Aforis.
Clutching Ylly to her chest, she began to run again.
Drawn to the screams of the occupants, people had come to stare at the House of Epatut. Perhaps they’d seen her pick up the baby disgorged by the house itself, but none of them got in her way. If they whispered to each other in her wake; if they reported to the king that the runaway Gardener had been seen; if soldiers came, then that was to her advantage. A heartbeat later, she began to shout at strangers in passing.
“Summon the guards! Rouse the army! Understorians are here!”
She didn’t stay to see if any took heed, nor did she angle towards another, taller gobletfruit which held the palace and its associated outbuildings; it must be in mimicry of the King of Audblayinland that so many wealthy merchants wanted gobletfruit crowns of their own.
Only the Garden mattered, and the blue-white blaze before its Great Gate, distant but growing larger as Unar approached.
She saw armoured Audblayinland soldiers in brown skirts and tunics wielding weapons against bare-limbed Understorians. The king’s men were here. She had rarely seen so many. Two hundred or so, and that was two-thirds of the soldiers that he commanded, with only a third left behind to protect the palace. Metal made dull sounds against bone. Some that fell screamed, but others fell in silence.
It was a battle like none the Garden had seen in Unar’s lifetime.
Unar thought the closeness of death in this moment made all the warriors’ lives blaze brighter to her magical senses. She sent threads out along the web of wooden paths, searching for Frog and Kirrik, the ones she must avoid until she could reach the Gate. If Kirrik sensed her, she might snuff her life out, stealing her body, to keep her from interfering, and then make off with Audblayin.
If only Unar had learned from the sorceress to see the future. Or somehow earned her sister’s loyalty. Two enormous men swung swords at one another right before her. Unar tried to take another path, but fighting blocked that way, too.
Lightning struck the brown-clad soldier. His skeleton glowed blue-white as he fell. The other man turned towards Unar, his sword turning with him. She skipped backwards to avoid the gleaming blade.
Only, there was no more path beneath her feet.
FIFTY-SIX
UNAR LOOKED down at nothing.
It occurred to her to try and heave the child back onto the branch, even as she tipped back and any attempted action became futile. She moved her arms briefly to throw, but the baby’s weight didn’t shift. The child wasn’t falling. Instead, under Odel’s protection, the baby bobbed like an empty barrel.
Unar clung to Ylly for her life, gasping. Another soldier had already engaged the Understorian man who had swung the sword at her. Nobody seemed to notice them floating there, to one side of the renewed battle. The men were too busy fighting for their lives. Unar’s kicking shin, spines extended, finally found the path. Writhing, she used the anchor point to draw herself and Ylly back to safety.
Thank you, Odel, she thought sacrilegiously.
Lightning struck, again and again.
Kirrik’s work, or Frog’s. There was no way for Unar to fight back without attracting their notice. She had no choice, though, and so there was no more need for her to stick to existing paths. Her power flowed in the trees, and the trees were in her. She was the pathway.
Merging her will with the tallowwood, Unar knew several things simultaneously. One, the home of the three hunters was sealed against intruders. The fishing room was flooded. Oos’s life force moved restlessly within the breathable space, a pale blob of tenuous power in Unar’s awareness. Esse, Bernreb, Marram, Hasbabsah, Issi, and the older Ylly were there, too. The bones of the lizard-like dayhunter had settled to the bottom of the trap that Esse had made, while other traps held the fresher corpses of warriors whose snake-tooth magic still lingered. Those, Unar presumed to be Kirrik’s men.
Two, Kirrik and Frog, stood with their backs to the Gate. Unar found the eyes of all the fighters, all the unguarded lives, abruptly available to her. In the vicinity of the Garden, she could see what she wished. Visions spun around her, answering what it was she desired to see. Frog and Kirrik must have sensed Unar’s magic in motion, but they had neither a clear line of sight to attack her with lightning, nor any melody to steal from her lips. The danger was an attack to displace her soul. How was such a thing accomplished? Audblayin, protect my soul. Aforis, a rope around his neck, knelt between Kirrik and Frog, his head bowed and his breath wheezing through a bone of the Old Gods.
