ODEL’S EMERGENT stood high above the other great trees.
Imeris took a moment to gaze down at the green patchwork. It looked so different from above. She was used to gazing up at it from deep down among sombre, towering trunks.
The gaps between leaves were dark instead of cloud- or sky-bright, their shifting and flailing movement hypnotising to watch. Wind and the foraging of creatures four- and two-footed made the many shades of citron, lime, emerald, beryl, and gleaming greenish-black ripple like the fur or feathers of some breathing thing.
She couldn’t see any boundary to the forest in the east, west, or south. To the north, a half circle of pale yellow plain divided Odelland from the edge of Audblayinland. The Floorians who lived there, Imeris supposed, must see each other in daylight all the time. She remembered the feel of the Bird-Rider at her back.
She remembered her clumsy attempt at gliding down to kill Kirrik.
Now, as then, her spines trembled in their long bone sheaths.
Today I will win.
Aurilon will share her secrets.
And when I have learned them, Kirrik will not escape from me again.
After her long, nightmare-filled sleep in Middle-Father’s dwelling, she felt Oldest-Father’s death, not as proof that Kirrik’s defeat was impossible, but as part of his final command to her and her final responsibility to him.
Odel’s Temple above her was a great edifice of golden sweet-fruit pine heartwood. Formed by magic or metal tools into the shape of a scaly carp balanced on its parted lips, it rested where the growing shoot of the tree should have been, at the apex of a white spiral plank-stair around the outside of the tree connecting a handful of wide branch paths. Below the stair was a gaping, east-facing tree hollow, Odel’s Test, where parents had once flung their children over the edge to be sure of the god’s protection.
The tree’s arms, cast wide around it, formed a picturesque frame but offered minimal shelter from the wind. The Temple’s wavy fishtail stuck up far beyond the drooping fingers of fine moss-green needles and tiny, scaly, branch-tip fruit. Imeris walked along one of those arms, flattened on top into a smooth pathway with a low, woven rail of pegs and vines. She had borrowed a pair of her father’s loose Canopian trousers to cover the creases in her shins where her spines lay.
Her forearm spines, she didn’t wish to cover. Inside the fish-shaped Temple, she took off the pretty embroidered robe that Audblayin had given her and draped it over the edge of a vast, floating dish where offers were given to the god. Her sleeveless tunic freed her arms but covered her good climbing harness so that enemy hands couldn’t grasp it.
She tried not to feel naked without knives, traps, cords, or poison.
Your own Understorian body, Horroh had said, is all that you need. Trust it.
Several slaves were there, setting tributes from their masters on the dish and whispering the names of young children, but the god himself and his Bodyguard were nowhere in sight. The internal staircase that led down to Odel’s Test had been covered by a perfectly fitted sweet-fruit-pine plug, but Imeris knew where it was.
She waited until she was alone in the Temple with the hovering offerings and the blue-tinged lanterns.
Then she knelt on the floor, set her spines into the fitted puzzle piece, and pulled it open like a trapdoor.
The stairwell wasn’t lantern-lit, but yellow sunlight entered it from somewhere, most likely the outer opening into the hollow below. Imeris slipped quietly into Odel’s Test, pulling the trap shut over her head, listening intently.
Aurilon owned a colour-shifting chimera skin, too, and she used it, not for gliding, but to move invisibly through the darkness. It was the skin of the demon that had killed Odel’s previous incarnation, ending a middle-aged man’s life but not the eternal soul of the god.
A curse had fallen upon Aurilon at the chimera’s slaying.
All killings of chimeras ended in curses.
But it hadn’t affected Aurilon so far, not where Imeris could see, anyway. Odel had told her that curses were patient.
Turning a corner, she found Odel’s Test newly repurposed as a kind of library or scholarly study. The gaping eastern hollow did admit the morning light and permit a view of supplicants approaching the Temple. On the other side of the much-widened space, a west-facing annexe like a beehive had been built onto the side of the tree, with tall, elliptical glass windows.
Odel sat behind a desk in the annexe. His black hair was in short twists, and his head dipped low over parchment. According to Aurilon, Odel’s previous, older incarnation had been prone to sleeping by day and wandering restlessly at night by taper light. The smoke and smouldering heat of the taper had provided a focus, a way to help him distinguish between visions and reality.
