Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

  “Come to my Temple, Gardener Unar,” he said. “You gave tribute to protect the child Audblayin while you were there, though you did not know that the child you prayed for was she. Putting your hands on that tribute will allow you to speak across the distance between us and Audblayinland. You can warn the girl’s guardians of what comes.”

  Unar had been stuck in one place for so long that she forgot to retract her spines, and gasped as she tried to raise an arm that wouldn’t move. Then she remembered. The points slid back into her, springing out as she drove them towards a higher section of the tree. She lifted her knee, her body moved upwards, and she didn’t strike the barrier.

  As she dragged herself fully back into Canopy, she shuddered. A familiar sensation filled her. Earthy smells. Juicy roots. Fruit sweet and sour and bitter. It was Canopian growing-magic, life-magic, returning. Her magic, as powerful as it had ever been, and more. And at least half of it flowed from Marram’s amulet, the bone seeming awakened by the mere act of crossing the barrier.

  Strength flowed through her arms and legs. All the weariness of her heartbreak, the flight and the climb were gone. Part of it was the lightness that came from musical magic, the two inner sources now completely meshed, sound and sight and smell working together. Unar paused to wonder.

  Then, with new energy, she scaled the sweet-fruit pine as far as the winding Canopian road where Odel and Aurilon waited for her.

  Unar knelt before him and kissed the ground in front of his sunset-hued boots, careful not to seem like she was even thinking of touching him.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh, thank you.”

  The heartbreak was still there, after all; returning power could not redeem her. In the pit of her stomach, despair still lay in place of desire. Her final obligations were to secure Audblayin safely within the Garden and ensure that Oos was out of Kirrik’s reach, that no Servant could be used to sever the trunk of the great tallowwood.

  Then she would do what she had been going to do before Marram put his hands out and caught her.

  “The Temple is this way,” Odel said. “Put those spines away. The king’s law forbids them, and you may need them before the sun rises. The amulet is forbidden, too; I should hide it beneath my shirt, if I were you.” Unar obeyed him, tucking the bone amulet out of sight. Odel hesitated before turning towards Aurilon and telling her pointedly, “Ehkis is vulnerable without her Bodyguard.”

  Aurilon bared her teeth at him. “No.”

  “You must do as I say, Aurilon.”

  “I must stay with you. My duty is to protect you.”

  “You know where she sleeps. You’re faster than they can ever hope to be. Go, before it’s too late and we end up forced to trade for rain with One Forest. They’ll demand we abolish the barrier. If we refuse, the monsoon will never come again, and children will not be the only ones to die.”

  Aurilon’s nostrils flared. She quivered. Then she was gone.

  “Come, Unar,” Odel said.

  For a moment, Unar was afraid to enter the circle of blue-white light that emanated from the closest of Airak’s lanterns, but then she remembered these ones were safe and produced only light. The fish-shaped Temple was twelve trees away, the spiralling planks that had seemed perilous no longer frightening to a Gardener with spines to catch against the sweet-fruit pine if she lost her balance.

  Unar stood in the room, laden with tributes, where the bronze dish, blazing, floated in the shallow pool, and swept her eyes across the tangle of offerings.

  “Where is the cloth, Holy One?” she asked. Odel, behind her, didn’t reply, and when she turned to face him, she took an involuntary step back.

  The chimera filled the doorway to the Temple.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  THE DEMON rippled and flexed its claws.

  “How has it come here?” Unar asked without thinking; it was obvious how the chimera had come into Canopy. Odel had torn a hole in the barrier because she had asked him to.

  “Forget about finding the tribute,” Odel said without taking his eyes from the mesmerising glow of the chimera’s twin bulbs. He stood between her and the beast with the taper in one hand, the other hand relaxed at his side, and he’d sent his Bodyguard, his only real protection, to Ehkisland.

  “I can use Audblayin’s power to—”

  “I forbid you to use Audblayin’s power in my realm. In any case, other than the barrier itself, magic will not affect a chimera.”

  “Airak’s lantern held it at bay.”

  “Did it? Did you see it turned back by the lantern? Or did you see a demon playing with you, as a monkey plays with an injured bird? You carried chimera skin on your person and your magic was spent. It couldn’t be sure what you were. But now it knows.”

