Hands landed lightly on the wet crown of her head, and she looked up, getting rain in her eyes. Edax hung from a branch by his talons, above and behind her. When she turned to him, their lips were level. His hands were at the back of her head now, pressing her forward, so that their mouths met.
She was glad to close her eyes; she couldn’t get used to the sight of his upside-down smile. The kiss electrified her, as if she had sworn herself to the lightning god. Like her powers, her oaths had been left behind in Canopy.
He had kissed her before, but this time he didn’t stop. Edax lowered himself slowly, sliding down her body like a viper; he kissed her chin and her throat. He unbound her breasts and kissed them, and Unar’s stomach plunged as though she was in free fall, diving, a thing she had been afraid of, once, but now thrilled to do.
Her knees felt weak, but to kneel would be to put herself out of reach of his lips. He slid down further, his tongue leaving imprints down her belly, and without removing her loincloth, he encircled her hips with his arms and pressed his face between her shivering thighs.
Unar looked up and saw the deep cuts he’d made in the branch with his unnatural feet. Without the goddess in him, blood must be rushing to his head as it hadn’t in Ehkis’s realm, but she couldn’t think of that; his clever fingers had found their way inside her final wrappings, found it hot and wet as the rain.
She clung to him to keep from collapsing and pulled some leather binding loose by accident. Were his weapons slipping? She didn’t want him to lose them. Abruptly, there was his manhood, at the level of her eyes, shockingly engorged, at once ridiculous and mesmerising. Had she been afraid of such a thing?
His feet couldn’t hold their combined weight. He lost his grip. They fell into the pool. Unar hadn’t had a chance to take a proper breath and water filled her nose. She remembered not to scream; she had screamed underwater in the moat at the Temple, where Oos’s magic had saved her.
There was no magic here.
Edax hauled her out of the water. Fingers that had probed her private places now cleared her mouth of her own myrtle-leaf-garlanded hair.
“Are you hurt?” he shouted.
“No!” she managed in return.
He kissed her again, the right way up this time.
“And your oaths? Little Gardener, do you wish to keep them?”
“No,” Unar said. She closed her eyes. Not to block the view of his sensuous mouth, when he stood the right way up, but so she could pretend he was Aoun, who would die before breaking those oaths his ignorant child-self had made long ago.
TWENTY-TWO
RAIN, WIND, and thunder still assaulted the Garden upon Unar’s return.
Her fingers slipped on the streaming Gate carvings.
Have you stolen food? the wards whispered. Have you stolen the sovereignty of another’s body? Have you stolen human life?
“No!” Unar gasped as she reached the top of the Garden wall. Her ankle caught on one of the carved fruits, and she tumbled instead of sliding, turning her shoulder to take the impact of the ground—only it wasn’t the ground that she fell on.
It was a shape, warm, white-robed, well-wrapped, and twice the size of her, smelling of eggshell and lantern oil, burnt wick and wet soil. Unar knew she smelled of sex; impulsively she wanted Aoun to smell it on her—taste it, even.
“Gatekeeper,” she said as they struggled to stand, and when he bent to peer into her face, she put her tongue in his mouth.
His body straightened, and he thrust her away, holding her at arm’s length.
“Only another adept could do this to you,” he breathed. “Break your bonds this way. Who was it? I’ll kill them.”
“You did it to me, Aoun. Come closer. Keep doing it.”
He let go of her completely, backing away.
“Iririn woke and saw your hammock left behind in the loquat grove. Everyone else had moved theirs to the monsoon pavilion to stay dry. She was terrified for you. She thought you must have fallen from a bridge or an edge in the storm. It never occurred to her that you might have left the Garden to meet men.”
“Audblayin’s bones, who is Iririn?”
“Your fellow Gardener.”
“The one who shaves her head?” Unar’s fists went to her hips.
“Yes.”
“She should mind her own business.”
“Are you drunk? Injured?”
“No.”
“While Iririn and I searched the Garden for you, we found a slave woman working. Washing clothes in the dark. She said you had given the order. Did you?”
