IMERIS’S SPINES tried to spring from their sheaths.
But Kirrik, in Wife-of-Epatut’s body, had wrapped her arms and legs in so many layers of silk she was rendered temporarily helpless.
“I hoped you would all gather together,” Kirrik told Audblayin over Imeris’s shoulder, “so that I could kill you all at once. A council of Canopian deities! But this brainless Hunter was never going to succeed at that task. I should have known. I shall settle for just you, Audblayin.”
In a nonmagical body, how can she attack a goddess? Imeris wondered, tearing off ribbons and sashes, struggling to find her weapons. Did somebody kill Nirrin? If they did, how could Kirrik’s soul cross the barrier? Wife-of-Epatut is—was—not gifted. She was neither spinewife nor Servant.
Imeris’s eyes rose to Aoun, then, who stood with no amulet to protect his naked soul. No weapon to hand but his magic, which would be extinguished as soon as Kirrik struck him from the body that housed him. Audblayin, too, was vulnerable; Imeris had heard somewhere that Kirrik had once stolen the body of the goddess of rain. Instead of turning to slash at Kirrik, Imeris launched herself at her sister and the Gatekeeper, arms outstretched.
“Into the Garden,” she screamed at them, sweeping them up, feeling first her fingers and then her arms and face rebounding from nothing she could see; but they were safe; they were behind the wards.
Now she could turn. Put the Gate at her back. Fling down the last of her silk wrappings and hold Oldest-Father’s bore-knife out between her body and Kirrik’s.
I do not have my chimera skin.
“How did you get through the barrier?” Imeris snarled, striking hard from the strength of her extended back leg, but Kirrik danced back, teeth bared.
“Go ahead and kill me, Hunter. Kill the one who speaks of One Forest, who speaks what is in your heart!”
“You do not speak what is in my heart,” Imeris shouted, thrusting again with the bore-knife in her right hand. “Killing my sister is not in my heart!” Kirrik dodged the knife, but Imeris brought out her spines, stepping through and swinging from the elbow, a tight movement to bring her fist close to her hip, and then, dropping to one knee, the swifter, deadlier, cutting-edge reversal.
It caught Wife-of-Epatut—Kirrik—in the back of her extended right knee. Silk parted. Blood spurted. The joint tore, and Kirrik went down on her side, knuckles white against the wooden platform, still snarling.
“That is not your sister,” Kirrik insisted, undaunted by Imeris’s knee on her chest. “Your sister lived for only one breath before that thief stole her body. Audblayin is a parasite in human clothing, a power-hungry soul that drank the blood of a Titan to become what it is today. Kill me, protect it, and it will not reward you. It will never abolish the barrier. None of them will. One day you—”
Imeris pressed the blunt curve of her bore-knife to Kirrik’s throat. It was not the threat of death that silenced the sorceress but the physical restriction of air.
I will cut my birth mother’s throat, but Kirrik will not die.
“What is the use of killing you like this?” she muttered, trying not to see Wife-of-Epatut in the choking, darkening face. “You will only murder somebody else.”
The smell of panther musk and crushed banana leaves reached her nostrils before the small green hand appeared over her shoulder. She did not flinch or move to strike when she felt Anahah’s body against her from behind.
She let his hand close over her knife hand and draw it back. When he tried to take the knife from her, she allowed that, too.
Kirrik sucked in a deep, desperate breath.
Anahah dug at Imeris’s belt pouch. He put something in her hand. The slave-making coin. Imeris wanted to turn her head, to meet his eyes, to laugh, but she couldn’t let her attention drift away from Kirrik. Using her adze-handle in her left hand, she prised open Kirrik’s jaw. Took the bone coin between her right thumb and forefinger.
“You told my oldest-father that your son was a slave,” she said. “You said you refused to pay his ransom. Maybe now you will meet him in the Palace of Odelland.”
But Kirrik had also told Oldest-Father that switching bodies was a way to escape slavery. As the bone coin touched her squirming tongue, Kirrik’s whole body relaxed.
“Anahah,” Imeris said, sitting abruptly back on her haunches, “she is leaving! I did not know she could leave before the host body died!”
Where will she go? To the closest unprotected body.
Imeris jolted to her full height, careless of Wife-of-Epatut’s long, still form at her feet. She reached for her bore-knife but Anahah had taken it. Raising the adze instead, she put out her spines, quivering in horrified expectation.
Anahah stood there in his short, brown skirt, his green hair shifting in the wind, one corner of his mouth upturned. His pot-belly was gone. He looked lean and tired. Between his hands, a tiny cage made of bone held a single smouldering fragment of something colour-shifting and difficult to see.
“What is that?” Imeris asked, daring to hope that it was still Anahah and not the sorceress that she spoke to. “What is that inside the cage?”
“It’s burning chimera skin,” was the reply, and she could not tell if it was really him; did not trust herself to tell. Kirrik, or Anahah, raised the cage to pursed lips and blew sharply.
Black smoke billowed from the bars of the fist-sized cage, far more than should be possible for anything less than a bonfire. Imeris coughed and waved her hands. In moments, the smoke was dispersed, but what was left behind was a hovering, multilimbed apparition of sooty haze. A branch shifted in the wind, and the last sunbeams touched the shifting shape, turning it brown. Audblayin and Aoun stared at it from behind the wards of the Garden but made no move to approach.
Anahah stepped forwards, passing the little bone cage through the haze. Some part of the shape shrank, solidified and stayed within the contained space.
What remained was the smoky shape and glowing eyes of a chimera. Imeris only just had time to recognise it. The next gust of wind blew it away. All that remained was the silently railing, shrunken human smoke-shape, confined by the tiny white bars between Anahah’s hands.
“I know just what to do with this,” he said, smiling, giving it a shake near his ear like a child with a new rattle.