Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

  “What do Understorians do with their dead?”

  “We seal them into the wood of the trees that give us life. Surely you do the same?”

  No. Unar wanted to close her eyes again. We let them fall.

  “When Audblayin died,” she said, “her body was wrapped up and kept in the Temple. They keep it there until a new god … goddess … comes to the Garden. Then they grind up the old bones and brush them onto the body of the new god … goddess. When he … she swims through the water to reach his … her new home, the bone-dust goes into the moat. I guess.”

  “It is strange,” Marram said, grunting with the effort of shifting the bath. “When I fell asleep, there was a sort of cold feeling in the base of my skull. I was instantly convinced that it was the shadow of the first storm of the monsoon. I fell down. It felt like my skin was shrinking in on itself. When I woke up, I thought my own skin was a coating of moss. Then I realised it was still summer, even though the rain had stopped. I could not understand why I had woken early.”

  “Maybe the rain stopping helped you to wake, even though the spell was still on you.”

  “Maybe. Then I thought it was my amulet, but the amulet was gone. I guess it was just superstition, then.”

  “What superstition?”

  He laughed.

  “That a pendant of bone from the Old God whose essence now belongs to Audblayin protects the wearer from sorcery. Floorians find the bones sometimes under the roots of Audblayin’s emergent. The amulet I brought was given in trade for a bundle of furs. I snatched it up when I saw what Frog had done to Oos.”

  Unar frowned, trying to remember where she had seen the amulet last.

  “Maybe it’s not superstition,” she said slowly. “Maybe it does protect you. From having your body stolen. Frog put it in my … Frog betrayed me a second time. She thought she’d replaced my weapon with something ineffective, but she didn’t know that Kirrik wanted to steal my body.” Didn’t she? “Kirrik can’t have told her. The amulet is outside. I’ll fetch it.”

  But when she tried to give it back to Marram, he wouldn’t take it.

  “You put it on,” he said. “If it is your body the sorceress wants to steal, you had better be the one to wear it.” And Unar acquiesced, not believing that the long curve of bone had any power. It felt inert to her, as it had before. Most likely it was not the bone of an Old God at all.

  The bathtub wouldn’t go through the front door of the dovecote. Marram set to with a hatchet, enlarging the opening. Unar couldn’t make herself care whether anyone might come, whether messengers or wounded soldiers returning.

  Nothing really mattered.

  Marram sweated as he worked. Unar watched his strong, slender body in motion and felt nothing. Yellow hair fell over his young face and his odd, pomegranate-pink, Understorian mouth was pinched in concentration. She should have been relieved that he was awake. Saving him, bringing him away from the dovecote, had been one of her important goals. Vaguely, she remembered that before Frog had put him away like winter clothing, his collarbone had been broken and his leg had been all but chewed off. Nothing of those wounds remained, though the scars on his hands and feet remained. She didn’t remark on it.

  Soon enough, he tossed the hatchet aside. Unar applied herself to her end of the tub. It scraped through the splintered edges of the newly widened doorway and out onto the path. Together, they wrestled it to the very edge of the circle of blue-white light, where Marram manoeuvred it so that it stood upright on two of its four legs.

  “Now,” he said, “Unar, stand back.”

  She obeyed and he heaved the tub so that it fell forward, encompassing the lamp, dousing the light.

  For an instant, it seemed as if they had succeeded, and would be able to walk over the top of the copper tub and away from the dovecote. Then, the gleaming metal flashed white hot.

  Unar might have stood there, gazing at it, until death came, but Marram had the presence of mind to seize her arm, throw her into the dovecote, and push her down among the coats and boots of the cloakroom.

  The blast turned her deaf for a few confusing moments. Everything was white, and then black, and then Marram’s lips moved in front of her face, making no noise. She sat up, and realised half the wall behind her was missing.

  A hand-sized piece of jagged copper pinned Marram’s hand to the floor.

  She pulled it out. It was embedded deeply and she needed all of her physical strength. Marram didn’t shout, or maybe he did and she was still deaf, or maybe his words had been stolen.

