AN HOUR before sunset, men’s arguing voices on the northern high roads prompted Imeris to climb around the circumference of the emergent.
As stealthily as she could, trying not to make the windowleaves rustle or shake, she selected windowleaf trunks with plenty of rootlets that would bear her weight without pulling away from the floodgum host.
On a smooth, grey branch road arriving from the penda tree, a dozen rangy soldiers stood. Their leather armour was stained Ulellin’s green and blue, and they contended with a stockier, black-clad soldier with feathers in his hair and a crossbow over his shoulder who suspiciously resembled Captain Oniwak.
Behind Oniwak stood a little boy, head cocked attentively. At the boy’s side hovered a man of middle height in mulberry silks carrying a fiddle. Ibbin and Owun. Imeris systematically searched the other paths and platforms. After several long minutes of scrutiny, in which Oniwak’s voice grew louder and began to carry enough for her to decipher his words, she finally located Eeriez against the penda tree trunk, armour and tunic smeared convincingly in ash and perfectly still, as always.
“It’s lovely that you’re defending the Temple,” Oniwak argued, “but understand, king’s men are no deterrent to the creature. I’m a king’s officer. The thing did not hesitate to attack me. I just told you that my company has lost both a Servant of Atwith and the gods-protected Bodyguard of Oxor!”
“Our charge is to keep this road safe for worshippers of Ulellin,” the leader of the Ulellinland soldiers answered. “You are not here to pay tribute to the Speaker of Truth.”
“How observant are the keen-eyed knives of the wind,” Oniwak sneered. “Our charge is to hunt the beast and kill it no matter where it goes!”
Besides Orinland, Imeris thought.
She climbed down into the Temple, avoiding the node where Anahah lay curled and quiet; she’d brought him food from the Temple only to find him sleeping. Which worried her, since Bodyguards didn’t need sleep, and why hadn’t she realised something was sapping his strength when he’d slept in her room at the Mistletoe Lodge?
“Come to tell us of another problem, have you?” Leaper whispered. He, Sorros, and Daggad were taking a break from their labour in the mouth of the face-shaped topiary.
Imeris looked at the wire coiled on the floor. She was a good judge of rope lengths from their bundled size. What they had in copper looked to be forty paces or twenty body lengths, no more, which would barely be enough to wrap Orin’s monster three times around. She’d have no spare lengths for binding the legs. That would leave at least four sections of the monster free to re-form.
“Soldiers,” she said. “Ulellinland soldiers. They are arguing with Oniwak on one of the north roads, but when they get here, they will want to put a pair of guards on every path leading to the Temple. Once they put someone on the south road, that person will only have to turn around to see straight through the funnel and discover exactly what we are doing.”
“We are worshipping!” Leaper said, raising a gourd of magenta cherry wine.
“Put that down and help me get the wire closer to the entrance.”
She’d barely arranged it the way she wanted before scraping sounds and shouts came close by. Motioning for Leaper to get out of sight, she strung her bow and moved her quiver to her hip, keeping one eye on the entrance the whole time.
Something moved in the open air, but it wasn’t Ulellinland soldiers, or even Captain Oniwak.
Orin’s creature, grunting and snuffling, stuck its face into the funnel. Imeris had not yet expected it. At the very least, Oniwak should have seen it and raised a cry. She lost her grip on the arrow as she took a few paces back. Leaper and Daggad shouted a warning to Sorros. Imeris smelled spilled wine and heard blades sliding free as the whole building shuddered.
The grotesque new head, empty of tusks, too tight in some places, like a poorly felted blanket, and too loose in others, like the abdominal skin of a gutted carcass, filled the opening. All of its tiny human eyes were as wide as they would go, gathering the paltry available light. Daggad, Sorros, and Leaper had not lit any candles to replace the fading sun, and Leaper had removed those of Airak’s lanterns that might flicker to life as the day dwindled.
Imeris found another arrow. Nocked it and went to full draw. Loosed. Allowed the motion of her fingers falling away from the string to turn into a reach for her next arrow.
She didn’t aim for the eyes. She did not want to kill the component pieces until they were all snugly trussed together. Instead, she sank her shafts up to the feathers into nonvital joints and folds.
They would be her anchor points.
Seven of them, and the creature snarled and clawed at the shafts. Several snapped off close to the skin. The protruding splinters were still long enough for her to use.
Imeris tossed the bow aside. She heaved a coil of copper over her shoulder, taking to hand the stiff, bladed end of the metal sheet where Sorros had run out of time to draw the wire; he had unhinged the die to set free the unfinished section.
The creature reached for her with the one foreleg it had managed to stuff into the funnel-shaped Temple entrance. Sorros, moving past Imeris, bravely swung one of his hammers at the scrabbling, clawed cat toes, making the animal roar. Oniwak must have heard that. He and the other Hunters must be on their way. Imeris focused hard.
Under the tongue and between the jawbones. That was where her huge copper darning needle and thread must pass, if she was to keep the monster from withdrawing from the Temple before her work was done. Yet who was to say that its skeleton was built in the usual way? She hesitated, holding the copper blade in her right hand, the hilt of the sheathed boar-tusk sword in her left.
