“I will never fear Audblayin,” Imeris said stubbornly, but this time the shared glance was between Unar and Anahah, and Imeris felt herself excluded from what they knew about the ruthlessness of immortals. “I will speak with her. I will try.”
Anahah tried to hide his smile, but Unar caught it.
“Encouraging her, Anahah?” she admonished him. “Haven’t you got enough problems of your own? Wanted a child so badly you thought you’d go ahead alone, and now look at you. Where are you going to go? Who do you know with young children? Anyone?”
Anahah’s smile vanished.
“No,” he admitted.
“You could shelter him at your farm, Godfinder,” Imeris said smartly, “if you are so concerned about the unborn child.”
“No,” Unar squawked.
“You must be concerned. You served Audblayin, whose domain is new life.”
“I live by myself. I like it that way.”
“Leaper lived with you,” Imeris reminded her.
“Not for long, and I’ve never taken care of a newborn.”
“What?” Imeris said with mock outrage. “What about me? You were there, too. My three fathers, my three mothers, and you.”
“I was sleeping.”
“I thought,” Anahah confessed, “that if I didn’t know what to do, I could transform into some animal with strong mothering instincts. It would be like transforming into territorial animals when I fight.”
“What, and leave whole broods of newborn creatures motherless?” Imeris said.
“That would lead Orin straight to you,” Unar said, “and besides, animals are no fit mothers for babes. They raise human children only in conveniently long-ago legends.” She swallowed hard then, and looked at Imeris. “What I mean is—”
“Come to the Gate of the Garden with me, Anahah.” Imeris did not know why those words had left her lips. She was angry with Anahah. Helping him again would only get her into more trouble. “My sister will not turn you away.”
“Will she not?” Unar said with exasperation. “Her own Servants turned her away when she was little more than a year old! How do you think she came to be raised in Understorey with you? Besides, he’s no innocent. He can’t enter the Garden any more than you or I can.”
“I was having a good dream,” Leaper groaned, yawning and turning over. He rubbed his eyes. “You three are noisy.”
“I’m not staying,” Unar said, rising to her feet.
“Nor am I,” Anahah said, doing the same.
Imeris realised the rain had stopped.
“You heard about the curse?” she asked Unar. “You heard about the curse that Ulellin placed on Leaper?”
“What curse?” the Godfinder asked sharply.
“No curse,” Leaper lied. “Don’t be ridiculous, Issi. Just the chattering of a goddess with no power in my niche. If I ever talk about leaving the forest, you’ve got permission to slap me till I come to my senses.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE KING’S palace in Airakland rested in the pale arms of a living floodgum.
It was near sunset, two days since they had left the monument tree. Imeris followed Daggad, who walked with a bowed head on account of his great height, through bone-white corridors that opened to arching walkways of wood glazed with black glass. Darkening overcast skies lay above them. The lantern-lit roads of Canopy lay below. Occasional lightning strikes visited Airak’s emergent, barely ten thousand paces to the west of the palace, but as the palace manservants and maids paid no attention to the flashes or resounding whip-cracks, Imeris did her best to also ignore them.
Oniwak led the party, looking resplendent in a more ornate dress uniform that his soldiers had provided. Ibbin had been taken in hand by the maids and scrubbed until he shone, but Eeriez and Imeris had both resisted the temptation of heated, fragrant baths, choosing eucalyptus-oil scrapings instead, nodding at one another outside the bath hall door in silent acknowledgement of each other’s commitment to a camouflaged scent. Daggad, of the widest shoulders and most apparent musculature, had spent several hours in the palace kitchen being wooed by the cooks and Airak knew who else. He had returned, bathed and looking very pleased with himself.
Leaper, however, bringing up the rear behind Imeris, looked guilty and hunched his shoulders. He’d tried to vanish on arrival in Airakland, but Oniwak had insisted he remain with the party to explain Ulellin’s animosity to the king.
Never mind, Imeris had told him drily. If anyone can turn a tale from a disaster into a hero’s epic, it is you, Leaper. The king will probably reward you with a fortune in glass.
