Echoes of Understorey

by Thoraiya Dyer

  * * *

  ONIWAK SIPPED his ti without lowering his gaze from Unar’s face.

  “So you heard screaming. Then what happened?”

  They sat across from each other on feather-stuffed cushions. Daggad sprawled on the blue carpet behind them, propped up on one elbow to drink his ti. Ibbin swung in one of the Godfinder’s hammocks, whistling quietly to himself, while the Lakekeeper sat as far back from Unar as he could manage with a barely disguised expression of distaste. Ingaget turned the blue lantern over curiously in his hands.

  Imeris squirmed in her cushion-seat, wanting to get Unar alone. The caramel smell of the satinwood was stifling. Her relief and happiness on finding the Godfinder alive had faded. A sense of urgency had overtaken all else.

  Unar could get a message to Understorey. To Youngest-Father. To tell him what had happened at Loftfol. That Imeris had killed her teacher Horroh and was now outcast. Hunted.

  That the students might be hunting Youngest-Father, too.

  Oldest-Father had many clever traps, but he was no longer alive to maintain them, and Youngest-Father couldn’t fight off all of Loftfol if they found out where he was. She thought of the spy who had seen her at Mistletoe Lodge in Ehkisland. How many spies did Loftfol have in Canopy? What if they were watching her now?

  Her name was written tall on the wall of the memorial tree, and twelve Hunters being chased out of Orinland by the king’s soldiers and waves of wild animals could hardly stay secret. Informers could be lurking outside the farmhouse at that very moment. If they were, they might not dare to strike at the Hunt, but they might tear Understorey apart looking for her fathers, to punish them instead.

  Imeris squirmed again.

  “I went up the steps,” Unar said. “I saw something enormous with its head stuck in my vines, trying to wrench them out by the roots, but the vines kept growing, wrapping it in deeper and deeper layers—”

  “Enormous?” Oniwak interrupted. “How big, exactly?”

  Unar raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Longer than it was wide or tall. Maybe ten or twelve paces long. Three paces high at the shoulder. The head, as I said, was wrapped in vines, but the front legs and haunches were black-furred. Powerful, but with red scars running all over. At least, I thought they were scars at the time.”

  “Could you see who was screaming?”

  Unar’s nostrils flared and her eyes lost their focus.

  “I saw legs and shoes sticking through the arch, between the creature’s front paws. Veiny old legs with green-dyed sandals. They belonged to the woman who sold flowerfowl fodder at the crossroads. She was delivering a few bags for me, and the birds had gone to greet her, eager to get at the grain.”

  “Do you know the grain farmer’s name?”

  “To my great shame, no,” Unar admitted. Imeris tried catching her eye. Tried to stare at her from behind Oniwak’s head, to signal that she had something important to say.

  “How did you drive the creature away?” Oniwak sounded irritated, and Imeris couldn’t decide if it was because he wished Unar had left the creature tangled in the vines by the head, or if it was because he was starting to suspect that magic would be more effective in the Hunt than the crossbow that he carried.

  “I didn’t. It pulled back from the arch, and its head came away from its neck. The red scars that I saw weren’t scars. They were places where it could break apart. Once the body moved back to make room, the head broke into these writhing chunks. A handful of them, half red-raw, half furred, or half tusked. They rolled back along the bloodied path and stuck back onto its body again. It stood there breathing heavily for a few moments, as though that had been an effort for it. I think—I thought—there might have been more than two eyes.”

  Daggad snorted with apparent amusement, but Oniwak didn’t blink.

  “How many?” Oniwak wanted to know.

  “There might have been two eyes in each piece that made up the head. It turned around and went into the crossroads. I went to the woman’s body, but it was gutted. Gored. A whole lot of my birds had been crushed as well. There were lots of feathers and blood. Her grain barrow had been knocked down, I think. My archway was poisoned, nearly dead. I tried to find the woman’s family at the crossroads.”

  “They’d already gone to the palace,” Oniwak said, “to report the attack.”

  “I went to Airak’s emergent to do the very same. I have a—a relative, there.”

