“Will you call Audblayin, or not? She told me to come and see her, but I cannot go into the Garden, and you are saying she would not come out. Not even to heal her own Bodyguard.”
“On Bernreb’s insistence.”
“They have to do something,” Imeris blurted. “The goddesses and gods. They have to stop fighting each other. They have to work together.” She expected Igish to step forwards and add her voice, her agreement, but she stayed behind Imeris, half bent.
“The last time they were unified in purpose,” Aoun said regretfully, “was when they raised this great forest from the Bright Plain and put the barrier in place. That was a time of crisis.”
“This is a time of crisis! Aurilon is dead! The surviving Hunters are being picked off one by one! My father—” Her voice fractured, and she stopped to swallow and lower her pitch. “My middle-father is injured. Our deities should form a council. Like the teachers of Loftfol. Like a guild council.” She turned to look at Wife-of-Epatut, who had told her about the silk merchant’s guild and their council, where each had an equal voice, but the silk-decorated head remained bowed. “They could gather at the Falling Fig. Settle disputes. Speak freely. Make peace.”
Audblayin stepped out from behind the shadow of the Gate.
“One small success with a gang of bloodthirsty boys,” she said, shaking her head, “and you think you’ve got the answers to all our problems.”
“You,” Imeris said angrily, accusingly, “are supposed to be a goddess, but you allowed Middle-Father to be harmed.”
“He guards me,” Ylly shot back. “I don’t guard him.”
“You need to speak to Orin. All of you. Face-to-face!”
“It’s not just Orin. Thanks to our little brother, Ulellin’s been cursing Airak and his Servants every time she comes down from her tree. She used the wind to blow all the bees of Ukakland away from the flowering trees of Irofland as retribution for the use of bespelled insects by the Hunter from Ukakland within her niche. She blew a few children out of their cradles to spite Odel, whom she blames for your actions. We’re not friends, Imeris. We can’t be. Power-giving tributes paid to one deity are tributes that can’t be paid to another. The only reason we don’t normally strike directly at one another is that it would be a waste of our bodies and weaken the barrier.”
“You could make friends,” Imeris beseeched her. She turned a third time to Wife-of-Epatut for support. The movement opened up a direct line of sight between Igish and Audblayin.
“Kirrik,” the goddess said with astonishment.
Wife-of-Epatut’s lips drew ferociously back from her teeth.
FORTY-SEVEN
IMERIS’S SPINES tried to spring from their sheaths.
But Kirrik, in Wife-of-Epatut’s body, had wrapped her arms and legs in so many layers of silk she was rendered temporarily helpless.
“I hoped you would all gather together,” Kirrik told Audblayin over Imeris’s shoulder, “so that I could kill you all at once. A council of Canopian deities! But this brainless Hunter was never going to succeed at that task. I should have known. I shall settle for just you, Audblayin.”
In a nonmagical body, how can she attack a goddess? Imeris wondered, tearing off ribbons and sashes, struggling to find her weapons. Did somebody kill Nirrin? If they did, how could Kirrik’s soul cross the barrier? Wife-of-Epatut is—was—not gifted. She was neither spinewife nor Servant.
Imeris’s eyes rose to Aoun, then, who stood with no amulet to protect his naked soul. No weapon to hand but his magic, which would be extinguished as soon as Kirrik struck him from the body that housed him. Audblayin, too, was vulnerable; Imeris had heard somewhere that Kirrik had once stolen the body of the goddess of rain. Instead of turning to slash at Kirrik, Imeris launched herself at her sister and the Gatekeeper, arms outstretched.
“Into the Garden,” she screamed at them, sweeping them up, feeling first her fingers and then her arms and face rebounding from nothing she could see; but they were safe; they were behind the wards.
Now she could turn. Put the Gate at her back. Fling down the last of her silk wrappings and hold Oldest-Father’s bore-knife out between her body and Kirrik’s.
I do not have my chimera skin.
“How did you get through the barrier?” Imeris snarled, striking hard from the strength of her extended back leg, but Kirrik danced back, teeth bared.