Unar hugged Ylly close as she walked forward, using the eyes in her own head once more, new path bursting to life beneath her feet. Kirrik would have no fear of the Great Gate at her back. She would know that any Servant or Gardener emerging from its protection would be easy prey for her, or for Frog. But Unar would not be her prey.
“Stand aside, Kirrik,” Unar called when she was close enough.
The tall, maggot-white, black-skirted woman met her eyes and showed her teeth. Lightning didn’t immediately stab down at Unar, which meant that Kirrik supposed she still had some hope of controlling her.
“Stand aside,” Unar demanded a second time, with no fear that her voice would be stolen and used.
Neither Kirrik, nor anyone else, would be able to borrow her power again. Seeing Aforis, kneeling and humiliated, Unar knew she would have to kill him to deny his power to Kirrik and Frog, this poor man who had loved Edax. The thought of Edax’s memory being lost with Aforis’s death fostered her own self-loathing.
Kirrik tried to intercept the flow of Unar’s magic, Understorian meshed with Canopian, through the branch beneath her feet. Unar easily fended her off.
Kirrik’s eyes widened.
Unar continued to grow her inevitable path towards the Great Gate. She saw Servant Eilif standing beneath the beautiful, ornate archway, Aoun at her right hand, other white-robed Servants around them. Unar could hardly believe her childish self had wanted to kill Eilif once. That seemed so far behind her.
Frog, too, tried to take control of Unar. When she failed, she tried again, growing visibly angrier.
“How are you resisting? What bone of the Old Gods have you stolen?”
Unar didn’t bother to tell her.
I hate myself more than you could ever hate me. You don’t really know me. True knowledge is required for true hate.
At last, when Unar and Ylly were mere paces from the Gate, Kirrik said, “Nameless commands no bone of the Old Gods, Frog. Somebody has let the secret slip. I shall have to take her before this body’s time.”
Whatever else Kirrik said, with her mouth wide and her throat vibrating, it made no sound. Her dark power coiled and struck at Unar. It felt like the first time Unar had heard Kirrik laugh with a vibration that was opposite to joy, seeming to form a tunnel to a time before trees; to draw from a formless but magnificent primordial rage. It smelled of old blood and sounded like the hiss of a chimera.
Unar had once wondered what such magic was useful for, and now that use became plain: It was intended to convey Kirrik’s soul from one body to the other.
Kirrik’s power rebounded from the bone amulet Unar wore around her neck. Marram’s amulet. They had guessed true. While Unar wore it, Kirrik couldn’t steal her body, could not displace her soul.
“Core Kirrik?” Frog asked Unar, her little face bent by rage. “No, you cannot be ’er, you cannot take ’er.” Kirrik’s tall body swayed, and Frog leaped towards Unar, beating at her with fierce fists. “I cannot serve you if you look like ’er. I hate ’er. I hate ’er!”
“I am Unar,” Unar said angrily, turning her shoulder to protect Ylly.
“I am still here, Frog,” Kirrik said from behind Frog, sounding shaken. “Very well, if you hate her so much, destroy her. We cannot use her anymore.”
Frog stepped back quickly, standing at Kirrik’s side again as if pretending she’d never left it, gripping the sorceress’s skirt in one hand like a much smaller child. “Gladly,” she seethed.
The lightning turned on Unar.
Unar was struck. No, Ylly was struck. Unar’s hair stood on end. Her teeth clenched and her muscles spasmed, but it was Ylly who was burning, dying. Unar flooded little Audblayin with desperate healing, reflecting the tiny goddess’s strength back into the blackened, breathless body until Ylly’s eyes opened, her skin unblemished and whole.
“Is that a slave’s child?” Frog’s expression was ferocious. “Have you bought your way back into Canopy with human lives? You would still rather serve this unholy Temple on your belly than be free?”
Another strike fell. Audblayin died again, and lived.
“Stop it,” Unar shouted. “Stop it, if you care so much for human life.”
More lightning. More burning. This time, a more powerful bolt, and Unar was dying, too, in too much pain to heal herself. She staggered. Fell to her knees. Something touched her, causing more agony. Another lightning strike? Blows from a sword? Was her head split?
