INSIDE THE dovecote, half a day later, Frog sat on the edge of her bunk, projecting the lie of the distracted child, swinging her legs while practicing her letters.
Unar knew all her attention was on the two men, each bound to their respective bunks. If Aforis so much as reached for his own magic, Frog was instructed to give him a dose of it, and let Unar heal him afterwards if the punishment turned out to be too severe. As for Edax, he had until sundown to decide to sing for Core Kirrik. Unar didn’t know what would happen, then, but she was afraid for him.
“Edax. Please.”
He wouldn’t even look at her.
“You heal ’im better than anyone you healed before,” Frog said conversationally. “I thought Core Kirrik had killed ’im, that last time. With the hot coals and the poker.”
Unar flinched.
“I’ve brought food and water for them. Shall I call the men to untie them?”
“I do not need the men,” Frog said scathingly. “Untie them yourself. I promise not to let them hurt you.”
Frog would steal Unar’s magic, too, if it seemed like Unar might help Edax to escape. When Unar had asked Kirrik to fulfil her side of the bargain by answering her questions, Kirrik had laughed and said Unar could wait until Edax had retrieved the Talon.
Unar’s hands shook as she unlaced the leather bindings that held his wrists to the support post of the bunk above his. She tried to pull him into a sitting position, with his ankles still bound, but he resisted, and when she put a goblet of water into his hands, he threw it down.
“I don’t need water, Gardener,” he said. “I am the rain.”
“Feed the other one,” Frog sneered. “This one will die of pride.”
Aforis, whose failed escape attempt several hours ago had ended with him setting fire to his own internal organs, took the porridge and water with hands that shook even more than Unar’s.
“You think what she’s doing is right, then?” Unar asked Frog.
Frog sneered again.
“When you have lesser numbers, you must do things the other side has no need to do.”
“That doesn’t answer the question. This isn’t right, Isin.”
“You call me that when you want me to take extra notice of what you say. But when you say it, I hear only the wind. You speak to the dead. Maybe the dead will take notice of you. Maybe the god of the dead will hear you, loyal Canopian that you are.”
Was she a loyal Canopian? A loyal Canopian wouldn’t have attacked a Servant of Airak or the Bodyguard of Ehkis. Yet she’d done it so she might win free, to protect Audblayin. She had spines like an Understorian now, but being in the dovecote repulsed her. It was a place of pain, a container of suffering.
“I fell while trying to save a slave,” Unar pointed out.
“And now you are one. But at least you are a slave to the cause of justice.”
“She promised to tell me what I wanted to know.”
“I heard no such promise from ’er lips.”
Frog used Unar’s next words to tie the two men up again. She didn’t even look up from her ink and parchment.
“Go to Core Kirrik,” she said. “Tell ’er the Bodyguard will not change his mind.”
Unar looked at Edax again.
“Edax,” she said with the same hopelessness with which she had called out to Marram. “Please!”
She might as well have been talking to the dead. He didn’t understand what kind of a woman Kirrik was. Her cold ruthlessness. Just like Unar’s mother. The day little Unar had spilled the expensive lantern oil, kicked it over because she was chasing butterflies, she had begged Father not to tell his wife. Please, Father! Her short little arms had gone around his knees, to try to stop him from going to Left Fork, where a strike that Airak hadn’t prevented had killed one of the trees. Fuel-finders from all over would be going to take it apart, cutting charred homes away from under the feet of the families of the departed, but she hadn’t cared about that. She’d only cared about not being alone when Mother came home.
Uranun had looked down at her, she’d thought then, with the eyes of the dead. He’d taken one stride, breaking apart the grip of her little hands, and left without a word.
Here, now, Edax didn’t stir.
Unar went to Kirrik. Waited until the older woman finished placing the rolled parchment in the clutches of a small green parrot and sent it on its way. When Kirrik turned her ghastly, pale, mad expression on Unar, it was easy to imagine the wrathful Old Gods had taken possession of her woman’s body, that there was nothing of reason or compassion left at all.
“Frog says to tell you that the Bodyguard won’t change his mind.”
Kirrik steepled her fingers. She took the god’s ear bone from the table, unfolded her leather umbrella, and led Unar outside.
“Spin, my spider,” Kirrik said, and Unar blew on the bone flute.
