Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(50)
“What was that?” Ylly bellowed from the other side of the door, trying to lift the latch.
Unar threw herself to the floor, arms protecting her head, as splinters and spray exploded through the wall of water. The tallowwood shook again, hard. Unar imagined Gardeners on swinging bridges in Canopy being tossed to their deaths. Something blocked the thin light that came through the water entrance. Luminescent fungi went dark in long, black scrapes.
The tree hummed as vibration slowly died. The wet tallowwood beneath Unar’s cheek became still.
She sat up. Through the falling water, the trunk of a yellowrain tree protruded far enough into the fishing room that it brushed the door where Oos had held the latch. Ylly shouted and pounded on the other side of the door, managing to open it only a handbreadth before it jammed on the intruding beam. The tree trunk parted the river. Its hard, black, close-pattered bark was blotched with frost-green moss and it led like a log road out into sheeting monsoon rain.
There was daylight out there, glimpsed in a narrow pair of triangles beneath the log, in between its rounded edge and the room’s floor. Unar searched for Oos, horrified by the thought that she might have been crushed. Then the silhouette of a heavy-breathing head popped up beside the log, close to the river. Oos’s shape scrambled up onto the log, rolling up her breeches so that her bare feet could get a grip on the bark.
Taking a deep breath, Oos then clawed her way, on all fours, through the vertical river, to freedom.
“Oos, wait,” Unar screeched. Oos didn’t wait. Unar went after her.
The river water was relentless, as if a whole tree-crown had fallen on her. Though only a few days had passed, the weight of water was twice what it had been when they had first come to the three brothers’ house. It almost carried her away, but then she was through, and she saw Oos ahead of her, fleeing down a road straighter and longer than any that existed in Canopy. The other end of it, where the fallen tree’s roots must have been, was lost in murky greyness.
“Where are you going?” Unar shouted, but Oos didn’t hesitate or even turn her head.
Rain, everywhere. Rain and gloom and the river. The trunks of the closest trees to the tallowwood were shadowy giants. The sound of Oos’s breathing was already lost in the downpour, and the Servant’s shape was indistinct with distance. A mosquito half the size of a sparrow whined at Unar’s ear, and she slapped at it.
The yellowrain trunk that she stood on might not be stable. She might get a few more footsteps along it, only to join Oos in the abyss. She was not Marram, to extend her spines and stick like a burr to the closest tree.
But Isin, Unar’s sister by blood, had fallen. She couldn’t let Oos fall, too. Not her sister by soil, seed, and the Garden. No matter how much Oos liked hats and hair-sticks and wouldn’t tell Unar what she’d learned in the Temple.
Unar touched the empty sheath at her waist, which she wore to remind Esse of what he owed her. If she slipped, she wouldn’t even have the bore-knife to save her.
“Audblayin’s bones,” she swore, and dashed through the rain after Oos.
THIRTY-ONE
WITH HER arms out for balance, Unar sprinted along the fallen tree.
It held her weight without moving, which was encouraging. Though the tree’s crown was missing, the occasional lateral branch thrust directly up, forcing Unar to skirt around. She couldn’t see Oos anymore through the monsoon, but where else could Oos have gone? There were two options, straight ahead or straight down, and Unar hadn’t heard any screams.
Another branch blocked her way, one of a cluster radiating out from the trunk at a node. Unar threw her arms around the vertical one and stepped out onto a horizontal one, only to find Oos resting on the other side, sitting with her back to the vertical branch. She nursed a bleeding scrape along her left arm. Her legs dangled down on either side of the trunk.
“Is this where you’re going to sleep tonight?” Unar yelled.
“Better than back there!” Oos yelled back. “Leave me alone!”
“What are you going to eat? How are you going to climb? What were you thinking?”
“You want to know what I was thinking? I was thinking that when Hasbabsah was taken as a slave, she could’ve tried harder to get away. Before she was marked, she could have tried. Maybe she didn’t try because her spines were broken. Her power was taken away. It was easier to do what she was told. Eat what she was given. Sleep somewhere warm, with a fire.”
“We’re not slaves. Understorians don’t have slaves.”
“Don’t they? How do you know? Have you asked, or were you too busy weaving baskets for your new masters? I’m going home, Unar!”
Oos had pulled her legs up, crouching on the yellowrain, ready to run again, when they both heard the deep, threatening hiss of an animal made invisible by the rain. Unar’s heart pounded. She met Oos’s fearful glance, hardly daring to breathe.
A skinny figure hurled towards them through the gloom, dark-faced and white-grimaced. A starved adult. No, a child of eight or nine.
“A demon is comin’,” the child said, throwing herself at the jumble of branches and clambering over them without seeming to slow. Unar and Oos hesitated. They gazed after the fleeing child, then snapped their heads back towards the approaching menace as the angry hiss sounded again, closer this time, but the source still invisible.