“Of course I did,” Unar started to say, but Aoun had put one of his great bear paws to her throat; his hand was huge enough to almost encircle it. Her eyes went wide, and she began to pry at his fingers, even as some magic-working of his inside her chest distracted her. Time ran backwards for a moment; Aoun was forcing her to relive the emotions of the past night, out of order; a sensuous surge went through her as the working brought strongly back to her what she had done with Edax; and then she was feeling pity for Ylly, warm fingers touching cold as she handed over the seed porridge.
No, they weren’t her own warm fingers she was feeling, but Aoun’s, his hand turning over the soil where her memory-seeds were buried.
“Did you order the slave to wash clothes after dark?”
“No,” Unar said immediately, against her will. “Her name is Ylly. She’s friends with another slave, Hasbabsah, who’s too old to do the work that’s given to her. Ylly and I do Hasbabsah’s work after nightfall so that Servant Eilif won’t throw her down.”
Aoun let go of her throat. The magical structure that he had grown in her shrivelled instantly and died. Unar wrapped her arms around herself, no longer aroused, incredulous at what he’d done.
“The Garden will spit you out, Aoun!” she screamed. “You have stolen the sovereignty of my body!”
“In the service of the Garden,” he insisted, staring at his palm as though it was someone else’s, sounding as shaken as she was. “It is allowed.”
“Like killing slaves is allowed? You could have been a slave! I was almost a slave! Would you throw me down if I couldn’t work? Is that what you are for?”
There was nothing but the sound of the rain and wind for a long time. Aoun put his right hand through his hair; it settled at last on his left shoulder, trembling. Unar put her back against the Gates, squeezing herself tighter and tighter. Her floating high, the giddy sensations elicited by Edax, had turned to horror and the spectre of death.
“It is the way of the Garden,” Aoun said at last, helplessly. “Old growth is cut away to make room for the new. I must tell Servant Eilif in the morning.”
Unar ran from him. He didn’t follow.
If Hasbabsah was to die in the morning, Unar couldn’t wait that long. Sunrise was mere hours away.
Suddenly, she felt tired. Too tired to do what had to be done. Hasbabsah had been given extra days. It was enough, wasn’t it? The deception was over, now. The inevitable was coming.
Unar imagined the old woman falling and increased her speed.
“Ylly,” she crowed by the door to the wet-weather slave quarters.
It was Hasbabsah who hobbled through the insecticidal smoke that screened the door. Her hair was awry, and her eyes were bloodshot.
“Ylly is sleeping.”
“But not you? Has the Gatekeeper been here?”
“The storm makes my bones ache; that is why I am awake.”
“Wake Ylly. Tell her to gather all her things, and you must gather all yours. We’re leaving the Garden, right now. The Gatekeeper knows we’ve been doing your work.”
Shame heated Unar’s cheeks, but in the darkness of the storm, nobody could see them.
“And how can we leave the Garden, Warmed One? Our tongues are marked.”
“Maybe you can’t cross the wall, tread the walkways, or climb the ladders. Maybe you can’t pass through the Gate. But your marked tongue won’t hold you up when Eilif pushes you off
the edge, will it? We’ll go straight down. The wards are weakest that way.”
“You do not know what you are doing, do you?”
“Has Ylly lied to me all this time? Isn’t your life at stake? Hasn’t concealing your infirmity been crucial?”
Hasbabsah sighed, a long sigh. “It has been crucial, Warmed One.”
“Then go, get her. I’ll be back very soon.”
Unar didn’t go to the kitchens to steal. There might have been people there. She raided the trees and bushes she’d tended for the past four years. Bent, oozing sugarcanes made a frame for a nest of watercress, which cradled a late clutch of flowerfowl eggs. Unar stuffed the wrung-necked mother down on top of the eggs, her downy corpse still keeping the eggs warm. Limes the length and shape of fingers came next, with a layer of beans to follow, and a few handfuls of magenta cherries for good measure.
Instead of stealing ropes, Unar let herself down by a single-handed grip beneath the wattle-grove garden to strip bark-ropes from the great tallowwood tree itself. She paused to roll the ropes under a roof of sodden wattle-flowers; the blooms sagged on the ends of their branches like new-hatched yellow chicks with their fluff still stuck to their skin.
