“I fear,” Nin said, “that what you ask of us will cost a fortune in metal.”
“It is possible, then?” Imeris hesitated at the hanging tapestry which covered the opening to the kitchen. Excitement and hope expanded her chest. Anger as well. Odel had helped her where her own sister had refused. “You can do it? You can make a trap for Kirrik’s soul?”
“Yes,” Sorros said, looking up at her with purpose and determination she’d never seen on his bearded face before.
“I will make ti,” Imeris said again, and found herself seeming to step back in time, confronted with the cluttered but well-organised gourds and herb boxes, and the wooden shutters over the little square windows with their insectivorous-plant-smothered sills, which had so amazed her as a child, when her own family’s cooking area was little more than the open hearth and a series of spits.
She was a head taller now than she had been.
Nirrin’s ghost lingered.
We only have honey on feast days, she had said, and Imeris had quizzed her about feast days, which her fathers had hardly mentioned. Meat and fish were so abundant in the dwelling of the three hunters, she supposed every day was a feast compared to the way things were in Gannak.
Imeris made the tea, trying not to remember the ti-house, Breeze, where Oldest-Father had cooked his last fish.
FORTY-TWO
THE NEXT day, after the bridges were set, she went to the ti-house at Gannak.
It was where Nin sold moonflowers every morning. If agents of Loftfol were watching for Imeris, the ti-house was bound to draw their attention.
Imeris instructed Sorros and Nin to stay locked in their house. She could only assume Daggad was still snoring at the forge. If her plan went wrong and she ended up dead, she didn’t want them involved.
She didn’t go by the bridges. Instead, while the mist still lingered, she glided down from a high point on the ulmo tree where Nin and Sorros lived to the spiny plum where the ti-house of Gannak was bored through the mottled grey-and-brown bark. It was a much older tree than other spiny plums she had seen. Opportunistic white and orange fungi decorated the old slashes left behind by the spines of prior climbers.
Imeris set two simple noose snares at the small, paired rear doors that seemed the most likely unobtrusive exit.
Then she waited for a gap in human traffic, glided down onto the bridge, and entered by the main door, folding her colour-shifting chimera wings behind her.
The ti-house had no name. Most villages only had one. This one looked like it had been carved long before Loftfol, with moss and glowworms covering the domed ceiling of the reception area. There, a dozen villagers had shucked their nets, tools, harnesses, and raincloaks, and a smiling order taker with charcoal finger marks on her apron stood behind a counter where bowls of dried ti displayed the various types of available leaf.
Imeris shed none of her belongings. She asked the order taker for a bowl of duck broth, paid in shell coins, and walked into the C-shaped common room where a few blond, bearded men looked up from their game of sticks and a small boy selling wine from a gourd started hopefully towards her, probably tricked by her short hair and the low light into thinking she was a man. Women in Gannak were not supposed to get drunk, Nirrin had told her once. It reduced their fertility.
Imeris sat with her back to the wall in the centre of the C so she could see almost everyone. Nobody else sat there. It was too close to the fire. She wanted them to be able to see her face clearly. The stick players, seeming to ignore her, drew their colours one at a time from the jumbled tower of sticks on their table. The stage beyond them was empty of players, though a flute rested on a stool in promise of some future performance.
Half an hour later, one of the stick players finished off his wine and shuffled away to the distant end of the C, shifting the belt of his trousers as though his bladder was uncomfortably full.
Imeris waited, her ears pricked. Probably she wouldn’t be able to hear him urinating from the common, but she might hear the rear doors opening. She heard the flap of a batted tapestry. The rap of a wooden spoon across knuckles and the squeals of children in the kitchen.
The stick player returned. Beckoned the boy over for some more wine. A thin man came in, holding a bowl of ti, sipping it too quickly and grimacing when he burned his mouth, but apparently in a hurry to finish it and get up on stage. He had to be the flute player.
When he saw Imeris, he set his ti-bowl down abruptly. He went to the distant end of the ti-house. There was a creak. It might have been a door.