Sorros swung his hammer. The creature roared again. Imeris charged forwards, head down, a human arrow with a head of copper. The wind of its breath brought back her failure at Mistletoe Lodge; it mingled with the magic wind of Ulellin that had once helped cook Oldest-Father’s fish.
She speared the copper blade through the floor of the monster’s mouth. It felt like pushing her arms into wet padded armour; like upholstering a chair. Imeris dropped the coil of copper rope into a pool of frothing saliva. Jerked backwards before the mouth could snap shut. Dropped to the floor and rolled under its chin. There, she pulled the copper blade free.
She needed both hands to pull the bloodied wire through. As soon as she let go of the sword hilt, she felt a wrinkling heaviness in her skin, like she’d fallen into water wearing quilted clothes. Pausing to pick up the sword again, she stuck the crossguard between her teeth, letting the blunt edge of the blade lie along her breastbone, and immediately felt lighter.
More time to do what you must do.
In the corner of her eye, Sorros rolled and moaned on the floor, sprouting fur from hands that had dropped the hammer. She could spare no thought for him. Imeris used her spines to climb. She sank them in the creature’s fur and face, climbing through sagging gore so unlike the solid purchase of a tree, until she swung one arm and her spines connected with a satisfying thunk to the Temple’s wooden, perforated roof.
She went up through one hole, carrying the copper blade, and down through another. She stabbed the monster through the snout a second time and secured the blade to the loose end of the copper wire.
It thrashed and squealed. Imeris had stitched its head to the entryway.
She could not stop, terrified that it would come apart and re-form. Seizing the loose end of the metal rope, she went up through the ceiling again, coming down on the platform outside the Temple where the monster’s body hunched, its four feet scrabbling at the door frame for purchase, straining backwards.
Oniwak and the three other Hunters clustered there. Crossbow bolts and poison darts stuck out from the creature’s rump. Ibbin darted in, stabbed, and darted out again. Owun played his fiddle, and a cloud of hornets, seeming hypnotised by the tune, swarmed in and out, buzzing and stinging.
“Back!” Imeris tried to bellow with the sword between her teeth. “Get back, for your lives!”
Oniwak looked up at her with something akin to hatred. Nevertheless, he obeyed. They all did. Imeris climbed over the fetid skin, dragging the wire, until the creature’s body was wrapped three times in copper.
Then there was no more wire. She bent the nubby end around another piece of itself and dropped back down onto the platform. She lost the sword as she landed on her back and her bones jarred. Chunks of loose hair, leaf litter, and waist-high splinters carved up by the beast’s claws obscured the place where the sword had landed. She knew it hadn’t fallen to Floor; she’d heard it clatter on the wood.
Her skin started to feel thick again. All her many harness straps, ropes, and fittings were too tight. Her body deformed. Her arms grew longer and her legs shorter.
Oniwak lifted his crossbow. The bolt pointed at her heart.
I would rather be dead, she had time to think, than be part of the monster. But who will kill Kirrik?
Her searching hands closed over the hilt of the sword and for the second time, the prickling transformation reversed, spreading from palms to shoulders and from there up and down her spine. She shook herself off. Rolled free of the debris. Sucked in a sweet breath; yet another chance at life.
Oniwak’s crossbow bolt thudded into the place where she had lain, but she had as little time for him as she had for Sorros.
Holding the bone blade in her left hand, she stabbed with a bore-knife at the ends of the creature’s limbs not contained by the rope. Searched out the pairs of human eyes and drove the knife between them. Did not flinch when she recognised the mournful eyes of Irrafahath, the Bodyguard of Oxor, despite the wasp-stung swellings, or the tear-scarred tracks beneath the lower lids of Ay, once Lakekeeper of Ehkisland, who might have helped her defeat Kirrik.
Legless, tailless, the creature squirmed, a hairy worm wound with gleaming copper ribbon. Imeris staggered back from the beast. She looked up and saw Leaper standing on top of the upper leaf of the Temple, the curving relic of the Old Gods, Tyran’s Talon, in his upraised hands.
“Now, Leaper!” she cried.
Spears of lightning struck between the widespread boughs of the emergent. The crack was deafening. Imeris fell backwards as the whole tree convulsed. Her hair stood on end. She resheathed her spines. Threw a forearm up to shield her eyes as a second bolt struck, and then a third.
She smelled charred flesh. Heard sizzling. A final scream sounded before the silence.
When she lowered her arm, she saw a burned black mountain of meat. Long, jagged cracks in it oozed juices that bubbled and stank. No part of it was recognisable as once human.
No part of it moved.
Imeris blinked, shook her head, and blinked again at the sight of the goddess Ulellin standing on top of the Temple beside Leaper. Ulellin struck Leaper across the face with the back of her slim hand. Wrenched the relic out of his grasp. Leaper dropped to his knees, his expression horrified.
Imeris’s heart was in her throat. They had done it. They had killed Orin’s monster, and the Hunt was complete. She should have been weeping with joy, but her brother had been touched by a deity.
That meant he would have to die.