Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(38)

“I’m stuck,” Ylly said abruptly.

“It is sap glue.” Hasbabsah sounded even wearier and gloomier. “For dayhunters or needle-teeth, to stop them from damaging the net or taking the fish. The glue could not set hard until the rain stopped.”

The rain had stopped, but only temporarily, Unar thought. The rivers were running. The next time it rained, it would rain longer and harder than before and it would go on until the end of the wet season.

“It’s only stuck to your clothes,” she said. “You can wriggle out of them.”

“No,” Ylly said. “It’s gone through my clothes. The undersides of my knees and my hands are stuck.”

Oos began to weep noisily but her hands were stuck, too, so that she couldn’t even wipe her face. “My aura is faded by now. I’ll never get home. The barrier will be closed to me. And there’s no magic here.”

Ylly turned on her, as much as she was able.

“Some wicked force that you can’t control is keeping you from the ones you love? Imagine that!”

Unar felt strangely remote from Oos’s concerns about faded auras; of course they could get back. Of course there was magic here. Understorians had carried a magic bed to the king of Odelland, after all. There must be rules that were not taught, or properly understood, in Canopy.

“We can wait for a raid to breach it,” she said, thinking aloud. “When the barrier is weak. They must be able to come through when the god of the niche is weak.”

“She is weak,” Oos cried. “She’s a suckling babe of six moons! Yet there were no raids this winter past. Gods form alliances for the protection of their niches while they are weak.”

“My granddaughter is a suckling babe of six moons,” Ylly said, “yet I’ve never seen her. I pray you never see your goddess again.”

“That does not help us, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said.

“Are you stuck, too, Hasbabsah?” Unar asked, trying to twist; her skin burned, threatening to tear. “I’m stuck by my buttocks. Atwith take whatever Understorian fisherman slathered glue here!”

“I am stuck too,” Hasbabsah acknowledged.

“Should we shout to attract attention?”

“Noise will bring hungry demons. It is unlikely anyone will come to assist us. Most Understorians stay in their well-stocked homes for the wet season. As I said to you, there can be no trunk crossings in the monsoon rains.”

“Aren’t there any bridges between trunks?” Unar tried to see where the nearest trunk might be, but the meagre dawn light through the forest fog was little better than using a candle in another niche’s Temple for seeing the carvings on the Garden Gate. Unar could still barely make out the shapes of her companions.

Hasbabsah made a reproving, sucking sound.

“Would you make a bridge to your door for a demon to cross? If there is one good your barrier has done us, it is that demons can no longer cross from tree to tree by the canopy. All but the chimera must descend to the floor. They have been fewer, and leaner, these last thousand years.”

“Fire, then,” Unar suggested.

Hasbabsah shrugged. She perched glumly in her woven cloak and robe like a wet wood hen.

“Fire would be a fine thing. It would repel the creatures and draw any curious straggling passersby. But I see no way to make one.”

Unar had to admit she saw no way to make one, either, and when the rain began again, heavy and relentless, the point became moot. She passed magenta cherries and beans to the others, poking them into mouths when hands were stuck. They chewed slowly as the light grew bright enough for them to see each others’ dripping, despondent faces.

“Perhaps the rain will soften the glue,” Unar said.

“No,” called a voice from around the curve of the trunk, half drowned out by the rushing of the river. A few moments later, a soft, nasal laugh came from closer by. “The rain will not soften it.”

Unar stared at the spread-eagled, sticklike young man who crawled carefully around the circumference of the tallowwood. He was slightly above the level of the plank where they perched and drenched like they were; he wore a plain grey shirt and breeches cut off at the elbows and knees, made of strapleaf fibre designed to hold body warmth and protect from bark friction rather than any attempt to keep dry.

The man’s forearms and shins seemed to adhere to the trunk. It wasn’t until he moved again that Unar saw the flash of slim white spikes that protruded from his ashy Understorian skin. The huge pack on his back was hung with more ropes and grapples than she’d ever seen in one place before.

“They are not the dayhunter who has been poaching my catch,” he said over his left shoulder. “But they have wrecked my net all the same. And their skins are not worth anything.”

“Who are you talking to?” Unar asked loudly.

“He talks to his blessed side,” Hasbabsah said. “It is what one does, when one is contemplating wrong action.”

The man turned his head back to them and smiled at Hasbabsah. He had brown hair and clear grey eyes.

“Welcome home, older sister,” he said. “You have fallen far. My name is Esse. I will get you down.”

“Up,” Oos begged. “We want to go up. Not down.”

Esse ignored her. He eased one bare foot down onto the platform where it met the trunk, closest to Unar. The brown glue squished between his shockingly pale toes.