At the sound of his strangled yelp, Imeris followed after him, dodging tables and stools as quickly as she could manage.
She didn’t want him to completely hang.
His face, when she found him kneeling and choking in the rear doorway, was purple.
“Stop struggling,” she told him coldly, removing the noose. “Who are you?”
“Greerg,” he managed, clear grey eyes bulging in the light from the brazier that burned beside the back door.
“Take me with you,” she said, “to the house where you were going to inform on me, or I will cut your throat. I am sure you have heard that I am a killer.”
They went back through the ti-house, Greerg nervous and twitching, Imeris calm and arm in arm with him, smiling softly as though they were father and doting daughter. Outside the main door, they crossed a dozen bridges, circumventing the market tree and the trade-houses, towards the Headman’s house. Sorros had lived in it, before he gave up his claim to being Headman. It was difficult to give advice and sit in judgement when you did not speak. One of his cousins became the respected elder of Gannak.
Their destination lay one level above a signposted school in a wide and twisted bloodwood tree. Children’s chanted genealogies and insect-repelling smoke wafted from a lower window. The Headman’s house was positioned in a bend of the great trunk so that his toilet sat well away from the schoolhouse. There had been fire or a lightning strike in the past, so that the bark was burned black. Epicormic shoots sprouted vigorously from cracks where hardened sap the colour of heart’s blood glittered, jewel bright.
A ring of ballista platforms hosted bridges stretching off in five different directions. Two thin young men who could have been the flute player’s brothers stood watch over the ballistae. They looked nervous at Imeris’s approach, lowering the crossbows in their hands. She smiled bitterly at them, thinking of a time when she would have given anything to have more friends her own age, when a Headman’s sons would have seemed like kings.
Inside the house, she found the Headman himself, a broad, silver-braided man. He wore slightly too-small silver-tooled red leather armour that he’d probably owned since his own stint at Loftfol, and she interrupted him feeding kept birds, which she suspected would fly to Loftfol at once if she was to open the cage door.
After an exchange of blows that demonstrated how lazy his practice of the Gannakim’s curved knife techniques had become in old age, Imeris tied him to his flute-playing relation, the pair of them back-to-back in the writing room, and completed feeding the birds.
It was gloomy in the room. She lit a pair of oil lanterns and half a dozen tallow candles. There were plenty to spare. No matter how long she had to wait.
“You will write to Loftfol,” she told the Headman. He hadn’t screamed for help when he might have, and now he was gagged with a long, thick braid of his own severed silver hair. “Tell them to send someone with the authority to negotiate with me. If they proceed in good faith, many slaves may be saved. No attack, or I’ll make both of you slaves of Odelland before anyone can kill me, and if the climb does not kill you, you will live out your days scrubbing the shit holes of Canopy.”
* * *
LOFTFOL SENT the one-handed student, Kishsik.
I do not understand, his last words had been to her. Why betray us? Why whore for them when they failed you, when they let you fall?
She answered him now, in the birdcage room of the Headman’s h
ouse, a night and a day since she had captured them, her two prisoners beside her and the magic bone coin from Odelland bouncing on her palm.
“I have not slept in two days,” she told Kishsik. “I cannot ever sleep a truly restful sleep because the sorceress Kirrik is out there. She killed my father. She killed the son of one of the villagers. She took the body of my best friend for her own. I went to Canopy to learn the skills to fight her, the same reason I went to Loftfol. Horroh the Haakim tried to kill me before I could explain, else I would never have raised a hand to him.”
Kishsik stood thin and strong as a cidergum sapling in gliding harness and bark skirt, head cocked to one side so that his long, reddish-brown fringe fell away from one baleful hazel eye where reflected candle flames leaped. He reached for no weapons, but like her, Kishsik had trained hardest with his own spines. The missing hand affected his climbing and woodcraft but not the swing of a forearm full of snake’s teeth.
