WHILE DAGGAD chopped at the window frame, Imeris dozed.
Not in the bed—that was taken up by half of Ingaget, whom she had set sliced side down and covered with the blanket. It was Canopian to roll corpses into the abyss; Understorian to seal them into tree hollows.
Imeris suspected that after Orin’s creature had visited the lodge a second time, not only would nobody be in any hurry to return to it, but Southeats might also be abandoned. Ingaget and the slain, deformed remnants of Orin’s Servants were as good as sealed in.
She slept in the sole unblooded corner.
Horroh came into her dream, again.
Whole.
Eyes burning with displeasure.
They stood in the training hall at Loftfol. The sound of falling water was the same as before. When he opened his mouth, Horroh spoke with Oldest-Father’s voice.
You are the oldest child, Imeris. You have no choice but to look after your sister and brother when I am gone. They are dreamers. They do not like to work with their hands. You are the only chance they have to survive with the sorceress out there searching for all of us.
Imeris jerked awake.
Anahah knelt beside her, left hand on her shoulder, expression earnest.
“It’s time to go.”
The boar tusks in his right hand no longer looked like tusks.
“You have changed them,” she said groggily, blinking. “By magic.” One ivory sword was longer than the other. Both were single-bladed and slightly curved. The longer sword had a hilt carved with birds. Leopards adorned the shorter sword. “But ivory does not cut, Anahah.”
“These weapons will,” he answered earnestly, “but only when brandished by human hands. They won’t miss. Neither to parry nor to strike. And they can be used by adepts and nonadepts alike.”
Daggad guffawed.
“If they are so great, why not take them yourself and slay the creature right now?”
“They won’t work against the wild,” Anahah said. “Only against mortal men and women. Domesticated beasts, perhaps. We’ll barter the larger one for Understorian coin, weapons, ropes, food, whatever else we need. The shorter one is for you, Imeris.”
Imeris took the white sword that had been a boar tusk.
“Why give me a sword that will fail against my enemy?”
“Don’t you have other enemies?”
Imeris gazed into his glowing green eyes. Kirrik is my enemy, but even a sword that never misses cannot parry her magic power. Loftfol is my enemy, but I do not wish them ill; I will avoid them if I can.
“A weapon like this,” she said, “would certainly surprise the Bodyguard of Odel. Yet I wonder if Aurilon is not too wild for the blade to become sharp against her crocodile skin.”
Anahah smiled.
“It wouldn’t do to seriously injure your future teacher, anyway,” he said. “Daggad’s made a hole big enough for us to get out. You said you’d show us the way.”
When she poked her head out of the Mistletoe Lodge, Imeris saw two Servants of Ehkis on the platform outside Southeats. Sunrise was still several hours away.
“You had better turn invisible,” she told Anahah, regathering the strong strapleaf ropes they had used for the trap and several other unused coils besides, taking a few moments while he transformed to expertly splice the ends together. She put the leather cap on her quiver to quiet the rustling of the fletches of her recovered arrows. “Daggad, follow as quietly as you can to the balcony below. The toilet will be the lowest part of the lodge, and it faces away from the food markets. We begin our descent there.”
As the three of them slipped through the empty lodge, Imeris picked up one of Airak’s lanterns, some tally-paper, and charcoal from the hapless innkeeper’s study. She paused in the bathroom to set the lantern on the closed lid of the nearest toilet.
“Servants of Ehkis are headed here,” Anahah reported, his disembodied voice issuing from just inside the arched window. “You have only moments before they enter the lodge.”
Imeris scrawled out a message in her untidy handwriting. She opened the glass pane in the side of the lantern, thrust the message inside and cried out her brother’s name.
The lantern flared. The message vanished. Imeris bit through her lip in an attempt to hold in a scream of pain.
Her right hand was badly burned. It hadn’t happened to Oniwak when he’d done it. There had to be some trick to it, or some power bestowed on the soldiers of Airakland.
“Are you mad?” Daggad asked, swiping the lantern with the back of his hand so that it flew out the window. He seized her by the wrist of the injured hand. “That was a fire-startin’ lantern. Not a cold one for light. Now you cannot climb without first salving this burn, or lose the dexterity of this ’and.”
Imeris snapped her spines out angrily, barely missing him; he let go of her in a hurry.
“I can climb,” she said through gritted teeth. “Onto the window ledge!”
“I ’ave no spines!”
“This is a tallowwood tree. My brother and my blood. Climb onto the window ledge, I said. I will show you what to do.”
She sprang out the window ahead of him, ivory sword, quiver, adze, and longbow strapped across her back. She had to remember they were not wings. She had to remember the others could neither stick into tree bark nor, once they were below the barrier, fly. They were like children. She had to care for them.
You are the only chance they have to survive with the sorceress out there searching for all of us.
“Give me your great sword,” she instructed, dangling by the spines of her right forearm, reaching up with her left hand for the sword. Daggad reluctantly unbuckled it. Holding it by the harness, he let it dangle into her palm.
Imeris thrust the sword, scabbard and all, horizontally through the bark of the tallowwood tree like a tailor putting a needle through cloth.
“Anahah must cling to you, Daggad, monkeyback style,” she said. “All you need to do is hold one end of your great sword in each hand and do not let go.” One-handed, Imeris secured one end of the single spliced rope to the harness of the great sword. The other end, she tied to one of the slanting support timbers of the protruding bathroom. “This coil is three hundred body lengths long. That is more than enough to get us below the barrier, yet not so long that you will come to Floor. Wait for me when you reach the end of it.”
“What is down there?” Anahah’s voice inquired. “Is it Loftfol?”
“It is the village of Het,” Imeris answered, using her shin spines to swing her body to one side, making way for Daggad and his invisible rider. “There will be spies from Loftfol there, no doubt. We must keep ahead of them, while also keeping you below the barrier for no more than five or six hours at a time, lest you lose your arcane aura.” She would have gained an aura herself in the course of the Hunt, and must not let it escape her.
“Sounds easy,” Daggad said, laughing, taking hold of the great sword, one hand fractionally ahead of the other.
Vertical cords of grey tallowwood bark pulled away from the tree. The fresh bark was reddish-brown beneath. The gap that opened as the sword took Daggad’s weight was only a hand’s breadth, enough for the sword and its passengers to begin a slow slide downwards.
Imeris watched as their speed increased. She sucked her bleeding lip into her mouth, trying to feel confident. The strapleaf rope would hold. The splices were good. There would be no defects in the fibrous bark. The strip would be continuous to the base of the tree. And Daggad was strong.
He shrank away into darkness.
Doubt gnawed at her. She couldn’t help but remember the moment her trap had ended the old man Ingaget. Images flashed before her eyes: her arms dangling, ungainly, upside down while her fathers battled the sorceress. Horroh had told her to trust her body, but it had betrayed her when she’d needed it most; she should have flown more, used her sword less, left her armour behind; if she’d been more Understorian, she would have known that. Her failure at Odel’s emergent. The stupidity of her attempt to send a message to Leaper; if she’d been more Canopian, she would have known that.
Would the blond man with the birds be waiting in the village of Het?
Imeris shook her head. There was no choice but to go on. She could hear footsteps falling in the passages of the lodge, most likely those Servants of Ehkis investigating the incursion of Orin’s wild magic into their mistress’s niche.
Ignoring the terrible pain and dangerous tightening in her right hand, not wanting to add her weight to the strapleaf rope that safeguarded her unspined companions, she began to climb carefully down after them.