She didn’t dare go to her hammock in the monsoon pavilion for her meticulously maintained bore-knife and machete, but took blunter, cruder ones from the tool cache in the prison-tree outside the loquat grove.
“I’m not leaving you,” she whispered to the Garden. “You are mine, and I am yours. We’ll simply be apart for a little while.”
She returned to the slave quarters. Ylly and Hasbabsah stood just outside it, shod and loaded with soggy blankets. They would need them, if they were to survive the monsoon away from the Garden. When distant lightning struck and Unar could finally see them properly, they were blanched with fear.
“The waterfall,” Unar said. “Where we washed the clothes, Ylly.”
They set off for it as quickly and quietly as they could, though Hasbabsah missed her footing on the bridges and had to be carried between them. It reminded Unar of the time Oos and Aoun had taken her between them. Her lips drew back from her teeth; she wouldn’t allow them to punish her this time.
She wouldn’t let herself fall into their hands. Not until Ylly and Hasbabsah were beyond Audblayin’s reach, and perhaps not even then. Unar was too learned, too powerful for them to touch her. If she had to learn from other Bodyguards, spy on different goddesses or gods, so be it. Edax knew her, inside and out, now. He’d help her. And the god Odel had been kind to her.
With the bark-ropes, she secured her own belt to Ylly’s and to Hasbabsah’s, just to be sure she wouldn’t lose them. She left several paces of rope between them, so that they each had room to move.
“Take my hands,” Unar said as they prepared to drop into the pool far below. It wasn’t as deep as the one in Understorey. Unar would have to use her modestly regrown shoot of magic to cushion them from the bottom and perhaps to raise them to the surface again.
Hopefully, no Servants would be awake to sense it.
They jumped.
PART II
Wet Season
TWENTY-THREE
UNAR FELL, a glass bead in the darkness with all the other beads of rain.
But this was not the small, safe fall she’d taken so many times with Edax.
Water caught whatever tiny fragments of light it could. Yellow light from the lanterns of the Garden. Blue light from the lanterns of Airak on the roads of Audblayinland. Light bounced from their wet, flailing arms and legs. Reflected light showed Unar a faint mirror of her feet as they approached the surface of the pool. She was slightly ahead of the others, having jumped a moment before them, and the rope between her waist and Ylly’s was taut.
The splash blinded and deafened her. She tried to swim upwards, but the rope, which had held her up, now kept her down. Then it came level. Unar’s head broke the surface of the water at the same time as Ylly’s. They gasped into each other’s faces. Ylly seemed to have trouble breathing; perhaps she’d swallowed some water. It had happened to Unar often enough.
Without words, they struck out for the side of the pool; Unar’s feet found a carved ramp close to the end of the screw pump.
Together, Unar and Ylly dragged Hasbabsah out of the pool.
The old woman was clawing at her mouth and bawling. Only then did Unar see blood on Ylly’s lips and realise why she was having trouble breathing; the blood was black in the blue light.
“Your slave-markings,” she said.
“If you would return us to Understorey,” Ylly said around her swollen tongue, “you must do it soon, before we choke in our own blood. There’s no path from this level. The ladders will turn to dust if we touch them. You must go up, and pull us by the ropes after you, or we must find a way down.”
From above Unar came Oos’s impassioned voice. “Go back up, Unar. You must go back up. The ladders will obey me. They will hold you. All of you. Go back up.”
Impossible, Unar thought, flabbergasted to be intercepted by a once-friend who should have been sleeping soundly in the egg-shaped Temple. Oos stepped out from behind an angled leaf-catcher, white robe sodden, beautiful and shivering and, to Unar’s eyes, tortured by the wrong she was complicit in.
“Change their markings, Oos,” Unar cried. “Remove them. Help them. The old woman can’t breathe.”
“Aoun knew you’d try to take them, even though it’s not in your power. That’s why he woke me. He couldn’t watch the Gate and this pool at the same time. He wasn’t sure which one you’d try.”
“Help us, Oos!”
“I am a Servant of Audblayin!”
