IMERIS OPENED her eyes to blue sky through the quandong crown overhead.
She was still in the forecourt.
The drive to move, to find the palace, was gone, and she was able to conceive the thought I have been seen by hundreds of people.
Loftfol will hear from their enslaved ex-students that I am here. One Forest has spies in Canopy also. Kirrik will know that I am here. Neither can pass through the barrier, but both can call on their agents to act. I have to hide. I have to get out of sight.
A neat-bearded man in a tall cylindrical hat crouched by her side. He wore loose silk robes patterned with a repeating toucan-pair motif, in colours that were nearly but not quite Odel’s, as was custom in Odelland. He took his broad, dark brown hand away from her chin. She felt her tongue. The slave’s mark was gone. He had used magic on her.
“Who are you?” she asked faintly.
“One who walks in the grace of Odel attends the court as king’s vizier. I am Ubehailis of the House of Ikkased, once a Servant of Odel. Nobody here knows you, slave, but the Hunt has been declared by the king of Airakland. The device points to the heart that beats beneath your weak woman’s breast, and by our law, you’re to be freed from the palace and given over to serve.” He shook his head, whether in dismay or puzzlement, Imeris couldn’t be sure.
She sat up, the scales of her armour clinking. Beside the vizier stood a wrinkled, white-haired man. He wore metal-studded leather over rainbow-hued tunic and short skirt, and he could have been Middle-Mother’s brother; he had the same wide mouth, bright gap-filled teeth and crease-cornered, amused-seeming brown eyes. His were sunken with age, though.
Soldiers of both coloured cloths whispered behind their hands. The scowling officer with the raven feathers shook the device as if he could force it to give a different answer.
“Aurilon,” Imeris said woozily. “Aurilon is the greatest hunter in Odelland.”
“Apparently not,” the Airakland officer said, still scowling.
I am free again, Imeris thought. The mark is gone, and yet again my slavery has not lasted an hour. She felt humbled. Wretchedly relieved. It was hard to concentrate on what the soldiers around her were saying.
“Kill her,” the vizier suggested, “and the device will point out another, sure enough.”
That got her attention.
“You should be content,” the king said sternly to his adviser, “that Aurilon is not called to the Hunt. Odel’s safety is imperative.”
“I’m not sure how it works, Warmed One,” the officer admitted to the vizier. “It might choose another, or it might simply leave us one person short of a hunting party.”
“You will be one short in any case,” the vizier said, straightening to his full height, pulling Imeris up after him. Their eyes were level. “Orinland will surely not supply a man to destroy the horror that its mistress has created.”
“Perhaps not,” the officer said with a crooked half smile. “We go next, and lastly, to Orinland.” He bowed deeply before the king, an unnecessary courtesy to a monarch not his own. “We thank you for discharging this obligation in such a timely manner, your majesty of Odelland. May the thirteen protect you.”
The Odelland king inclined his head. He withdrew in a stately fashion across the drawbridge into the palace, his vizier and several soldiers by his side.
“What are you called, slave?” the Airakland officer asked. He put the device away in a leather satchel, removed and unrolled a parchment, and waited, poised with a stick of charcoal, to record her name for posterity.
Only then did Imeris feel nausea returning, deeper than the relief that she’d escaped whatever fate waited for her within the walls of the palace of the king of Odelland.
I am to kill a chimera, after all. I am to join the Hunt and track a demon through Canopy.
She made a decision quickly.
If am to kill my fourth mother, I will do it swiftly and with dignity. I will take these other Hunters for the teachers that Loftfol will no longer supply me, and in the meantime, surrounded by the greatest fighters in all of Canopy, I will be safe from both Loftfol and Kirrik. There will be time to think. Time to plan my reconciliation with the school. They must listen to me. I am not the enemy. The sorceress is. She threw her shoulders back. Stood tall.
And I will teach these Canopians a thing or two, no doubt.
“I am—” Abruptly, words failed her.
Was she Imerissiremi, of the wilds near Gannak, or was she Imeris of Audblayinland? Was she Issi, daughter of Marram, Heightsman of Loftfol, or a nameless fallen child returned to win honours in the city of her birth?
“Yes?” the officer said impatiently.
“I am Imeris,” she said simply. She’d chosen. The Canopian form of her name. It didn’t sound the same forwards and back, was not auspicious for travelling in both directions. The officer scribbled it down on the parchment.
