Unar felt a chill.
“What is it?”
“Something that threatens the Master’s plans.”
“And what are the Master’s plans?”
“How do you find the barrier from this side, girl?”
It seemed a non sequitur; Unar struggled to make the connection. Did the Master mean to destroy the barrier? That was impossible. And why? There was a way through. Otherwise Hasbabsah couldn’t have become a slave.
“How do I find the barrier? I haven’t seen it. I haven’t touched it since I fell.”
But I’m sure it has a weakness. Somewhere. The window of the Odelland palace opened for me, and so did the wards of the Garden.
“And if you desired to feel the sun, what then? If you needed fresh fruits to cure a child’s illness? What if you had fallen and your family remained above, and they were forced to watch while demons ate the flesh off your bones?”
“That would be my misfortune.” If I hadn’t been born gifted. “The barrier is to keep demons out of Canopy. Without it, chimeras would grow fat, and it would be the end of us all. The gods use more than half their strength maintaining it. Each one spends power on the section that protects their niche.” That was what Unar knew for sure. What came next was guessing. Thinking aloud. “They can’t fashion one that lets Understorians in but keeps demons out. Any large, warm body—”
“Lies. Chimeras live in Understorey, and yet we thrive. And Canopians pass through the barrier. Why them and not us?”
“Canopians are born under the gods’ protection. It’s your misfortune, as I said.”
“Why can they not protect everyone? Are they so weak?”
“No! That is, I don’t know—”
“One Forest,” Kirrik said. “One people. That is what the Master seeks in the future. That is what we hope to achieve. We believe the gods can and should protect everyone. And if they cannot, they are not true gods, and should be killed to allow the Old Gods to return.”
The Old Gods cared for everyone, Hasbabsah had said. Now Kirrik seemed to be saying the same thing. Yet Unar had seen a neck bone in the bedchamber of a princess, and an ear bone in Frog’s custody. And those had not been small bones. They had not been human bones, and in her experience it was rare enough for humans to care about other humans.
From which distant country would the Old Gods come, if their souls were to be reincarnated in the bodies of giants? And why did the Canopian gods have to die for it to happen?
FORTY-FOUR
THE THREAT predicted by the future-searching did not materialise; nothing menaced them in the night.
By morning, Unar had stopped turning Kirrik’s One Forest speech over in her mind. She was so tired she could barely think or speak. Imagining Frog, snug inside the dovecote but no doubt restless with anxiety that Unar would fail the test, was all that kept Unar’s eyes from closing and her cheek from sinking to the branch.
The notion that she still owned the energy to somehow get her breeches down and urinate off the edge also faded. She’d let loose, uncaring, and the seat of her pants had felt warm for a moment. Eventually, the relentless monsoon had washed the warmth away.
Now songbirds flew down from the bright treetops, entering into the tiny windows of the dovecote. The death-lamps of Airak burned steadily, neither flickering nor waning, though they seemed dimmer as cloud-scattered daylight infiltrated as far as it ever would in Understorey, where the sun never warmed anyone.
Contrary to what Kirrik had said about fasting, cooking smells and men’s voices came from the closed door of the dovecote. More tiny birds fluttered down, wet and bedraggled, to enter the windows, and some of them left, again, flying up towards the light.
At last, the heavy door swung back and Frog’s big eyes peered out at Unar and Kirrik.
“The Master says you may enter and break your fast. But be quiet. ’E is upstairs. Sleepin’.”
Core Kirrik passed the umbrella to Frog and swept immediately past Unar, through the open door. It took Unar’s fogged mind a few more moments to absorb what was happening. She still didn’t move until Frog took her hand and tugged.
“This way.”
“I did what she told me,” Unar said, too loudly, but the world was weird and tilting. “I passed the test.”
“That was not the test,” Frog said. Unar felt as though she’d been flattened by a broken bough. That was terrible news. And the world was tilting even more. Unar lost her balance. Stumbled through the doorway. Her hands and knees found polished floor in place of rough, wet bark.
She had tumbled into a cloakroom. Lit by an Airak-lamp of the nondeadly variety. Unar slowly raised her head to see not only heavy fur cowls and rows of strange boots with separated toes, but unfamiliar weapons with spikes and multiple curving blades.
“Let me help you up, Outer,” said a voice like a belling ox, and Unar realised that one of those pairs of boots was occupied. A man’s broad black hand was extended towards her.
Somebody else from Canopy. Somebody else who has fallen.
“Warmed One,” Unar gasped, grasping the hand, and as it drew her to her feet, she absorbed the rich layers of embroidered silk that covered the man from neck to knees, the way his priceless outer coat was cut off at the elbows to leave his forearms bare, and the scar-like seams where his climbing spines were hidden.
“My One Forest name is Sikakis,” he said. There was grey in his black hair and beard, but his grip was strong and his dark eyes unwavering. “I was Acis, once, a prince of Airakland, but those days are far behind me.”
“You will leave Core Sikakis alone,” Kirrik snapped, unseen, from beyond the cloakroom. “He has no time for you, Nameless. Come here!”
Unar went, stumbling a little. The floor was uneven where the five branches beneath joined one another. Kirrik waited in a room with a round table and sixteen chairs around it, none of them occupied. In the centre of the table, the blue-white light of another lantern overpowered the yellow light from a hearth fire on the right-hand side. To the left-hand side, a writing desk was covered in scrawled-on parchments and the droppings of tiny birds, who sat on rows of perches pecking grain from wooden feeders. Shelves on every wall held leather-bound books, stacks or rolls of skins and paper, and row upon row of stoppered ink bottles and feather quills.
“Is this a library?” Unar asked, bewildered. “A school?” She had expected more weapons. Space for fighting men to train. Cooks to feed the warriors and seamstresses to repair their armour. From the outside, it was a large building.