Echoes of Understorey

by Thoraiya Dyer

  Imeris wanted to cut Daggad for insulting her sword. She wanted to cut Oniwak for his contempt and mistrust. She wanted to send a message to Youngest-Father, to warn him that she’d angered Loftfol.

  She had no way to reach him. Her armour was bent out of shape, and she removed the front and back pieces carefully. She wanted to sink into sweet oblivion, but just as her head came to rest on her bent arm, her eyes bulged and her mouth dropped open; the import of what Erth had said to Ilan struck her.

  Orin’s beast had killed a farmer in Airakland.

  The Godfinder.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE MONUMENT tree was a fig tree.

  Its white arms contained a wide, clear lake. Its inner walls were magically inscribed with the names of Heroes, Minstrels, Games Winners, and Hunters. In the late afternoon, the surface of the lake was half deep shadow, half shimmering reflection of the stark black letters and silhouetted profiles of the noteworthy stamped into the pale bark.

  Imeris’s group of Hunters and soldiers slept by the purpleheart for four or five hours, then roused themselves to reach the monument tree before dark.

  Two lanterns flanked the narrow approach to the lake. They were each as tall as Imeris, made of bronze and panes of glass, blue-lit by the grace of the lightning god. Children filed along the approach, jugs balanced on their heads, bringing water back to their homes for evening meals and washing. Fisherfolk paddled palm-frond rafts out into the centre of the lake and dipped baited wooden hooks on the end of strapleaf lines beneath afternoon-sun-warmed lilies.

  Captain Oniwak took the parchment with all their names to the closest lantern. He hadn’t crossed out Ootoo, the name of the Servant of Atwith who had died.

  It was an Understorian name. Imeris wished she’d had a chance to speak to Ootoo before they’d reached the palace of the king of Orinland, but Oniwak had been in such a hurry.

  “The Hunt is called,” Oniwak said. He opened a pane on the side of the lantern and thrust the parchment into the crackling blue light, withdrawing his hand swiftly with a hiss of indrawn breath, slamming the pane shut. The list crisped in an instant and crumbled to ash. At the same time, an empty place on the white walls around the lake blazed blue, and twelve names appeared in black.

  Beside the names appeared a drawing of a creature. The size was not indicated, but the features were clear. A short-snouted, maned head with tusks longer than the head was wide. A boar, Erth had named it, and it matched the animal Imeris had seen for the first time at the palace in Orinland. Small eyes. Short, tufted tail. These contrasted with huge, padded cat paws and long, powerful, smooth-furred legs.

  Imeris looked at the engravings of other demons who had triggered Hunts. Here, a fiveways troupe. There, an embracer. A pair of floating eyes to indicate a chimera.

  Nothing as unnatural as the creature these Hunters faced.

  Cries of awe and surprise went up around the lake. Children abandoned their jugs and rushed over to touch Oniwak’s armour and grip his hand. He tried to shake them off, but they laughed, undeterred, clinging to him harder.

  Imeris stared at her name. The letters were an arm’s length tall. Whether she lived or died, they would stay there for as long as the forest survived. She didn’t know what to feel. The distinction wasn’t earned. Not yet.

  Is this how my sister feels? That she must fight all the harder to be worthy of the honours she already receives? Could I use this acclaim as currency to bring Canopy and Understorey together against the sorceress?

  A chill passed through her at the recollection that in the levels below, in the Understorian town of Hundar, the monument tree carried other names carved by axes in human hands and rubbed with char. The names of Leaders who returned gloriously from raids on Canopy. Those who died or were captured as slaves.

  Youngest-Father will never be able to pass through the barrier to look with pride upon my name.

  Yet, had she stayed to be a Leader at Loftfol, Leaper and Audblayin would never have been able to look with pride upon those honours, written down in the dark.

  Did they not think of that, all my mothers and fathers with their grand wishes and dreams? Did they think it would be obvious to me that I am Understorian when every one of my mothers besides the chimera is Canopian-born? When my brother and sister live in Canopy? When this is the colour of my skin?

  Imeris shook her head and wondered if Floorians, too, used the same monument tree for their own mysterious memorial purposes.

