Do you think one who walks in the grace of Airak knows nothing of the hidden nest you’ve been building for ten years in the guaiacum tree on the southern edge of Eshland?
Leaper ran towards Eshland, away from the casual agony of having his deepest hopes and dreams exposed to wither and die like a snail pulled out of its shell. He raced over the rough, kinked low roads in the dim glow of Airak’s blue-white lanterns and under the mocking leer of the moon, as if he could outrace the memory of his proposal, the proposal he had not yet dared to present, already discarded.
“We will want that pretty silver,” a low, guttural voice said. A muscular arm that ended in an iron hook caught Leaper by the back of his collar and swung him.
He dangled dangerously off the end of the low road. A fatal plunge to Floor lay below.
His silk shirt began to rip along the seam.
Leaper squinted, left eye closed, along the white, hairy arm into a jowly face with pale Understorian eyes, a gummy mouth, and no teeth. Further back along the branch road, two accomplices lurked. Lanterns blued the left sides of their black faces. The moon silvered the right sides, as though they, too, were Servants of Airak.
He could have struck them dead by magic. Weak as his abilities were, he’d honed them since first joining Airak’s Temple. Leaper gathered power to his mind with a heady rush of enhanced scent. His flared nostrils filled. There was the oily palm smell of fresh bark clothing. The copper of clotted blood. The sweet rot of an open wound beneath twine-tied wrappings, breath made sour by slow starvation, and sweat, newly sprung of exertion and desperation. Beneath it all floated the perfume of moth-pollinated blossoms springing open in the night.
With a flick of his focused will, he could have connected the cloudless sky to his attacker’s thick skull with a finger-thin bolt of lightning.
He chose not to.
After calling lightning to slay Orin’s beast, Leaper had sworn an oath never to do deadly violence again, by magic or by hand. Instead, he imagined himself to be the man’s kin. Rooted in the same place the man was rooted. Buffeted by the same winds. He imagined himself a thin passionfruit vine, tenuous and clinging, its origins the darkness below the city, at the mercy of the stronger trees it leaned on.
“The master knows!” he gasped in his clumsiest Understorian accent. He kept his left eye, the eye turned silver in the lightning god’s Temple, tightly closed. “Someone seen you. Someone told that you were still alive!”
Frowning, the toothless man jerked back, drawing Leaper and his ripped collar to safety. Airakland was not Odelland; despite Imeris’s triumph of diplomacy, slaves were neither routinely freed nor allowed to buy their freedom here. If this once-captured warrior was roaming the low roads at night, he might be on a sanctioned mission, passing the spoils of robbery on to his master, but if that was so, why was he starving?
More likely, Leaper thought, he was a runaway, unable to drop below the barrier because of his branded tongue, and starved due to staying out of sight. Fellow slaves could be bribed to tell a master that a man had fallen to his death.
And currency among slaves trading favours was sometimes knocked-out teeth.
“Who are you?” the man demanded, shaking the hook so hard that the silk collar tore completely free. Leaper sprawled sideways onto the branch road.
When he looked up, miming terror, left eye still closed, he could see the other’s suspicious expression smoothing out, presumably as he realised that Leaper, too, was lighter-skinned than an ordinary Canopian, that his nose was too narrow and his lips too thin.
“Came to warn you,” Leaper said, crawling to the man’s knees, pressing elbows against shins, looking up, wide-eyed in appeal. “Soldiers coming.”
The toothless man panted heavily. He shifted his weight from foot to foot indecisively. Then he snatched at Leaper’s necklace of silver links, breaking the clasp, bruising the back of Leaper’s neck. For a moment it seemed like he might tear at the earrings and finger rings as well.
But then he stuffed the broken chain into a pocket and fled. The two accomplices were silent shadows at his heels.
Leaper waited until they were long gone before he got to his feet and brushed down his ruined clothing. He shouldn’t have let himself get so distracted. In Canopy, growing too deeply distracted was a good way to die.
At least he’d resisted the instinct to use Airak’s magic.