  No. She’s gone. She’s gone, and I do not hate Marram.

  “I’ll find something to bind it,” he said. “Something to stop the blood.”

  Unar sat alone for a while.

  Baby Ylly. Your mother tried to teach me to dive like a duck. And I paid for that lesson in chimera skin.

  “Chimera skin,” she murmured to herself.

  When Marram returned, she made herself look at him. Really look at him. He’d dressed in odd bits of armour that he’d found inside the dovecote, leaving his shins and forearms bare. His demeanour was confident, but his eyes said he was afraid for his brothers’ lives. They were in danger because they lived in Audblayin’s emergent, but also because they had given shelter to two fallen, gifted women, two escaped slaves, and a little girl running from a demon.

  “I know how to get past the lantern,” she said.

  The piece of chimera skin that had held the floating fragments of bone was barely big enough to drape the lantern. Marram took a slew of already-deformed weapons from the cloakroom to nudge the colour-shifting cloth into position. When it covered the lantern, only a tiny circle of escaped light remained.

  “I’ll go first,” Unar said, brushing past him. Holding up her black skirts, she leaped over the little circle, half expecting to be speared by lightning, but she passed by it unharmed. Marram came a bare step behind her.

  “I wish you had thought of that before the bathtub,” he said, grinning.

  “What are you doing?” Unar sucked in a sharp breath as Marram grasped the top handle of the lantern through the cloth.

  “Bringing it with us.”

  “What if it can’t be—” Unar fell silent as Marram proved that the lantern could be moved.

  “It could be useful,” Marram said, and his smile turned grim. “If we encounter that charming friend of yours, I will throw it in her face before I let her cut our tallowwood in half with Esse, Bernreb, and Issi inside.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  NIGHT CAME.

  There was no sign of Kirrik or her soldiers. Unar and Marram had gone quickly, but Unar suspected the gap between parties had neither widened nor narrowed. They trod the same path, and Kirrik had half a day’s head start.

  Marram set the lantern down behind them and uncovered it so that nobody could creep up on them from behind while they were sleeping.

  “I’m not tired,” Unar said, but mostly she was afraid of her dreams. Upon waking, stiff and uncomfortable from being wedged between branches, she felt more tears on her cheeks and the gut-wrenching aftermath of a nightmare whose lingering images she didn’t care to examine.

  “We will need to leave the lantern,” Marram said softly in the dawn gloom, and when Unar twisted around to question him, she saw the demon crouched on the other side of the blue-white light.

  Only its eyes, huge, round, and glowing yellow like twin suns, remained fixed, Unar’s height above the branch. The rest of the body flickered through umber, emerald, and sooty grey, but the shadow stretched behind and puddled beneath it betrayed its basic form: a four-legged predator with a sleek, muscular, long-tailed body. If it had ears, they were invisible, and its scaly legs were tipped by curved black claws.

  The chimera tested the air with a forked tongue.

  “I agree,” Unar said, shivering. “Unless you think the demon’s skin will protect it from lightning the same way the dead piece of its hide protected us.”

  “I think it wo
uld have crossed already, if it could.”

  “Yes. I wasn’t thinking. Should we go on?”

  “We cannot go back,” Marram pointed out, passing her a curled leaf that carried water. Unar watched the chimera while she drank. Its glowing eyes didn’t move. When she got to her feet, she thought its tail might have twitched, and then she was following Marram down the trunk of the fallen floodgum, hunching her shoulders but not looking back.

  In the middle of the day, Marram paused to squint through the forest at something indiscernible to Unar.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Is it the chimera? Has it found a way around?” At her feet, a lateral branch of the floodgum vanished into the distance. Marram knelt and touched the bark, as if to detect damage from the passage of boots. “Do you think Kirrik and Sikakis might have gone down the side branch? Is that the way to Ehkis’s emergent?”

  “No,” Marram said, straightening. “It is the way to Odel’s emergent. The placement of the branch is convenient. Why were they not tempted?”