Out of the path, a wooden barrel began taking shape. It was all of a piece and part of the living wood. Bodiless, Unar rode the wave of unheard melodies, yet at the same time, she smelled the tacky floodgum sap, as she would have when performing magic in the Garden, and was distracted by the combination, as though two opposite ends of her nature were finding a way to knit together. Almost as soon as the continuous walls of the barrel rose, rainwater began to fill it. Kirrik stopped when the vessel was chest-high and just as wide.
They stood together silently while water fell around them.
“Not fast enough,” Kirrik mused. “Fetch water in a bucket and fill it.”
Unar bowed her head and went inside. Rainwater from the dovecote’s flat roof was channelled into a holding tank behind the bathroom and kitchen. She trudged back and forth for an hour or two, filling a pair of buckets on a frame, carrying them on her shoulders and then tipping them into the new pool Kirrik had made.
When it was full to the brim, Kirrik sent Unar to fetch Frog, Sikakis, and the two prisoners. Frog and Sikakis took Aforis with them from the bunkroom first, leaving Edax alone with Unar for a brief interval.
“I have to help her,” Unar said. “I have to help her, to win my freedom and save Audblayin.”
“The moment you stop helping her,” Edax said, meeting her eyes at last with his pain-emptied ones, “you’ll become her. If you want to save Audblayin, you’d better cut your own throat with those spines, before they heal and you become a fit shell for her black soul to crawl into. The gift goes with the body. Only godhood goes with the soul.”
Unar didn’t understand him. She stood, mystified, while Frog and Sikakis returned to untie Edax from the bunk.
“Keep up, Unar,” Sikakis grunted as he dragged Edax down the corridor.
Outside the dovecote, the sun was almost down. The grey cloud-light seen high above in tiny patches between the trees had turned bruise-yellow, and the blue-white lanterns that kept demons away were too low on their branches to light the surface of the water in the pool. There, raindrops made small gilded circles before fading so that Unar couldn’t see them at all.
“Put the Bodyguard in the water,” Kirrik ordered, and Sikakis moved to comply.
Edax came to life, thrashing, straining for the edge again. There was fear in his eyes that Unar had never seen before, and it was contagious. She turned to go inside, but Kirrik’s hand flashed out and seized a handful of her shirt.
“Stay. There is a thing about Bodyguards that you do not know. Every one of them has a private means of communication with his mistress. For the rain goddess, whenever she is immersed in water, her Bodyguard feels whatever she feels. It is so he can sense that she is safe while she sleeps. Most often, she feels nothing. She is rarely wakened at the bottom of her lake. What fool would disturb her rest?”
Sikakis wrestled Edax over the edge of the pool. Once he was in it, Kirrik motioned for Unar to spin again. Unar’s knuckles whitened on the ear bone, but she didn’t raise it to her lips.
“What are you—”
Kirrik seized her words and the rim of the water-filled pool began to grow closed, stopping just short of a complete seal, holding Edax by his neck in the water. He lifted his desperate gaze to Unar.
“Jump,” he said. “Jump, now!”
“What my little birds have discovered,” Kirrik went on, smirking, “is that this bond between goddess and Bodyguard goes both ways. When he is immersed in water, in her element, in turn, the Lady Ehkis feels what he feels. Did he tell you she was ignorant of his little excursions? Did he tell you so while he took you under the water, so that she could share in all those delicious sensations?”
“No,” Unar said. They hadn’t been together underwater. Only in the open air. But Aforis stared in horror at Edax.
“Jump, little Gardener,” Edax said again, clearly. “Please!”
Unar remained still. She refused to abandon Audblayin, but she couldn’t see any other way to stop what was about to happen. Kirrik planned to reach through Edax to harm his goddess. He wanted Unar to sacrifice herself to protect Ehkis. Just as Unar had sacrificed him to try to protect Audblayin. If Unar jumped, Kirrik wouldn’t be able to use her.
“You are talking to the wrong tool,” Kirrik informed him, just as Frog seized Aforis’s power. Aforis’s lips moved, making no sound as he attempted to speak to Edax, and Frog did something to the water that Edax was trapped in.
Edax gritted his teeth. An agonised sound still escaped him. Unar heard the muffled thuds of his clawed feet kicking the inside of the wooden vessel. He twisted, and the skin of his neck tore and bled. Aforis shouted in dismay, but the louder his objections, the more power Frog had to use.
It wasn’t until Unar saw the steam rising that she realised Frog was boiling Edax alive. Trying to hurt him so badly he would agree to be their tool. Trying to hurt his goddess so badly that he would agree to be their tool.