“Go ahead and kill me, Hunter. Kill the one who speaks of One Forest, who speaks what is in your heart!”
“You do not speak what is in my heart,” Imeris shouted, thrusting again with the bore-knife in her right hand. “Killing my sister is not in my heart!” Kirrik dodged the knife, but Imeris brought out her spines, stepping through and swinging from the elbow, a tight movement to bring her fist close to her hip, and then, dropping to one knee, the swifter, deadlier, cutting-edge reversal.
It caught Wife-of-Epatut—Kirrik—in the back of her extended right knee. Silk parted. Blood spurted. The joint tore, and Kirrik went down on her side, knuckles white against the wooden platform, still snarling.
“That is not your sister,” Kirrik insisted, undaunted by Imeris’s knee on her chest. “Your sister lived for only one breath before that thief stole her body. Audblayin is a parasite in human clothing, a power-hungry soul that drank the blood of a Titan to become what it is today. Kill me, protect it, and it will not reward you. It will never abolish the barrier. None of them will. One day you—”
Imeris pressed the blunt curve of her bore-knife to Kirrik’s throat. It was not the threat of death that silenced the sorceress but the physical restriction of air.
I will cut my birth mother’s throat, but Kirrik will not die.
“What is the use of killing you like this?” she muttered, trying not to see Wife-of-Epatut in the choking, darkening face. “You will only murder somebody else.”
The smell of panther musk and crushed banana leaves reached her nostrils before the small green hand appeared over her shoulder. She did not flinch or move to strike when she felt Anahah’s body against her from behind.
She let his hand close over her knife hand and draw it back. When he tried to take the knife from her, she allowed that, too.
Kirrik sucked in a deep, desperate breath.
Anahah dug at Imeris’s belt pouch. He put something in her hand. The slave-making coin. Imeris wanted to turn her head, to meet his eyes, to laugh, but she couldn’t let her attention drift away from Kirrik. Using her adze-handle in her left hand, she prised open Kirrik’s jaw. Took the bone coin between her right thumb and forefinger.
“You told my oldest-father that your son was a slave,” she said. “You said you refused to pay his ransom. Maybe now you will meet him in the Palace of Odelland.”
But Kirrik had also told Oldest-Father that switching bodies was a way to escape slavery. As the bone coin touched her squirming tongue, Kirrik’s whole body relaxed.
“Anahah,” Imeris said, sitting abruptly back on her haunches, “she is leaving! I did not know she could leave before the host body died!”
Where will she go? To the closest unprotected body.
Imeris jolted to her full height, careless of Wife-of-Epatut’s long, still form at her feet. She reached for her bore-knife but Anahah had taken it. Raising the adze instead, she put out her spines, quivering in horrified expectation.
Anahah stood there in his short, brown skirt, his green hair shifting in the wind, one corner of his mouth upturned. His pot-belly was gone. He looked lean and tired. Between his hands, a tiny cage made of bone held a single smouldering fragment of something colour-shifting and difficult to see.
“What is that?” Imeris asked, daring to hope that it was still Anahah and not the sorceress that she spoke to. “What is that inside the cage?”
“It’s burning chimera skin,” was the reply, and she could not tell if it was really him; did not trust herself to tell. Kirrik, or Anahah, raised the cage to pursed lips and blew sharply.
Black smok
e billowed from the bars of the fist-sized cage, far more than should be possible for anything less than a bonfire. Imeris coughed and waved her hands. In moments, the smoke was dispersed, but what was left behind was a hovering, multilimbed apparition of sooty haze. A branch shifted in the wind, and the last sunbeams touched the shifting shape, turning it brown. Audblayin and Aoun stared at it from behind the wards of the Garden but made no move to approach.
Anahah stepped forwards, passing the little bone cage through the haze. Some part of the shape shrank, solidified and stayed within the contained space.
What remained was the smoky shape and glowing eyes of a chimera. Imeris only just had time to recognise it. The next gust of wind blew it away. All that remained was the silently railing, shrunken human smoke-shape, confined by the tiny white bars between Anahah’s hands.
“I know just what to do with this,” he said, smiling, giving it a shake near his ear like a child with a new rattle.