I don’t need to hurt, maim, or murder. I’m not Imeris, to reach for a sword, and I’m not my goddess-sister, Audblayin, to reach for ultimate power. I’m smarter than they are. Quicker than they are. I don’t leave bodies behind. I’m not the Godfinder, to topple trees, and though I am the soul of the Godfinder’s dead sister, I’m not a cold killer like Frog was. Not now. Not ever again.
Besides, the god always sensed where and when his borrowed power was used. Leaper rubbed at the marks on his neck. Slaves, runners, and low-ranking citizens whispered to one another and pointed at him. He tried not to glare at them; none had offered to help him. They might have aided a Servant of Airak; it might have been profitable to have a Servant owe them a favour. But he’d disguised himself, hadn’t he?
Leaper partially unfolded and pulled his cloth head wrap down so that it covered his white eye. Pointing himself east, towards Eshland, he ran, once more, like the wind.
THREE
LEAPER MADE good time.
He arrived at the clockmaker’s tree shortly after dawn.
Since crossing the border from Airakland into Eshland, he’d found the great trees growing thicker and closer together, their limbs broader. His magic felt far behind him, always out of the corner of his eye, and he knew, even as he reached experimentally for it, that it would not be there.
The attempt left him feeling like a dead tree, hollow, with a faint, swirling whiff of semen and menstrual blood; those were the dark default tributes given in Eshland.
The clockmaker’s tree was a grey-barked ebony slathered generously with moss and carved forebodingly with death symbols. Single and paired pinkish fallen flowers on the path showed the ebony to be a female tree.
It wasn’t boarded up with planks and pegs as an abandoned Airakland tree might be; instead the tree was sealed by the power of the wood god, Esh, as though there had never been an entrance. Leaper walked along the old road from the neighbouring tree. The path now penetrated the ebony tree near the foot of the filled-in doorway. He put his hands against the place where the opening had been.
Then, pulling an axe from a belt loop, he tapped with the back of the steel head against the trunk.
It was solid. The echoes, if they were there, were deep. Scowling, Leaper chiselled off a section of bark and found what he’d half expected; the grain had grown inward from all directions, forming an intermeshed knot of axe-wrecking stubbornness in exactly the place where he wished to enter.
As if ebony weren’t already an irritatingly hard wood.
But he wasn’t without resources. Like Audblayin and Imeris, he’d been raised by three hunters of Understorey, and he had the climbing spines to prove it. Kneeling, he chipped experimentally at the spiny plum branch road that supported him. It wasn’t a true branch at all, but a modified leaf stem. Esh-hardened, like all the roads, to keep travellers safe. It was nonetheless much softer than the ebony.
Leaper rolled up his sleeves. He rolled down his boot tops. Dropping from the path to hang by left forearm spines and left shin spines from the bark of the ebony tree, he began chopping at the spiny plum path with the axe in his right hand.
The sound of chopping drew a few curious children. In the path’s shadow, in the low light, he knew they’d have trouble making out much more than the dark blob of his shape. Wood was not usually taken by force in Eshland. Instead, it was a gift of the god in response to tribute. But Leaper had no time for that, and he wasn’t supposed to give tributes to any goddesses or gods besides his own, in any case. By the time Esh was drawn by the tree’s pain to punish the offender, Leaper planned to b
e long gone. Anyway, what was one more deity’s doom-filled pronouncement compared to the curse of the wind goddess he was already under?
To be banished from Canopy until my heart’s desire grows to love another more than she loves me. Or was it to wander far from home until she loves another? Who could remember the exact wording of prophecies? It was ten years ago. Besides, Leaper had been distracted by the imminent prospect of death at the time. Maybe it was to be banished from my true love’s home. Which would make more sense, since her home is not mine. I don’t have a home.
He’d lived in the home of his three mothers and three fathers as a child. He’d lived in the Godfinder’s flowerfowl farm for a few years after that. Then it was the Temple of Airak. None of them sanctuaries. All of them rigid with other people’s rules.
Long, pale splinters flew. The children melted away as the road trembled. Leaper cut all the way through the half-pace thickness of it, wishing he had something like the toothless man’s hook to help pull out the severed plug. Instead, he stuck it diagonally with his spines, set aside the axe in favour of a bore-knife, and twisted the tapering tip of the road until old, dried-out fibres gave way.