“Really?” a man’s voice boomed. “You are named after a children’s story about a giant silkworm?” He guffawed. The sound of Gannak was in his speech. A white-skinned, bare-chested brute pushed through the black-clad, black-skinned soldiers. Imeris looked up into an unfamiliar blue-eyed face even as she instinctively shifted her weight and edged back, making room for combat.
The brute had snapped-off spines: definitely a slave. He had a kite-shaped head with a short, heavy jaw, high forehead, and bow-shaped mouth. Thin, tented brows quirked as he turned side-on to her, matching her aggressive stance. Both hands went up and over his shoulder, hovering near the hilt of the longest sword Imeris had ever seen. Leather strips between his massive shoulder blades held back his long, straight, black hair.
“Who are you?” Imeris asked, feeling her spines in their sheaths. If he drew that beast of a weapon, she’d be out of his way before the blow could land, adding his blood to Horroh’s in her spine’s serrations before he could swing again.
“These are your fellow Hunters,” the Airakland officer said in a bored voice, tucking the parchment away. Imeris’s quick glances revealed even more non-black-uniformed types oozing to the fore. “I’m Captain Oniwak of Airakland, leader of the Hunt.” He slapped the back of a thin, hungry-looking fighter in red and grey with a shaved head and prominent canine teeth. “I’ve named this man my second, to take the lead in the event of my death, but I doubt the Hunt will last long. He is Eeriez of Eshland. You’ll want to seek the company of your own kind, though. Your fellow slave is Daggad, a fighting captive Understorian chosen by the device from the niche of Audblayinland. He remains the property of one of their merchants. The House of Epatut has no wards, and so it wasn’t necessary to free him.”
The brute lowered his hands and put out his tongue. Imeris eyed the loom symbol burnt into the wet pink flesh. He waggled it suggestively before he put it back in his head.
“He,” Imeris said, relaxing her stance, “is not my own kind.”
Daggad’s enormous fists went to his hips. There, hung over the short skirt and leather loincloth, he carried a round shield with a cloth-wrapped bundle stuffed into the back of it. His studded sandals looked expensive. Ugly red scars crisscrossed his fishmeat skin. He was perhaps twenty years older than she was, a survivor of many battles.
“Maybe we do not look alike, little sister,” he said, “but you talk like a child of the dark. ’Ow else did such a sweet citizen’s face get a slave’s song stuck down ’er throat?”
“Later,” Captain Oniwak barked. “Fall in, Daggad. Proper introductions come later, at the monument tree. There, the full company will receive detailed instructions on the boundaries of our mission. For now, if we march all day, we can be at the border of Orinland by nightfall.”
“I am in no ’urry to confront the Queen of Birds,” Daggad drawled, but he moved into the double line that the black-clad Airakland soldiers began forming. Imeris joined the line by the side of the Eshland Hunter, Eeriez. They linked arms at the elbow; the intent was to balance one another while running along thin branches, weapons drawn on either side in case of aerial attack.
She did it casually, as though she’d been trained in a Canopian barracks and not overheard Loftfol teachers speaking of how to counter Canopian tactics. The pair in front of her were not soldiers and didn’t manage so easily. One wore the foot-tangling sky-blue and storm-black robes of a Servant of the rain goddess. The other was a mere child, dirty-soled, dressed in a pauper’s drawstring trousers and woven bark shirt.
“We aren’t going to confront the goddess, but to claim the thirteenth member owed to us by ancient accord,” Oniwak corrected Daggad, adjusting the crossbow slung over his shoulder.
But the little boy whispered to the richly robed Servant, “Lakekeeper, when Orin hears that we mean to murder her pet beast, won’t she be angry? Maybe unleash it upon us?”
“Maybe,” the Lakekeeper whispered back kindly. Beneath his jewelled and heavily embroidered costume, he had broad shoulders and a thick neck, but no weapons visible on his person. “If she does summon it to us, the Hunt will be over very quickly. Oniwak is very good with that crossbow. You’ll have wealth and fame without ever having lifted a hand.”
And Imeris thought, Orin’s pet beast? I thought we were hunting a demon.
Besides, there was no way, short of growing eagle’s wings and flying, that they could reach the palace of Orinland before dark.
* * *
THEY SET off, trotting along high roads cleared by the captain’s omnipresent scowl.
Every two hours, the twelve Hunters and their escort of Airakland soldiers stopped at the edge of public markets to rest, share marching rations, and drink; a gourd-flask was passed around by a stumpy, bearded old man with a strange parchment stole covered in inked symbols hanging around his neck.
