AIRAK’S EMERGENT fanned up and out of the canopy like a charred, skeletal bat wing.
Of the thirteen Temples in the teeming treetop city, Airak’s was the only one that was dead. Even the death god, Atwith, was connected to the soil of Floor through the living body of a great bone tree. The fingers of this blackened hand were floodgum branches which had once been white and covered in long, leathery leaves, now hollowed spears where lightning bolts entered through the open culminations at the command of unseen adepts wielding magic within.
“Leaper will be sleeping now,” Imeris said, stopping on the twisting gobletfruit road. “Does he know about Oldest-Father? Has somebody told him?”
Sunlight flooded the stretch of Airakland ahead of them. Many homes and workshops were in other, lesser floodgums just as blackened and scarred as the emergent. Glassmaking was not confined to the Temple. The king of Airakland’s palace was similarly visible, its pale, magic-sculpted wood roundly cloud-shaped with windows shaped like jagged bolts to let the blue lantern light shine through. It, too, was hosted by a floodgum, but that tree was alive, draped in wet, gleaming foliage of dark grey-green. Tree and palace were turned rowdy by yellow-tailed black cockatoos ripping up the bark for beetle larvae and screaming at each other over territorial incursions.
Imeris noted the way the birds dropped underneath the branches, holding on by a single foot or clawed toe, then opened their wings to catch the air and sail away. It was so effortless.
She remembered pushing off the tangle of windowleaf stems, in so much of a hurry to join her fathers she’d felt like she was already standing with them against Kirrik. Then the swish and jerk of the tangled wing tip. The pendulum swing. The crunch and judder as she hit the trunk.
Disgrace. Death.
“I told him about Esse,” the Godfinder said, a deepening of her frown, quickly smoothed away, the only sign of her own feelings. “I passed on to Leaper what your sister said, which was that she was pleased to announce his glorious rebirth, in any case. You Understorians don’t take it very hard when warriors die, do you? Everybody seems to expect it. You’ll see Leaper after dark. Come on. I’m not as fit as I used to be. I can’t run around Canopy all day like you young things.” It was a joke. Imeris and the Godfinder were physically about the same age, early in their third decades of life.
Imeris followed Unar again along the gobletfruit path. They took two turnings along floodgum paths, then skipped along the prickly, seldom-used branch path of a false palm heavy with huge, head-sized nuts.
That branch ended at the hollowed node of a scented satinwood tree. An arch in the horizontally striped bark admitted them to a sheltered crossroads where paths radiated out in two dozen directions. Traders, eager faces lit by the omnipresent blue lanterns, had sprung up around the edges, and one old woman, perched on a pyramid of grain-filled sacks, called out to Unar.
“Your ugly little children need a feed, then, Godfinder?”
Unar laughed and shook her head as they passed. The old woman frowned at Imeris’s bandage-wrapped arm and Understorian tunic and said no more. The satinwood branch they walked out on from the crossroads, ten paces wide and flattened on top by the power of the wood god, Esh, led in a straight, level line to the innocuous-looking gate of Unar’s flowerfowl farm.
Imeris couldn’t hear any of the two hundred birds clucking, pecking, or fussing. That was because they flew down to Floor during the day, a drop of some six hundred human body lengths, to gorge on mineral-rich mud and mate with the heavy, Floor-bound, mature male birds.
When evening came, the hens returned to the farm to eat grain and roost for the night in their woven wicker pens. Unar had made the pens to protect them from owls, pythons, and spotted cats. The birds soon learned to be grateful when the Godfinder locked the gate.
Imeris halted before the entrance with Unar at her side. She hadn’t been to the farm before, only heard stories of the flowerfowl and their adventures from Leaper. The gate spanned the whole width of the road. Everything that lay beyond it belonged to the Godfinder.
It appeared to be only a simple arch with dead vines hanging from it.
“Lend me your injured arm,” Unar said. Imeris held it out to her, grimacing.
