he’ll have forgotten where we are and what we’re doing. Besides, he was never stronger than I was.”
“And Leaper?”
“Nor Leaper. Two of them together couldn’t do what I could do. Their strength was in lightning, besides. We’ve seen that lightning only makes the winged ones stronger. We can set you back down in Atwithland but our final destination has to be Audblayinland!”
Through his exhaustion, Leaper knew she was right.
Audblayin is my sister.
I’ve never asked her for anything, but she’ll help us this one time. She’ll know what to do. She’ll lend her full power to Unar if that’s what it takes to drive Hunger back.
Atwith went rigid beside Leaper, who risked a sideways glance with his human eyes.
Cloud-arrows were shooting into Atwith’s chest.
“Ahhh!” Leaper cried. He tried to twist away from Atwith, but Unar was there, leaning forward with fascination.
“It’s the souls of the dead,” she yelled. “They’re passing through him!”
Each translucent, fast-coalescing cloud now looked to Leaper like a naked human body stretched long and rope-thin, slightly thicker in the middle and tapering at the ends, spearing into Atwith but not reappearing behind him. The souls were white in the instant they first appeared; they spent a second absorbing the mango glow of the sinking sun, and each one left an amber remnant on the front of Atwith’s windturner.
The forest was beneath them. Impenetrable. Speckled with blue-white lanterns like the net of diamonds in Ilik’s hair. This was the dense tangle of Eshland. Home of the wood god.
Leaper veered Hunger’s body to the east. Atwithland is the next niche over. We have to find a bone tree. Atwith’s Temple is in the crown of a bone tree.
“Hey! Are you all right?” Unar shouted at Atwith, who, instead of answering, turned his head in a slower, more dignified manner than Leaper had seen from him before. One hand rose to finger the fringes of the windturner with distaste. Atwith’s gaze locked onto the bone skirt around Leaper’s waist, and his expression became incensed.
“You! How dare you?” The death god paid no attention to the misty wraiths spiralling hands first, like sideways divers, into the approximate location of his beating heart.
“I said—” Unar started to repeat herself.
“I heard what you said, Godfinder,” Atwith thundered. “You will address me as Holy One, or King of the Dead!”
“Holy One! There’s something I’m curious about!” Unar shouted. “You said you can’t go into Audblayinland, which makes sense enough, but is there any conflict between yourself and Esh? Any reason you can’t go to Eshland?”
“No. Why would—?”
Unar leaned back against Hunger’s teeth and kicked Atwith with both feet. All the strength of her thighs was behind the kick. The death god fell backwards, over the edge of Hunger’s mouth.
“Ahhh!” Leaper cried again. Hunger lurched, attempting to hover. She was too big, and they started to lose height. Atwith’s fall could be tracked by the stream of souls shooting into him. Hunger plummeted not far behind.
“Fly on to Audblayinland,” Unar remonstrated, her head sticking out over the edge of Hunger’s jaw. Leaper smelled the sweet sharpness of passionfruit pulp and hookvine sap—Unar’s magic—as fresh green foliage reached up from Canopy to cushion and cradle the falling god.
She’s the Godfinder, Leaper reminded himself, cursing his instinct to recover A
twith. She doesn’t kill gods. She saves them.
The winged one struggled to climb again. Leaper heard faint screams of terror from the people of Eshland. His human pectorals ached, though they were not the muscles straining. His human nostrils flared, though they weren’t the ones sucking at the air, calling on the wind and stars to aid him.
They cleared the tops of the trees, swinging north towards Audblayinland.
“Whatever agreement Hunger had with the Old Gods to conceal herself and stay secret is well and truly over now!” Unar hooked her legs around Hunger’s teeth again, resteadied Leaper with her right arm, and reached for Aforis with her left. All the wild careening and commotion must have woken him, but Leaper couldn’t spare a thought for his mentor.
Audblayinland.
Part of him dreaded taking the unpredictable winged one directly to his childhood home, to the tree where his mothers and fathers had raised him. His old family was there. They could be hurt. Anything could happen.
Another part of him whispered, Ilik and our son are your true family now. And they’re safe in Airakland.
I’m so tired.
“There!” Unar pointed to the tallowwood emergent, standing high above the other great trees of the canopy. At the heart of the Garden, surrounded by still water, Audblayin’s inner sanctum, smooth as an egg, gleamed in the fading light.
The winged one dived towards the platform in front of the Garden’s great Gates. Her approach frightened worshippers who had been heading home, including two heavily pregnant women, one noble and one out-of-nicher, and a girl carrying empty baskets on her head. They scrambled back towards the safety of the Temple.
Leaper watched the ornate monuments to Canopian power grow nearer, and remembered his excitement on first arriving at the Garden as a nine-year-old boy. He’d been far too enthused to really grasp the fact that his sister Ylly would be going through that battle-scene-covered Gate and emerging rarely, if at all. On his first night in Airakland, he’d bawled with homesickness and loneliness, muffling the sound with both fists on account of Unar snoring at his back. Imeris and Ylly had been annoying, yet devoted to him.
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