THE PALACE of the king of Orinland filled the crown of a firewheel tree.
It was easily five times the size of the palace of the king of Odelland. No part of it was crafted by human hands. Not a timber was sawn; not a nail marred the hard, pale bark of the firewheel tree. It appeared as if the tree had simply chosen to split and grow in the form of five grey, identical, parallel towers. Fallen autumn leaves of previous years provided mulch for flat roofs fragrant with blue-flowered flax. Over all five towers spread a second roof of glossy, dark green firewheel leaves and flowers like flaming red wheel spokes in palm-sized circles, yellow-hearted and with the tip of each spoke graced by a tiny golden sphere.
The façade of each tower crawled with realistic, high-relief representations of battling birds and beasts. Somewhere out of sight, screw-pumps must have turned by magic or the sweat of slaves; fountains frothed from the mouths of the wooden birds and animals, falling into a perfectly circular lake that ringed the tree in a level forty body lengths below.
A huge processional road ran from the front of the palace towards Orin’s emergent, five hundred paces distant in a dimly glimpsed waratah tree. The road was twenty paces wide, the biggest that Imeris had seen.
The old man with the parchment stole saw her looking.
“The king pays his respects at the Temple of Orin often,” he said. “The goddess, when she comes to bless the royal family or to watch the Games, travels along this road in a jaguar-drawn chariot.”
The little boy in the bark shirt sniffed.
“In Irofland, our high-ups have better things to do than praise each other in public and give out purses to naked, fake men in fancy poses.”
“This palace,” Imeris said, ignoring the boy, “must have been built by Esh.” She glanced at Eeriez, who said nothing. “In Audblayinland, they mock the wood god for having neither Servants nor proper Temple, for wandering mute and friendless. I have seen Audblayin’s Garden Gate, which depicts with some skill historical instances of its defence. I never could have imagined anything like this, and this must be nothing compared to the palace in the labyrinth of the king of Eshland.”
“Bet there’s people starving here,” the boy muttered. “Take care of us, our high-ups do, not just themselves.”
“We passed through the labyrinth of the king of Eshland,” murmured a middle-sized, crop-haired Hunter, “on our way to fetch Eeriez. They have no soldiers, it’s said, but Eeriez was in there selling skins. I would rather hunt a hundred beasts than die in that place.” The neck of the fiddle he carried ended in a roaring bear’s head, and the back of the instrument was carved with swarms of bees. Imeris supposed he hailed from Ukakland. If he had any weapons to hand, they were well hidden in his silks, or perhaps in the leather case across his back.
A young woman in a brown shirt and trousers and a crimson cloak, carrying a lyre, approached Captain Oniwak and asked him if he’d like her to sing him the songs of the beasts portrayed on the palace walls. He waved her impatiently away.
“It’s a common misconception,” the old man with the parchment stole told Imeris, “that Audblayin and Atwith are the mother and father of this Titan’s Forest. Birth and death are the moments when life is weakest. Orin and Esh represent animal life in its prime and tree life at its greatest strength. Orin and Esh are the true mother and father of Canopy. That’s why we find Ilanland between Orinland and Eshland. Justice must always temper strength. The Hunt can’t be called against the innocent. It can only be called after a demon draws human blood.”
The boy sniffed again. “Just ignore old Ingaget’s teacher talk, slave. He’ll fill your head with dung when what you need is hunting smarts.”
The old man, Ingaget, clapped his hand on the hilt of a short sword hanging from a belt at his waist.
“Don’t I have hunting smarts, whelp?”
A small, sharp, steel dagger appeared in the boy’s grip by impressive sleight of hand.
“Fall in!” Captain Oniwak barked, and both child and elder put their weapons away. Imeris linked arms again with the Eshland Hunter, guarding the left side of the column as they progressed down the processional road, ready to slash wide at a moment’s notice with the spines of her left forearm.
For the cavernous mouth of the central tower offered no hospitality. It presented only the open jaws of wooden serpents, wasting jets of water in wide, decorative arcs. This extravagance, outside of monsoon season, boasted of power and excess. Imeris stepped over a line of regularly spaced holes bored knee-deep into the wooden floor.
Deeper inside the cave-like entrance, a pair of inner doors covered in carved demons, everything from fiveways to chimeras in the act of terrorising wide-eyed humans, remained resolutely shut. Again, nobody appeared to receive them, or even to turn them away.
“This is an insult, Captain,” Eeriez called to Oniwak at the head of the halted column. His voice echoed.