  Unar glanced at the Lakekeeper, who scowled and looked away.

  “You’re an interesting woman, Godfinder,” Oniwak said. “You’re acquainted with an Odelland slave girl as well as the Lakekeeper of Ehkisland. You were a Gardener, serving Audblayin, and now you claim to have a relative among the Servants of Airak. That is very interesting. Can you think of any reason why Orin’s creature would seek you out? Are you acquainted with the traitor Anahah?”

  “No.”

  “Could the traitor have been hiding here? Could the creature have been following his scent? Before the attack, did any of your grain or fowl go missing?”

  “No.”

  Imeris went very still. Her heart beat faster.

  Could the creature have been following his scent?

  “Could you have been,” Oniwak pressed ruthlessly, “anywhere that the traitor could have been, where his scent could have gotten on you, or his stolen magic mixed up with you or yours?”

  “Not unless he’s disguised himself as Odel. Since the monsoon ended, Odel’s Temple is the only place I’ve been that is further from here than the next tree.”

  Imeris struggled to stay motionless. Her queasiness deepened. Oniwak gestured towards Ingaget.

  “Pass me the lantern, Ingaget. I’ll send a message to the others in Eshland. Godfinder, have you parchment, quill, and ink to spare?”

  “Yes,” Unar said, stiffly unfolding her legs from the cushion, pushing one hand off the floor to rise.

  Imeris seized the opportunity to go after Unar into the next half room.

  “What’s wrong?” the Godfinder asked her, and Imeris grabbed her by both upper arms, turning her away from the main room, spilling in desperate whispers the disaster of her return to Loftfol, the death of Horroh, the loss of the chimera-skin wings, the slave-branding and its overturning when she was chosen for the Hunt.

  “I beg you,” she said at last, searching Unar’s face, “warn my fathers.”

  “Of course,” Unar said. “You don’t need to squeeze the blood out of my arms. And don’t worry about them. They’ve been dodging Gannak far longer than you’ve been dodging Loftfol.”

  Imeris let go.

  They returned to the main room. Oniwak wrote a message out on the parchment before opening one of the panes of the lantern and stuffing it inside.

  “Eeriez of Eshland!” he cried as the message was consumed, the blue glow intensifying. A moment later, the blue glow flared brighter again. Oniwak thrust his hand into heat and light that should have seared him to the bone, pulling out a piece of reed paper scrawled on in charcoal.

  “What does it say, Captain, if your fellow Hunters are permitted to know?” Ingaget inquired, while Daggad craned his neck over Oniwak’s shoulder, trying to read it directly.

  “It says,” Daggad boomed, “that the wooden clockmaker killed by the creature in Eshland ’ad been commissionedta craft somethin’ for the traitor. A soul cage, made of bone. Eeriez cannot say if the cage was completed before the clockmaker’s death.”

  “What is a soul cage?” Ibbin called from his swinging hammock.

  “What does it sound like?” Daggad said, guffawing.

  “There’s no such thing as a soul cage,” muttered the Lakekeeper. “Superstitious nonsense.” But when Imeris glanced at the Godfinder, Unar looked contemplative and said nothing.

  “We’ll meet them on the southern border of Ehkisland,” Oniwak said. “At a place called Mistletoe Lodge. The innkeeper was killed there. We must discover the connection between them.”

 
“Must there be a connection?” Daggad drawled. “It could be killin’ indiscriminately.”

  “No,” Ingaget mused. “Its mission is neither to sow fear nor cause chaos. And anyway, to accomplish either of those things, it wouldn’t need to expend energy ranging so quickly or so far. The captain is right. There must be some common connection to Anahah, the creature’s quarry.”

  Unar’s gaze snapped sharply into focus. Imeris felt it strike her like an arrow.

  The Godfinder’s farm. Mistletoe Lodge. Imeris was the connection. She had sheltered Anahah there.

  If I become a human guest in a human space, Anahah had said, the Mistress of the Wild cannot find me.

  He had also said, Orin killed every living member of my family. All my friends. Anyone she remotely suspected might provide me with shelter.