  “The creature’s trail goes cold!” Oniwak shouted, trying to be loud and look serious while surrounded by cheering children. “I’ve decided to split our forces. Eeriez, you’ll take Owun, Erth, Omt, and Iraffahath to Eshland to investigate the death of the clockmaker.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Eeriez said, grinning.

  “The rest of you will come with me to Airakland. Daggad, Ibbin, Ay, Ingaget, and you, woman. We’ll see what clues we can find in the wreckage of the flowerfowl farm.”

  “My name is Imeris,” Imeris said. She pointed. “It is written on the walls.”

  Some of the children with the water jugs, startled by the sound of her woman’s voice issuing from beneath the blood smears and bronze scale armour, abandoned Oniwak’s side for hers, singing her name over and over.

  “Imeris! Imeris! Imeris!”

  Imeris beamed until one of them chanted, “Imeris the giant worm, fat and furry for certain! Made a cocoon the size of the world, and died to give us curtains!”

  Daggad laughed uproariously as her smile faded.

  “Let us go to the weapons market, Imeris,” he said. “Before we go anywhere, you need a better sword.”

  Imeris glanced again at the animal depicted on the wall.

  “I do not want a sword,” she said. Oldest-Father would say that a trap was best to defeat any kind of creature, humankind included, but without Anahah, Imeris had nothing to bait a trap with. Perhaps armour, spines, and knives were best against tree bears and jaguars at close quarters for an Understorian clinging to the sides of trees, as Middle-Father had taught her, but battles here were fought as often as not on flat roads and even ground, where range was a more important factor. Youngest-Father’s weapon of choice would serve her better in this Hunt. “I want a longbow.”

  “You couldn’t draw a man’s bow,” Oniwak said.

  “Then we shall get one made for a woman,” Daggad said. “Others of us could no doubt use whatever sharpenin’ services are on offer.” He snatched up the closest cheering child. “Girl! Which wayta buy weapons?”

  The Ilanland weapons market, when they found it, ran through the heart of a pink peppercorn tree. One entrance to the tunnel, which was kinked to avoid the structural heart of the tree, was the public entrance. The other end came out on a path running directly to the palace armoury.

  The six Hunters destined for Airakland—Oniwak, Ingaget with his parchment stole, Ibbin the bark-shirted boy, Ay the Lakekeeper of Ehkisland, Daggad the slave, and Imeris with her forbidden spines—gathered on a platform outside the market. The ferny fronds, clusters of hundreds of pink berries, and powerful aroma of the peppercorn tree surrounded them.

  “Be quick,” Oniwak instructed, eyeing a leashed, bell-covered tree bear dancing for its keeper’s benefit on the back of a barrow.

  “First,” Daggad said, engulfing Imeris’s hand in his, which she reluctantly allowed, “you need coin. Sell that shoddy sword if you do not intendta use it.”

  Tight-lipped, she nodded. She still had some of Unar’s coins, but there was no reason to keep the sword. She would never go back to Loftfol. Never train under the Litim. Not even if I am able to make peace with them. That would be too much to expect. They entered the tunnel together, squeezing between people. On the left and right sides, round openings to roomy workshops alternated with narrow display fronts. The locked doors of stockpile strong rooms stood behind them. Colourful flags hung over the shop entrances, stitched with house symbols of makers and traders.

  The air wafti
ng through the tunnel was hot and dry. Many of the workshops contained forges, crewed by smiths of all flavours of metal. They wore hoods, despite the heat, to keep sparks from catching in their hair, and their wooden walls were lined with fire-resistant flax fibres coated in clay.

  Goods being drawn from quenching barrels ranged from trap jaws and axe heads to shears, combs, and coins bearing Ilan’s profile. Weapons racks hung from every wall, and polished items gleamed from tables blanketed in oilcloth.

  “Where—” Imeris had time to say before Daggad pulled her through a curtain of insect-repelling smoke into a pond. At least she heard the splash and stepped out of the trough into something soft and gritty before the water could seep through her boot-stitching.

  “A banner that I recognise,” Daggad said. “They will pay you the metal’s proper worth.” He noticed her staring at the yellow grit. “The sand protects the floor against fire.”

  “Also good for sharpening steel,” the smith said cheerily, and Imeris laid out her short sword for appraisal. The smith mentioned neither the chipped and bloody blade, nor the maker’s stamp from the Understorian village of Lit. Instead, a set of scales appeared from under the table and the weighing commenced. Imeris allowed Daggad to do the haggling, and walked away from the smithy with two gold coins in her hand and an empty sheath.