“I have a mandate,” Oniwak replied, leaving his crossbow in place but removing the artefact of Ilanland from his satchel. He bent his head to study it. “The compass points deeper inside this tower.”
“Many women and men have met their deaths here,” the Servant of Atwith said softly from his place at the front beside Oniwak. Imeris hardly heard him. In the dim light, she’d noticed wooden gratings at ground level all around them.
Maybe the gratings were for ventilation. If so, why were they large enough to admit a person? Surely that was a flaw in the tower’s defences.
Then she saw a pair of animal eyes glittering in one of them.
“Retreat,” she cried, extruding her spines, “or be trapped here with wild animals.”
Instead of ordering the withdrawal, Oniwak clapped his hands over his ears.
“Slave,” he hissed. “Silence your shrill woman’s voice.”
Imeris could have gone by herself, saved herself. She didn’t owe them anything. Their silly Hunt was for fools. Yet she had been chosen. A thing of the gods had sought her out. She must meet whatever fate it promised her.
I am one of them.
In the gratings, the points of wooden stakes withdrew silently into the walls, as if the palace yawned with two dozen deadly mouths. In the high archway behind the Hunters, sharpened logs thundered from the fountain-edged opening down into the hollows that Imeris had stepped over, caging them in the confined space.
“As you wish,” she said to Oniwak, furious. “I will be silent.”
A slat-ribbed tree bear, as tall at the shoulder as Imeris was, emerged first. Its black-and-yellow face was scarred, long lips drooping, black nose twitching. Imeris had never known a tree bear to attack a man except in self-defence. Their teeth were for grinding tough shoots and cracking beehives, their claws for opening wood and bark in search of grubs.
This one swung a paw at the Servant of Atwith, knocking him down. The column of Hunters and soldiers closed into a circle with bear and Servant at its heart. Imeris saw, in the corner of her eye, Oniwak putting a crossbow bolt between the bear’s ribs.
Then she was in the outer ring, staring into the face of an approaching, half-starved jaguar. Beside her, the fiddler made no move to abandon the musical instrument and draw weapons. Instead, he set bow to strings, eliciting a low hum reminiscent of a hive of bees, and out of the curling holes in the soundboard came the very insects depicted on the back, making for the black viper emerging at the jaguar’s heels.
Magic, again, but this time on her side.
“Towards the fountainheads,” Oniwak ordered, and the circle, fending off bears, cats, and raptors as it moved, crept back towards the archway where the regularly spaced logs blocked the way. Stripes of light showed more and more animals coming through the open tunnels. Crocodiles. Yellow-furred apes. Smaller, grey tree bears. Flightless birds with bladed heads and taloned toes. Beasts like the goats she’d seen in the Garden but with horns as long as swords.
Imeris could focus only on the creature closest to her.
Mostly jaguars, Anahah had said. To kill by swift ambush and a bite right through the assassin’s skull.
Imeris ducked as the animal sprang at her. Front legs enfolded her. Front claws tried to shred her shoulders, hind claws her abdomen, carving her bronze scales instead. Imeris allowed its weight to collapse them both. Rolling backwards beneath it, forearms raised, she couldn’t cut upwards, because her spines were blunt on their distant edges, but when she pulled her spines back down towards her chest, they opened both of the jaguar’s carotid arteries and made parallel splits down either side of its rib cage. It felt like killing Horroh all over again.
Imeris lay under it, stifling a sob, washed with blood, waiting for it to die. She heard the sounds of an axe biting into wood. When the jaguar gurgled its last and shuddered to stillness, she heaved it off her and saw that the disciplined circle had broken apart. Amidst the chaos, the Hunter from Ilanland, wearing purple-stained, iron-studded leather armour, had chopped handholds in one of the logs with a double-bladed axe not designed to be used on wood. As Imeris scrambled to her feet to face the next frenzied animal, a kind of hard-hoofed tapir with tusks, the black-skinned Hunter returned his axe to its loop and seized the log, lifting.
The pair of them, Hunter from Ilanland and Daggad the white-skinned slave, were matched in hulking size and strength. After a long moment of struggling and swearing, they heaved the log by its fresh-cut handholds, out of the hole that had received it, high enough for a human to escape through.
“Send Ibbin through to scout the surrounds,” Captain Oniwak bellowed. The boy in the bark shirt pulled his dagger from the white breast of a harpy eagle and looked up towards the light. The bird’s talons had scored his hands and face, barely missing an eye. Before he could obey and tumble towards the hole, the old man, Ingaget, garbled some objection and pushed his way ahead of the child.
