Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(17)

Then she saw somebody walking on a branch road towards the Temple, carrying a lit taper that made the smallest possible amount of light. The figure was pale. A naked slave—no, a man clothed completely in high-necked, long-sleeved robes, a tunic and waist-wrap of pale pink. The colour of dawn, the colour of the orchid mantis, the colour of women’s parts he’d never see or touch, for gods and goddesses swore the same oaths of virginity as their Bodyguards.

He stopped on the path beneath her and looked up. His square face was middle-aged and kindly.

“You don’t look like a killer,” he said, raising the taper in his gloved hand. Whenever Odel ventured into the thick of the populace, he had to keep his skin covered. Like other incarnated deities, he could only be touched by sunlight and rain. It would be a shame for his Bodyguard to have to toss some innocent down to their death because of an accidental skin-to-skin contact.

“My god,” Unar gasped.

“No.” Odel smiled. “I see that I am not, in fact, your god, and even if it weren’t for those clothes, you have the smell of the Garden on you. You serve Audblayin, who has died this day. Have you come looking for newborn babes?”

“No!” She didn’t know what to do. She should stay where she was. She shouldn’t approach a god without permission. But she was higher than he was. It was disrespectful to be higher than a god.

“Sensible of you. There are no women here, after all, but my Bodyguard, and she will carry no children. She mustn’t be made vulnerable by their potential to fall.”

Unar tried to look everywhere at once. There was no sign of the Bodyguard.

“Where is she?”

He ignored the question.

“I recognise you from a long-ago dream. You had a sister who fell.”

She gazed at him helplessly. For a moment, she couldn’t answer. Finally, she said, “It wasn’t your fault, Holy One. They didn’t come. My parents.”

“No. They didn’t.”

“Did you think I came here to kill you, Holy One?”

“Many attempts are made.” Odel shrugged. “Sometimes they wish to release my soul from this body. Their own offspring are almost ready to draw their first breath, the breath that brings the soul into the body, and they would have a god’s soul in the ether, waiting. Others wish for revenge.”

Unar shifted in her seat and realised the weights of her valuable bore-knife and machete were gone from her belt. Twisting, she saw them only an arm’s length away, unsheathed in the grip of a beautiful, naked woman whose amputated breasts allowed her to press, flat as a lizard, against the bark of the tree.

“Those are mine,” Unar cried.

“Give them back to her, Aurilon,” instructed the god, and the Bodyguard, quick as a hunter spearing a snake, drove the weapons back into their sheaths, making Unar cry out wordlessly again.

The Bodyguard fitted her fingers back into leather gloves tipped with claws as long and keen as knives, which had clung by themselves to the bark while she stole the tools, and tightened the leather wrist-straps in their black-painted buckles with her teeth. The back of her body from nape to heels was criss-crossed with raised scars to look like the brindled bark. In the dark, still naked but for the clawed climbing gloves, she was all but invisible.

“Chimera claws,” Unar blurted out. “They are real. You have a chimera skin here. I came to see it.”

“That old thing?” the god called up to her. “It’s rotted away. But why should you want to see it?”

“I have to see it. I’m losing belief in Audblayin. I’m losing hope. I need the proof that female can turn to male. I need to see that she can return to us a man, if she chooses.”

“Come down here,” Odel said. Unar was afraid to come close to him, and he must have known it. He stepped back, still smiling, to give her room. She hated herself for trembling, for feeling like bursting into tears. She bowed to him, deeply, and didn’t rise.

“Were there not elders in the Garden,” he asked quietly, “Servants of Audblayin, whom you might have gone to for guidance?”

“I hate them,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“I wasn’t chosen.”

Her heart pounded. Why was she telling him this? She was wicked; she’d always known it. She hadn’t obeyed her parents. In the end, although they’d given her life, the most precious commodity of Audblayinland, she hadn’t loved them. Grub gathering as a child, by crossing the border of Oxorland, she’d thought to be rewarded by her mother’s love, but instead had been rejected even more harshly. Failing to learn from this, she had crossed the barrier into Understorey where, instead of finding the fallen baby, Isin, she’d weakened the Garden’s hold on her, wakening something she feared might be desire.

As incapable of obeying the Servants’ laws as she was of obeying her duty to family, she’d treated the Great Gates like streams to be stepped over instead of walls to keep her safe, and now she stood in another niche insulting one god to another. He’d have her thrown down, one thousand paces into darkness, to break in the boneyard of Floor as her baby sister had broken before her.

She raised her eyes to his face, briefly, expecting scorn, but found only understanding.

“I can’t see the future,” Odel said. “Not yours, anyway. It’s only the deaths of children that I see. Since I turned sixteen, whenever I close my eyes, it’s little children falling who fill my dreams. I am the forty-fourth incarnation of Odel, and I will find no peace until I die. Here’s a thing that I have learned, little Gardener. Sometimes, it’s best to not be chosen.”