  “But the lanterns protected the dovecote from demons.”

  “Other demons, perhaps. Not chimeras. They are ancient creatures, close kin to the Old Gods. You said the woman, Kirrik, was a sorceress; a soul-switcher. If she spoke true, it’s likely that she gained that power by merging her bones with those of a chimera; the stench of that foul deed would be itself enough to keep other chimeras away.”

  Unar wanted to laugh. If chimeras could smell past deeds, it was a wonder this one wasn’t repulsed by her, too. She scrabbled in the mound of tributes for a tasselled spear and a costly, inscribed sword with an ivory handle, hefting them in her hands.

  “I’ll distract it,” Unar said. “You can go to the king of Odelland. Order his soldiers to go after Kirrik.”

  “You can’t kill it, Gardener Unar,” Odel said sadly, “and this king would not spare a single soldier for the defence of a niche not his own. You must go after Kirrik. Perhaps we’ll meet again in my next life.”

  And he blew out the taper with a gentle breath, just as the bunched chimera leaped at him, teeth bared.

  Odel staggered backwards a quick dozen steps with the beast’s jaw closed on his shoulders and neck. The chimera followed furiously on its hind legs, tail lashing the floor. Unar circled sideways around them, sword and spear still feebly raised, watching with dismay as the god crashed backwards into the pool and burning branches tipped from the bronze bowl over both of them.

  “Holy One!” she cried.

  “Go!” Odel shouted as he and the beast both began turning the white-hot colour of the bathtub right before it shattered. The chimera had let go of him, god’s blood on its black teeth, trying to back away, but Odel’s arms were locked around its neck and he whispered fiercely in the place where its ear should have been.

  Unar dropped the weapons and ran.

  She ran through a night that beat with the overwhelming percussion of frog song until her bleeding feet screamed. Odellanders stared at her as she pushed past them, but nobody hindered her flight from the Temple. She was crying again.

  Another god, dead because of me. Everything I touch turns to poison. Everyone I try to save turns to dust.

  Would Odel’s power still keep baby Ylly from falling, if the chimera destroyed him? Or was Audblayin made even more vulnerable by his imminent death? What if Kirrik’s people threw Audblayin out another window, with nobody waiting to catch her this time, and she did not float?

  Unar stopped to rip more sections of her skirts away and bind her feet in them as best she could. She’d gotten turned around somehow. This wasn’t the road she’d travelled before, and this late at night, only a few unlucky slaves still laboured along the lower paths.

  She tried to control her breathing. Tried to feel her connection to the Garden. She couldn’t, immediately panicking that despite everything, Kirrik had managed to cut the emergent down.

  There.

  There it was.

  Unar took another deep breath. The Garden was still there. She knew which way to go. Ignoring the pain in her feet, she flew along the streets of Canopy, across the border into Ehkisland. There was an autumn market there, being unshuttered and stocked in the dark by slaves and the stricken, which shouldn’t have opened until the
true end of the monsoon. Unar didn’t stop to speak to them.

  Seven trees later, she found the place where Kirrik and Sikakis had come through the barrier.

  At least, bodies whose throats had been slashed by serrated spines lay around the turning that led to Ehkis’s emergent. Unar froze, indecisive, at the junction of wide, flat lateral branches. Her ears felt sharpened to points.

  She could hear only the frogs and the wind in the leaves.

  Kirrik had been far ahead of her, but how much time had she lost during her incursion into Ehkisland? Was Kirrik still battling in the rain goddess’s domain? Did Aurilon defend the submerged goddess at this very moment? Was Odel’s Bodyguard also dead? Or had Aurilon found Ehkis already missing, kidnapped, and Kirrik’s soldiers moved on into Audblayinland? There were too many possibilities, most of them awful.

  Unar stepped out along the path to Ehkis’s sacred pool, then backed up and took a few steps towards the Garden. Her magic was returned to her. She would grow a new branch through Kirrik’s black heart, before the woman even knew she was there, if only she could find her.