  “Marram,” Unar said, feeling sick, but unable to keep back from him now what she should have told him straight away. “Kirrik can’t cut down any more emergents. She almost killed me to cut down this one. She used all of my power, do you see? Even if she captures Oos, Oos isn’t as strong as I was. The tallowwood where your brothers live, the tallowwood that holds the Garden, is safe. Kirrik can climb it, or perhaps burn it, but not bring it down.”

  “Perhaps burn it,” Marram repeated emphatically.

  “She still has Aforis, Servant of Airak,” Unar allowed. “But she was going to get … they were going to get Ehkis first. Ehkis first, and then Audblayin. If you can sneak past them while they’re busy invading the Temple of Ehkis, you’ll have time to warn Esse and Bernreb of the danger. The three of you can make sure Oos isn’t captured.”

  He eyed her.

  “Me? If I can sneak past them? The three of us? Where are you going? Back to feed the chimera?”

  Baby Ylly. Odel’s power protects you for now, but whose power protects Odel?

  “I need a way through the barrier, Marram. Your brothers, the ones you need to protect, are down here. Mine are up there.”

  Marram made an exasperated sound.

  “Whatever it is that lets you pass through the barrier to Canopy, you need to steal from Kirrik,” he guessed. “You are going to wait for me to sneak past and then try to take something valuable from two hundred Understorian warriors, and you have no magic to protect you?”

  Unar shook her head slowly. Trying to take the sleeping goddess away from Sikakis would be impossible.

  “What I need is in Odelland.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  “Thank you for saving me, Marram,” she said, and wouldn’t say any more.

  Sighing, he took the rolled-up chimera skin from behind the strap of his shoulder guard and pressed it into her hands.

  “Thank you for saving me, yourself. I hope we will meet again. If you are going to try to climb up through the barrier, at least let me help you with those.”

  He pulled out a knife and cut away the front of her skirts at the level of her knees. Her bare feet were blistered from running along the rough bark and there was muck between her toes.

  “I’ve never used them,” Unar said, staring at the crease in her shins where her spines were hidden. She hadn’t had time to practice. Now she must climb, or die.

  “Pull them in before you lift from the knee,” Marram advised, “or before you lift from the wrist. Have them out before impact.”

  “I’ll try.”

  They clasped forearms. Marram smiled encouragement at her a final time before turning to continue along the main trunk. Unar knew she shouldn’t stand there watching him. She had little time herself if she was to reach baby Ylly ahead of Kirrik and Sikakis.

  It was important, though, that she watch him. She needed to erase the image of him falling and replace it forever with the vision of him lithely leaping along the toppled abode of the lightning god.

  When she couldn’t see him anymore, she turned to the lateral branch and began making her way along it. As night began to fall on the second day since leaving the dovecote, her nostrils brought her the smell of sweet-fruit pine.

  The branch of Airak’s emergent was wedged tightly against the sweet-fruit pine trunk. Unar could only goggle at it for a moment, wondering how it could possibly be the precise tree that she needed, at a time when she had no magic, no means of growing a pathway.

  There must be other sweet-fruit pines in Odelland. This might not be the one.

  When she put out her spines and drove them into the sapwood, she realised it wasn’t the one. Odel’s emergent was ancient. This tree was too young and new. Somehow, she could taste its age through the snake’s teeth that jutted out of her forearm.

  It didn’t matter. Who was to say Odel was in his Temple, anyway? He hadn’t been, the last time Unar had climbed the steps cut into the spongy, white wood.

  Pull them in before you lift from the knee, or before you lift from the wrist.

  Pain shot through her bones as she took her full weight on her forearms. It should have frightened her. Nobody had mentioned pain. Maybe the spines were still not properly healed, or maybe they hadn’t been properly set, so that Kirrik could laugh if Unar tried to escape and instead plunged to her death.

  Have them out before impact.