FORTY-EIGHT
WHILE IGISH’S still-breathing but soulless body slept, Imeris practiced the seven disciplines and the six flowing forms in the House of Epatut.
Once the silk carpets were drawn back, the sanded sapwood floor of the gobletfruit tree provided as smooth and uninterrupted a surface as Imeris could have wished. She let all her guilt and all her fears float away as her body went through the motions.
When she was finished, she drank a gourd of water, put the carpets back, and went to the main bedroom to check on Igish.
The woman’s empty husk had not so much as rolled over in its sleep.
Imeris trickled a little water into the dry, open mouth. Wife-of-Epatut could still swallow. It was three days since Imeris had carried her injured, unresponsive body back to the bed where she’d given birth.
Three days since Anahah had trapped Kirrik’s soul and taken it away.
Imeris should have felt free. Her debt to Nirrin, Vesev, and Oldest-Father was paid. Your spirit can be reborn now, Oldest-Father. You do not need to watch over me any longer. No urgent matters demanded her attention. No monster rampaged. Nobody needed her protection.
Still, she could not seem to bring herself to leave the House of Epatut.
A parchment lay on the chair beside the bed. Imeris picked it up and sat down. She didn’t need to look at it. She’d read it so many times she knew it by heart, had curled and uncurled it so often that it would never again lie flat.
Most Formal and Humble Greetings to the House of Epatut, it read. We, the pale warriors down below, were most surprised two days past to be the recipients of a well-fed young man fallen from your wondrous realm. He is alive and unhurt. We are unable to pass through the formidable magical barrier erected by your fearsome gods to deliver him. Please burn the log enclosed in this basket. The fragrant smoke will guide him home.
Anahah, who had been the one to find the note, had soberly explained to Imeris how Kirrik’s sorcery had worked. By adding a dark spell to the crushed bone from Oldest-Father’s amulet, she was able to form the log from sawdust into a conduit for her soul. Imeris could hardly bear to imagine Wife-of-Epatut crouched before the sharp-smelling flames, breathing the smoke, imagining desperately that she was welcoming Epi home, when in fact she was welcoming her own end.
Is there a chance that Epi really is alive? Imeris had asked, but Anahah had given her such a look that she regretted asking.
“All you ever wanted was loving family around you,” she said to the inert form on the bed. “Youngest-Father would have been the right kind of husband for you.”
Impulsively, she rose to find a fire upon which to burn the treacherous parchment. The insect-repelling brazier wasn’t lit, but coals in the kitchen hearth could be coaxed to life. Imeris set the parchment over them. It smoked copiously and stung her throat, but it was a good, familiar sting, unlike the sharp smell that she now knew was the stench of burnt Old God’s powdered bone.
This burning parchment smelled much the same as the one she’d received from Epatut’s brother, Otoyut, and burned within a day of the sorceress’s defeat. Nobody had seen or heard from Epatut since the last time Imeris had seen him. She was inclined to agree with Anahah when he said that Kirrik had probably simply pushed the merchant out the window of his own House.
Still, there was no reason for Otoyut to so hastily claim what he described as his rightful inheritance. Especially while Wife-of-Epatut, technically, still lived.
On her way back to the bedroom, Imeris put her hand to her throat, touching smooth skin where the leather thong holding her bone amulet had rested for so long. The amulet was back in Audblayin’s hands. Imeris didn’t need it anymore.
Your soul trap, Imeris had said to Anahah outside the Garden, correctly identifying the bone cage. You were going to use it on Orin to keep yourself and your baby safe.
I’m still not sure, Anahah had replied, shaking the little cage again and peering at Kirrik’s black, agitated soul, that I did the right thing. The source of the bone for the trap, Anahah had not deigned to reveal. He’d also refused to tell Imeris where he was going to put the trapped sorceress for safekeeping. If you don’t know, you can’t tell anyone. Not even by accident.
He had, however, told her where he’d been staying with his newborn for the past week or so.
With the Godfinder? Imeris had repeated, incredulous. After the fuss she made? About living alone and liking it that way?
