IMERIS LAUNCHED herself from a third ballista towards the lemon ironwood tree.
The jolt was uncomfortable and the elevation unsatisfactory, but the speed—the speed was good.
Imeris flew through the rain. The lemon ironwood tree rushed at her. She tipped the frame. Began to fall. Reached out with her spines but caught loose bark and slid down the tree trunk. Sloughed fibre and splinters enveloped her.
Gritting her teeth, Imeris retracted the spines in her forearms, but her upper body was being dragged back by the weight of her glider. She struck out with her arms again, but couldn’t reach the tree at all.
Then her shin spines snagged in the thick, juicy body of a passionfruit vine, one that reached all the way from Floor into the sun-drenched arms of Canopy. Imeris hung by one knee gratefully, protecting her face with both arms until the broken bark and splinters fell away.
Not a very graceful landing. Youngest-Father would have been ashamed.
Tightening her stomach, Imeris pulled her body upright again. In the meagre glow of the almost-extinguished taper, she set her forearm spines more carefully into the solid sapwood of the tree. The strong, bitter-lemon smell that wafted down to her could have been the tree itself or a pot of ti-leaves brewing at Breeze.
Imeris climbed as quickly as she dared.
The path was more scarred than the magenta cherry trunk had been, evidence of the eagerness of decades of Breeze patrons. When she found one of the lower west-facing entrances, she admitted herself by an arched opening to the inside of the tree. The staircase was worn by many, many bare and booted feet. The establishment was lower down in Understorey and therefore that much warmer and more stifling than Imeris’s home, but fire was always wanted for light, and Breeze was famous for staying cool all year around. Most ti-houses were shuttered during the monsoon, but not Breeze, because its magic needed access to the open air.
Imeris listened. Tried to be cautious. Heard a creak. A crackle. Whispered voices and the smell of cooking fish.
She lifted her wings off the floor with both hands and moved soundlessly up the stairs. They were cut directly into the tree, and when she turned a corner, where two entry staircases merged into one, she felt the famous breeze blowing full into her face, cooling her sweat. It brought the smell of smoke from a gobletfruit bark fire and the lingering hints of fruit syrups and dried lemon ironwood leaves.
She heard the voices clearly.
“Will you put that away? We cannot wait for Zhamahz any longer. It is midday, and his wife said dawn. He has either been killed by the enemy or his own inept climbing, and if the former, this place may be a trap set for us.” The normally gentle voice of Imeris’s youngest-father, forced now to a strained whisper.
“Fighting on an empty stomach,” answered the idle voice of Imeris’s oldest-father, “is worse than flying on one—that is to say, for burned ones and buffoons.”
Imeris climbed the staircase and turned a second corner. The main sitting room of the ti-house was shaped like the interior of a bright, golden bell. The pace-long bone of the wind goddess, which imparted the continuous cool breeze, hung by the ceiling like the clapper of the bell. Multiple fireplaces, their chimneys bored sideways instead of upwards, were arranged around the wall, forming an outer circle. Low round tables formed an inner circle around the central stage below the magically hovering bone.
Imeris’s fathers looked up at the same time from the single active hearth where Oldest-Father had laid lemon-ironwood-leaf-wrapped fish over the coals. They should have looked guilty, taking their ease in Breeze with neither the landlords’ permission nor remuneration, but Oldest-Father smirked while Youngest-Father sighed at the sight of her.
Aside from the two men, the enormous chamber was empty. Out of season, none of the hallmarks of a renowned ti-house were there: no proprietors balancing wooden bowls of steaming beverages as they emerged from tunnels to the kitchens, and no customers playing checkers and sticks. The aisles hosted neither women selling moonflower nor men selling bia. The stage was empty of poets and prophets of the Old Gods sermonizing or actively enlisting warriors for raids into Canopy, claiming they’d had visions of when and where the barrier would open for them.
Oldest-Father turned, silent and self-satisfied, back to his leaf-wrapped fish and prodded the blackening package with a poker deeper into the coals. His skinny shoulder blades touched each other in a hunch. He wore an olive-green woven-grass shirt and knee-length trousers. There were touches of grey in his short brown hair.
Youngest-Father wore only a waist wrap, gliding harness, quiver, and longbow, his belt heavy with coils of rope. His unlined face was boyish, and his blond hair was stuck down by rain. He rubbed his bare chin, beard abraded away by the regular use of sandpaper fig leaves, and sighed a second time.
“Issi,” he said resignedly. “I should have known that was why he wanted to wait. You look well.”
Imeris, no longer keeping quiet, let her wings drop and drag on the floor behind her, freeing her arms to embrace Youngest-Father. It was many months since she’d seen him. The Loftfol school did not permit frequent home visits. She was slightly taller than he was, and she felt their two bone amulets press against one another, hers beneath her shirt and his resting on his bare chest.
“So do you, Youngest-Father.”
She went to Oldest-Father and hugged him from behind, wetting him, and he made a mock-disgusted noise and shook her off.
“You came quickly,” he said. “The fish is not done.”