No, it was a pair of wrinkled old hands. They were very like Hasbabsah’s, only as richly brown as the soil of the Garden; they belonged to a Canopian, not a colourless Understorian. And there was dirt from the Garden under the nails. Unar could sense the spores.
Servant Eilif. The burnt sticks that had been Unar’s fingers were returned to flesh and blood by the old woman’s skill. She has to love me to heal me. How could she love one who had wished to kill her? Unar tried to push Ylly into the curve of the other woman’s body.
Take her into the Garden, please. Heal her. Protect her.
Eilif’s arms began to close the circle.
But then the lightning fell again, and Eilif fell with it. Into the dark, before Unar could do more than snatch at her sleeve. Ylly floated. Unar gathered her. But Eilif was gone.
A half-formed thought, of branches like spears piercing Kirrik’s heart, entered Unar’s head, but she couldn’t concentrate on it for long enough to make it happen. The branch behind her was burning. Her clothes were burning.
Everything was burning.
Then it started to rain.
FIFTY-SEVEN
UNAR HEALED the child and held her.
“You have until the count of five to crawl back down where you belong,” boomed the thunder.
I forbid you to use Audblayin’s power in my realm, Odel had said. But he hadn’t said that it wouldn’t work. Only that he had forbidden it, and Ylly, who ruled this realm, could barely speak, and so could not forbid anything.
Soldiers covered their ears, but the sound was everywhere. Unar looked into Ylly’s eyes. The child goddess and her would-be protector curled up together a mere body length beyond Kirrik’s bare feet. Raindrops darkened the enemy’s black skirts. Kirrik’s fingernails cut into her palms. Frog had eyes only for her mistress and Aforis let the bone fall while they weren’t looking.
Unar watched the bone plummet, wondering if it would land on Eilif’s broken body. She looked at Ylly again. The child should have been terrified, but she reached out to pull a yellow leaf out of Unar’s hair.
“I want Mama,” she said.
Unar kissed her, pushed the warm little head whose wounds she had healed so recently, and in rapid succession, into her armpit, and craned her neck to try to see what Kirrik was staring at.
A woman stood at the far edge of the fighting, dressed in robes so luminously kingfisher-blue that Unar could hardly bear to look at them. Her skin was blue-black, but her eyes were as sky-pale as the gleaming silk she wore. Like most goddesses and gods, her hands were gloved and her feet booted. A high collar studded with sapphires stood up around her long neck, sheathing a head of grey and indigo hair twisted into ropes like rivers running down ironbark.
Bringer of Rain.
Audblayinland soldiers who had cowered at the sound of Ehkis’s first command straightened and looked at their opponents, giving them space, clearly expecting them to flee back to Understorey now that all the rules had been broken. A goddess had trespassed in another deity’s niche. It was unheard of. The Canopians couldn’t imagine that the enemy wouldn’t be as shocked as they were and obey the very voice of the storm. In the separation of combatants, Unar finally spotted the king of Audblayinland, a fat fighting man whose belly protruded through his vest. Spines from slaves he’d captured rattled on a chain around his neck.
“One,” the thunder rumbled. The blue-clad figure’s lips had not moved. Unar saw, with her magical sight and sense of smell, the connections between the woman, the sky, and every drop of rain that fell around them.
“Ehkis,” Unar whispered. She looked for Aurilon and spotted her, camouflaged, in the shadow of a bent branch.
“Put her to sleep, Frog,” Kirrik murmured above Unar’s head. “I will divert her.”
Then everything happened at once.
Aforis twisted away from Frog. He would have fallen, taking the leash and its holder down to Floor, if rain hadn’t seemingly solidified around him. Wind howled through the trees, lifting Aforis high into the sky. Unar watched him fly upwards, and then fall with the rain towards some distant part of the forest.
Ylly, after everything that had happened, finally started crying.
Frog, who had let go of the leash, stood motionless, staring after Aforis, for a full second before seizing Ylly’s cries from out of her mouth.
“You cannot steal a goddess’s power, Core Kirrik,” Frog said, meaning Ehkis, but making a liar of herself as she prepared from Audblayin’s power the pattern of something encompassing and smothering, suited to putting everyone outside the Great Gates, besides Kirrik and herself, to sleep.