  Or Kirrik would use Unar’s power to triumph again. Steal her body, smash the Garden, and snatch Audblayin. She shrank from that thought as she shrank from the road to the Temple. The amulet was more than it had seemed, but could she trust it? Could she trust Understorian old wives’ tales? The amulet hadn’t saved Marram from Kirrik’s sleeping spell. Yet he had woken early. And his soul remained firmly embedded in his body.

  I can’t risk meeting her. The consequences of her soul in my body are too terrible.

  With stars wheeling overhead, Unar went away from Ehkisland, choosing the other road, over the border into Audblayinland.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  WITH THE crossing, Unar felt as though she doubled in size.

  She blinked. One hand went to Marram’s amulet. The other hand went to the place below her ribs where her magic resided; her body hadn’t grown at all, but the well of power within had deepened, and now it pulsed, exerting pressure on her to be used.

  No. I am not worthy of this.

  I was wrong about everything.

  Edax, Airak, Aurilon, and Odel died for nothing.

  Audblayin’s Bodyguard will be a man. Not me.

  Yet it was like nothing she’d felt before. It had to be something that Kirrik had done to her. Some wicked power entering her. Audblayin’s gift somehow twisted. She wouldn’t use it.

  “Boy,” she said, grabbing the elbow of a dirty child who scampered along the road with his arms stretched as if to catch the stream of flat-faced white bats overhead. “Which way to the House of Epatut?”

  “Maybe I know!” He tried to pull angrily away from her. “What’ll you give me?”

  Unar put her hand up and caught one of the creatures, ignoring the razor-teeth that it drove into her thumb.

  “I’ll give you this.”

  Eyes shining, likewise enduring the creature’s gnawing, the boy paused to wrap the bat in his jacket before scampering off again.

  “This way!” he shouted back to her, and Unar followed with her palms pressed to her sternum, as if she could keep the magic from oozing out. It had wanted to come out. It had wanted to make a cage for the bat from vines and leaves.

  It doesn’t want anything. Audblayin doesn’t want anything, except for milk and arms around her. She’s only a baby!

  Only a baby, and because of Unar, that baby had been sold away from the safety of the Garden. If Wife-of-Epatut had lost the baby she’d been carrying before the monsoon, she might have decided to love baby Ylly instead. Or, in a fit of jealousy, she might punish Sawas with hard labour.

  If only Wife-of-Epatut knew that the daughter she’d dropped in the silk market now had an Understorian name. Rescued from the mouth of a chimera, Imeris lived with three huntsmen, below the barrier, in Audblayin’s emergent.

  Old Ylly, grandmother of the child that Wife-of-Epatut knew, cared for Issi in baby Ylly’s place, while baby Ylly was cared for in the House of Epatut.

  Unar felt dizzy just thinking about it.

  Is this what you wanted, Audblayin? Was this your plan, when you chose to enter baby Ylly’s body with her first breath?

  But Audblayin couldn’t hear prayers until she became self-aware at puberty and her memories merged with those of the body she had taken. Odel had said he might see her in his next life, but he couldn’t know for sure. His domain was neither birth nor death. Anyway, Unar wouldn’t survive him long. She had one last task to carry out before she joined him, maybe in the same chimera’s jaws. The demon could very well be following her.

  “There it is,” the boy said. “In the gobletfruit tree. The whole crown, it’s his, isn’t it? My pa catches songbirds. Sold some in a cage to the wife. But if you need cloth, and obviously you do, he’s not open till morning. I’m going home.”

  Unar didn’t answer him. She stared at the gobletfruit tree. Ruddy, skin-soft arms were twisted into a labyrinth of hollowed burls each as big as most men’s houses, connected by small bridges to a hollowed bulge in the wide main trunk. Fluffy white flowers that would open with the sun and bell-shaped nuts hung everywhere. If Wife-of-Epatut had caged songbirds inside, it would be a wonder if she could hear them over the screeching of parrots that would arrive at daybreak to feast on those nuts, and daybreak was not far away.

  Unar marched up the front ramp and beat her fist on the heavy door. Smoke to keep insects out oozed under and around the oval-shape; the wheel and cocoon of the silk merchants’ guild were carved over the more humble loom symbols of the family of weavers from which Epatut had come. Unar beat on the door a second time. When it was finally thrown back, the short and dumpy human-shape that answered was too smoke-wreathed to identify for a long moment.

