Oos begged you to come after me? Oos cares. But she doesn’t know how worthless I am.
“You were wrong,” Unar said, eyes still lowered. “I would’ve gone anywhere, done anything, to learn the secret of wielding magic when the gods ordained that I shouldn’t. My heart is bad, Marram. It’s rotten inside. That’s why it hurts.”
“We do not have time for that. We have got to go after them. They have cut down Airak’s emergent. They will cut down Audblayin’s emergent. The tallowwood. Our home.”
Unar raised her head. When Kirrik spoke of a path that stretched all the way to Audblayinland, Unar had imagined an extension of the great branches that held the dovecote. Nothing prepared her for the sight through the trees of a great floodgum, as thick through the trunk as the Garden was wide, sliced through a thousand growth rings and fallen, forming a road wide enough for fifty barrows to pass in each direction.
The great, creamy circle of the severed tree seemed to glow in the gloom.
“Was that Airak’s emergent?” Unar asked.
“Yes.”
“With his Temple in the crown of it?”
“Yes.”
“Did the god fall?”
“He did if he was home. Unar, stand up. We must go. I do not care about Airak. I care about my brothers.”
But Unar couldn’t care about anything except the pain that hollowed out her middle. She could no longer see the broken tree. The world was blurred by tears. Her body felt too heavy to ever stand or walk again.
“You go,” she said.
“And have that evil woman put me to sleep again?”
“She can’t. Not without me.”
“Then I need you to help us fight. We do not have magic.”
“Me neither. Not anymore.”
Marram sat back on his haunches at that.
“Is there something that will help?” he asked eventually. “Something she might have left behind in the hut? Birds? Bones? Any kind of tea that Hasbabsah might have taught you about?”
Nothing will help. Except to let me fall.
Unar wished she had been hit on the head. She wished she had amnesia. In the corner of her eye, she saw the living barrel where Edax had boiled to death. He was still in it, in memory too close to the present. Unar closed her eyes and shrank away, gasping for breath in between sobs. She wished she knew how to put the hibernating spell on herself, and even then, she couldn’t be sure that those in hibernation didn’t dream.
Death waited over the edge. She shifted her weight in preparation.
“You do not want to go down there,” Marram said quietly, catching her as she rolled. “I was only in the water down at Floor for a few minutes, but I almost did not make it to the closest tree. The ripples, you see. The water-dwellers can tell the difference between a river and a living thing falling in.”
Unar cried until her ribs hurt too much to keep heaving.
“I’m no use to you,” she croaked. “I’m no use to anybody.”
“Now, that is not true, is it? Esse said you made only the second-worst rope he has ever seen. Come on. Lean on me. I am not Bernreb. I cannot carry you if you will not walk.”
Unar leaned on him, but only because he wouldn’t leave her alone. He took her inside the dovecote, and she made no move to help or to hinder, even though the place made her sick. He found fresh fruit for them both, killed several of the birds for them to cook and eat. They tasted better than the owl. Marram put the parchments the birds had carried into the flames.
“Now,” he said when he had taken her to toilet and back to the fire, “I want you to describe to me, in detail, what the process is for passing through the light of those lamps. I can see they are no ordinary, light-giving lamps.”
“They keep away demons,” Unar told him dully. “Lightning strikes whatever wanders into the circle of light. Although they seem not to burn the branches that they rest on. Kirrik had a thing like a basin on a stick for putting over them, for quenching the light.”
He left her for a while, then, ransacking the writing room and the other rooms in search of the bell-shaped bowl on its long rod. Unar stared at the flames.
“It is not here,” Marram admitted hours later.
“She’s taken it with her,” Unar agreed.
“If I cut through the branch, will the lantern fall? Or will it float, like the bones do?”
“I don’t know. What bones?”
“There were little pieces of bone, no bigger than grape seeds, wrapped in chimera skin and stowed under her bed. When I shook them out of the cloth, they floated, forming a shape like a dream of half a giant’s skull in dust. Can you use magic like that?”
“No.” Unar shook her head. “I told you, my magic is gone.”
“I will try to make something to replace the basin and stick, then. Maybe the bathtub. Can you help me to carry it?”
Unar shrugged and went to help him.
They dragged and pushed the copper tub all the way down the corridor. Its feet tore up the wood and its weight fell on Marram’s instep once; he shouted an oath loud enough to wake whatever poor souls still slept in the storey above.
“How did you wake up, Marram?”
He lifted his end of the tub again, and hobbled forward with it, turning it to fit it through the doorway to the writing room. Unar backed slowly away with her end, staring into the gleaming curve of its full belly. The thing was expensive. No Understorian, denied the metal-seeded fruit of Akkad’s niche, should have used such wealth in metal simply to hold water. Obviously Frog had friends in all parts of Canopy. Perhaps the bath could contain the power of Airak’s lantern. Perhaps.
“It was a mistake, I think,” Marram said. “Or the work of the Servant of Airak. I pretended to be still sleeping until the other wakened ones were gone, but the sleepers lay on the other side of me like corpses. It reminded me of a joke my brothers played on me when we were children. Left me crying because I could not wake them. Gave me a preview of their deaths.”
“What do Understorians do with their dead?”
“We seal them into the wood of the trees that give us life. Surely you do the same?”
No. Unar wanted to close her eyes again. We let them fall.
“When Audblayin died,” she said, “her body was wrapped up and kept in the Temple. They keep it there until a new god … goddess … comes to the Garden. Then they grind up the old bones and brush them onto the body of the new god … goddess. When he … she swims through the water to reach his … her new home, the bone-dust goes into the moat. I guess.”
“It is strange,” Marram said, grunting with the effort of shifting the bath. “When I fell asleep, there was a sort of cold feeling in the base of my skull. I was instantly convinced that it was the shadow of the first storm of the monsoon. I fell down. It felt like my skin was shrinking in on itself. When I woke up, I thought my own skin was a coating of moss. Then I realised it was still summer, even though the rain had stopped. I could not understand why I had woken early.”
“Maybe the rain stopping helped you to wake, even though the spell was still on you.”
“Maybe. Then I thought it was my amulet, but the amulet was gone. I guess it was just superstition, then.”