“Feed the other one,” Frog sneered. “This one will die of pride.”
Aforis, whose failed escape attempt several hours ago had ended with him setting fire to his own internal organs, took the porridge and water with hands that shook even more than Unar’s.
“You think what she’s doing is right, then?” Unar asked Frog.
Frog sneered again.
“When you have lesser numbers, you must do things the other side has no need to do.”
“That doesn’t answer the question. This isn’t right, Isin.”
“You call me that when you want me to take extra notice of what you say. But when you say it, I hear only the wind. You speak to the dead. Maybe the dead will take notice of you. Maybe the god of the dead will hear you, loyal Canopian that you are.”
Was she a loyal Canopian? A loyal Canopian wouldn’t have attacked a Servant of Airak or the Bodyguard of Ehkis. Yet she’d done it so she might win free, to protect Audblayin. She had spines like an Understorian now, but being in the dovecote repulsed her. It was a place of pain, a container of suffering.
“I fell while trying to save a slave,” Unar pointed out.
“And now you are one. But at least you are a slave to the cause of justice.”
“She promised to tell me what I wanted to know.”
“I heard no such promise from ’er lips.”
Frog used Unar’s next words to tie the two men up again. She didn’t even look up from her ink and parchment.
“Go to Core Kirrik,” she said. “Tell ’er the Bodyguard will not change his mind.”
Unar looked at Edax again.
“Edax,” she said with the same hopelessness with which she had called out to Marram. “Please!”
She might as well have been talking to the dead. He didn’t understand what kind of a woman Kirrik was. Her cold ruthlessness. Just like Unar’s mother. The day little Unar had spilled the expensive lantern oil, kicked it over because she was chasing butterflies, she had begged Father not to tell his wife. Please, Father! Her short little arms had gone around his knees, to try to stop him from going to Left Fork, where a strike that Airak hadn’t prevented had killed one of the trees. Fuel-finders from all over would be going to take it apart, cutting charred homes away from under the feet of the families of the departed, but she hadn’t cared about that. She’d only cared about not being alone when Mother came home.
Uranun had looked down at her, she’d thought then, with the eyes of the dead. He’d taken one stride, breaking apart the grip of her little hands, and left without a word.
Here, now, Edax didn’t stir.
Unar went to Kirrik. Waited until the older woman finished placing the rolled parchment in the clutches of a small green parrot and sent it on its way. When Kirrik turned her ghastly, pale, mad expression on Unar, it was easy to imagine the wrathful Old Gods had taken possession of her woman’s body, that there was nothing of reason or compassion left at all.
“Frog says to tell you that the Bodyguard won’t change his mind.”
Kirrik steepled her fingers. She took the god’s ear bone from the table, unfolded her leather umbrella, and led Unar outside.
“Spin, my spider,” Kirrik said, and Unar blew on the bone flute.
Out of the path, a wooden barrel began taking shape. It was all of a piece and part of the living wood. Bodiless, Unar rode the wave of unheard melodies, yet at the same time, she smelled the tacky floodgum sap, as she would have when performing magic in the Garden, and was distracted by the combination, as though two opposite ends of her nature were finding a way to knit together. Almost as soon as the continuous walls of the barrel rose, rainwater began to fill it. Kirrik stopped when the vessel was chest-high and just as wide.
They stood together silently while water fell around them.
“Not fast enough,” Kirrik mused. “Fetch water in a bucket and fill it.”
Unar bowed her head and went inside. Rainwater from the dovecote’s flat roof was channelled into a holding tank behind the bathroom and kitchen. She trudged back and forth for an hour or two, filling a pair of buckets on a frame, carrying them on her shoulders and then tipping them into the new pool Kirrik had made.
When it was full to the brim, Kirrik sent Unar to fetch Frog, Sikakis, and the two prisoners. Frog and Sikakis took Aforis with them from the bunkroom first, leaving Edax alone with Unar for a brief interval.
“I have to help her,” Unar said. “I have to help her, to win my freedom and save Audblayin.”
“The moment you stop helping her,” Edax said, meeting her eyes at last with his pain-emptied ones, “you’ll become her. If you want to save Audblayin, you’d better cut your own throat with those spines, before they heal and you become a fit shell for her black soul to crawl into. The gift goes with the body. Only godhood goes with the soul.”
Unar didn’t understand him. She stood, mystified, while Frog and Sikakis returned to untie Edax from the bunk.
“Keep up, Unar,” Sikakis grunted as he dragged Edax down the corridor.
Outside the dovecote, the sun was almost down. The grey cloud-light seen high above in tiny patches between the trees had turned bruise-yellow, and the blue-white lanterns that kept demons away were too low on their branches to light the surface of the water in the pool. There, raindrops made small gilded circles before fading so that Unar couldn’t see them at all.
“Put the Bodyguard in the water,” Kirrik ordered, and Sikakis moved to comply.
Edax came to life, thrashing, straining for the edge again. There was fear in his eyes that Unar had never seen before, and it was contagious. She turned to go inside, but Kirrik’s hand flashed out and seized a handful of her shirt.
“Stay. There is a thing about Bodyguards that you do not know. Every one of them has a private means of communication with his mistress. For the rain goddess, whenever she is immersed in water, her Bodyguard feels whatever she feels. It is so he can sense that she is safe while she sleeps. Most often, she feels nothing. She is rarely wakened at the bottom of her lake. What fool would disturb her rest?”
Sikakis wrestled Edax over the edge of the pool. Once he was in it, Kirrik motioned for Unar to spin again. Unar’s knuckles whitened on the ear bone, but she didn’t raise it to her lips.
“What are you—”
Kirrik seized her words and the rim of the water-filled pool began to grow closed, stopping just short of a complete seal, holding Edax by his neck in the water. He lifted his desperate gaze to Unar.
“Jump,” he said. “Jump, now!”
“What my little birds have discovered,” Kirrik went on, smirking, “is that this bond between goddess and Bodyguard goes both ways. When he is immersed in water, in her element, in turn, the Lady Ehkis feels what he feels. Did he tell you she was ignorant of his little excursions? Did he tell you so while he took you under the water, so that she could share in all those delicious sensations?”
“No,” Unar said. They hadn’t been together underwater. Only in the open air. But Aforis stared in horror at Edax.