“Are you a Servant to a deity?” Imeris asked the first time, taking a sip from the gourd when he insisted. It tasted of nothing. She held up the gourd, puzzled, weighing it with her hand, feeling the heft and the slosh of liquid inside.
She tried to take another sip. More nothing. She’d made the motions of swallowing but couldn’t tell if she’d gotten any of the drink. The stumpy little man smiled impishly at her confusion.
How she hated magic.
“That’ll suffice,” he said. “It’s the potion of the winds. One who walks in the grace of Ulellin is no Servant, but it’s from Ulellin’s Temple that one acquired this rather valuable magically enhanced concoction. Speed can be advantageous in a hunt, wouldn’t you agree?”
Imeris stared after him as he took the gourd to the next member of the party. She licked her lips, trying to taste the so-called potion.
When she rose from her crouch to continue the march, her limbs jangled oddly. Her whole body felt lighter. Heat burned in her joints. The world seemed brighter, her vision less colourful yet keener.
She linked arms with Eeriez and they did not run, but raced. Wind whipped past her as though she guided a glider. The giant slave, Daggad, moved to the front of the column. He kept up a warning bellow that barely reached the ears of citizens ahead of the river-quick party.
“Make way for the Hunt!”
When their pace slowed, breath threatening to burst Imeris’s armour-constricted chest and pinpricks of light exploding around her, they stopped for a rest and another sip of the intangible potion before hurtling onwards to Orinland. In fact, it seemed to work better each time.
“We’re getting closer to Ulellinland,” the old man with the parchment stole told Imeris when she remarked on it. “Some deities’ magic won’t work at all outside their niche, but all of them are strongest in the seat of their own power. Our friend there, the Lakekeeper, could drown you in a deluge by his mistress’s lake. Here, he can’t even fill a cup with water.” The Lakekeeper didn’t look up from his seat on a kink in the branch two paces away, where he tended a blistered toe, but a rustle of his silks told Imeris he was listening. “We have a black-robed Servant of Atwith in our Hunting party also, though his death-touch here is but a tickle.” Imeris looked for the Servant and found him, folded patiently in on himself at a platform’s edge. “Yet the wind does not stop at the borders of Ulellinland, and if Esh could not shape wood outside his own domain, how would we live?”
Eeriez, the Eshland Hunter, broke into a toothy grin. He, too, lingered only a few paces away, but his teeth and the whites of his eyes were all that Imeris could see of him; he’d subtly arranged himself by a piece of bark which matched the colours and textures of his tunic and armour, assuming a petrified stillness that had made her forget he was there.
I can see why he was chosen, she thought.
Abandoning doubts that her own selection had been a mistake, she wondered which qualities she owned that made her suited, in this case, to victory. What kind of “pet beast” has Orin set against us, and why?
“It would help if I knew what we were hunting,” she said to Captain Oniwak. “What to look for.”
“When we have our thirteenth, woman,” Oniwak said, turning away.
“When he came to our bakery,” the ragged boy confided in Imeris, “he shouted at my mother. No good reason. In the middle of the night, he shouted at a stranger that she was stopping me from being a soldier. As if I ever wanted to be a soldier! Would’ve broken his filthy fingers where they grabbed me. But mother’s mouth was all sucked in the way which means she’s too proud of me to speak. So Irof smile on me, I’ll make her even prouder.”
They set off again.
Orinland felt at once wilder and quieter than Odelland. Imeris saw no written signs or splashed deity’s colours, but pedestrians’ clothing changed from light, bold, and ornamented silks and seed-wool to dun-coloured linen and leather. Instead of grass screens and smoke guarding entrances to homes, Imeris observed glass or horn windows and metal grates. Washed clothes fluttering at the sills of open windows vanished in favour of closed-in, guarded, gourd-shaped market-hollows, workshops, and schools.
Those on the roads spoke softly to one another behind raised hands.
Imeris remembered hamstringing a man on the low roads of Orinland. He and his four companions were around here somewhere. And Horroh’s blood was on her spines.
Are you proud of me, Oldest-Father? She shivered as she ran, though Canopy was warm and she was covered in a sheen of sweat. Will your memory rest when I have killed Orin’s beast with these others? Will I not have done better than any son? Will my work finally be done?
She knew it would not be. Not until Kirrik was gone from the forest for good.