IMERIS TOOK the low roads.
For a while, as she warmed to the task, when she turned her head she could see Epi labouring along the high roads, mouth open in a ragged O, armpits damp, the silk streaky with sweat, his eyes bulging more than usual.
Then she forgot him, lengthening her stride, enjoying the wind of her passage as it broke over her brow. The dappled sunlight of Canopy made patterns on the road that were unique, never to be repeated again. As the day grew hotter, less suitable for trussing a squealing tapir calf and taking it to market, most people retreated to the shade if they were able, so that sometimes Imeris was the only witness to the shadow-play.
Any snow that had fallen overnight without being saved in a box would have melted ten times over. The air smelled of human waste that had not quite made it over branch edges, lemon ironwood and sweet-fruit pine oils, the powder down of parrot flocks, banked fires of floodgum bark, and winter flowers with a whiff of flying fox.
She was perhaps a quarter of the way to the Falling Fig when the sound of heavy shapes slapping the leaves of the passionflower-vine-covered gap-axe she was in made her slow down in order to search out its origin. One of the leaf-concealed, rapidly moving shapes gave a long, wild wail. Imeris glimpsed golden fur.
Gibbons, she thought. Their meat tasted tolerable when well spiced but otherwise worked better as bait. Nothing to worry about.
Still, she wanted them to pass before she sped up again. She could not keep an eye on the troupe and run safely at the same time without slipping. Something about the answering wails of the other gibbons recalled the wildness of the bone sword Anahah had made for her, made an image of Orin’s many-eyed monster flash though her mind.
Then she remembered where she’d last seen a gibbon: the cave-like entrance of the palace in Orinland.
From a branchlet that split off from the high road, an ape swiftly arced, one-handed. It was the size of a just-walking human child. Its fine yellow body fur turned white in a ring around its black, bare face. White canines gleamed in a black hole-mouth as it swung towards her, screaming.
Imeris sidestepped the fast-flung, hairy body, feeling the wind of its passage. The gibbon’s long arms caught in a hanging vine beside her and its trailing legs, feet as dexterous as hands, grabbed the harness across her back. Imeris felt it with the finality of dropping to the end of a rope. It jerked her towards the edge with surprising strength. When she braced herself and spun, swinging angrily at it with her spines, the gibbon did not abandon her.
Instead, holding on by its feet, it swung the opposite way and wrapped itself around her eyes, a smothering blanket that smelled of rancid oil.
A second gibbon slammed into one shoulder, unbalancing her again towards the edge. Then a third. She couldn’t turn her forearms around enough to cut the first animal; the angle needed was one as if to cut her own face. Blunt teeth chewed her ear in a lightning strike of pain. Blood ran down her neck.
Imeris reached her adze. Freed it with difficulty. Wedged the blade of it between the first gibbon and her forehead, prising it loose. Once it was away from her, she was able to insert her other forearm into the gap and cut through the animal’s hide. It took a piece of her ear along with it when it fell. The other two gibbons, swinging about with their feet open, seeking a hold, she didn’t strike at directly. Instead, she slashed with her spines at the vines they were using as ropes.
They fell, but not far. Almost faster than her eye could follow, they swung back to the high road and aimed themselves at her from different directions.
Now that she was prepared for it, Imeris had no trouble slicing them along their breastbones as they came. Her spines stayed magically sharp, unlike the skinning knives she’d used on monkeys under Middle-Father’s eye. Their naked lungs deflated as their chests opened. Imeris blinked more ape blood out of her eyes.
She stood, red-smeared and panting, on the gap-axe road, trying to look in all directions for more gibbons.
Covered in gore, she must have presented a curious sight to Epi. She heard him coming, puffing and wheezing like forge bellows. She saw his face, a hundred paces back along the high road. Goggling at her. No sign of recognition.
He was so absorbed in the spectacle of her that he made a misstep. The branch road kinked. Epi kept running straight ahead.
He seemed to hang in the air. Imeris’s heart seized; for a moment she thought he was young enough that the protection of Odel would still hold. He opened his hands and waved desperately about. Passionflower leaves came loose from their vines in his grip but failed to slow or check his plunge.
Imeris started running towards him, spreading her arms as if to fly and catch him, but her glider wasn’t there.
He plummeted into darkness. Imeris fell to her knees.
Her chimera wings. The angles were all wrong. She couldn’t have caught him anyway.
I still would have tried.