UNAR WISHED that Kirrik had killed her.
I was wrong about everything.
Edax died for nothing.
Audblayin’s Bodyguard will be a man, again, since she is born a woman. Not me.
Kirrik recognised Audblayin, baby Ylly, before I did.
I have no destiny.
Never before had she been able to see the selfishness of her own actions so clearly. She didn’t always behave in the way that the gods said a person was supposed to behave—showing kindness, consideration, obedience, humility. But the criticisms of her elders hadn’t touched her. Not while she did what was no more than necessary for her to meet her glorious fate.
Now that there was no glorious fate, she looked back on recent events as though examining the life of a stranger, and she could not love what she saw. Nobody could. No wonder Frog had chosen Kirrik.
No wonder Aoun had pushed her away.
Unar kept her eyes closed and covered her ears with her hands. She didn’t object when Sikakis dragged her by one leg off the path, to make room for the pounding bare feet of Understorian soldiers. They poured out of the dovecote as though emerging from another world, hundreds of heavy-breathers who smelled of decades of sleep.
“The Servant of Airak,” Frog panted, somewhere close by. “’E tried to kill the sleepers, too, Core Kirrik. Then ’e tried to wake the goddess. You should take control of ’im. ’E keeps gettin’ away from me, as if ’e hates ’imself more than I hate ’im.”
“Do you need more motivation than to save your own miserable life?” Kirrik said, and Unar knew from the cutting edge to her voice that she spoke to Aforis, not Frog. “I could claim a different god today. Your god. Whether he fell or not, I could use you up to find him. I could spend my men’s lives fetching him here.”
“The other Servants of Airak would kill you,” Aforis said, meeting malice with malice.
“Not if I put my soul inside your dead bones. I could walk right up to him. He would embrace me.”
“Pah! You cannot switch bodies and souls. That is the death god’s domain!”
“I could do it. But it would be wasteful. The time is right to take the others today, not Airak. Airak’s body is a young man’s; he is early in his cycle. I am patient. I can wait until age slows him.” And she petted Unar fondly with her foot as if imagining herself in the younger woman’s skin. “I can wait until his mind begins to decay. Will you obey me today, Servant of Airak?”
“I will.” Aforis sounded shaken.
“Lead the way, Sikakis,” Core Kirrik said.
When they had all gone, the branch beneath Unar stopped vibrating. Everything was still, even the wind.
No rain fell on Unar. Moisture seeped into her from the wet bark, but that was all. With her hands still over her ears, she heard her own pulse against the nothing noise of trapped air in her ears, or perhaps that was the flutter of feathers. Kirrik’s winged messengers came whatever the time; whatever the weather.
Time to roll off the edge. Time to fall. All the way to Floor, this time. No nets. No more thinking. No more thoughts.
Hands lifted her, gently. They peeled her palms away from her ears. Too big to be Frog’s hands, and Frog didn’t really care about Unar, anyway. Nobody did.
“Are you hurt?” Marram asked.
Unar opened her eyes. Marram’s fingers were covered in scars, like tiny teeth had torn into them, over and over.
“I’m hurt in my heart,” she said.
“Aside from the fact that Oos begged me to go after you, I knew you had not gone willingly.”
Oos begged you to come after me? Oos cares. But she doesn’t know how worthless I am.
“You were wrong,” Unar said, eyes still lowered. “I would’ve gone anywhere, done anything, to learn the secret of wielding magic when the gods ordained that I shouldn’t. My heart is bad, Marram. It’s rotten inside. That’s why it hurts.”
“We do not have time for that. We have got to go after them. They have cut down Airak’s emergent. They will cut down Audblayin’s emergent. The tallowwood. Our home.”
Unar raised her head. When Kirrik spoke of a path that stretched all the way to Audblayinland, Unar had imagined an extension of the great branches that held the dovecote. Nothing prepared her for the sight through the trees of a great floodgum, as thick through the trunk as the Garden was wide, sliced through a thousand growth rings and fallen, forming a road wide enough for fifty barrows to pass in each direction.
The great, creamy circle of the severed tree seemed to glow in the gloom.
“Was that Airak’s emergent?” Unar asked.
“Yes.”