“Horroh the Haakim defended you to the other teachers like you were his own blood,” he said, making Imeris’s heart lurch. “He begged to be the one to confront you when news came of your sighting in Canopy. She will speak the truth to me, he swore. We could only guess that the truth you spoke was one he could not bear to hear from one who had restored his faith in the future of Loftfol.”
“I told him the truth!” Imeris rubbed her forehead with a knuckle, distressed by the revelation, struggling to remember exactly how it had happened. “I told him some of the truth. But only after he caught me in a lie. I did not want to endanger my fathers. Why must the ones I love war with one another, and why must I always be forced to choose?” She bared her teeth. “I am sick to death of choosing.”
“Sleep does not come easily to me, either,” Kishsik said softly. “My father was murdered when I was a child. We all have our reasons for wanting revenge on Canopy.”
“Each time you try for revenge, all you do is make more slaves,” Imeris said. “What if there was a better way to help our people, both those below and those already taken?”
He did not take objection of her use of our people to include herself and him.
“You would reinstate the practice of buying back slaves?” he guessed calmly instead. “We have nothing with which to pay. Only the scraps that fall from their table.”
“Loftfol could generate wealth. Teach Canopian youngsters to kill demons. Those skills are a rarity up there. Both the meat and skins and the luxury of boasting. They would like nothing better than to risk their lives demon-hunting in Understorey, so long as their lessons and the hunt itself were kept to brief enough time periods that they could keep their auras and return home.” Imeris slipped the bone coin into her pouch and held up both empty hands, pleading for him to picture it. “Our villages would be safer. Canopian students would give Loftfol their metal coins and take all the foolish risks on themselves. Take their money and rid us of dayhunters and needleteeth.”
“They could not be trusted.”
“Even city-dwellers know Loftfol by its fearsome reputation. Use it!”
“I would rather use it to slay their goddesses and gods.”
“That is Kirrik’s alleged aim, but she has killed as many Understorians that I love—” Imeris tried to keep her voice from breaking; she was so tired. Why couldn’t he just agree? Why was he going to force her to kill him? “—as she has killed goddesses and gods.”
Kishsik stood, still and proud, for a quiet moment. The two prisoners watched him, wide-eyed, over their gags.
“I have heard of the sorceress,” he said at last.
“At the very least, give me leave to hunt her freely. You can kill me after she is done.”
“That is,” he qualified, “I have heard of a rogue spinewife from Dul who once went by that name. That Kirrik once killed Audblayin, Odel, Airak, Ilan, and Ehkis in a single day.”
“Audblayin died of old age,” Imeris corrected him, outraged. “Odel was killed by a chimera. Airak was unharmed. What she did manage was to steal the body of Ehkis for about five minutes before getting her throat cut by a Bodyguard, and for that she needed to have her minions kidnap Ilan. She cannot steal bodies across the barrier without a goddess or god to make an opening for her.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“I know a lot about Loftfol, and I tell you I have never betrayed it!” Her voice did crack with emotion now, and there was nothing she could do about it. “I brought an ex-slave with me to Gannak. His name is Daggad. You could have freed him years ago under an exchange like this. You could have bought back his life, for him to live as he wished, before it was half over. Please, Kishsik. Take this plan to them. Convince them. I can even give you the name of your first pupil. He is Epi, a silk merchant’s son from Audblayinland.”
FORTY-THREE
IMERIS PUT her hand up to feel for the barrier.
It was open. Her sister had made a hole for her as promised.
One last time.
Her month in Gannak had flown by. She looked at her upraised hand. It trembled.
Curse you, Ylly. You have no right to make me choose.
Sap from the tallowwood was fragrant on her spines. She rose into the dawn birdsong cloud, distracted by her calculations. Sorros had told her he needed one hundredweight of steel and fifty of silver to finish the trap for Kirrik’s soul. That, and a piece of bone from the Old Gods.
Imeris had considered giving him the amulet that protected her from Kirrik. She had considered letting him use the bone coin that turned humans into marked Odelland slaves. Or sending a message to Leaper to say that she needed him to steal back Tyran’s Talon.