Yet it was not the king of Airakland who left Leaper sweating where they waited in a mirrored hall outside the king’s reception chamber. A group of courtiers clustered there, merchants and royal relatives, famed beauties and decorated solders.
Aforis, too.
When Leaper laid eyes on his superior Skywatcher, he pivoted on the ball of his foot as though he would march straight back down the hall of mirrors and make a tidy escape, but the guards at the door had come in behind him and were using a stick with a hook on the end to pull down a rope and give it a single, emphatic swing.
Leaper turned back to Aforis just as the deafening note from the bell made the mirrors tremble. Leaper’s nervous face, reflected a hundred times or more in the opposing walls of silver-backed glass, might have shivered as a result of the bell or in anticipation of his reprimand, Imeris couldn’t be sure.
The hundred reflections of Aforis looked stern. His arms, bulging to rival Daggad’s, were crossed over his black robes and bearskin, his black hair in short braids, one white eye a reminder of his previous status. Adepts who did not obey could be cast aside, that eye seemed to say.
“It wasn’t without reservations that I agreed to help shelter and tutor you, Leapael,” he said.
Leaper winced.
“But, Aforis—”
“I was a firsthand witness to the wickedness of your soul. Still, I felt sorry for you. In logic, mathematics, and philosophy you were so far behind the others of your age. The Godfinder convinced me that I could guide you towards better choices.” His voice grew quieter, not louder, forcing Imeris and Leaper to lean in to hear what he was saying over the babble from the other occupants of the hall. “My mother was a teacher. My father was a teacher. Teaching was in my blood, Unar insisted. Why else had the Temple kept me on, though I’d become afraid to use my power, barely able to summon lightning even under the direct watch of my deity? I could redeem myself through you, she said, and I wasn’t completely fooled. I knew you were part of her redemption, too.”
“Just let me explain,” Leaper pleaded.
“You will explain to the Lord of Lightning. Come.”
“Aforis,” Imeris said quickly. “Skywatcher. Warmed One. Captain Oniwak wishes that Leaper first appear before the king.”
“Airak does not serve the king,” Aforis said in his quietest, most velvet voice yet, and somehow the Hunters, soldiers, and courtiers, wide-eyed and askance, all heard him and edged back from him, Oniwak included. “The king serves Airak. So do I. So do you, Leapael, though you oft forget it.” He put his right hand to the back of Leaper’s neck as though he would drag him off by the scruff, but Leaper cringed beneath it so there was no actual contact. Aforis extended his left hand imperatively towards Oniwak. “Give me the bone of the Old Gods.”
Oniwak, who had been told by Ulellin not to give the bone to anyone besides the Lord of Lightning himself, handed over Tyran’s Talon like an obedient child.
The soldiers who had rung the bell moved out of the way so that Aforis and Leaper could leave.
Imeris looked after him anxiously for only a moment before the doors at the other end of the hall opened. The returning victors of the Hunt were ushered into the reception chamber.
It was perhaps a hundred paces long and wide, a straight, square space hollowed from the floodgum tree. There were no windows. Airak’s lanterns, these ones smelted from s
ilver, hung from silver chains.
Standing on a dais that glittered with glazing in many shades of green, giving the impression of a jewelled meadow beneath their bare, silver-ankletted feet, the king and queen of Airakland gazed over the sparsely occupied chamber with filled chalices raised to their lips as though they had been interrupted at dinner by the sound of the bell. Shorter and plumper than their guards, they wore long, grey stormbird feathers in their hair. Cylindrical sheaths of swirling, cloud-coloured silk encased them from shoulders to knees. Silver streamers and strings of miniature blue-lit lanterns hung from the grey cloth. From a distance, they looked like small cities in themselves.
“Welcome, Hunters,” the king called, raising his chalice in tribute to them. The group of courtiers from the hall of mirrors, spilling into the chamber at the Hunters’ backs, cheered, applauded, and stamped their feet on the grey-carpeted wood floor. Imeris tried to feel welcome. She tried not to feel overwhelmed by the lustre of the room, or dimmed by the dazzle of the king and queen. She tried not to resent them for setting old men, children, and slaves against a goddess, and for showing no sorrow at the absence of over half the group.