Leaper sheathed his spines quickly as the road ending tumbled away, but he wasn’t quick enough to save his bore-knife and swore as the handle jerked out of his hand.
Never mind that. Greater wealth waits inside. The opening was only just wide enough for him to wriggle his shoulders and hips through.
The air was stale. It took a full body length of squirming and cursing before Leaper was able to stand up in the passageway behind the sealed entrance. Sneezing in a cloud of dust from the crumbled path remnants, his head cloth pulled loose by the edge of the tunnel, he wished he’d brought his precious transport-lantern for easy recovery of whatever loot lay deeper inside the tree, but he hadn’t thought, until that moment, of taking anything more than the clock spring needed by the queen.
Still distracted. Still a fool! Pain flared up in him again at the memory of her retreat into formality, and he shook his head. Tousling bark, flowers, and splinters out of his hair with one hand, he used the other to unfasten one silver earring, reverse it, and snap it closed again. Thus manipulated, it formed the miniature cage shape of a thumbnail-sized lantern, flaring to life like a captured star.
Leaper held it up to light his way.
The passage was spiral-shaped. It began in wide, high-ceilinged corridors through the creamy sapwood. Then it curved in on itself, entering dense, skin-smooth, night-black heartwood.
He couldn’t help but put his empty palm to the ebony. It seemed Ilik had spoken the truth and that nobody really had walked here since the clockmaker was killed by Orin’s beast. No animal droppings were evident. No footprints disturbed the faint trace of dust on the formerly shining floor.
As he moved deeper, empty spaces where cylinders and cog shapes had been appeared in the walls at shoulder height. It was as though the clockmaker had invoked Esh and the pieces had come free at her bidding, of a piece and perfectly formed.
Then the walls fell away and Leaper raised the meagre light source to reveal what he could of a wide central room. It was round and low-ceilinged, with sharp, square, identical repeating alcoves around the rim. A cog, he realised belatedly, or rather, an internal gear. Each alcove contained a fire-resistant surface of honey-tree wood. Most were cluttered with works in progress.
His magical senses twitched, despite the distance from his niche. The tiny lantern buzzed like a trapped fly, flickering. There had to be fragments of Old Gods’ bones in the room. Leaper stumbled over the edge of a shallow iron bowl embedded in a honey-tree slab—a fire pit—and realised he’d walked towards the strongest source of the pull without knowing.
Standing heedlessly in the cold ashes of the pit, he turned from one alcove to the next like the shaft of the gear, holding out the lantern to get the flickering reaction from it that betrayed the priceless nature of the hoard.
BIRTH AND DEATH, read an inscription running over the tops of the alcoves, MUST BE SEPARATED BY TIME.
There were hundreds of bone fragments. Thousands. None were shielded by chimera skin, or if there were any shielded pieces, they were in addition to the ones making his tiny lantern flicker.
Why had the wood god, on his visit to seal the tree, left these relics undisturbed? What was going on—or had gone on—here? If the clockmaker was an adept, how had she been so easily dispatched by Orin’s beast? Leaper took another step forward, out of the fire pit, and stopped.
No ordinary thief, without a magic lantern, or magic of his own, could have revealed the room’s riches. For a moment, he felt the impulse to laugh. Might as well be standing on a mountain of gold on a tribute tray in a Temple.
Yet wealth had always been, for him, a means to an end. Stealing had been for a single purpose. Now that he knew the desired end would never come to pass, now that he knew there was no purpose, what did he care about the scarcity of old power-imbued bones?
“I don’t want any of it,” he whispered to the empty, gloomy room. “Keep your mouldy dust and secrets. All I want is to repair Ilik’s favourite clock.”
She will never come away with me.
He went to the closest table and searched it for springs. The pocket-clock that was there, disassembled, a seashell of bronze cupping the moving parts, was too small for its components to be a match for the broken spring. He moved to the next table, and when that was similarly unhelpful, to the next, ignoring precious gems and bone slivers, knocking aside gold filigree and all-but-legendary mother-of-pearl.