She likes the baby. Anahah flashed a grin. You’ll like her, too. Come to Airakland when you can.
Imeris did not know if she could go to Airakland. Last night, a runner had brought a message from the Garden. The goddess Audblayin would call on her before noon. Perhaps it was just to see if she could offer any more healing on Wife-of-Epatut than her Servants had already managed, though it seemed obvious to Imeris, who was no expert on magical healing, that without a soul, Wife-of-Epatut would never walk or speak again.
Perhaps Imeris’s goddess-allotted time in Canopy was up, though, and Audblayin was coming to send her down to Understorey for good.
That is not your sister, Kirrik had said. It will never abolish the barrier. None of them will.
Imeris felt shamed by her inclination to half believe the former and completely agree with the latter. She was too worn down to resist anymore. Too tired to try and bridge two worlds. Let the whims of deities blow her where they would. She would be Understorian by default, by the simple process of elimination.
Igish wet herself on schedule. Imeris changed the wrappings and cleaned her birth mother’s female parts, thinking, I came from here. This was my doorway to life. I had no soul when I came through this door and then I took my first breath.
She sat back down in the bedside chair.
The clang of somebody’s foot catching on the brazier in the entrance hall brought her head up sharply. A male voice cursed. Was it Epatut? Who else would come in without knocking and without resistance from the door guards? Then she remembered Epatut was presumed dead. Her eyes focused blearily on Audblayin’s face, gold-lit by the long-wicked oil lanterns.
The portrait. She had fallen asleep in the dining room.
No, she was still in the bedroom.
Richly dressed Canopians surrounded her. The smell of incense filled the room.
Imeris blinked.
Audblayin stood there in the flesh, her hair caught in a net of live monkey-ladder vine. She was gloved and gowned in pale green with white trim to match the slowly opening white flower clusters of the vine. A man stood beside her in a metal-thread-embroidered black silk wrap that covered him from chest to knees. He wore a headdress consisting of a blue-glowing silver tree, sharply forked like frozen lightning, emerging from a length of black silk wound around his head. Silver rings hung from his ears, and his haughty, full-lipped face was night-black on the left side and bone-white on the right. He could only be Leaper’s master, Airak, the lightning god. When Imeris looked at his curly-haired legs, she saw his right shin was black-skinned and his left shin was white.
“Good evening, Hunter Imeris,” Odel said politely, drawing Imeris’s eyes back up again. Odel’s long, luxuriant body wrap, boots and high-collared jacket were the colour of sunrise. His new Bodyguard, the bearded king’s vizier, in yellow jacket and red split skirt, stood beside a towering fighter in Ilan’s purple who leaned on a silver scythe.
Ilan herself wore the same painted silks resembling armour that Imeris had seen before. Four of them in one room.
Two goddesses. Two gods.
The man who had cursed in the hallway and stumbled over the brazier, marked by ashy smears on one bare, pale knee, was Daggad. He hesitated in the unenviable position of wanting to push through the crowd without touching any goddesses or gods. He wore a short wrap skirt and a harness to hold his ridiculously long sword.
He carried the limp form of a dark-haired Understorian woman with a leg brace, whom Imeris had last seen sending lethal magic in her direction.
Nirrin.
In a heartbeat, Imeris recognised the slack-mouthed stillness, identical to Igish’s, which characterised the soulless. Daggad negotiated the crowd and finally managed to get Nirrin down onto the bed beside Igish. He blew out his breath, pinched the black mark on his lip, and knuckled his back.
“I am dreaming,” Imeris said, gazing from one deity to another, adding a belated, “Holy Ones.”
“Move away from the bedside,” Ilan said briskly. “It is time for justice.”
“It is time to raise the fallen,” Odel said, the corner of his mouth quirking, “and to bestow on them the safety of a second childhood.”
“It is time to fuse body and soul with the first spark,” Airak said, glowering.
Imeris vacated the chair and dragged it back. Audblayin took her place, putting one hand on Igish’s wrist and the other on Nirrin’s. White flowers bloomed beside her earlobe. A green tendril curled around her cheekbone.
Echoes of Understorey Page 36