This younger version had a keen instinct for recording histories. He valued ink galls and a comfortable chair over walking boots and silks. Imeris admired his physique, the strong hands, ink stained, so often covered by gloves, bare to her scrutiny for once. In this place, contrasting with the way he appeared in public, he cared only to wear a robe unlaced, uncrossed and slipping away from his bare brown shoulders. Imeris could make out the hem of a short wrap skirt covering his thighs. That was all.
There was no sign or sound of the Bodyguard.
It was warm in the room. The glass windows, Airak-made, didn’t open and the air was still. If Odel were to cover the open hollow with a curtain, the study would become an oven.
“You are one day late,” he said pleasantly, without looking up from his work. It appeared to be a copy of an older, torn manuscript: On the Flourishing of Temperate Trees in the Event of Concurrent Weaknesses of Sun and Rain Goddesses. Beneath it, she glimpsed an unrolled scroll titled Predicting the Rare Occurrence of Snow in Winter: A Study of Airak’s Emergent.
Not answering immediately, Imeris moved silently into the circle of direct sunlight, taking care that her face remained shaded, searching the dim corners for Aurilon’s camouflaged presence.
“There were complications, my lord,” she said after she’d completed half the circuit.
“Remember, Imeris. If you touch my bare skin, your life is forfeit.”
“I know the laws of Odelland, my lord.” She slid across the smooth wood, searching.
Searching.
“I’m sick of the pair of you breaking my things.”
“She finds it entertaining to watch me struggle to avoid you, my lord.”
“It’s not entertaining,” Odel said, frowning but still not looking up, “to execute someone for no reason except that they’ve brushed up against an immortal.”
“Could you not change this unjust law, then, my lord?” Imeris cracked open a cabinet, peered inside, and found it full of shelves and papers.
“I can’t change all the laws at once.” He set the quill in the well and raised his hazel eyes at last. The honeyed light turned them the colour of tallowwood; the colour of old amber. “They already take any opportunity to murder me. Can you imagine if I stirred them up too much? Aurilon tells me you’re quite free with the person of Audblayin, but then again, your sister lives in her Garden behind her Gates and wards and is generally safer than most.”
Imeris circled again, still keeping her back to the blinding sun.
“Perhaps you could tell me where your Bodyguard is, my lord. I could try to draw the battle out of your holy Temple—”
She felt the slight give beneath her feet in the instant before the second trapdoor opened. As she started to fall, Imeris’s instinct was to put her spines out and stick to the lip of the opening.
Aurilon had used her instincts against her before. Imeris made two parallel bars of her forearms in front of her face, protecting her head. She dropped, unresisting, into darkness.
Impact with the smooth, flat floor came a few seconds later. The trapdoor closed, cutting off the last light. Sealed inside, as Kirrik sealed Oldest-Father into the windowleaf tree. No. Focus. Imeris rolled backwards. Was the trapdoor mechanical or operated by hand? If Aurilon had waited near the ceiling and heard Imeris’s near-silent steps, the assumption would be that Imeris would roll forwards in the direction she’d been facing.
She’d made a trapdoor herself, once, in preparation for their second duel. Now she’d fallen into one. Careless! Remember what has gone before!
This was their fifth fight. For every move and countermove that Aurilon made and Imeris remembered, the reverse was also true.
They hadn’t fought in the dark before, though. Who had the advantage? Aurilon might have assumed it would favour her slithering, constant-contact fighting style, but then again, Imeris was Understorian and she’d visited with the Bird-Riders.
The clarity that reduced the enemy to moving parts instead of persons took over Imeris’s mind. She moved into the steps of the form called Floor, slashing the air with her spines. She felt for the shape of the chamber with her feet, finding its circumference. It would be deliberately deceiving. She must make out any obstacles quickly, before her opponent could drive her into them. Ropes. Nets. Stumbling blocks. Allowing the Bodyguard to choose the battleground was a serious mistake.
No, she admonished the weaker self who wished to remind her of recent losses. There is no sorceress, no family defenceless in the dark. There is no past or future. Only here and now, and I am Imeris, a Heightsman of Loftfol.
