Tides of the Titans

by Thoraiya Dyer

  “No Audblayin. No Odel,” Igish mused.

  “No Odel, but also no need for him.”

  “I’ll come with you. All my household will.” She met Oken’s eye, and the girl answered with,

  “Yes, Aunty!”

  Leaper couldn’t help but smile. These two were his first recruits to Ilik’s cause. One a fighter. The other a skilled merchant and weaver.

  “We depart from Airakland,” he said, “as soon as we can. If you ask for the Godfinder’s flowerfowl farm, you’ll be shown the way. You really should leave Audblayinland tonight. We can travel together, if you want protection, company—”

  “We’ll travel on our own,” Igish said. “There will be no shortage of company.”

  “Aunty has six workshops and thirteen significant-sized warehouses,” Oken told him reluctantly. “When she says all her household will come, she means all three hundred and thirteen workers, along with their families.”

  “Nobody should be forced to leave Canopy,” Leaper insisted. “And the goddesses and gods mustn’t be forewarned.”

  “I’m starting a new flowerfowl venture,” Igish said dreamily. “My workers need retraining in Airakland. The silk, looms, breeding boxes, and other materials they take with them are as payment for their training. Any who wish to remain in the silk trade may take over the warehouses I plan to abandon.”

  Leaper smiled and gave her a courtly bow.

  “So long as you understand there’ll be no nobility to buy your silk in the mountains. You may need it for bedding, for moon bleeding or for babies’ napkins.” He turned to Oken. “There will be nothing out there except what you bring and what you make. No poetry, blades, books, or wine. Your spines won’t work. They won’t stay sharp. They won’t stay clean. It’s the wild.”

  Oken shrugged irritably. “The wild doesn’t have nothing; it has everything. This forest is wild. You and I come from the wild.”

  Behind her, Igish had ducked into a side room and reemerged clutching a potted mulberry tree to her chest with both hands.

  “Why do you linger in my hallway, foster brother of Imeris? Didn’t you say we were short of time?”

  Leaper licked his lips.

  “We are, Wife-of-Epatut. Perilously short. Although I wonder if I might have those books. Somebody I know is going to need them. And are you going to leave all that food back there, sitting on the table?”

  * * *

  IT TOOK longer than five days for Leaper, Aforis, and Nirrin to reach Airakland.

  Along the way, everyone who recognised Nirrin’s clothes stopped her to ask what had happened at the Garden.

  Yes, Audblayin was dead. Yes, Audblayinland was infested with demons and the roads had been cut, but they would be healed as soon as possible. No, there was no flying master demon living in the Garden and gobbling up children by the dozen.

  Not unless Airak strikes me down with lightning, Leaper thought. There could be some subsequent gobbling.

  The last time Leaper had looked up at the Temple of Airak, the wooden structure had hummed with the lightning god’s magic. To a Servant’s senses, bright strings of light or the smell of their potential paths had connected the blackened limbs to all of Canopy.

  On this morning, as Audblayin’s adept, he saw it for what it was: a corpse. Inside the lifeless tree skeleton waited a small, petty piece of something that had once been a titan. Carefully sequestered in its own realm. Suspicious of the rest of itself.

  Yet still capable of striking Leaper down. I have to be careful.

  Obsequious. Self-effacing.

  He summoned the speech pattern of an out-of-nicher by recalling the shape and growth patterns of a windgrass plant. Windgrass was quick growing and common, yet sweet smelling and useful for almost everything.

  “I am nervous,” Nirrin said, following his gaze. “Airak might not want me. Because I am weak. Because I am white.”

  “No weaker than me,” Leaper said. “Only slightly whiter.”

  “You had the famous Godfinder to vouch for you.”

  “I had Aforis. So will you. They should be the nervous ones. You mightn’t want them.”

  Nirrin smiled. It might have been the first time Leaper had made her smile; he couldn’t remember seeing it before.

  “If they turn me away, I do not know where I will go. My father will want me back to take over his forge, but how can I go back to hammering and climbing when I once flew?”

  Leaper frowned, distracted. He held his arms out and flapped them a little.

  “Hey. Why can’t I fly? Audblayin’s Bodyguard flies.”

  “Audblayin’s Bodyguard flies within the boundary of the wards of the Garden.”

