Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(36)

Hopefully, no Servants would be awake to sense it.

They jumped.





PART II

Wet Season





TWENTY-THREE

UNAR FELL, a glass bead in the darkness with all the other beads of rain.

But this was not the small, safe fall she’d taken so many times with Edax.

Water caught whatever tiny fragments of light it could. Yellow light from the lanterns of the Garden. Blue light from the lanterns of Airak on the roads of Audblayinland. Light bounced from their wet, flailing arms and legs. Reflected light showed Unar a faint mirror of her feet as they approached the surface of the pool. She was slightly ahead of the others, having jumped a moment before them, and the rope between her waist and Ylly’s was taut.

The splash blinded and deafened her. She tried to swim upwards, but the rope, which had held her up, now kept her down. Then it came level. Unar’s head broke the surface of the water at the same time as Ylly’s. They gasped into each other’s faces. Ylly seemed to have trouble breathing; perhaps she’d swallowed some water. It had happened to Unar often enough.

Without words, they struck out for the side of the pool; Unar’s feet found a carved ramp close to the end of the screw pump.

Together, Unar and Ylly dragged Hasbabsah out of the pool.

The old woman was clawing at her mouth and bawling. Only then did Unar see blood on Ylly’s lips and realise why she was having trouble breathing; the blood was black in the blue light.

“Your slave-markings,” she said.

“If you would return us to Understorey,” Ylly said around her swollen tongue, “you must do it soon, before we choke in our own blood. There’s no path from this level. The ladders will turn to dust if we touch them. You must go up, and pull us by the ropes after you, or we must find a way down.”

From above Unar came Oos’s impassioned voice. “Go back up, Unar. You must go back up. The ladders will obey me. They will hold you. All of you. Go back up.”

Impossible, Unar thought, flabbergasted to be intercepted by a once-friend who should have been sleeping soundly in the egg-shaped Temple. Oos stepped out from behind an angled leaf-catcher, white robe sodden, beautiful and shivering and, to Unar’s eyes, tortured by the wrong she was complicit in.

“Change their markings, Oos,” Unar cried. “Remove them. Help them. The old woman can’t breathe.”

“Aoun knew you’d try to take them, even though it’s not in your power. That’s why he woke me. He couldn’t watch the Gate and this pool at the same time. He wasn’t sure which one you’d try.”

“Help us, Oos!”

“I am a Servant of Audblayin!”

“I thought you’d say that.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Unar moved closer to Oos as they spoke. Ylly and Hasbabsah, still roped to her, had no choice but to stagger after. Unar looked below the leaf-catcher. There, a new-formed river ran between ridges of tough, hairy, orange-tan bark, down the mighty trunk of the tallowwood tree. It would flow until the rain stopped, five months later at the end of the monsoon season.

“Nothing,” Unar said. “Don’t say anything. Just take a deep breath.”

“A deep breath?”

Unar launched her full weight at Oos, carrying them both into the vertical river. Resistance from the twin bark-ropes jerked her back momentarily before Ylly and Hasbabsah were dragged with her over the edge.

They fell for a minute or two. Audblayin’s magic ripped away from Unar’s insides as they breached the border of Canopy.

Unar clung to Oos, hoping for a pool; waiting for a pool. When they’d fallen for so long that the light of the Temple and surrounding city was lost from sight and demons howled in the dark, she knew they were going to die.

She’d made a mistake. There were no pools. There were no lateral branches in lightless Understorey. Only the straight trunks of the great trees, separated by hundreds of body lengths.

All four of them would smash to pieces when the river reached Floor.





TWENTY-FOUR

UNAR PLUNGED down with the river, lungs bursting, still gripping Oos around the waist with both arms.

I’m going to drown before I can smash to pieces.

But then her legs were bending up behind her head. Bodies pushed into hers. Something had caught them, was stretching with the weight of them.

A net.

Unar heard the cracking of the wooden pegs that held it in place. She felt fish flopping around her face. It was a fishnet. There was air. She could breathe it. She shouted with outrage at the fish-slime on her face and with relief at being alive.

Then the pegs gave way, a hidden lever was sprung, and the net leaped up into open air to one side of the river, holding its struggling, tangled, retching occupants in empty space where predators couldn’t poach the fish.

“What have you done?” Oos croaked, somewhere above Unar. “You’ve killed us all.”

“Be still,” Hasbabsah snapped. “This is a grass net for barkskippers. If you break it, we truly will die.”

“The marking on my tongue is gone,” Ylly said with wonder. “The pain and the blood, at least. If we’d known that all we had to do was drop down beyond the barrier, we would have gone decades ago.”

“Mine still bleeds,” Hasbabsah said. “But then, I have worn it longer. And we could not have known there would be people living here. Understorian towns do not normally lie below the most populated parts of Canopian niches, lest the water be polluted and the turds fall like rain.”