At last, he found the replacement spring he was looking for. He pocketed it. Then he rummaged in a cupboard for a rusty bore-knife, which he sharpened with oil and stone from the clockmaker’s kitchen. There, too, he slaked his thirst from an old, stale barrel.
In case Esh was waiting to destroy him by the front door, he departed by the toilet hole, which contained a wooden board on a hinge that acted as a one-way valve.
Leaper climbed carefully down on his spines to a place where a paperbark branch road brushed by the bark of the ebony tree. The dappled early light was blinding after the tomblike darkness inside the tree.
Instead of returning immediately to Airakland, he turned south. Three hours later, he reached the hidden home he had been building for ten years in the guaiacum tree on the southern edge of Eshland.
It was now hot, and the unscreened sun had begun to burn the back of his bruised neck. Below Eshland, the unparalleled splendour of the southern grasslands spread. It looked like an emerald leaf threaded with the bright blue veins of rivers. Their sources sprang from the distant plateau Leaper could never explore, not just because of duties owed to the Temple, but because of the curse laid on him by Ulellin.
He sat on the broken-branch platform outside the secret, orchid-screened entrance to the place he’d longed to bring Ilik, and resisted the urge to bawl like a baby once more. It wasn’t really over yet. He hadn’t really tried to persuade her, and he was practically the most persuasive person in the whole of Canopy. Part of what he had hoped for was that she’d make the suggestion to elope by herself; clearly that wasn’t going to be the way of it, so he would bring all his charisma to bear.
I convinced the Godfinder to take me to Canopy. I convinced Airak to accept me, even after failing the Temple’s tests, even though I was born and raised a birth-magic adept in a bole beneath Audblayinland. I’ve convinced Aforis to forgive a hundred transgressions, and I’ve convinced the mighty god of lightning himself to forgive a thousand more.
I can convince my lover to leave the dimwit she calls king.
He crawled, yawning, under the orchids and entered the dwelling. Removed the silver earrings and finger rings that had almost lost him his life in Airakland and set them on a sideboard.
After I’ve had a full night’s sleep.
The paired thieves’ lanterns he’d used to stock the house with stolen luxuries shone brightly on the cloak hooks in the entr
y hall.
Maybe two nights. Airak will expect that I’ve carried his letter personally to the fruit Temple. No need to disabuse him of that notion.
Leaper woke a long time later in the floating, feather-mattressed bed. Guaiacum fragrance surrounded him. Its layered swirls of orange-brown and darker greenish-brown were soothing. The bedroom walls were lumpy, but he’d hollowed and polished them with his own hands.
He drew the clock spring out of his pocket and stared at it for a while.
Maybe I shouldn’t take it to her. Maybe I should stay away until she pines for me.
Until she comes to me.
No. Acting like a petulant child would not help. Leaper didn’t want to remind her of the ten years’ age difference between them. In terms of athleticism, he compared favourably against her husband, but in terms of maturity, he was afraid he did not.
She doesn’t think I need her.
Of course he did. He simply hadn’t revealed the extent of his need to her. He would face his fears, if weakness was what would win her over. He would cry in her presence and beg with all the desperation he possessed. He’d give her one of his thieves’ lanterns and send her scrolls of tearstained poetry.
That’ll make a nice contrast to a king who can barely spell his own name.
Leaper put the clock spring back into his pocket, feeling drunk with hope and despair. He picked up one of the paired lanterns, wrapped it, and fixed it to his belt. There was enough potion of the winds left to see him swiftly to Airakland.
As he ran, he reconsidered the tears and poetry plan. Perhaps there was something else she needed, in order to choose him over King Icacis.
She thought the king needed her love and loyalty. Why was that important? For his sake, or because love and loyalty would allow King Icacis to do his best for the people of Airakland? Perhaps she suspected that Leaper’s interference in palace matters was in aid of those same people, but she didn’t know. Not for sure. Instead of acting in front of her, instead of trying to manipulate her, maybe all he really had to do was tell the truth about what he’d been doing all this time.
Tides of the Titans Page 4
