Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(39)

“This may warm your rump somewhat, Warmed One,” he said. He took a stoppered gourd from the place where it hung from his pack. Laughing his soft, nasal laugh, he turned his head again, briefly, to his left shoulder. Then he poured a splash of clear liquid from the gourd into Unar’s lap. It was not the most expedient place to pour it but clearly he intended to provoke her.

As it seeped through her clothes and reached the edges of the hardened glue, smoke began rising from it and it made a hissing sound. Unar bit her lip to keep from letting out a shriek as heat prickled her skin.

Then, she found she was able to lift herself off the plank.

“Stay still,” Esse said, climbing over her with his long spider-legs to pour the fluid onto Ylly, Oos, and Hasbabsah.

“What now?” Hasbabsah asked.

“You will stay with us until the rain stops. Then you can go home.”

“You are generous.”

“I’ve never seen Nessa,” Ylly said longingly. “Nor met my mother’s people.”

“There is little to see in Nessa,” Esse said, smiling, head and shoulders taller than the tallest of them. “It is very dark. Here, the lopping of the tree branches at the level of the fabled Garden lets a little light down to us, sometimes. Gannak is closer and more scenic. Still, to get to Gannak right now, you would have to descend all the way to Floor, and if it is not already flooded, it will be soon. You would have to swim with piranhas or risk a boat voyage not consecrated by Floorian bone women. They would sink you with wicked words.”

“We will go with you gratefully,” Hasbabsah said.

“We will?” Oos said incredulously.

“If you wish to jump but are too cowardly,” Ylly said, “I can push you.”

“You are a grandmother, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said sharply. “She is a child. Remember yourself.”

“Sawas was my child, and this one sent her away.”

“Quiet, now,” Esse advised. “The rain and mist screen us somewhat, but I built that net to catch something other than Canopians. The dayhunter who visits this part of the tree has claws longer than that Gardener’s leg bones.”

Unar looked down at her legs.

“This Gardener will go with you,” she said, mimicking his stilted, formal manner of speaking. “This Gardener will do what you say.”





TWENTY-SIX

UNAR SQUATTED to watch Esse work.

How would the five of them go down? He was the only one with the serpent-tooth spines that let him cling to the tree like a spider. Hasbabsah’s had been snapped off when she’d first been captured and made a slave. Esse took a sharp axe from his pack, cut away a slab of tallowwood bark that would have done for a sleeping mat, and began to chisel something from the side of the tree above their heads.

It seemed forever before the short plank, pointed at one end and barely wide enough to hold a single person, was ready to be separated from the tree. Esse paused to push his pursed lips into a bark crevice, drinking the rainwater. Unar and the others did the same. They waited, wet and miserable, while he meticulously shaped another five short planks.

Unar thought about Aoun discovering that she and the two slaves were gone. She imagined him having to tell Servant Eilif that he had failed. It serves him right. Let him torture himself wondering if she and Oos had died or lived.

Edax, though. Edax deserved an explanation. When Unar failed to appear at their secluded meeting place, he might wonder how he’d offended her, when he hadn’t offended her at all. The opposite.

He wouldn’t know that she was below the barrier, as he was, but too far away for him to hear her and with no magic to stretch out to him. In fact, the pool below Ehkisland where Edax had taught her to dive, swim, and move with a man in intimate ways might be near the Understorian town, Gannak, which Esse had said was the closest town, if not the town where Hasbabsah had come from, Nessa.

It occurred to Unar that she could have visited Nessa at any time. She’d never thought that news of it might comfort Hasbabsah, or that she might carry a message from the old woman to her folk. That was because unenslaved Understorians were dangerous and savage.

“Step down,” Esse told her quietly.

He’d used his axe to make holes in the tree trunk. Then, he’d wedged the six little planks into the holes to make a sort of suicidal spiral staircase. Unar stepped down until she stood on the second-lowest plank. The others were arrayed behind her, with Ylly on the second-highest plank.

“Pull out the highest plank and pass it down to me, potplant.”

“Potplant?”

“An Understorian slave grown like an exotic specimen in the soil of the cursed Garden, are you not?” Esse smiled at Ylly. Unar took hold of the front edge of the plank as it was passed down to her, and Esse hacked another hole, lower down, to wedge the plank into.

In this manner, they progressed slowly and carefully, until, by midmorning, they stood at the river’s edge far below the place where Esse had netted them. Unar saw a wooden ramp, narrow and covered with moss and lichen, leading straight into the flow.

“Hold the railing tight,” their guide advised. “Yes, you must get wet again, but you will become warm and dry inside. We keep the fire burning for the whole of the monsoon. Do not think I have enjoyed cutting and drying the fuel. Go on. Go past me. I must bring the planks in.”