IMERIS CREPT with Oldest-Father along a broken lateral branch.
The branch had no doubt been a strong and vital bough when the floodgum was young and growing. Shadowed by the canopy, though, and dragged on by the weight of windowleaf vines, it had long since cracked and fallen away. Most of her mud had washed away in the rain, and Imeris suppressed the urge to slap at insects.
The side of the sorceress’s dovecote came into view.
“You will never get past the lanterns,” Imeris breathed, “to reach the central vein.”
The building took the shape of two enormous windowleaves, jutting out twenty paces or so from the side of the tree, connected by slender columns of equal lengths. Ceiling-leaf and floor-leaf were perfectly parallel, one about two body lengths above the other. The leaf-perforations that ate away a fifth of the edge of each dark green, leathery surface matched one other, too. Rainwater collecting on the ceiling-leaf fell through the upper holes in glittering, bluish streams and straight through the corresponding lower holes.
It was beautiful.
But the death-lanterns that shot lightning bolts into any body that blocked their light were hung strategically from the twisty, creamy-brown columns at the tip and both sides of the lower leaf. The lanterns’ blue glow defended not only the gaps between leaves where Oldest-Father might enter, but also the upper and lower perforations. There, the shafts of light looked like ghostly blue spears.
Only the central leaf veins, where there were no perforations, were safe. The sorceress must sleep on the lower vein, sheltered from the monsoon by the upper one.
“The leaves are tough,” Oldest-Father whispered, “but not like tallowwood. If I cut around the base of that column closest to us, column and lantern will both fall.”
“Killing you on the way down,” Imeris said dolefully.
“We still have enough rope between us. Give me yours.” His hand touched her arm. “I can swing out of the way.” Oldest-Father always carried more rope than anyone. He was afraid to glide, even in the dry season. If he had to cross the spaces between great trees, his preferred method was to tie one of his ropes to the belt of a person who did have a glider, and once they’d made the crossing and secured it for him, to swing across after them.
Imeris looked down at his hand. They were close enough to the lantern light for her to see the spots and scars on the back of it. He was old, too old to be trying acrobatics, and she was a Heightsman of Loftfol.
“Let me do it, Oldest-Father.”
He scowled.
“Did I summon you here to watch you die?”
“Did you summon me,” she retorted, “to carry rope for you?”
“The plan is not altered, Imeris. You will take Bernreb’s part. You will finish her off at the end. Not before.”
I am my own woman, she thought angrily. You do not command my obedience anymore.
When Imeris had made that forbidden visit to Nirrin’s home, aged twelve, she’d been known by everyone as Issi. Issi, did you know that women can be Heightsmen, too, if they beat all the men in the race to Loftfol? Nirrin had said. Issi, did you know that Loftfol is a school for training war leaders to raid Canopy?
Usually it was Nirrin who enlightened Issi, but that day, the day they had tried on the wedding headdress, Issi had found herself able to contribute. Nirrin, did you know that if our people get captured in Canopy, they snap off their spines and make them slaves forever?
Nirrin had been horrified, clutching her arms. Issi had clutched her arms, too. Only for a moment. Her blood was Canopian, but her spines made her Understorian, or so she thought. But the idea of slavery was fresh in her thoughts. So when Oldest-Father punished her with a beating and by taking away her wings, she had tried to hurt him back by calling him a slave.
Do you wish we lived in Canopy? Oldest-Father had asked her scathingly. That I truly was a slave, and you were not Imerissiremi, but Imeris? Imeris was your Canopian name, before your blood mother dropped you over the edge to be eaten by demons.
He’d called her Imeris from that moment on, a constant reminder, and she had defiantly reclaimed it, though her other two fathers still called her Issi or Imerissiremi. And he’d taken away her knives, replacing them with chimney brushes, saying she would not hunt again until the chimneys were cleaner than her filthy mouth.
She hadn’t known how to fight with her spines then.
“At the end,” Imeris acceded. “Not before.”
She gave him her rope. He whisked away.
Imeris climbed after him, slowly and arrhythmically, trying to disguise the drag of her glider wings as leaves rustling in the rain. If Oldest-Father was able to cut any of the leaf-dwelling away, it would be because the sorceress was sleeping. In her head, as her fingers and toes found holds in between the fleshy stems, Imeris practiced the throat-cutting move.
My Great Deed.
The end of the sorceress Kirrik, and the end of my family’s ambition for me.
She would not leave the fatal blow to others, as she had with the sentry. Her heart thumped.
Then she flinched back, flattening herself between leaves, as the blue lantern fell. Abandoning silence, pushing her way up through the foliage to find a viewpoint, she glimpsed, through the hole he had cut, Oldest-Father climbing through the lower windowleaf of the dovecote.
Imeris peered into darkness in the direction where Youngest-Father had glided, hoping he was in position and ready to begin his glide towards the dovecote. She clambered higher up the trunk, forced to go around several of the huge, flat leaves. Behind a clump of them, several paces higher than and around the trunk from the dovecote, she waited, hugging the stems, feeling her spines quiver, scanning for a second sentry, seeing no movement and smelling nothing but windowleaf fruit and the faint stink of panther musk.
She rearranged several of the leaves so she could see.
Oldest-Father knelt on the upper leaf of the dovecote, putting his head through one of the holes to peer inside it.
Whatever he saw made him leap back. There were ten paces of safe space around him devoid of the direct, deadly light. Imeris unfolded her glider frame, snapping it into place, ready to launch in Youngest-Father’s place if Oldest-Father could not buy enough time.
“Kirrik, who was once Rannar of Dul,” Oldest-Father shouted, “and the tanner Aaderredaa before her! I seek an audience.”
His thin body was straight and unafraid.
How can a man be afraid of heights but not of a body-snatching enchantress?
A young, dark-haired woman pulled herself up through the hole where Oldest-Father had peered. Her back was half turned to Imeris, but her figure was achingly familiar. A huge bosom contrasted with a thin boy-bum and wide bare feet. The woman wore a sleeveless black shirt, a short olive-green split skirt, and one leg brace with steel hooks.
Nirrin.
Nirrin’s spines had never taken in that leg, which had been broken when a dayhunter tried to snatch her out of her cradle. Imeris felt nauseated. Memories of the moment in the forge threatened to overwhelm her.
No. It is not really her.
“How,” the woman who was not Nirrin asked imperiously, lifting Nirrin’s chin, “do you know those names?”
“I had a bird from one of your sons,” Oldest-Father said. “He is a slave in Canopy and seems to think it your fault. You never taught him to switch bodies. He says switching bodies is the only way he can rid himself of the mark upon his tongue.”
“He has asked me to pay his ransom before,” Kirrik said, putting her fists to her hips. “Now he sends you. What can you offer that he could not?”
“I am a problem solver.”
“You would serve me?”
“I am a machine maker.”
“No machine is worth the loss of my lamp.” Her tone turned dangerous. “I shall have to risk the climb to Floor to recover it.”
“I have slain many demons.”
“I have slain more. Also, many women and men.”
“Yes,” Oldest-Father agreed, “many. Including Sikakis, who was a prince. Garrag, who was another of your sons. Nirrin, who would have been a spinewife of Gannak, if you had not sent her soul into the ether.”
Silence between them. Stillness.
Hurry, Youngest-Father, Imeris thought, her pulse racing, her spines vibrating with their need to spring from her forearm and shinbone crevices.
“Those names,” Kirrik said at last, menacingly, “are not known to my son.”
A bird made of chimera cloth swooped out of the darkness, covering Kirrik in a heartbeat with colour-changing wings.