Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(11)

“Ehkis give me courage,” she said, naming the rain goddess.

“You shouldn’t swear by other gods!” Oos said, scandalised.

“I can if I want. When my goddess is dead, anyway. Ehkis holds sway over fish, doesn’t she? She can keep them away from me!”

They jumped off the platform’s watery edge together.





FIVE

THE WATER was cold, like death.

Like slow falling.

Unar’s arm jerked in its socket. Oos was trying to pull her up towards the surface. Unar imagined there were slimy fish all around her. She sucked water into her lungs. White lights burst behind her eyes. She curled her body and tried to cough.

Something powerful uncurled her. It was water weeds, in the grip of Oos’s magic. Just as Oos was able to coax seedlings up towards the light, she was able to form a floating, moving mat of weeds that drew Unar up and flattened her, belly-up, on the surface of the lake.

“Relax,” Oos said soothingly by her ear. Unar found her chest full of air again. The urge to choke and thrash was gone. Streaks of powdered mother-of-pearl dripped from Oos’s hair.

“I don’t know why there isn’t a bridge.”

“It’s so we can be reborn by passing through water.”

“I don’t want to be born again. Once was enough. Please get me out. I’m scared of the fish.”

“You really should have thought of that before you gave yourself to the Garden.”

They climbed out together beside the others, who had already been robed in red by waiting slaves. Twenty-eight Gardeners ascended the ivory steps into the egg-shaped Temple they’d pledged themselves to but had only ever seen from the outside.

Sunlight penetrated the translucent white walls, making them glow, making Unar’s eyes widen in awe. Inside, the promised white-and-purple banisters spiralled up to a ring-shaped platform that rested against the widest circumference of the egg, halfway up the sides of it.

But the sky-coral and the birds had fallen. Broken shells, yolk-matted feathers, and honeycomb-structures made an ugly mess on the floor. The power of the goddess had held them suspended.

The goddess is dead.

Unar climbed the staircase at the end of the single-file procession, combing her wet hair back from her forehead with her fingers, pulling stray weed strands away, treading barefoot in the little drips left behind by the others. Soon, she saw the white-robed Servants standing in a semicircle on the annular platform, most of the men grey-bearded, the women white-haired. They’d served a long time. This incarnation had been long-lived. Gardeners had come and gone without the opportunity to be promoted.

Until now.

Unar was one of the youngest, but she knew the magic was suited to her nature. Ambition, desperation, single-mindedness, and strength; these were all the qualities of unborn life. Her mother had cursed her for selfishness, for striving above her station, but striving was the basic nature of a seed and selfishness the basic nature of a newborn child.

Her magic was powerful. Perhaps the most powerful of all the candidates.

I will be chosen. I must be chosen.

She bowed her head with the others as the old goddess’s Bodyguard came up the other staircase, carrying a white-shrouded body in his thickly-muscled forearms. Unar studied him intently. At last. Her chance to see him up close, to speculate on the qualities Audblayin’s Bodyguard must cultivate.

The man had wide shoulders and a tree-trunk neck. A broad nose like a bracket fungus. A potbelly that he actually rested the weight of the corpse on as he walked. He wore an open, elaborately embellished jacket over a tunic and long, split skirt, the same as Edax had, but his were white instead of black; pristine, as though he’d never left the Temple.

And perhaps he hadn’t, since the foray that had separated him from Audblayin the one and only time that Unar had laid eyes on her living goddess.

Unar was utterly dismayed. This man was nothing like the skilled, athletic Edax. She chastised herself for not realising what was obvious: Why should the Bodyguard of Audblayin leave the Temple when the deity did not? He was never required to fight. Even if the Understorians staged a raid and penetrated the local niche, how could warriors hope to pass by the wards that protected the Garden?

This Bodyguard had spent his tenure watching from the high, crescent-moon-shaped windows, and when he didn’t watch, he ate. Food was the most common tribute to the gods, and how much could one little old woman, imprisoned in an egg, possibly eat?

He looked up from his burden and met her gaze blackly, as though he knew what she was thinking. When he opened his mouth, she expected to be chastised, but instead, he said, “Our Audblayin has gone at last to Atwith, as Atwith must go to her when he is born. Her body will remain in the Temple until we find her—or him—again.”

He took a step back and, with his magic, lowered the shrouded shape through the central hole in the platform. It floated gently down to rest upon the shattered corals and ruined nests.

One of the Servants stepped forward. Unar recognised the Gatekeeper of the Garden, even as the old woman set the heavy bronze lantern and red-and-green stole of her office down by the hem of her white robe, relinquishing the role.

“I will join you in the search,” she said. Five others mimicked her, stepping forward, saying the words. Six ex-Servants would leave the Garden with the ex-Bodyguard, making a total of seven. They would make note of new babies that had been born, even though the incarnation wouldn’t reveal itself until puberty. They would wander, without magic, naked as when they were born out of respect for the birth goddess, living from charity, speaking only to each other, for ten or fifteen years, watching the children from afar as they grew.