“Who is Zhamahz?” she asked. “The informant?”
“He is a windowleaf fruit cutter,” Youngest-Father explained. “He saw lanterns through a tangle of windowleaves.”
“In Canopy? That is not unusual.”
“Not in Canopy. We are below Ulellinland, the realm of the goddess of wind and leaves. Here, even Understorey is a labyrinth of tangled green growth. There are leaves on the windowleaf trees all the way down to Floor, but they are still windowleaves. They have holes in them. Lantern light shines through.”
“Oldest-Father wrote that you had found Kirrik’s new dovecote.”
Youngest-Father rolled his eyes at Oldest-Father’s turned back.
“The lantern lights were blue,” he said, “and killed a bird that came too close. Who else in Understorey holds three of Airak’s death-lanterns?”
Imeris was silent, recalling Youngest-Father’s heroics, the Great Deed of his lifetime. She’d grown up hearing the story of how he’d rescued Unar, the Godfinder, from Kirrik’s original dovecote beneath Airakland. Youngest-Father and the Godfinder together had used chimera skin to escape from the deadly ring of lanterns, bringing one of the lanterns along with them. Later they’d used it to escape a live chimera. The demon had not dared to enter the fatal blue glow.
Middle-Father had accomplished a Great Deed, too. He’d killed a chimera, and now he was Bodyguard to a goddess.
Oldest-Father pretended to scorn the notion of Great Deeds, yet he had killed Kirrik, or at least one form the sorceress had taken. She had worn the body of her son, Garrag. Oldest-Father had trapped her with a spring-loaded wooden cage and a ballista bolt through the heart.
Imeris might have felt pressured to kill Kirrik for her Great Deed even if the sorceress hadn’t murdered her friends. Other families, she suspected, were not so keen on Great Deeds. If Imeris’s birth mother had never dropped her, she might have gone her whole life without anyone demanding to know what her Great Deed would be.
Stop trying to keep her home, Youngest-Father had reprimanded Oldest-Father. Our Issi is gifted. She can accomplish anything.
Imerissiremi, Middle-Father had told her, your Great Deed awaits. I took you from the maw of a chimera. It saved you so that you could save the world.
Imeris had no intention of saving the world. Only, at first, of unmuddling her life, and now, achieving retribution. Revenge for Nirrin was why she’d overcome her reluctance to apply to Loftfol. It was why she’d gone to find Aurilon when her application to Loftfol had first failed.
I will kill Kirrik so far from any available bodies that her soul will shrivel into the ether before it can find a replacement.
“Which tree was it?” she asked Youngest-Father, tapping her foot. “Why are we waiting around for Oldest-Father’s fish to cook?”
“The tale of the curious blue lanterns passed from household to household by no less than six messenger birds,” Youngest-Father explained, scrubbing his sodden fringe back from his forehead with the fingers of one hand. “From Zhamahz to his seamstress wife. From the wife to her brother. From the brother to his wife, the distiller. From the distiller to her mother, the bolt turner. And the bolt turner remembered my songs. She sent me a message.”
“How long did all this take?” Imeris unbuckled her wings from her body harness and spread them over several stools beside the fire. She lit a torch and set it into a bracket on the wall.
“Two weeks. The location of the windowleaf tree in question was lost along the way. But Zhamahz’s wife expects a bird from him today. He cuts fruit during the monsoon because it is fattest and richest while the great trees’ roots are underwater, and he has a trade arrangement with the Bird-Riders of Floor. They take one half of his harvest. In exchange, their bone women see him safely between the great trees where he makes his deliveries. Today, he is due to deliver here.”
“And after the delivery, he will send a bird to his wife to let her know that he is well?”
“Yes.”
“But he might not be well at all.” Imeris kicked at a polished stool. The thought of Zhamahz, a helpless fruit cutter, being hunted by Kirrik enraged her. Kirrik should come to Loftfol if she wanted a true challenge; so many of the students had lost older siblings to her cause, voluntarily and involuntarily. “He might be dead. Or she might be in his body, coming to meet us. To see who we are and get rid of us.”
“Yes.” Youngest-Father shrugged. “I think we should go.”
There was the thud and shudder of a bridge hitting a platform outside the ti-house.
Oldest-Father rose at once, the iron poker in his fist. He was a head taller than Youngest-Father, a decade older, but there remained swiftness and strength in his gangly limbs. Youngest-Father made a subtle, shrugging movement, disgorging the weapon that sat diagonally across his back, digging in his hip-pouch for a bowstring. Sliding his belt around his waist brought his quiver within reach. He stepped through the stave and strung the bow.
Imeris, instinctively after her hard previous year specializing in spine-fighting under Horroh the Haakim, held her arms out slightly from her body, resting her spines in their sheaths, bending her knees and gripping the wooden floor lightly with her toes.
Ugly, laboured breathing echoed in one of the entry tunnels.
“Quickly,” a woman’s deep voice shouted. “Into the ti-house!”
Imeris shared a glance with Youngest-Father. Their imminent visitor did not seem to be Zhamahz.