CAKED IN dried ape-blood, Imeris entered Odel’s Temple.
She half expected Aurilon to descend on her, but once again, there were only worshippers in the wide main chamber.
Her gore-covered right forearm spines needed to be cleaned before they could be retracted. Flesh seemed to stick where sap never did. Canopians, citizens and slaves alike, performed a slow but sure evacuation, edging away from her in a strained silence, all but tossing their tributes in retreat and warning the others they met along the paths in whispers.
“Aurilon,” Imeris said loudly, hoarsely, but nobody came. She placed the three golden seeds one by one on the floating dish and added, “Ibbin, a Hunter of Irofland. He is still a child. That is for him, if Orin has not murdered him yet. The second seed is for the not-born child of Sorros the Silent Smith and his wife, Nin, the moonflower seller of Gannak. The third is for the child of Anahah, who was once Bodyguard to Orin. I do not know if that baby is born or not.” She smiled, and the movement stung her bloody, chewed ear.
Imeris went to the sweet-fruit pine plug in the floor, sunk her left forearm spines into it and tried to pull it open, but it resisted.
“Protector of Children,” she shouted. “Holy One!”
There was no response. When she peered through the fish-mouth door, she saw the whisperers, heads together, still blocking the roads to the Temple. She wondered if someone had gone to the palace to alert the king’s soldiers.
She needed to ask for her gifts before she returned to Wife-of-Epatut in disgrace.
Imeris began washing her bloody arms in the clear, perfumed water on top of the central platform where the bronze tribute-dish floated. If anything got a reaction, desecrating the water would.
Moments later, the trapdoor in the floor flew open.
Odel’s amber eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Imeris was shocked by his dirt-streaked face. Scabs covered his head where he’d apparently inexpertly shorn off his own hair. The strong, ink-stained hands were uncovered. He wore a loose, pink, rumpled robe and a long wrap skirt slit up the side, but nothing on his feet.
“How dare you pollute my—” he snarled before encompassing her own wretched appearance. His mouth flattened. His nostrils flared. He swallowed. “Orin attacked you.”
“I have not seen gibbons attack of their own accord before,” Imeris said, staring at him, wanting to ask why he looked so dishevelled, but knowing there could only be one answer, and that the answer was one she did not want to hear.
“Imeris, Aurilon is dead.”
“No,” Imeris whispered.
“I’ve summoned the king’s vizier, who was once my Servant, back to be my new Bodyguard. You bring tribute for Anahah’s child, oblivious to the harm he has done the balance by becoming pregnant, an essentially female act, but if Orin can’t contain the damage by killing him, I’ll counteract it in the opposite direction by making my new Bodyguard a man. I’ve given him three days to bid his family farewell. Three days, I hoped to have to mourn my most faithful Servant in private. Yet somehow here I am, talking to you.”
Imeris hardly registered what he said about Anahah.
“No,” she repeated. “Aurilon cannot be dead.”
“Many gifts intended for you, as Hunter of Odelland, were brought here.” Odel was now calm. His voice held no further trace of bitterness. “Aurilon opened them all to be certain they were safe. This one looked like a knife but it was a mirage. Orin’s doing. A rival god’s spell that reached out and borrowed power from the blade you brought to trade for the skin.” Imeris hung her head, but Odel hadn’t finished speaking. “The spell compelled her to take up the blade, and to use it. Aurilon couldn’t let go of the bone sword’s hilt once she seized it. She leaped to her death rather than start laying about her and slaughtering innocents in my Temple.”
No. Imeris couldn’t say it anymore; she could only think it. My miscalculation again.
“Orin’s magic in the seat of my power.” Odel sighed. “If I had power to harm her, I would, but I can’t withhold my power from her niche and let children die. I’m not the Mistress of the Wild, to be fickle with my people’s lives. But nor can I forgive her. Oxor is weak this season and so even gods can’t find it in their hearts to love and forgive.”
Imeris wiped tears from her cheeks and made a sound suspiciously like a sniffle.
“Please forgive me, Holy One.”
