“Wake Ylly. Tell her to gather all her things, and you must gather all yours. We’re leaving the Garden, right now. The Gatekeeper knows we’ve been doing your work.”
Shame heated Unar’s cheeks, but in the darkness of the storm, nobody could see them.
“And how can we leave the Garden, Warmed One? Our tongues are marked.”
“Maybe you can’t cross the wall, tread the walkways, or climb the ladders. Maybe you can’t pass through the Gate. But your marked tongue won’t hold you up when Eilif pushes you off the edge, will it? We’ll go straight down. The wards are weakest that way.”
“You do not know what you are doing, do you?”
“Has Ylly lied to me all this time? Isn’t your life at stake? Hasn’t concealing your infirmity been crucial?”
Hasbabsah sighed, a long sigh. “It has been crucial, Warmed One.”
“Then go, get her. I’ll be back very soon.”
Unar didn’t go to the kitchens to steal. There might have been people there. She raided the trees and bushes she’d tended for the past four years. Bent, oozing sugarcanes made a frame for a nest of watercress, which cradled a late clutch of flowerfowl eggs. Unar stuffed the wrung-necked mother down on top of the eggs, her downy corpse still keeping the eggs warm. Limes the length and shape of fingers came next, with a layer of beans to follow, and a few handfuls of magenta cherries for good measure.
Instead of stealing ropes, Unar let herself down by a single-handed grip beneath the wattle-grove garden to strip bark-ropes from the great tallowwood tree itself. She paused to roll the ropes under a roof of sodden wattle-flowers; the blooms sagged on the ends of their branches like new-hatched yellow chicks with their fluff still stuck to their skin.
She didn’t dare go to her hammock in the monsoon pavilion for her meticulously maintained bore-knife and machete, but took blunter, cruder ones from the tool cache in the prison-tree outside the loquat grove.
“I’m not leaving you,” she whispered to the Garden. “You are mine, and I am yours. We’ll simply be apart for a little while.”
She returned to the slave quarters. Ylly and Hasbabsah stood just outside it, shod and loaded with soggy blankets. They would need them, if they were to survive the monsoon away from the Garden. When distant lightning struck and Unar could finally see them properly, they were blanched with fear.
“The waterfall,” Unar said. “Where we washed the clothes, Ylly.”
They set off for it as quickly and quietly as they could, though Hasbabsah missed her footing on the bridges and had to be carried between them. It reminded Unar of the time Oos and Aoun had taken her between them. Her lips drew back from her teeth; she wouldn’t allow them to punish her this time.
She wouldn’t let herself fall into their hands. Not until Ylly and Hasbabsah were beyond Audblayin’s reach, and perhaps not even then. Unar was too learned, too powerful for them to touch her. If she had to learn from other Bodyguards, spy on different goddesses or gods, so be it. Edax knew her, inside and out, now. He’d help her. And the god Odel had been kind to her.
With the bark-ropes, she secured her own belt to Ylly’s and to Hasbabsah’s, just to be sure she wouldn’t lose them. She left several paces of rope between them, so that they each had room to move.
“Take my hands,” Unar said as they prepared to drop into the pool far below. It wasn’t as deep as the one in Understorey. Unar would have to use her modestly regrown shoot of magic to cushion them from the bottom and perhaps to raise them to the surface again.
Hopefully, no Servants would be awake to sense it.
They jumped.
PART II
Wet Season
TWENTY-THREE
UNAR FELL, a glass bead in the darkness with all the other beads of rain.
But this was not the small, safe fall she’d taken so many times with Edax.
Water caught whatever tiny fragments of light it could. Yellow light from the lanterns of the Garden. Blue light from the lanterns of Airak on the roads of Audblayinland. Light bounced from their wet, flailing arms and legs. Reflected light showed Unar a faint mirror of her feet as they approached the surface of the pool. She was slightly ahead of the others, having jumped a moment before them, and the rope between her waist and Ylly’s was taut.
The splash blinded and deafened her. She tried to swim upwards, but the rope, which had held her up, now kept her down. Then it came level. Unar’s head broke the surface of the water at the same time as Ylly’s. They gasped into each other’s faces. Ylly seemed to have trouble breathing; perhaps she’d swallowed some water. It had happened to Unar often enough.
Without words, they struck out for the side of the pool; Unar’s feet found a carved ramp close to the end of the screw pump.
Together, Unar and Ylly dragged Hasbabsah out of the pool.
The old woman was clawing at her mouth and bawling. Only then did Unar see blood on Ylly’s lips and realise why she was having trouble breathing; the blood was black in the blue light.
“Your slave-markings,” she said.
“If you would return us to Understorey,” Ylly said around her swollen tongue, “you must do it soon, before we choke in our own blood. There’s no path from this level. The ladders will turn to dust if we touch them. You must go up, and pull us by the ropes after you, or we must find a way down.”
From above Unar came Oos’s impassioned voice. “Go back up, Unar. You must go back up. The ladders will obey me. They will hold you. All of you. Go back up.”
Impossible, Unar thought, flabbergasted to be intercepted by a once-friend who should have been sleeping soundly in the egg-shaped Temple. Oos stepped out from behind an angled leaf-catcher, white robe sodden, beautiful and shivering and, to Unar’s eyes, tortured by the wrong she was complicit in.
“Change their markings, Oos,” Unar cried. “Remove them. Help them. The old woman can’t breathe.”
“Aoun knew you’d try to take them, even though it’s not in your power. That’s why he woke me. He couldn’t watch the Gate and this pool at the same time. He wasn’t sure which one you’d try.”
“Help us, Oos!”
“I am a Servant of Audblayin!”
“I thought you’d say that.”
“What do you want me to say?”
Unar moved closer to Oos as they spoke. Ylly and Hasbabsah, still roped to her, had no choice but to stagger after. Unar looked below the leaf-catcher. There, a new-formed river ran between ridges of tough, hairy, orange-tan bark, down the mighty trunk of the tallowwood tree. It would flow until the rain stopped, five months later at the end of the monsoon season.
“Nothing,” Unar said. “Don’t say anything. Just take a deep breath.”
“A deep breath?”
Unar launched her full weight at Oos, carrying them both into the vertical river. Resistance from the twin bark-ropes jerked her back momentarily before Ylly and Hasbabsah were dragged with her over the edge.