  They washed the sand from their shoes into the trough on their way out; the water was there to make sure none of the valuable sand was lost. Then it was on through the tunnel until Imeris spotted a yellow flag with crossed, pace-long arrows embroidered in black.

  The bowyer’s bowl-shaped booth smelled of yellowrain sap, beeswax, and feathers, giving Imeris a swift flashback of the room at Loftfol where she’d found Oldest-Father’s bird. Myrtle and yellowrain staves, some taller than Imeris, leaned against the peppertree wood wall. Completed bows, some flat, others recurved and laminated with thick risers of myrtle or floodgum, rested on purpleheart pegs above her head.

  “You need—” Daggad began, reaching for something light and accurate, suited for shooting birds on the wing, but Imeris, ignoring him, went straight for a heavy stick of yellowrain, the rich red heartwood contrasting sharply with the white sapwood. Yellowrain is the very hardest of softwoods, Youngest-Father had told her in his gentle voice. The sapwood is the best wood under tension, while the heartwood is peerless under compression. A natural spring.

  “This one,” Imeris said, reading the inscribed draw weight of the bow, represented by nine tiny notches. It was one third of her bodyweight. “With a sinew string.”

  “You should ’ave a silk string”—Daggad smirked—“with a name like yours.”

  Imeris turned with the bow in her hand to the short, wide man behind the shop counter.

  “A sinew string, please,” she said, “and two spares.”

  She tried not to look at Daggad, but they had to wait some time for the three strings to be measured and made. He hummed a tune reminiscent of the rhyme the children had recited at the monument tree.

  “Stop that,” she said eventually.

  “Stop what?” Daggad asked innocently.

  “That song about the fat silkworm. I can hardly believe you are the best hunter in Audblayinland.”

  “But of course I am not.” Daggad guffawed. “First thing that ’appens when a Hunt gets called is the deities’ Bodyguards and the kings’ secret guardians and assassins send birdsta each other with messages to get down.”

  “Get down where?” Imeris said incredulously. I knew it. Middle-Father is the best hunter in Audblayinland. Aurilon is the best in Odelland.

  “Get down below the barrier, inta Understorey.” Daggad pushed his finger hard against the tabletop as though he could force it through the wood. “So the device cannot sense them. So they cannot be chosen. Goddesses and gods do not give up their personal safety so easily!”

  “But Oniwak. He’s a king’s captain. And Irrafahath is Oxor’s Bodyguard.”

  Daggad shrugged.

  “The king of Airakland was the one who called the Hunt, so Oniwak would ’ave ’ad no time to sneak away. Besides, ’e seems too stuffy and honour-bound for ’is own good—perhaps ’e would have stayed anyway.” Daggad laughed. “As for the Bodyguard of the goddess of love, maybe the others do not like ’im enough to send ’im a bird. Or maybe it is a jest, you know, the one about the jaguar that goes ’unting flowerfowl in Oxorland and they end up bedded instead. You know what they say about Oxorland!”

  “No,” Imeris said. “I do not know.”

  Daggad leered, and appeared about to tell her when the bowyer returned with the strings. Imeris paid for everything, including a full quiver with thick, sticky fig sap in the bottom to keep the arrows from falling out when she climbed, and a waterproof leather cover and back strap for the bow. An attached leather cap came with the quiver; fig sap would hold horizontal arrows in place but could not grip them if the quiver was turned upside down. Imeris preferred her quiver be open, in case she needed to shoot quickly, but took the cap to keep the earnest bowyer happy.

  They found Oniwak pacing in agitation on the platform outside the market.

  “Ready to go?” he demanded.

  “I must test the new bow,” Imeris said.

  “Must you? In the dark?”

  “A fool takes an untested weapon into battle, and you Canopians have no idea what true dark is.”

  Daggad spectated with interest, buying a bag of roasted nuts from one of the little girls who scurried from shop to shop setting gathered hoards on unoccupied coals wherever they could find them. Ibbin, the boy from Irofland, filched a handful out of the bag. Ingaget glued new strips of silk around the grip of his short sword, parchment stole fluttering in the breeze. Ay, the Lakekeeper, adjusted his blue and black robes.