“I don’t blame you,” Odel said. “I blame Orin, and I blame the chimera’s curse. The chimera Aurilon killed, the one that killed me, was of the wild before it died. Orin may be to blame for sending the box, but Aurilon shouldn’t have succumbed to the spell in the seat of my domain. Would not have, if not for the curse on her. I suppose I was lucky to keep her as long as I did. Could anyone but Aurilon have survived twenty years with a chimera’s curse hanging over them?”
“No,” Imeris said, trying to smile.
“I’m sorry you weren’t able to beat her, Imeris. She would have liked to die that way, too old, her reflexes too slow, with young blood come to take her place. But I never believed that you would have stayed. Would you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Canopy is not your home.”
* * *
IT WAS nightfall when Imeris pounded on the door of the House of Epatut.
On either side of the entry, the armed guards watched her but made no move to restrain her. Epi’s pale child-slave unbarred and opened the door, her timid face turned blue by the blaze of Airak’s lanterns.
“Can I help you, citizen?” the girl asked.
“I am no citizen,” Imeris said harshly. “I need to see the master and mistress of the House.”
“Master Epatut is away in Ukakland. Master Epi hasn’t returned home.”
“Let me in. I must speak with Igish.”
“I’m here, Imeris,” Wife-of-Epatut said, bringing an upraised oil lantern to the door. “Come inside. It’s late.”
When her eyes locked with Imeris’s, she sucked in a sharp, hissing breath.
She knew.
“No,” she whispered, sounding exactly as Imeris had sounded at the sight of Odel.
“Your son, Epi, challenged me to a footrace, and I accepted,” Imeris said, sparing herself no part of the blame in the telling. “I told him I would marry him if he won the race. At the quarter mark, I was winning. Instruments of Orin fell upon me; I fought them off. Epi was distracted by the fight.”
“No.”
“He lost concentration. He stepped wrong, straight off the edge. He fell.”
Igish did not cry or scream. Her protuberant eyes glazed with grief. In silence, moving stiffly as if every joint suddenly ached, she turned away and walked into the House. Imeris moved to follow, glancing hopelessly, questioningly at the girl for a moment, who shrugged in response to the unasked question: Am I still welcome in the House?
But Igish had told her to come inside, so in she went, around a sharp corner, and through a vestibule containing a smoke-curtain, past the gallery of stuffed birds, and into the great feast hall where the portrait of Audblayin hung by the head of the table.
Imeris wasn’t able to follow Igish any further then, for the mistress of the House went to her bedroom and barred the door.
Imeris stood before it, biting her lip. Then she went back to the feast hall.
“Please,” she asked the girl, “may I have something to eat and drink?”
The trembling, pasty slave freely shed tears that Igish had not.
“Is Master Epi really dead?”
“He fell. I saw it.”
“But you fell. Once.”
“True. I was lucky.” Imeris sat on one of the heavy, throne-like dining chairs. She traced the seams along both her forearms with her fingers. Glanced across at the girl, who should have had spines as her birthright. Epi could not free this younger slave now, as payment for his training. She would stay here forever, the mark of the House of Epatut on her tongue until she died.
“He had … there is … Master Epi had another chest of snow,” the girl offered mournfully.
Imeris laughed, low and sad.
“What is your name?”
“Haftfah. I was named after my—”
“After your mother,” Imeris said. Whom you will not see again, so long as the barrier between Canopy and Understorey survives.
Haftfah nodded.
“Leave the snow, Haftfah. I will have water and fish, if there is any.”
“There is, citiz—Hunter Imeris.”
After she’d eaten, drunk, and relieved herself, Imeris curled up to sleep on a pile of tapestries beside the cot that Igish had told her had once been hers.
She dreamed of Aurilon, naked and long-clawed, the bark in her hair replaced by a crown of lotus flowers. Aurilon’s back remained marked like a Crocodile-Rider’s, but it was a chimera she rode through the empty tunnels of Odel’s Temple. Tallow candles flickered in niches that had not been there in life. The chimera’s eyes glowed.
Imeris sensed it was the curse-chimera. The one that had been waiting to take Aurilon’s soul along with it into the ether. A man stood silently beside them, cheeks streaked with red, wearing only a skirt of bones. It was Aoun, the Gatekeeper of the Garden.
Watch your back, Imeris, Aurilon advised. Spend your life wisely.
Aoun waved his hand, and the candles went out, plunging the dream into darkness.