  “Oh.” He let his arms fall back to his sides. “Well, I’m never getting in there, am I?”

  “The Bodyguard before Bernreb found a way,” Nirrin said, “to magically alter his mind so that he had no memory of the murders he’d done. You could try it.”

  “No. I’m afraid I need the memories of all my murders. That’s what keeps me from murdering again.”

  Ousos emerged from the reflective obsidian gate of the Temple. Stroking her axes, she smirked greenly with one side of her mouth as if she hadn’t left Leaper to die at the edge of Floor.

  “Warmed One,” she said to him, strangely polite. To Aforis: “Skywatcher.”

  While they hadn’t yet been to Unar’s farm, Aforis had enjoyed a comfortable night’s sleep in an Ilanland lodge. He’d travelled another day back in time as he dreamed. Yet he clearly hadn’t travelled so far back that he’d forgotten Ousos. Leaper, sleepless, had watched over him through each night. It felt like an odd reversal of the burden of care between them. Hardly any time had passed since Leaper had needed Aforis to save him.

  “Shining One,” Aforis said to Ousos by way of greeting. “Has our master sent you in anticipation of our reception?”

  “M’Lord Airak will receive you,” Ousos answered, nodding. “Ulellin, visiting goddess of wind and leaves, will receive you, too.” While Leaper and Aforis shared a startled glance at this information, Ousos thrust her face into Nirrin’s. “Who’s this, then?”

  “One who would serve the lightning god,” Nirrin said, bravely swimming in Ousos’s breath without pulling away, though several rows of the small spines implanted along her ribs by Kirrik erupted nervously through her shirt.

  “Another Understorian,” Ousos complained. “We’ll have a hard time chaining those!”

  She referred to the metal mechanisms that had locked Leaper’s spines into his long bones before the lightning god had come to trust him. He’d forgotten to warn Nirrin about that possibility.

  Leaper had warned Nirrin about having to repair shattered obsidian. She’d given it a few practice tries on a discarded hand mirror after they’d crossed the border, and to Leaper’s relief, the bond Aforis and Unar had forged between Nirrin and Airak functioned as it should.

  Not that Aforis could remember doing it. The old man had been taken aback when they’d told him, for the sixth morning in a row, that Audblayin’s Bodyguard was accompanying him to Airakland to be a Skywatcher. Leaper hated seeing him unable to remember.

  But at least he accepts that he’s cursed. At least he trusts me.

  “Why don’t you walk ahead of us some, Skywatcher?” Ousos suggested. “Lecture your new applicant all about the layout of the Temple.” She gave Nirrin a little shove towards Aforis. “Always did like lecturing, the hoary bore.”

  When they were a few paces ahead in the entry hallway, Ousos linked arms with Leaper, strolling leisurely with him as though they were the best of friends.

  “Surprised to see me?” Leaper asked her when they’d lagged enough to be out of earshot. “Thought you’d drowned me with that early monsoon? Is this where you drag me into a cupboard and take my head off with an axe?”

  “I’m hurt, Leaper,” Ousos snarled softly. “No, really, my feelings are trod into dirt. It’s hardly my fault you were left behind. I know your spines
weren’t working and you couldn’t see straight what we had to do. I’d have helped you climb back into Canopy, if you hadn’t been all bent on heading to Gui at a rather vital time. Those squeezing dick-fleas were stealing M’Lord’s skull, weren’t they?”

  “They were.”

  “Then you understand why I had to get back in such a hurry. We both served Airak as best we could. Worked well together, even. Turned the tables on that brother and sister tried to kill us, didn’t we? It’s ridiculous for us to be enemies, just because of some mix-up with the monsoon.” Ousos leaned in companionably closely, and ventured, even more quietly than before, “I don’t have to worry you’ll mention, in front of the Holy Ones, me squeezing that dirt-kissing bone man, right?”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  AFORIS LED the party into Airak’s open-roofed audience chamber.

  Not through the main tribute hall with its crowd of would-be worshippers, but through the smaller spymaster’s entrance so familiar to Leaper from his former life.