“Sing,” Kirrik shrieked at him. “Sing, wake your bones, agree to fetch the Talon for me, and your goddess will feel no more pain.”
Clouds of steam erupted around Edax. Aforis clawed at his own face in an attempt to hold the sound of his involuntary shouts inside himself, to keep Frog from using them. Unar found herself screaming, too, though nobody bothered to use her screams. Her magic couldn’t be used for boiling water. Only the magic of the lightning god was good for that. When the steam cleared, Edax’s eyes were glazed and his head lolled to one side.
The rain stopped. There could have been no surer sign that the rain goddess had endured a terrible hurt. Edax was not resting. He was not unconscious.
“You killed him,” Kirrik cried, and whirled to strike Frog, hard, across the face.
“Not I, Core Kirrik,” Frog protested, sprawled on the path, nursing her cheek. “There was a surge from the prisoner, I lost control for a moment, and ’e—”
Kirrik struck Aforis, too, though he was not thrown to the ground by the force of it. Nor did he grin at her, or show any sign of triumph. His shoulders heaved, but Unar thought he was crying, not laughing.
She might have been crying, too. Was it tears, or rain? No, the rain was stopped. It stopped. Is the goddess dead, too? Is that how closely they are connected? Her face felt hot, but maybe that was the steam, the heat from the human cauldron.
Cut your own throat with those spines. Before they heal. A fit shell for her black soul.
At last, she admitted to herself what Edax had been trying to tell her. Kirrik would never reveal how to get through the barrier or how to keep her power to herself. The spines she had given Unar were intended for her own use; Unar was her backup body, spare parts, a vessel to hold her soul when her present body became too old or injured.
Frog’s multiple warnings about attacking Kirrik flashed through her mind. You want to kill ’er, but you would not like what would happen if you tried. Unar put her hand into her pocket and squeezed the tooth through the chimera-cloth blindfold. Now was the time. Unar could break every bone in Kirrik’s body. Destroy her. Rend that body beyond healing.
But Kirrik would take my body. Push my soul into the ether. Wear my face and lull my friends into lowering their defences. It’s no use. I stole this bone-breaking weapon for nothing.
“What is your plan, now, Core Kirrik?” Sikakis asked in a low, troubled voice.
“My plan, Core Sikakis? My plan?”
“The monsoon is over.” Sikakis gestured in the direction of the empty sky. “You’ve weakened the rain goddess. Your informers spoke true. You could take advantage of this. No Canopian army will be prepared for an assault more than a month early. They’ll be dozing in their barracks. Of course, we’re also unprepared. It will take time to train the men you have to work in units, to gather and secrete in strategic places the supplies they’ll need to sustain repeated assaults. And we don’t have the Talon.”
Kirrik stared at him, mouth open and chest heaving, the umbrella cast aside, her fingers crooking like claws and her spines extended from their sheathes, quivering.
“We still have these two,” Frog pointed out shakily. “The man got the better of me, but ’e is a sharper weapon than any old bone, if Kirrik wields ’im. If the rain goddess is injured, let us go and capture ’er right now!”
“We should wait,” Sikakis said. “Consolidate our new gains. Explore our—”
“I am tired of waiting,” Kirrik screamed suddenly. She seized Unar, turning her, kicking her in the back of her knees to force her down. “Frog, where is the blindfold?”
Frog’s tiny hands dipped into the pocket in Unar’s skirts. They pulled out the chimera-skin cloth and unwrapped, not the powerful tooth of the Old God that Unar had stashed there, but the useless amulet that Marram had been wearing when he arrived at the dovecote.
“Did you think I did not see you take it?” Frog whispered. “I took it back. So dank, Unar.”
“Give it to me!” Kirrik snatched the blindfold from Frog, letting the amulet fall; it snagged by its cord on the rough bark of the branch. As soon as the chimera cloth tightened over Unar’s eyes, the residue of the magic that had killed Edax became invisible to her. Kirrik’s spittle flecked her ear. “Play as you have never played before, tool.”
Unar had not jumped to her death. She had no choice but to play. Whatever it was that took shape in Kirrik’s hands, she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t sense it. Only feel the powerful flicker of her weightless mote-self, between hot and cold, up and down, swiftly accelerating heartbeat and silence. Perhaps Kirrik was killing everyone around her. Perhaps she was killing no one.
Perhaps she was waking all the warriors in her house, preparing for war.