“Soldiers,” Daggad panted in explanation. “Orinland soldiers waitin’ out there.”
Oniwak ordered the Airakland soldiers to go after the old man. Oniwak put a bolt through the neck of the tusked creature as it charged Imeris. She dodged it as it rushed anyway, hoping it would go down, but she was forced to draw her short sword at the last, slashing at its face to keep it back while it bled out. She glanced at the hole to see how many of her allies were out into the open and how many there were still to go.
“You’ll go last, coward,” Oniwak shouted at her. Imeris cut the head off a constrictor that struck at him while he reloaded his crossbow. The impact jarred both her shoulders in their sockets. He gave her no thanks, but turned to fire at another tree bear.
The bolt missed. Imeris’s sword was too short for her to want to close with the heavy, thick-furred, long-armed animal. She danced around it, trying to confuse it, trying to give Oniwak time to reload, but he was gone through the opening.
Imeris was the only one remaining in the dim space.
“Out, woman,” Daggad cried, his arms straining and the sweat standing out on every inch of him. “Go!”
“How will you follow?” Imeris demanded, sheathing her sword and lunging for the sunlit gap. Blinking in the brightness outside, she was forced to duck by the swinging blade of a curved spear wielded by one of her companions. Hunters fought the crimson and brown-clad soldiers of Orinland on the grand Temple road.
Behind her, the log thudded back into place. Daggad and the Hunter from Ilanland were trapped inside.
Imeris used her spines to scale the archway, sinking them deep into the water-spouting serpent heads. At the apex, the log that the two men had lifted emerged from beneath the most ferocious-fanged gargoyle of all.
Hanging from her left forearm and shin, Imeris drew her short sword again, hacking at the serpent head. Chips flew, and the lifelike sculpture shuddered, until it was weakened enough that the pressure of the flowing water came to her aid, blasting the head away and sending a much wider, forceful jet over the soldiers fighting on the road below.
Imeris kept on cutting, towards the socket where the log was held. Her sword was blunt, ruined for flesh. Her right arm ached. Below, six or seven of Orin’s soldiers seized the Servant of Atwith and tossed him off the edge of the road, down to die in darkness.
Captain Oniwak had been afraid their Hunt would have to do with only twelve. Thanks to their hostile reception in Orinland, they were down to eleven before they’d begun. Nine, if the two trapped in the cavern were torn apart by animals before Imeris could set them free. A crossbow bolt splintered the wood a pace away from her, but she couldn’t spare any energy to seek the shooter.
“I’ll help,” Eeriez said, quick grin flashing his pointed canine teeth. He’d climbed up carefully on the other side of the arch, carrying the axe. The Ilanlander must have passed it to him through the gap between logs. “Hold this for a moment.”
Imeris put her sword away. She took the axe, drawing it through the erupting water that separated Eeriez from her, almost losing her grip on it. It was heavy. Too heavy for her to swing. Eeriez roped himself swiftly to one of the other serpent heads.
When he took the axe back from her, he had both hands free and room to swing it. Each blow drove deep towards the log-trap’s housing, and when he split the socket, the log toppled with a groan, pushed by the water towards the battling Hunters and soldiers.
Eeriez didn’t pause to untie the ropes. He cut himself free using the reversed axe-blade. The weapon clattered down onto the road only slightly ahead of Daggad and the axe’s owner. They emerged, bloodied but not limping, into the melee, with half a dozen animals at their heels.
“Form up,” Captain Oniwak screamed from somewhere in the midst of the fighting. Imeris slipped down from her perch to join a double column, her right elbow linked with Eeriez’s left. She couldn’t effectively use her sword to attack with her nondominant hand, and it was too blunt to be much use, anyway, but by holding it reversed, so that it lay along her sheathed spines, she was able to block steel blows that came driving towards her. The animals were fighting each other, or fleeing. “Proceed to alternate road!”
Imeris understood his aims. The traditional method of retreat while in the double-column was to leave the front pair fending off the enemy while the rest shuffled back and then, when that pair became exhausted, for them to dash back and absorb themselves in the back of the column while the next pair took their turn. That would only work on a branch road that was one or two men wide, however.
Defending themselves desperately, like a spider surrounded by ants, the Hunters and their escort of Airakland soldiers inched towards a smaller path leading off the processional highway.