“With his Temple in the crown of it?”
“Yes.”
“Did the god fall?”
“He did if he was home. Unar, stand up. We must go. I do not care about Airak. I care about my brothers.”
But Unar couldn’t care about anything except the pain that hollowed out her middle. She could no longer see the broken tree. The world was blurred by tears. Her body felt too heavy to ever stand or walk again.
“You go,” she said.
“And have that evil woman put me to sleep again?”
“She can’t. Not without me.”
“Then I need you to help us fight. We do not have magic.”
“Me neither. Not anymore.”
Marram sat back on his haunches at that.
“Is there something that will help?” he asked eventually. “Something she might have left behind in the hut? Birds? Bones? Any kind of tea that Hasbabsah might have taught you about?”
Nothing will help. Except to let me fall.
Unar wished she had been hit on the head. She wished she had amnesia. In the corner of her eye, she saw the living barrel where Edax had boiled to death. He was still in it, in memory too close to the present. Unar closed her eyes and shrank away, gasping for breath in between sobs. She wished she knew how to put the hibernating spell on herself, and even then, she couldn’t be sure that those in hibernation didn’t dream.
Death waited over the edge. She shifted her weight in preparation.
“You do not want to go down there,” Marram said quietly, catching her as she rolled. “I was only in the water down at Floor for a few minutes, but I almost did not make it to the closest tree. The ripples, you see. The water-dwellers can tell the difference between a river and a living thing falling in.”
Unar cried until her ribs hurt too much to keep heaving.
“I’m no use to you,” she croaked. “I’m no use to anybody.”
“Now, that is not true, is it? Esse said you made only the second-worst rope he has ever seen. Come on. Lean on me. I am not Bernreb. I cannot carry you if you will not walk.”
Unar leaned on him, but only because he wouldn’t leave her alone. He took her inside the dovecote, and she made no move to help or to hinder, even though the place made her sick. He found fresh fruit for them both, killed several of the birds for them to cook and eat. They tasted better than the owl. Marram put the parchments the birds had carried into the flames.
“Now,” he said when he had taken her to toilet and back to the fire, “I want you to describe to me, in detail, what the process is for passing through the light of those lamps. I can see they are no ordinary, light-giving lamps.”
“They keep away demons,” Unar told him dully. “Lightning strikes whatever wanders into the circle of light. Although they seem not to burn the branches that they rest on. Kirrik had a thing like a basin on a stick for putting over them, for quenching the light.”
He left her for a while, then, ransacking the writing room and the other rooms in search of the bell-shaped bowl on its long rod. Unar stared at the flames.
“It is not here,” Marram admitted hours later.
“She’s taken it with her,” Unar agreed.
“If I cut through the branch, will the lantern fall? Or will it float, like the bones do?”
“I don’t know. What bones?”
“There were little pieces of bone, no bigger than grape seeds, wrapped in chimera skin and stowed under her bed. When I shook them out of the cloth, they floated, forming a shape like a dream of half a giant’s skull in dust. Can you use magic like that?”
“No.” Unar shook her head. “I told you, my magic is gone.”
“I will try to make something to replace the basin and stick, then. Maybe the bathtub. Can you help me to carry it?”
Unar shrugged and went to help him.
They dragged and pushed the copper tub all the way down the corridor. Its feet tore up the wood and its weight fell on Marram’s instep once; he shouted an oath loud enough to wake whatever poor souls still slept in the storey above.
“How did you wake up, Marram?”
He lifted his end of the tub again, and hobbled forward with it, turning it to fit it through the doorway to the writing room. Unar backed slowly away with her end, staring into the gleaming curve of its full belly. The thing was expensive. No Understorian, denied the metal-seeded fruit of Akkad’s niche, should have used such wealth in metal simply to hold water. Obviously Frog had friends in all parts of Canopy. Perhaps the bath could contain the power of Airak’s lantern. Perhaps.
“It was a mistake, I think,” Marram said. “Or the work of the Servant of Airak. I pretended to be still sleeping until the other wakened ones were gone, but the sleepers lay on the other side of me like corpses. It reminded me of a joke my brothers played on me when we were children. Left me crying because I could not wake them. Gave me a preview of their deaths.”
“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.”