  Airak sat on a throne of snowflake obsidian, on a dais of blackened floodgum. The black-and-white-haired head, crowned with sprouting arm-length branches of polished silver, was bowed. He was robed in silver. His bared face, arms, and legs were half black and half white. Airak ate fried mushrooms and eggs with a leaf-spoon from a bowl made of tree squash. A silver goblet rested at his elbow.

  Eliligras, his Bodyguard, was a tall, thin shadow behind the throne.

  Ulellin, whom Leaper had last seen outside her Temple ten years before, was all dark brown, clad in green. She wafted with her Bodyguard about the margins of the room, where heaped black, pink, and white sands waited for the lightning god or his Servants to transform them into glass.

  “Holy Ones,” Aforis said, bowing deeply. Leaper, Ousos, and Nirrin quickly followed suit.

  The wind goddess wore windowleaves, front and back, which covered her from chest to knees. They were stitched together with vines at the edges. Ulellin’s hair moved as if underwater, in currents of wind nobody else could feel or see. As she drifted, she trailed her slender hand over stone crucibles, brass braziers, and long-handled glass-grasping tools. Her feet disturbed nothing around her; when she walked over the edge of a pile of white sand, she left no footprints behind.

  “Here he is,” she said so softly that Leaper could barely understand her. “The boy that I cursed, come back to Canopy. In this time, to this place. As I knew he would.”

  “You sound like the winged one,” Leaper replied swiftly, so loudly and boldly that he shocked Nirrin and Aforis into stepping back, but it was Airak that he needed to show deference to, not the wretched waif. “Hunger, too, was confident that I’d dance like a puppet on strings to her own ends.”

  Airak said that Ilik and I were being watched. I assumed he meant by spies. Maybe even Ulellinland spies; it was Ilik’s niche, after all. But of course, he meant Ulellin herself, being whispered to by the wind.

  Ulellin laughed, neither surprised nor angered by Leaper’s response.

  “Instead,” she said, “you destroyed the last nest full of eggs that she’ll ever hatch. No child of Hunger can come to Canopy, now. No flock of wind-stealing upstarts will reach Airak’s glass gate. No leaf-clad star-spawn will be lightning-speared by inexperienced Skywatchers, ignorant of the danger that they would have made those hatchlings invulnerable at a stroke. The rebellion of Hunger and her kin is over before she could begin it. That was why I had to let you live, Leaper.”

  She had prophecies about both of us. And she told Airak what she saw.

  “That’s why I let you live, Leaper,” Airak said grimly, wiping his chin, lifting his head, “though you disobeyed me a thousand times.”

  They knew. Both of them.

  “I see. Holy One. Thank you for your mercy.”

  But how much did Ulellin see? She knew I would journey to the mountains, but does she know Ilik is alive? Has she seen the second founding of Time? Is she toying with us?

  “The prophecy I spoke concerning your true love was true enough,” Ulellin elaborated smugly, “yet it masked a deeper one which concerned you. Which promised that you would eliminate the threat of Hunger and snuff out the products of her last hatching. Both portions of that prophecy have come to pass, and here is Audblayin’s discarded Bodyguard, to fulfil the final portion of it.” She graced Nirrin with a tight, malicious smile.

  They can’t know about Unar cutting Audblayin’s soul away from Ylly. If they did, they’d never risk having powerful adepts in their presence. They can probably sense the weakness of the barrier in Audblayinland. But what about the fact that Hunger is my puppet now?

  Airak stood up, setting his empty bowl beside the goblet on the arm of the snowflake obsidian throne. He stepped down from the dais and came to stand in front of Nirrin, who respectfully lowered her eyes but didn’t cringe.

  “This is the one, Ulellin?” Airak asked.

  “Yes,” the wind goddess said. “I saw that face in the final moments of the vision. The wind whispered that she would serve you in his place. That she would serve you well.”

  Nirrin bowed again, shallowly, and beyond her Leaper caught a glimpse of Aforis, who gazed back at Leaper with puzzlement—he doesn’t remember Hunger at all—and gratification. Aforis was proud to hear of Leaper’s reported accomplishments. Leaper was so pained by Aforis’s pride that he almost missed Ulellin’s next remark.

  “You had to let him live before, My Lord of Lightning,” she said, “yet here is his replacement. There’s no need for him to live any longer.”

  “I am Bodyguard to Audblayin,” Leaper exclaimed.