She heard a sound like splinters lifting behind her.
Imeris spun and slashed again, pinning Aurilon’s fingers against the wooden wall with her spines.
Not fingers. A shock ran through her. She’d hit something harder than a human hand. Chimera claws.
She had time to realise Aurilon’s hand had escaped the climbing glove, time to calculate where the Bodyguard’s knees had hung and to guess where her opponent’s feet would fall. Shoulder to the wall, Imeris kicked out behind her with a leg that was sweeping, not cutting, interrupting what could have been a gracious recovery by the Bodyguard.
Aurilon gave a whoof of emptied lungs as she landed, facedown, on the floor.
This year, I will be the victor. Imeris dropped to one knee, following the sound of the exhalation with a driving fist, all her force behind it. Keep the fight short, Horroh had advised. Keep your secrets to yourself.
The blow connected only with empty floor, splitting the skin over Imeris’s first two knuckles.
Aurilon’s exhalation had been a decoy, and Imeris had fallen for it. Her second mistake. Aurilon’s huge hands which, every meeting, had sought a grip on Imeris’s clothes, now closed on spineless elbow joint and the back of her collar.
Imeris flew through the air, away from the wall. But Aurilon had thrown her before. An attempt at locking Imeris’s extended arm was how the Bodyguard habitually followed through. Aurilon’s weight lay across Imeris’s hips, her hands at Imeris’s wrists, again seeking holds where there were no spines. Imeris curled her arm, spines withdrawn, against her body, to prevent the painful, immobilising hold.
She kicked hard against the floor to turn over. Now the Bodyguard lay beneath her, naked and slippery, no softness where her breasts should have been, yet without the flayed-to-muscle feel of a fighting man of Loftfol.
Imeris swung her right forearm, spines extended, at the Bodyguard’s face, and again Aurilon managed to unbalance her so the spines stuck in the wooden floor.
As Imeris moved to withdraw them, Aurilon’s left shoulder wedged the spines against the grain. The seven snake fangs curved downwards. They were intended to hold Imeris’s full weight against the vertical trunk of a tree. Without raising her elbow, she couldn’t retract them. She struck towards the Bodyguard’s temple with her left elbow, but with her weight removed from Aurilon’s other shoulder, she felt both the Bodyguard’s arms snaking around hers like lianas.
Like sorceress-possessed vines. Imeris imagined her eyes popping as Oldest-Father’s had. She smelled Temple incense and Aurilon’s sweat; she imagined the smell of windowleaf sap. In a single motion, Aurilon flipped them both again. Aurilon’s thighs now held Imeris’s neck and shoulders to the floor. Between them, Imeris’s arm extended from Aurilon’s crotch to her throat.
The last time this had happened in one of their duels, Imeris had tried to twist her thumb downwards, to roll backwards, bend her elbow safely, and slip away.
This time, angrily, she tried to turn the blade of her hand downwards, prepared to sink her spines straight into Aurilon’s rib cage. To Floor with first blood. To Floor with duels to submission. I cannot lose again. I do not have another year to spare!
Before she could do it, she felt her elbow joint pop. It was agony, but, impotence spurring her to a blind rage, she tried to ignore it, to keep turning the limb, to push out her spines.
The bone in her forearm where her spines were embedded snapped.
She screamed with pain and fury.
Aurilon released her. Rolled away. Imeris lay there, still screaming. A few paces back from her, Aurilon struck a spark, blowing a taper to life.
She stepped forwards, looking down at Imeris. Her face was wet with perspiration but relaxed and expressionless. Now the shape of the room was clear. It was gently curving and bare except for a rough ledge at head height around the room. No tricks. No traps, apart from the one that had brought her down from the Test. Just two women, a pair of chimera-claw gloves, and an ineffectual curse that was yet to afflict Odel’s victorious Bodyguard.
“You should have stopped when it was only dislocated,” Aurilon said smoothly.
“Did I surprise you?” Imeris managed to demand through gritted teeth.
“No. You idiot. Did they teach you that at Loftfol? Sacrifice your arm, for what?” She shook her head. “Something a man would do. I am disappointed. But not surprised.”