  When her shin spines were set, the pain eased a little. She willed the spines in her right arm to retract, and they obeyed. She willed them out again. This wasn’t yet instinctive for her. She had to concentrate on each agonisingly sluggish shift in her weight and placement of her next cutting, downward stroke.

  She was getting higher. Sunlight reached her. The beam was only a finger’s width, and horizontal with the sinking of the sun, but she stopped to cry some more, with her face turned to the tiny trickle of light.

  Licking tears from her lips, her shins and forearms on fire from holding her to the tree, she turned her focus back to the climb. She climbed when she couldn’t see the bark in front of her face anymore. She climbed when night insects landed lightly on her nape to drink her blood.

  At last, her head hit something hard and unyielding. It was a thousand times stronger than the princess’s window. It was a thousand times colder than the magical wall around the Garden.

  She’d reached the barrier between Canopy and Understorey. There was no sleeping goddess in her arms to bore a way through. There was no artefact and no incantation.

  Unar pressed her lips to the sweet-fruit pine and used the barest breath of magic, the feeble speck that had regrown in her over two days of travel, to send the word she spoke into the heart of the tree, the secret word that Frog had ordered Unar to forget lest Kirrik discover she knew its power.

  “Tyran,” she whispered.

  The cold, hard barrier rippled.

  FIFTY-THREE

  UNAR HUNG from her spines, in a half daze, waiting.

  It seemed like hours before the Bodyguard with the brindle-striped back appeared on the other side of the barrier, gazing with black eyes down at Unar, hands in the claw-tipped gloves.

  “I need to speak to Odel,” Unar pleaded. “His life depends on it.”

  The Bodyguard didn’t step onto the barrier. It was insubstantial for her. She came down through it and searched Unar for weapons without a word, rifling through torn skirts and hacked-off sleeves.

  When she whisked away, agile as a lizard, Unar couldn’t be sure if the woman was returning to fetch the god she served, or simply evacuating in the wake of determining the nature of a threat.

  “Gardener Unar,” Odel’s voice said. “You return to us much changed.”

  He stood on a wooden platform in the shape of an orchid, its four corners pierced and threaded with rope, holding a lit taper in his left hand as he had before. Unar looked up and could barely make out the shape of the Bodyguard, stretched panther-like along the branch where the en
d of the rope was secured. The lights of Canopy were above her, illuminating roads out of Unar’s reach.

  “Understorians, Holy One,” she told Odel. “They want to kill you. You and the others, thirteen gods and goddesses, between sunrise and sunset of one day, to bring back the Old Gods. They have Ilan. It may be that Airak is dead. They’ve killed the Bodyguard of Ehkis and have gone to capture the rain goddess right now. That’s why the monsoon is over. They’ll go after Audblayin next.”

  “Come through the barrier.”

  “I can’t. That’s why I had to call you. Please, open it for me.”

  Odel cupped his chin in his gloved right hand.

  “You told Aurilon that my life depended on speaking to you. She owns the power to read truth. My life does depend on what you’ve told me. The question is, will I die if I open the way for you, or die if I do not?”

  Unar knew what she looked like: a spined Understorian coming to invade Canopy. Yet she had no weapons. Her clothes were torn, and her skin was dirty and scratched.

  “There isn’t much time,” she said hopelessly. A flicker of movement from above suggested that the Bodyguard, Aurilon, grew impatient. So she began to tell her story from the beginning. She told Odel of being passed over at the choosing, of Sawas and Edax teaching her to swim. She told him of how she’d leaped from the Garden while roped to Ylly and Hasbabsah, of the home of the three brothers and of the arrival of Frog.

  She spoke of Kirrik and her imprisonment at the dovecote. Without sparing her part in Edax’s betrayal, Unar told of Kirrik’s capture of him, and of Aforis. She told him of the sleeping warriors, wakened, and Marram’s flight towards his home.

  “Gods grant that he reaches it safely,” she finished gruffly.

  “Gods grant that,” Odel said, and sighed.

  He put his hand into empty air, curled his fingers, and made a pulling motion. There was a sound like cloth tearing.