“Yes. Over there. That way.”
Unar lifted the ear bone and blew. Her body lifted with the freedom of it. She knew the ear bone, at this point, better than she knew her own bones. Every unseen filament. Every concealed coil. There were gaps in and around it that should have been filled with living tissue, and it was these spaces where inaudible sound echoed and magic answered, as though a great being of spirit answered the cry of its naked child.
It was more powerful, more resonant, in the last several hours. Either Unar was growing stronger the more she flexed her magical muscle or there was something linking the bone with the location.
“Where are we?” Unar asked as the spiny plum they stood on sent softly uncurling spearhead-shaped leaves thrusting towards the gap-axe tree across the way. Rain wet down the new leaf fuzz as it grew. “What part of Canopy lies above us?”
“Airakland,” Frog answered absently.
The realm of the lightning god. Unar had heard that the trees here, mostly floodgums, were taller than the rest of Canopy, even the emergents that housed the Temples, and their bare crowns were blackened from absorbing the lightning strikes that might otherwise set fire to the forest.
Frog left Unar’s side, then, running lightly through the rain along the branch, and Unar followed, lifting the ear bone again, calling the gap-axe tree to meet her in the middle. The leaves meshed in patterns of dark greeny-black against pale pink.
Soon enough, with the sun fading, it was too dim to make out the colours of the leaves. Frog didn’t hesitate to take Unar’s hand and indicate direction in the dark. Seven crossings later, Unar thought she could see something glowing, like the moon behind clouds.
“That is the dovecote,” Frog said. Unar was too tired to answer her. Wordlessly, they crossed again, floodgum to myrtle, myrtle to another floodgum, and then there was no need to grow any new branches, for a branch level with them, old and with a flattened top like a low road in Canopy, led from the trunk to a wide, round, flat-roofed building perched at the intersection of five roads.
Four of the roads were lit, each with one of Airak’s blazing, blue-white lanterns. The lanterns were topped with wide, gleaming golden cones to keep the blaze from being directly visible from above. Unar realised that the fifth road, the one without a lantern, was broken.
If that was where they were going, there was no point standing around in the rain. Three tiny windows in the building, close to the roof, flickered with firelight, and she wanted to be where those fires were. Unar was halfway to the lantern before Frog cried, “Stop!”
Unar stopped. A door opened in the building, and a tall, narrow-shouldered silhouette with spreading skirts emerged, standing for a moment, fingers flexing, in the orange rectangle of the entrance.
“It is Frog,” Frog called. “Frog the Outer. I have brought ’er, Core Kirrik.”
“I felt her coming, Frog the Outer,” the woman called back in a high, musical voice. “Strong enough to wake me from a future-searching. Wait and I will quench the lamp. The Master will see you right away.”
Unar looked at Frog, whose eyes were wide and her grimace anxious. Neither demon attack nor Marram’s fall had disturbed the girl so much. She was afraid of something.
“If there’s some test to gain admission,” Unar told her, “I’ll pass it.”
“The test is of your ability to serve,” Frog said softly without taking her eyes from the dovecote, “and I am not so sure of that.”
Now it was Unar’s turn to grimace. Ungrateful child! If she had ever served anything, it was her desire to find her sister. She would hardly endanger this chance for them to be together. How bad could these people, this so-called Master, possibly be? No worse than Servants who threw worn-out slaves off the edges of Garden beds.
The image came to her, again, of Marram falling, and she shook her head to rid herself of it. She’d told him to go back. Three times, she’d begged him to go back.
The woman that Frog had named Kirrik emerged from the dovecote, holding something like a blackened, upturned bowl on the end of a long stick. As she came closer, towards the light, Unar saw black hair with a silver streak swept back from a pinched and pointed face, as cooked-fishmeat-white as the hunters’ faces had been, with bloodless lips and a cleft chin. Her coat and full skirts were black, too, but finely woven, and she carried something on a second stick, leather stretched over a basket frame, to keep the rain off.
“We’re already wet,” Unar told her, and would have stepped forward, but Frog grabbed her by the seat of her pants and yanked back.
“Do not go into the light,” she hissed.
“Why not?”
Frog stripped a piece of bark from the side of the road and tossed it contemptuously towards the lantern. Immediately, lightning crackled out of the lantern and set the bark on fire. It fell, smouldering, for a few body lengths before the rain quenched it.
“The lanterns keep the demons out,” Kirrik said, smiling at Unar, and lowered the black bowl over the top of the golden cone like a slave snuffing a tallow candle. The blue-white light vanished. Unar could still see in the light from the other three.
“Go,” Frog said, her fist now striking Unar in the lower back, and Unar walked forward until she stood in front of Kirrik, the black bowl between them, the rain diverted by the tilted, stretched leather making a river to one side of them. Unar was much shorter than Kirrik and didn’t like having to look up at her.
“You people are my sister’s protectors?” she asked. “Her adopted family? She owes her life to you?” Her questions were ignored.
“If you come into the Master’s domain, you will be called Nameless the Outer, until the Master chooses to give you a name. You will call me Core, or Core Kirrik.”
Unar grimaced. Even the Servants hadn’t taken away her name. But Frog had said the test would be of her ability to serve. She mustn’t make a mistake simply because she was tired.
“Yes, Core Kirrik,” she said, more humbly than she’d ever been able to say Servant Eilif’s name. Her eyes went to the firelight in the little windows. She imagined she could feel the warmth already. The Master would see them right away, Kirrik had said. Unar must maintain her humility until that meeting was over.
“Come past me, Frog the Outer,” Kirrik said, and Frog led Unar until they both stood well behind the taller woman. Kirrik lifted the black bowl. The deadly ring of blue-white sprang up again across the road. Kirrik followed Frog and Unar towards the doorway of the dovecote. Frog opened the door. Kirrik remained silent until Unar tried to pass through the doorway.
“You will stay outside with me tonight, Nameless the Outer. We stand watch until dawn. It is Frog the Outer, alone, that the Master wishes to see.”