One of the dead-looking vines blushed bright green, sent out a new climbing tendril and wound lovingly around Imeris’s wrist. Magic at play, again. Imeris did not draw her arm away from Unar, even when she felt the growing shoot curl between her still-tender spines.
“What is it doing?” she asked, as if the vine had a mind of its own.
“Tasting your blood,” Unar said. “So it knows, in future, that you’re to be allowed through. It’s my thief-catching vine. Mostly for young boys after eggs, too lazy to climb for their own.”
Imeris forcibly relaxed her forearm tendons as the playful green shoot withdrew. It spiralled back around the arch, turned grey and became still. The two women walked under the arch. Beyond it, the flat branch road widened into a burl sixty paces in diameter.
If the burl was perfectly spherical when it first formed, it was now flattened on top like the road, and that was where the fences and pens waited for the flowerfowl. Pitcher plants full of drinking water grew in a ring around the circumference and steps led down from the near edge to the dwelling inside the burl.
“Be my guest,” the Godfinder said, waving Imeris ahead of her. “Choose any place to rest.”
The inside of the burl was not very much like Imeris’s trunk-hollowed home. The brownish-pink satinwood smelled like caramel, the scent intoxicating as Imeris moved further down the stairs and away from the daylight. This is what I could do. This is how I could live. The walls felt dry and rough to her tracing fingertips; they weren’t self-polishing like tallowwood. Woven hammocks hung from the ceilings of three little half rooms that came off a main room.
In the main room, a small charcoal-burning oven with a thin, diagonal, metal chimney pipe opposed a table covered in clay pots of tiny trees and moss. A suspended blue lantern replaced the blazing Understorian hearth for giving light. Cushions stuffed with feathers lay on woven blue carpets against the curved walls. Blue-painted wooden chests sat beside them. Three steep stairs at the far end descended to another sunken little half room with pipes that came through the roof to refill three tapped water-barrels. A basket of leaves for wiping sat tidily by a toilet hole and a curtain.
Imeris looked up to find Unar’s expression expectant.
“The blue light,” Imeris said, smiling, “and no fire. It seems cooler.”
Unar nodded.
“I’ll send a bird to your brother to let him know you’re here.”
“I saw no cages,” Imeris said. “No writing implements.”
Unar stripped off her sandals and put them under the table with the tiny potted trees. She went down the stairs to fill a modest copper kettle with water and set it on the stove. Then, instead of lighting the laid fire with bedded coals or by striking sparks, she took the blue lantern down from the ceiling and opened one of its glass panes by sliding it up out of the frame.
A miniature bolt of lightning struck from the blue glowing heart of the lantern into the stove. Shortly after, flames licked up around the charcoal. Unar slid the glass pane down and rehung the lantern. Imeris was amazed.
Tiny trees. A tiny, trapped storm. She half expected a tiny man to pop out from behind the cushions and prepare the ti.
“When I was teaching my flowerfowl to return safely to me,” Unar said, taking two cups out of one of the blue chests, “I used a trickle of your sister’s power to make them trust me. Other birds came to that call. Songbirds, but also those who can mimic human voices. They carry my messages to Leaper and bring his messages back to me.”
“You live in a wondrous world, Godfinder.”
“One you were born to. It wouldn’t seem strange to you if you’d stayed in it instead of falling. Anyway, with birds to carry my messages and a market at my door, you can understand how I’ve lost some of my stamina. Will you drink? Sleep? I’ll have an afternoon nap, myself.”
Imeris shook her head ruefully.
“I will take ti with you, Godfinder. Before I can sleep, though, I must practice the seven disciplines and the six flowing forms. This is a good wide space for them.”
Unar smiled.
“Suit yourself. I’ll be sawing wood in that hammock.”
Imeris assumed her host was joking. The woman had slept for seventeen years in Imeris’s home without making a sound. But after the ti had been drunk and a talking parrot sent to Airak’s emergent, the clothes washed and hung to dry and the cups put back in the wooden chest, Imeris found her immersion in the first discipline, the Discipline of the All-Body Breath, tested by the gargling horror of the Godfinder’s snores.