  Orin’s creature had killed the poor innkeeper and then followed Imeris’s scent from Mistletoe Lodge back to the Godfinder’s home. To make sure Anahah was not being sheltered there. It must own more than an ordinary beast’s intelligence. It must still be partly human.

  She pressed her tongue against her palate, keeping herself from sharing all she knew with Oniwak, but also remembering the feeling of the slave’s mark there. Anahah had mixed his magic up with her. That much was certain.

  And Imeris now had bait for a trap, if she cared to use it.

  Herself.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IMERIS HESITATED at the edge of Southeats, looking down at Mistletoe Lodge.

  It was late in the day. The open, mistletoe-draped windows should have echoed with guests, and the insect-repelling braziers should have been lit. Neither of those things were true.

  Oniwak spoke with the owner of a crab-stick cookery. They stood behind the barrow a dozen paces away, at the edge of Imeris’s hearing. The owner’s story sounded similar to all the others’. A hundred bystanders or more had seen something like a great black bat drop down onto the slightly lower canopy of the smaller tallowwood tree, covering it like a sheet over a bush.

  The shadow had shrunk into a denser, four-footed shape and begun sticking its maned, tusked head into the windows of the lodge. At the same time, men and women had run screaming out of all available exits and along the branch roads to Northeats and Southeats.

  Nobody knew why the creature decided to crush the innkeeper when it found her hiding under a bed in one of the rooms. Nobody could say why it left all the others unharmed, including the terrified patrons of Southeats, by which route the monster departed, or why it went up instead of down into the darkness where it belonged.

  Imeris thought she had answers to all three questions, but the answer she spoke aloud was in response to the final one.

  “It cannot go into Understorey.”

  “What are you mutterin’ about?” Daggad asked, spraying saliva and bits of soft tree-hollow crabshell from around the stick it was skewered on.

  “The creature. It cannot pass below the barrier because it is made of magic and the magic of the Temples will not work in Understorey.”

  “If you are right, that might be a good wayta kill it.” Daggad wiped his mouth with his leather bracer. “Make it fall.” He let go of his crab stick.

  They both watched it fall.

  “I do not know enough about magic to be sure,” Imeris admitted. “Do you?”

  “The only magic that concerns me is this,” Daggad said, sticking out his tongue to show the emblem of the House of Epatut to which he belonged. “Let us bother the Lakekeeper about the barrier.”

  Imeris hesitated. The House emblem had seemed suddenly familiar, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

  Ay slumped gloomily against a stack of empty barrels. His robes no longer looked fine. They were stained and rumpled. He missed his lake, Imeris supposed, and his goddess. At least they were now within his niche, where his powers were strong. When he had fought Orin’s beasts and the king’s soldiers, he’d occasionally flung his tears like acid at the enemy, but mostly he’d ducked and weaved and used a green branch broken from a tree to block edged weapons and bodily beat the attackers away.

  Here, he could walk sideways and upside down, call a thunderstorm inside a man’s lungs to drown him, or boil the eyes out of an enemy’s head if he chose. According to Ingaget, anyway.

  Daggad repeated Imeris’s speculation about the beast, but the Lakekeeper only shrugged.

  “The gods and goddesses have power everywhere. If they’re sometimes weak when they fall to Floor, it’s because the people of Floor make no tributes to Canopian goddesses and gods. Surrounded by those who are devoted to them, our deities can venture wherever they choose to carry out the deeds it is in their nature to carry out.”

  “You could try harder to be of help,” Imeris said. “Even if you wish you had not been chosen as a Hunter.”

  “One who walks in the grace of Ehkis finds it difficult,” Ay answered stiffly, “not to be resentful when deities manufacture such conflicts to satisfy their pride. The goddess of rain has been twice murdered in two decades, yet where is the Hunt declared to find the sorceress Kirrik?”

  Imeris stared at him in shock.

  “Who, now?” Daggad asked.

  “I have met with the Godfinder far too often.” The Lakekeeper picked up a handful of fallen leaves and scattered them vindictively. “My Lady Ehkis, an immortal, is as vulnerable as a child. She is a child! And I’m stuck here, chasing down the product of another Temple’s frivolous internal quarrel, instead of teaching that child, and her Servants, how to navigate their powers.”