  “You were. Now she’s died and been reborn a male child. You’re of no more use to the birth god than you are to your former master, and you’ve learned dangerous things.”

  She can’t touch me. Not in Airak’s Temple. It’s Airak I have to convince; it’s always been Airak.

  Leaper threw himself to the floor in supplication.

  “Holy One,” he begged, pressing his forehead to the floodgum. “You’ve always trusted me to keep your secrets. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Holy One,” Aforis said with stiff dignity, “Audblayin, woman or man, will expect you to keep to the consensus between deities prohibiting attacks on one another’s Servants. You have an honourable record on this matter, though the wind goddess speaks openly of having desired to destroy Leapael even when he was your Servant.”

  “M’Lord Airak,” Ousos blurted, no doubt prompted by the potential for Leaper to start spilling secrets there and then, “I saw Leaper’s loyalty to you with my own eyes. In the muck of Floor, with enemies all around. He even threatened to kill me if I failed you! I swear it by your holy bones. You can trust him.”

  “I’m leaving Airakland,” Leaper told the floor. “I’m going back to Audblayinland. It wants defending from demons. You wanted oaths sworn to you by somebody my equal in skill, and Nirrin’s here. Nirrin is sure to surpass me. I’m no threat to you, Holy One. You’ll never hear my voice or feel my magic. You’ll never see my face again.”

  “Stand up, Leaper,” Airak said. Leaper did as he was told.

  Audblayin’s bones. He’s going to execute me. Hunger will have her body back again. She’ll tear Canopy apart trying to find me. Even though I’ll be dead and gone.

  “They plead so prettily for their lives, in Airakland,” Ulellin said sulkily.

  “For the first time, my disgraced Skywatcher and my Shining One are in agreement,” Airak observed. “Four mortals in alignment, like a rare configuration of stars. Go to Audblayinland, Leaper. Nirrin will replace you in more ways than one, do you understand? See that you stay in Audblayinland. If you make any moves against me, she will know.”

  I’m going to live. The forest, too.

  Leaper released the breath he’d been holding. He shouldn’t have been so worried. After all, he’d seen a vision of the end of the forest. Hunger hadn’t been in it. Yet by letting him go, Airak and Ulellin confirmed for him the fallibil
ity of future-seeing.

  “Thank you, Holy One.”

  “Go. Aforis will escort you to the glass gate.”

  Leaper obeyed his old master, the lightning god, one final time.

  By the time they passed out of sight of the sentries at the gate, Aforis seemed so confounded by what he’d heard in the Temple that he kept on walking with Leaper along the high road, muttering to himself about winged ones and hatchlings, all the way to Unar’s flowerfowl farm.

  Leaper stood with him at the arch covered with brown vines; the sole portal admitting visitors to the branch road that led to the farm. He could hear the roosting birds stirring, reluctant to fly down to Floor just yet, squabbling for spaces in the sun.

  “What is it?” Aforis asked.

  “Will it still work, now that Unar is dead?”

  Aforis’s face tightened. His eyes turned wet.

  “What do you mean? Why didn’t you tell me that Unar had died?”

  “The curse is getting worse, Aforis. You can’t go on like this. You can’t stay and help me. You have to go and find the lost fourteenth god.”

  The words curse and fourteenth god had an effect on Aforis, seeming to restore a little of what he’d lost.

  “No, no. I’m fine, Leapael. I remember now. She killed Audblayin and was struck down by Aoun in turn. You see? It’s just Nirrin I’m worried about. She came from a niche where there was a concerted effort to emancipate slaves. Other free Understorians surrounded her. Who will protect her here?”

  Leaper squeezed Aforis’s arm.

  “She was a Bodyguard, Aforis. A Hunter, too, I heard. Which means, since she survived, whatever demon it was was slain. She can survive a bit of Ousos’s bullying.”

  Inside the farmhouse, Unar’s absence hit him all at once. In the sitting room, he stared at the ti chest and tiny potted plants. Her own miniature version of the Garden. Leaper spotted the thieves’ lantern on a preparation surface in the kitchen corner. Above it, hanging from a hook, swung the faulty lantern Leaper had given Unar, his first illicit attempt at making lanterns, which the Godfinder had used for starting fires in her little iron stove.