“Jump, little Gardener,” Edax said again, clearly. “Please!”
Unar remained still. She refused to abandon Audblayin, but she couldn’t see any other way to stop what was about to happen. Kirrik planned to reach through Edax to harm his goddess. He wanted Unar to sacrifice herself to protect Ehkis. Just as Unar had sacrificed him to try to protect Audblayin. If Unar jumped, Kirrik wouldn’t be able to use her.
“You are talking to the wrong tool,” Kirrik informed him, just as Frog seized Aforis’s power. Aforis’s lips moved, making no sound as he attempted to speak to Edax, and Frog did something to the water that Edax was trapped in.
Edax gritted his teeth. An agonised sound still escaped him. Unar heard the muffled thuds of his clawed feet kicking the inside of the wooden vessel. He twisted, and the skin of his neck tore and bled. Aforis shouted in dismay, but the louder his objections, the more power Frog had to use.
It wasn’t until Unar saw the steam rising that she realised Frog was boiling Edax alive. Trying to hurt him so badly he would agree to be their tool. Trying to hurt his goddess so badly that he would agree to be their tool.
“Sing,” Kirrik shrieked at him. “Sing, wake your bones, agree to fetch the Talon for me, and your goddess will feel no more pain.”
Clouds of steam erupted around Edax. Aforis clawed at his own face in an attempt to hold the sound of his involuntary shouts inside himself, to keep Frog from using them. Unar found herself screaming, too, though nobody bothered to use her screams. Her magic couldn’t be used for boiling water. Only the magic of the lightning god was good for that. When the steam cleared, Edax’s eyes were glazed and his head lolled to one side.
The rain stopped. There could have been no surer sign that the rain goddess had endured a terrible hurt. Edax was not resting. He was not unconscious.
“You killed him,” Kirrik cried, and whirled to strike Frog, hard, across the face.
“Not I, Core Kirrik,” Frog protested, sprawled on the path, nursing her cheek. “There was a surge from the prisoner, I lost control for a moment, and ’e—”
Kirrik struck Aforis, too, though he was not thrown to the ground by the force of it. Nor did he grin at her, or show any sign of triumph. His shoulders heaved, but Unar thought he was crying, not laughing.
She might have been crying, too. Was it tears, or rain? No, the rain was stopped. It stopped. Is the goddess dead, too? Is that how closely they are connected? Her face felt hot, but maybe that was the steam, the heat from the human cauldron.
Cut your own throat with those spines. Before they heal. A fit shell for her black soul.
At last, she admitted to herself what Edax had been trying to tell her. Kirrik would never reveal how to get through the barrier or how to keep her power to herself. The spines she had given Unar were intended for her own use; Unar was her backup body, spare parts, a vessel to hold her soul when her present body became too old or injured.
Frog’s multiple warnings about attacking Kirrik flashed through her mind. You want to kill ’er, but you would not like what would happen if you tried. Unar put her hand into her pocket and squeezed the tooth through the chimera-cloth blindfold. Now was the time. Unar could break every bone in Kirrik’s body. Destroy her. Rend that body beyond healing.
But Kirrik would take my body. Push my soul into the ether. Wear my face and lull my friends into lowering their defences. It’s no use. I stole this bone-breaking weapon for nothing.
“What is your plan, now, Core Kirrik?” Sikakis asked in a low, troubled voice.
“My plan, Core Sikakis? My plan?”
“The monsoon is over.” Sikakis gestured in the direction of the empty sky. “You’ve weakened the rain goddess. Your informers spoke true. You could take advantage of this. No Canopian army will be prepared for an assault more than a month early. They’ll be dozing in their barracks. Of course, we’re also unprepared. It will take time to train the men you have to work in units, to gather and secrete in strategic places the supplies they’ll need to sustain repeated assaults. And we don’t have the Talon.”
Kirrik stared at him, mouth open and chest heaving, the umbrella cast aside, her fingers crooking like claws and her spines extended from their sheathes, quivering.
“We still have these two,” Frog pointed out shakily. “The man got the better of me, but ’e is a sharper weapon than any old bone, if Kirrik wields ’im. If the rain goddess is injured, let us go and capture ’er right now!”
“We should wait,” Sikakis said. “Consolidate our new gains. Explore our—”
“I am tired of waiting,” Kirrik screamed suddenly. She seized Unar, turning her, kicking her in the back of her knees to force her down. “Frog, where is the blindfold?”
Frog’s tiny hands dipped into the pocket in Unar’s skirts. They pulled out the chimera-skin cloth and unwrapped, not the powerful tooth of the Old God that Unar had stashed there, but the useless amulet that Marram had been wearing when he arrived at the dovecote.
“Did you think I did not see you take it?” Frog whispered. “I took it back. So dank, Unar.”
“Give it to me!” Kirrik snatched the blindfold from Frog, letting the amulet fall; it snagged by its cord on the rough bark of the branch. As soon as the chimera cloth tightened over Unar’s eyes, the residue of the magic that had killed Edax became invisible to her. Kirrik’s spittle flecked her ear. “Play as you have never played before, tool.”
Unar had not jumped to her death. She had no choice but to play. Whatever it was that took shape in Kirrik’s hands, she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t sense it. Only feel the powerful flicker of her weightless mote-self, between hot and cold, up and down, swiftly accelerating heartbeat and silence. Perhaps Kirrik was killing everyone around her. Perhaps she was killing no one.
Perhaps she was waking all the warriors in her house, preparing for war.
FIFTY
EACH OF Unar’s laboured breaths felt as if it might be her last.
As the vestiges of her strength ebbed, Unar’s weightless motes coalesced into a body again. She lay facedown on the wide branch, her left hand embracing the bark, her right hand holding the ear bone to her lips. Kirrik’s bare foot, with all her weight behind it, pressed between Unar’s shoulder blades. Her skirts slid through Unar’s hair and over her shoulders.
“More,” someone exhorted. “More!”
She is killing me. This is what it is like to be used up. To be drained to death.
Another heave of her chest. Another rush of power through the bone flute and Unar’s body flying apart. Sounds of something enormous breaking. The whole world split in two by lightning and water. But neither were Unar’s domain. It was a monster’s spine that was breaking. Or maybe Unar’s own spine, ground beneath Kirrik’s hate.
She can’t kill me. She needs my body. Edax said so.