She tried not to calculate how many slaves they must keep, for the palace to be maintained in this state of splendour.
Oniwak went to the foot of the dais, bowed deeply, and left the compass which had chosen Imeris in the palace of the king of Odelland near the foot of the king of Airakland.
“We feel only gratitude for this great honour, My King. Orin’s beast is no more. Order is restored. Our people are safe.”
He said it a bit pompously, Imeris thought, for a man who had very little to do with the actual killing of the creature. I am not safe, Imeris thought. Now that the Hunt was over, she was safe from the creature, and Oniwak, at least, but Loftfol and Kirrik still loomed in her mind.
Then she heard Daggad’s quiet chortle beside her, becoming aware of his heavy, solid presence, and remembered that he was with her now. That she had bought for Anahah a measure of safety, in exchange for the sword that had saved her from transforming, and that she stood in the audience chamber of the king of Airakland, being cheered by Canopian nobility. She could use her new fame, and their goodwill, to forge the peace she had longed for, once Sorros had built her a trap for Kirrik’s soul and she had filled it.
I will fill it. The Hunt has not injured me. It has made me stronger. I have more allies. I am more determined than ever. Her spines quivered in their sheaths.
“What,” the king asked Oniwak, “are the names of the Hunters who have returned? I would reward them.”
“Their names are Oniwak of Airakland,” Oniwak said, taking two steps back before standing straight and stiff with his shoulders thrown back. “Owun of Ukakland. Eeriez of Eshland. Ibbin of Irofland. Daggad of Audblayinland. Imeris of Odelland.”
At the sound of Imeris’s name, one of the women amongst the courtiers gave an exaggerated gasp. Imeris turned and saw a wide, big-bosomed woman clasping at her heart. She met the woman’s astonished protuberant eyes with cool curiosity an instant before it occurred to her who this must be.
Wife-of-Epatut. My birth mother. Here to reclaim Daggad, her stolen slave.
Imeris took a step back. Her gaze felt nailed to the woman’s goggle-eyed face and stubby-fingered hands. She searched for traces of herself, but she was not accustomed to seeing herself and owned no expensive handheld looking glasses of her own. Did her eyes bulge that way? Were they the same colour? Aside from height, they seemed to be the opposite in everything; Imeris was small-breasted and long-fingered.
She had to have guessed wrong. The woman must be mourning another whose name she’d expected to come after Imeris’s.
Then Imeris’s gaze shifted to the two men flanking the woman. One was older, white-haired, with sharp cheekbones and long-fingered hands.
My birth father, Epatut.
The other man was dimple-cheeked, stubble-chinned, and chubby. He was a year or two younger than Imeris and had Wife-of-Epatut’s bright, slightly bulging eyes.
The adopted heir to the House. Imeris couldn’t remember what Daggad had said his name was. He was weighed down with more colourful cloth than the king and queen. When he raised a goblet almost identical to theirs and opened his heart-shaped mouth, Imeris thought he might propose a toast to her, to claim her immediately back into the House.
“To Daggad, a slave of the House of Epatut!” he said in a high-pitched voice instead.
“An ex-slave of the House,” Imeris contradicted him loudly, angrily, and at once. “Freed by the ex-daughter of the House!”
Gasps, tutting, and commentary erupted from the court.
“My daughter,” Wife-of-Epatut moaned. “My daughter! You can’t be a birth mother’s ex-daughter!”
“And if you can,” Epatut said acerbically, “then you have no right to give away the House’s property. Your Highness, I entreat you to surrender the slave of the House back into the custody of the House.”
The king passed his goblet to a recently arrived man Imeris supposed was his vizier and clapped his hands once.
The sound echoed through the suddenly silent room.
“If surviving the Hunt,” the king said sternly, “cannot earn a slave his freedom, then what can? One who walks in the grace of Airak hasn’t called the Hunters here to shackle them, but rather to reward them. Daggad, Hunter of Audblayinland, you have helped make my niche safe, not only for my citizens and slaves but for my person and my family, and I thank you most sincerely. Where are the thanks of the House of Epatut?”