“I thought you’d say that.”
“What do you want me to say?”
Unar moved closer to Oos as they spoke. Ylly and Hasbabsah, still roped to her, had no choice but to stagger after. Unar looked below the leaf-catcher. There, a new-formed river ran between ridges of tough, hairy, orange-tan bark, down the mighty trunk of the tallowwood tree. It would flow until the rain stopped, five months later at the end of the monsoon season.
“Nothing,” Unar said. “Don’t say anything. Just take a deep breath.”
“A deep breath?”
Unar launched her full weight at Oos, carrying them both into the vertical river. Resistance from the twin bark-ropes jerked her back momentarily before Ylly and Hasbabsah were dragged with her over the edge.
They fell for a minute or two. Audblayin’s magic ripped away from Unar’s insides as they breached the border of Canopy.
Unar clung to Oos, hoping for a pool; waiting for a pool. When they’d fallen for so long that the light of the Temple and surrounding city was lost from sight and demons howled in the dark, she knew they were going to die.
She’d made a mistake. There were no pools. There were no lateral branches in lightless Understorey. Only the straight trunks of the great trees, separated by hundreds of body lengths.
All four of them would smash to pieces when the river reached Floor.
TWENTY-FOUR
UNAR PLUNGED down with the river, lungs bursting, still gripping Oos around the waist with both arms.
I’m going to drown before I can smash to pieces.
But then her legs were bending up behind her head. Bodies pushed into hers. Something had caught them, was stretching with the weight of them.
A net.
Unar heard the cracking of the wooden pegs that held it in place. She felt fish flopping around her face. It was a fishnet. There was air. She could breathe it. She shouted with outrage at the fish-slime on her face and with relief at being alive.
Then the pegs gave way, a hidden lever was sprung, and the net leaped up into open air to one side of the river, holding its struggling, tangled, retching occupants in empty space where predators couldn’t poach the fish.
“What have you done?” Oos croaked, somewhere above Unar. “You’ve killed us all.”
“Be still,” Hasbabsah snapped. “This is a gra
ss net for barkskippers. If you break it, we truly will die.”
“The marking on my tongue is gone,” Ylly said with wonder. “The pain and the blood, at least. If we’d known that all we had to do was drop down beyond the barrier, we would have gone decades ago.”
“Mine still bleeds,” Hasbabsah said. “But then, I have worn it longer. And we could not have known there would be people living here. Understorian towns do not normally lie below the most populated parts of Canopian niches, lest the water be polluted and the turds fall like rain.”
They hung, and spun, growing gradually still.
“What is the net attached to, Hasbabsah?” Unar asked.
“Probably a plank inserted into the bark of the tree. One of us should climb up to it, check that it is secure, and then pull the others up, one at a time.”
“Oos is on top,” Unar said.
“You’re the stronger climber, Warmed … Unar,” Ylly said.
Silence. Ylly had never been free, yet she had eagerly and instantly grasped their alterations in status.
Unar shivered. Silence, and the darkness, were much deeper here than they had been on any of her forays into Understorey. Of course. She was much, much further down this time. The air was heavier. Mustier. It held more murky memories. The smells of fish and mud, human sweat, wet bark, rot, and crushed fungi were less separable.
“Let me untie the bark-ropes,” Unar said.
“Will you let a slave tell you what to do?” Oos demanded.
“They aren’t slaves here, Oos. This is their home. Their markings are gone. We’re their guests.”
“Mine is not gone,” Hasbabsah grumbled.
“Guests?” Oos protested. “I see neither hearths nor homes!”
“My home was in Nessa,” Hasbabsah said. “It lies below the edge of Odelland. But there can be no leaping between trunks in the monsoon. No crossings from tree to tree, and we cannot stay here for a hundred and fifty days and nights. It may be we will have no choice but to try to return to the Temple.”
“I think there are enough fish here for us to eat for a hundred and fifty days and nights,” Unar said, shrugging to get them away from her neck as her fingers struggled with knots made impossible to untie by the great strain they’d been under. “Be still, everyone. I need to take out my bore-knife. I don’t want to cut the net by accident.”
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