  “Sawas?” Unar said, coughing.

  “It’s you,” Sawas breathed. She’d gained a great deal of weight since Unar had last seen her, and without her duties in the sun, she’d reverted to a lighter golden-brown. One of her enormous breasts was shoved into the greedy mouth of a boy child black as char against her brown bosom. It couldn’t be Epatut’s son. Unar hadn’t been away for long enough. An adopted nephew, maybe. Sawas’s other, covered breast made a wet spot on the front of her fine robe; the sight of the leak made Unar press her own chest even harder, determined that none of the evil she had brought with her would enter Epatut’s House.

  “It’s me,” Unar agreed.

  “Where’s my mother?” Sawas asked. “You stole her. You killed her.”

  “She’s alive in Understorey. I didn’t steal her. I freed her.”

  “Only a fool would believe you!”

  “Sawas, listen,” Unar said urgently. “Your baby is Audblayin reborn. She’s in danger. Haven’t there been attempts to steal her? You must take her back to the Garden, right now. Where is she?”

  Can I beg for her forgiveness?

  No. She’s only a baby. She can’t hear me.

  “She’s not mine to take,” Sawas said venomously. “She’s the property of the House of Epatut, and you are a runaway thief who couldn’t pass through the Gate of the Garden if you tried. If you have no fear of exposure or arrest—and I would fear both, if I were you—then come back when the sun’s in the sky and ask the mistress for the babe yourself.”

  Sawas closed the door in her face. Unar heard the bar dropping into place. There was no time to argue. There was no time to explain. Reluctantly, she took her hands away from her sternum.

  “Wake, friend,” she whispered, feeling the great gobletfruit from its top shoots brushed by cloud-filtered starlight and the first suggestion of sunrise to the roots that fed on fish corpses, pressed beneath the restless weight of swirling monsoon water.

  The House of Epatut came to life. It had no mind of its own, but it borrowed Unar’s mind while they were merged, and the creatures that had nested in its skin and kept the wounds open made its sap quicken with resentment.

  “Be gentle with them,” Unar said so
ftly. “They haven’t given you burdens you could not bear. Only give me the child.”

  A man started screaming. His voice was soon joined by a woman’s. More screaming voices joined in.

  Branches moved. The tree groaned. Windows widened and narrowed like talking mouths. Leaves entered cavities and brushed woody corners, searching. Unar shook her head; there was no need to search. She felt every human life within the tree. She knew each one of them intimately. Sawas was with both children in the farthest room of the house, body folded protectively over body, as she and Ylly had been before birth.

  There was no question about that baby being Audblayin. The power that animated the tree flowed directly from the diminutive form, not to the Garden and then to Unar, but on the shortest path, from one to the other.

  Wood bent into wave patterns. Sawas was tossed mercilessly into the air. Ylly was carried out from underneath her mother by undulations that brought her through previously solid walls, out the door and down the ramp.

  “As you were,” Unar said sharply, and the tree contorted itself back into shape. The screaming didn’t stop, but Unar knew no one had been harmed. She pressed on her sternum to stop the flow of power, as wonderful as the connection felt. The gobletfruit became separate from her, and she became separate from the child, even as she bent to pick her up beneath the armpits.

  Ylly gazed at her with enormous eyes. She was not a baby anymore, not really. Unar had forgotten how quickly children grew. Ylly’s feet, which had been doughy, club-like, and ineffectual, now bore calluses from leather shoes, and her hair was long enough to braid.

  “You’re big,” Unar said.

  “I want Mama,” Ylly answered.

  “Mama will come later. Let’s go to the Garden.”

  She wasn’t a thief. The Gates would open for her, though not in the way she dreamt. Nothing she could do would be enough to redeem her. Aoun wouldn’t welcome her with his arms around her. She would not be a Bodyguard, and she would not fly. But Audblayin will be safe.

  Then she smelled it. Ozone in the air. She heard the crack of lightning. Felt the flow of a different river of power, this one coming all the way from Airakland.