  “You don’t take orders well, do you, woman?” Oniwak said.

  Imeris, ignoring him, shot a few arrows at the great tree opposite them, a rata growing over a sweet-fruit pine, some hundred paces away. One of Airak’s lanterns illuminated a pace-wide section of branch suitable for setting her sights. She lost her first arrow, but the others struck in a tolerably tight group. There was hardly any shock to her wrist with the release; she was satisfied with the bowyer’s craftsmanship, superior to Youngest-Father’s if she was being truthful.

  Daggad accompanied her over a rata branch road that bridged the gap to retrieve the arrows.

  “Should a true Hunter not make all ’er own bows and strings?” he drawled. “Seem more like a figure of legend that way, less like a silkworm.”

  “Did you make that?” Imeris answered, slapping the sheathed broadsword on his back, refraining from seizing his long tail of black hair and jerking it sharply downwards.

  Daggad laughed. He laughed again when she couldn’t pull her arrows loose from the tree.

  “You know plenty about wood,” he said, snapping a sprig of notch-tipped rata leaves away from his face and crunching another mouthful of nuts. “You picked that bow quick enough. What you do not know is that although the bark of rata in Understorey is all soft and full of air holes, in Canopy they borrow the wood god’s powerta make it ’ard and durable wherever the rata is used for roads.”

  “Help me, please,” Imeris said, as politely as she could manage.

  Careful not to stand behind the nocks, Daggad wrapped his huge hands around the shafts and drew them out for her, one by one.

  TWENTY-THREE

  IT WAS still dark when the Hunters approached the Godfinder’s farm.

  There had to be hundreds of farmers in Airakland. Imeris had no information, no reason to suspect that the creature’s victim was Unar.

  Yet she stepped up to the false palm path with a sense of dread. Oniwak led the group to the crossroads in the scented satinwood tree. There, the barrows and hollows of the traders were covered in weighted blankets and tight-woven leaf mats to keep furry nocturnal pests and blown-in rain away from the grain.

  Flame-coloured climbing salamanders hunted slu
gs and moths in the lantern light. Crickets used the acoustics of the hollow to amplify their calls. A pair of hungry-looking out-of-nichers dozed on a pile of empty sacks. Otherwise, the crossroads were abandoned.

  “Wake one of them,” Oniwak said. “Find the way to the farm.”

  “The farm is this way,” Imeris said, stepping onto the straight satinwood branch which led to Unar’s gate. She half expected him to call her a liar and attempt to bring her back, but the Hunters fell in behind her.

  The path wasn’t lit. The last time she’d come this way, she’d been preoccupied with her failure and humiliation, longing for what she considered the easy life of flowerfowl farming. When she came to the archway with the dead-looking vines, she flung out her arms to bar Oniwak’s passage.

  “It is a magical gate,” she said. “The rest of you cannot go through.”

  “I don’t see a doorbell,” Ibbin piped up.

  “There may be clues left behind by the creature,” Oniwak said.

  “The Godfinder lived here.” Imeris’s voice came out huskily. She remembered the sleeping woman in her fathers’ home. The tea they had taken together so recently. “Her magic controlled the vines. Only she could have taught this gate to recognise you for a friend. You must not approach the arch. This is as far as you can go.”

  “But not you?” Daggad asked shrewdly.

  In response, Imeris put her upturned wrist into the archway. She held her breath, waiting for the vines to come to life. Waiting for them to taste her, to withdraw and let her through.

  The vines trembled, but they didn’t move. No new tendrils grew out of them.

  “Someone’s coming,” Oniwak said in a low voice, peering keenly through the night. “Be ready.”

  A cloak-wrapped shape stopped several paces back from the other side of the arch. Unar’s voice issued from it, and Imeris’s heart leaped.

  “Unfortunately,” the Godfinder said drily, “my thief-proof gate has been ruined by a goddess’s pet impossible for me to kill. The Hunt, is it? There don’t seem to be enough of you. Imeris, I’m surprised to see you again so soon. Aren’t you supposed to be at Loftfol?” Daggad grunted and stared at Imeris at this revelation. “This isn’t the usual hour for receiving guests.” Unar put her fists on her hips. Imeris blinked back tears of happiness at the familiar sight. “Come on. You might as well all come inside and have some ti.”