No, Sorros had said, consulting his compilation of notes from the writings given to them by Odel. That coin is a piece of the Old God who became Odel. We need a piece of the god who became Atwith or the goddess who became Audblayin. No other artefact will do.
She had considered going back on her promise to her sister to return the fertility pendant which had, to Nin’s delight, and some degree of nausea, functioned exactly as promised.
No, she had said slowly to Sorros, holding the pendant up to the firelight in the forge. I swore to take it back to her, and I will. But there is another piece of the old birth goddess that I think I know how to reach.
She was thinking of the protective amulet worn by Oldest-Father when Ulellin’s emergent had swallowed him whole.
As she climbed, Oldest-Father’s heaviest, most durable adze hung from one side of her harness, his best bore-knife on the other. The three gold seeds given to her by Audblayin stretched the seams of her belt pouch. Once she had filled the empty sack she’d brought for the steel and silver, she would be much too heavy for gliding. The chimera wings remained at home on the top shelf in the fishing room.
When she reached the platform outside the Garden of Audblayin, Canopians lined up outside the Gate looked on with fear mixed with curiosity as an Understorian warrior, spines and all, appeared to pound on the Bodyguard’s door.
She whirled, startled, as Middle-Father spoke her name from behind her.
“Imerissiremi.” He enfolded her in a hug. “Your sister has not yet woken. I will call her.”
“First of all,” Imeris answered, searching about her person for the rolled parchment she’d brought from the Headman of Gannak, “this is for you.”
She swapped it for a nut cake and a water gourd, gulping gratefully while he read the document. The proclamation was slightly crushed from its journey but still quite legible. Middle-Father’s eyebrows rose higher and higher. His beard trembled, and his mouth opened widely in an incredulous laugh.
“All my offers to slay demons for them,” he said, “and it is my dangerously daft daughter who brings me a pardon at last.”
“Sorros helped,” Imeris said quickly. “It was his father that you killed, after all, and his cousin who is Headman of Gannak. Now all of you, my mothers and fathers, will be able to visit openly. Trade. Play music in the ti-house. Buy your own bloody blades.�
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“This is wonderful, Issi.” He hesitated. “But the sorceress. If she knew where your mothers lived—”
“We are halfway to defeating her.” Imeris washed her face with the last of the water and handed the empty gourd back to Middle-Father. “Sorros is building a woman-sized cage of magic-infused metal for her body and soul.”
She would have told him more, but the Gate cracked open. Supplicants who had come to present tribute or ask Audblayin’s Servants for care fell to their knees before the resplendent birth goddess. Middle-Father reached into the open door of his dwelling, exchanging the Gannak Headman’s proclamation for the bloodstained wooden javelin.
Imeris fell to her knees among the supplicants for the sake of appearances, holding up the fertility charm. Audblayin walked by the other slaves and citizens to claim it.
“Thank you, Holy One,” Imeris intoned. “Wife-of-Sorros is with child, and grateful for your gift.”
“Holy One indeed,” Audblayin muttered. Loudly, she responded with, “Wife-of-Sorros has my blessing.” Then, quietly again, she added, “Imeris, come and see me again at dusk. We’ll talk.”
“I go to Odelland,” Imeris whispered back. “To pay the tribute that you gave me and to fetch the gifts I hope I have been given. It might take a few days.” Or weeks. I need that pendant from Ulellinland.
“However long it takes. Come to see me before you go.” Forever.
“I promise.”
Middle-Father could not drop his guard while the goddess was out in the open, but he spoke to Imeris out of the side of his mouth while he scanned the surrounding branches for attackers.
“News reached us of your deal with Loftfol.”
Imeris stood straighter before she could help herself.
“Loftfol has its first three Canopian students,” she said, “paid for with the lives of three freed slaves.”
“I am proud of you, Issi. Take extra care on your journey to Odelland. You will be sad to hear that one of your fellow Hunters, the one called Oniwak of Airakland, was killed by agents of the goddess Orin.”
Echoes of Understorey Page 33