  The Lakekeeper knows about Kirrik. Of course! Imeris had known about only one occasion when the rain goddess’s body had been stolen by the sorceress, but much went on in Canopy that she didn’t know about.

  “Could you wash the beast away with a magic river,” she asked, “if it came on us here in Ehkisland? Could you use water to get it off the side of a tree and down beyond the barrier? Would you try?”

  Ay met her gaze and shrugged again.

  “I’d try,” he said. “But I see no reason for it to come back here.”

  “We do not know what reason it hadta come ’ere the first time,” Daggad said.

  Oniwak called for them to follow him. Daggad offered a hand and lifted the Lakekeeper to his weary feet. In single file, the Hunters crossed the gap, down the tallowwood path to the Mistletoe Lodge. As they approached it from the south, the dying sun gilded the left side of it.

  Imeris noticed deep claw marks on the outside of the lodge. They were deepest by the window opening of the room in which she had stayed.

  “There,” she said, touching Oniwak’s shoulder, pointing.

  “The room where the innkeeper died,” was his gruff reply.

  He made a perfunctory examination of the abandoned lodge, beginning with the room where Imeris had sheltered Anahah. Blood made brown blotches on the tallowwood.

  “Why haven’t her relatives cleaned it up, taken it over?” Ibbin wondered aloud. “Expensive bit of property, this.”

  “They’re afraid the creature will return,” Ingaget said. “They can’t be sure why she was taken. Was it something about her? Something about the lodge? Or something about that room?”

  Imeris stayed silent.

  The lodge with its bloodstains and emptiness reminded her of the dark temple at Loftfol. How her poisoned throwing knives had gone deep into the wooden effigies of Canopian Servants and how Kishsik, then two-handed, had helped her to dig them out with his bore-knife. His poison-dipped needles peppered another of the effigies. Imeris had hesitated to compliment him on their accuracy, to be the first one of them to speak since her victory in the climbing race to become Heightsman.

  How her back had ached from the weight of the bow the day she’d won that race against Kishsik. How her heavy breathing had echoed in the humid, noonday stillness of the week before the monsoon, when the bark was driest and safest to pierce with blade or spine or bore-knife. Many of the men, arms like coconuts squeezed into be
ar stomachs, had raced with forearm spines alone, but Imeris had known her upper body strength was not equal to theirs. For the first half of the race, she’d lain back on lateral branches, more common in river nuts than other trees, and used Youngest-Father’s bowfishing arrows with a heavier, stiffer, foot-drawn bow to send ropes arcing over even higher branches. Holding the guide rope lightly in her hands for balance, she could then crawl up the bark on shin spines alone, using the muscles in her thighs instead of her shoulders, bow at her back, the scent of river nut sap sharp in her nostrils.

  It had been time-consuming, but energy efficient, leaving her with reserves for the last stage of the climb, where she’d abandoned bow and arrows, attacked the tree with fresh forearm spines, and overtaken Kishsik in the final dozen body lengths of the race.

  His intense, hazel eyes had fixed onto her face, his expression unreadable. In their practice raid in the dark temple, Imeris had held back from speaking to him because she assumed that he hated her; all his friends had made that clear. So it was a shock when he said mildly, I wanted to be the best. I wanted to kill the goddess in her true Temple. Now I see that it does not matter who kills her, so long as she is thrown down. You will throw her down, Imerissiremi.

  Imeris had ventured a guarded smile, thinking sadly, She is my sister, and I love her. I will never throw her down.

  The sun sank out of sight, and there was no sign of the other Hunters, the six men under Eeriez who had gone to Eshland. Daggad speculated that those six should have in fact reached the lodge first; south Ehkisland was equidistant from Airakland and Eshland, but Oniwak’s group had been forced to detour around Orinland.

  “Bring me one of Airak’s lanterns,” Oniwak ordered Ibbin. “Any one will do.”

  He used the mysterious communication method of his patron god to pass another message to Eeriez and quickly received one in return.