Unar soaked her senses into the tallowwood tree, and a branch erupted upwards, directly through Kirrik’s body. The sensation of the woman’s heart muscle squirming around the living wood, trying to keep beating, sickened Unar, and she heaved nonproductively over the silently screaming, struggling little girl in her arms.
And Kirrik’s soul hovered for a moment over the body that Unar had destroyed. An intangible essence, sucking light and warmth from the air, it crossed the space like an arrow and plunged into Ehkis’s body.
The rain stopped, again. It wasn’t just that no new droplets fell, but that water which had been suspended vanished as if it had never been.
“It is my power, now!” Kirrik cried triumphantly from the lips of the blue-robed goddess, but her voice didn’t boom like the thunder. Confusion crossed her beautiful features in the time that it took for Aurilon to leap out of the shadow and onto her back, curved blade in hand, already beginning a line of red across the slender throat.
The gift goes with the body. Only godhood goes with the soul.
Frog turned such a rictus of hate towards Unar that Unar knew she could no longer pretend that Frog could be redeemed. Had she really thought Frog would give in, just because her tool, Aforis, had been taken away? Had Unar really thought there was any way to keep Audblayin safe without spilling her sister’s blood?
“I love you, Isin,” she said, and the first flush of her magic through Frog’s flesh healed the cuts and scrapes Frog had received while climbing. The second flush urged even healthy tissues to begin replicating madly. Repair. Change. Grow, Unar’s magic ruled.
In Frog’s eyes, Unar saw the confused, unfocused eyes of the baby Erid had brought into the world, so different from the angry child who had tried to poison an adopted father, who had hoped to find a sister wiser than Unar had any hope of being. If only you hadn’t fallen. We could have protected one another. I could have protected you from Kirrik, and you could have protected me from my own selfishness. It wasn’t Audblayin that I was supposed to guard.
It was you.
Frog’s body was torn apart by ripe explosions of obscenely distorted muscle and bone.
Unar realised she could hear Ylly’s crying again. It was audible because nobody remained to steal the sound of it. Kirrik and Frog were dead. Murdered by her.
She kissed the cradled head, again, and whispered that all would be well.
Kirrik’s men, still stunned by the appearance and apparent assassination of Ehkis and flinching from droplets that fell from the trees, began surrendering all around her, new slaves for the king of Audblayinland. Servants emerged from the Garden, willing to heal soldiers outside of the grounds, another thing unheard of, but Unar didn’t care.
Unar crawled to the Gate and set her hand against the wards. There was no need to summon the Gatekeeper. She was home. Aoun had showed her how to open it. He had given her the key. She did what he had shown her, sowing the seed, taking a piece of it inside herself, but strangely, the wards didn’t soften against her hand. Instead, they accused her, in her head.
Have you stolen food?
Have you stolen the sovereignty of another’s body?
Have you stolen human life?
“No,” she said listlessly. It wasn’t supposed to accuse her. She was home. There was some mistake. It had to be Ylly who was keeping her from entering. Children stole things all the time. She let go of the incarnation of the goddess and beat against the wards with both hands.
“Unar,” Aoun said soothingly, shifting through the Gate to stand beside her. At his feet, Frog’s mutilated remains had left a shallow splash of blood, fat, and gristle. With one hand, he held Ylly back from the dangerous edge, ignorant of the fact that Odel’s power prevented the child from falling. With his other hand, he squeezed Unar’s shoulder. “Unar, you’re alive, you saved us, but you killed the woman and the child. You cannot enter.”
“I can,” she shrieked in his face, flecking his cheek with spittle. She beat harder against the wards, this time with her magic as well as her fists, feeling the shields made of Aoun’s magic begin to bend under the mighty, unmatched pool of power she now possessed. If he had tried to stop her, to drain her as he and Oos had once done before, she might have killed him.
Instead, he waited calmly by her side. Over and over, she planted the seed, the key, in the gateway, watched the tendrils curl out of it, only for those tendrils to wither under the weight of her crimes.
Crossroads of Canopy Page 31