Epatut, his wife, and his heir immediately went to their knees before the king of Airakland.
“I beg your pardon, Highness,” Epatut said tightly. “We are very, very thankful.”
Daggad bowed courteously from the waist.
“Your Highness is kind,” he boomed.
The king took his drink back from the vizier. He ordered food and fine glass knives to be brought for Ibbin, Oniwak, Daggad, Owun, and Imeris. Imeris swept the room constantly with her gaze, telling herself she was staying alert to threats but actually wanting to sneak glimpses of Wife-of-Epatut, who still knelt behind her husband and whose downcast features looked pensive.
When the time came for Imeris to receive her knives, she accepted them gratefully from a slave whose green eyes locked with hers.
It could have been envy in those green eyes, or it could have been scorn. It could have been an accusation: While even one of us is still a slave, you do not deserve honours.
Imeris would have answered, I am fighting as hard as I can, but I am not a god!
After the royals had retired to wherever they had been enjoying their feast, Imeris approached the representatives of the House of Epatut, the crowd parting ahead of her, all interested eyes fixed on the weapons. Perhaps they wondered if she was going to use the black glass blades to carve out Epatut’s heart; how sensational it would have been if she had.
Instead, she offered them to him.
“You lost a slave,” she said. “Twenty monsoons ago, you lost me. I have my reward, a sword made from a tusk of the monster. Take these to equip your future guards, or indeed your heir. You will not see me again.”
Those last words startled her even as they passed her lips. She hadn’t known, until she said them, whether she would want to know them, to understand them, or to part with them. The slave’s stare must have decided for her. Reminded her, that for all its airs, Canopy was uncivilised. That being godless and battling demons was better than keeping magically imprisoned people inside impenetrable wards. Imeris still carried the slave-making coin of the king of Odelland in her belt pouch.
Anything was better than that.
Epatut took the knives. He peered into her face as though his true daughter was inside her somewhere, at the end of a long tunnel, and if only he squinted enough, she would come into focus.
“I spent all my wealth trying to find you,” he said at last.
“I w
as raised by a chimera.” She matched his blunt coldness.
“You’re wild.” He nodded to himself. “You’d rather live among savages.”
“I have not seen true savagery,” Imeris said, “except in Canopy.” It was a lie. She thought of Loftfol. She thought of Sorros wanting to kill her for Bernreb’s crime. Wherever there was humankind, there was savagery.
“I’m called Epi,” the fat, cloth-heaped boy said, eyes shining. “I’m your cousin by blood, Imeris.”
Imeris looked at him through slitted eyes.
“Do not mention blood to me, Epi,” she said. “It might arouse my savagery.”
She turned on her heel and left them, looking for Daggad, but he was surrounded by women again. Instead, she found a gloomy, isolated alcove with a view of Airak’s Temple.
There she was free to stare at the lightning strikes and set her mind adrift. It was not a true time of triumph but a lull before the storm. Kirrik was out there, and this time there would be no blinding spears of Airak’s power to aid in the enemy’s destruction.
THIRTY-NINE
TWO DAYS later, Imeris and Daggad stood within sight of Odel’s emergent.
Imeris found the sweet-fruit pine boughs and fish-shaped building, gleaming in the rain and bathed with the orange cloud-light of late afternoon oddly comforting, though she had ended all her days there in defeat. This day would be different.
“I ’ad not seen Odel’s Temple before,” Daggad said. “I did not ever imagine to ’ave a use for it. Childless, as far as I knew, and my master and mistress ’ad given up on producing a true-born heir.”
“The first time I saw it,” Imeris said, “I was a nine-year-old child on an adventure. It seemed much bigger and more wondrous.”
“You saw Canopy durin’ your Understorian childhood?”
“My fathers arranged for tribute to be paid in my name at the Temple.” Imeris sighed. “Even though I lived below the barrier, Odel was able to save me when I should have fallen a second time. That is how I know my sister is lying when she says she cannot grant Sorros a child below the barrier. She does not want to. She does not want to think about them, about the life she had there, because that would set her at war with her immortal self, the self who does not care about Understorians and slaves.”
Echoes of Understorey Page 30