Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(51)

Unar wondered, Is it a chimera?

Then she didn’t have to wonder. A swinging, hammock-sized head sent mist curling away from pointed, scaly chin and jaw. A forked, pink tongue unfurled and dangled to test the air. The massive forearms that followed were striped gold and dark grey, with crescent-moon claws black and gleaming on top but caked on the undersides with animal fur, bark, and old blood.

A dayhunter.

Unar had never seen one, but the striped monitor lizards that sunned themselves in the Garden were smaller versions of this demon. And those claws were as long as her thighbones, just as Esse had warned.

“Go,” she shouted, but the back of Oos’s shirt was snagged on the upright branch. Oos screamed. Wept. Struggled. The shirt tore.

Unar put her foot to Oos’s shoulder and scrambled up the branch. Without thinking, she leaped, using her height advantage to get past the demon’s head and shoulders. Landing on its back, she ran down it as though it were a branch path itself.

A warm branch path. Smoothly scaled. Rippling. The wide body preparing to turn.

But the monitor lizards in the Garden couldn’t walk backwards, and pulling down, hard, on their tails could trap them against a tree, their claws sunk too deep for them to lift their feet free.

Audblayin keep me, Unar prayed, seizing the demon’s tail with both hands and swinging down to dangle beneath the yellowrain tree.

She hadn’t considered what would come next. Only that she must make time for Oos to get free. The emptiness between trees seemed infinite, deep and dark, around her, all sounds muffled, nothing even remotely near that could save her if the creature threw her off.

I can’t die, she told herself as her grip on the broad, scaly, dangling tail grew slippery with the rain running down its back. Audblayin called to me. Woke my magic. Gave me purpose. She wished she had a bore-knife instead of a purpose. She’d climb up the demon’s back as easily as scaling one of Oxor’s suntrees. But her bare hands couldn’t find purchase. If only she had Understorian spines for climbing. No, that was no use. Nothing could get through its hide, the hunters had said.

Then she remembered Marram’s report: Long streaks of dayhunter waste with insects trapped in it, only hours old and not set. The same fully grown male animal that left marks around your nets, Esse.

Maybe the fallen Canopians hadn’t been stuck to that branch by trapper’s glue, after all.

Unar hauled herself up slightly, so that she gripped the dayhunter’s tail with one clenched elbow instead of both hands. She reached her right hand around for the creature’s cloaca. Her curled fingers scooped up a creamy, cement-like substance. The dayhunter’s excrement.

She slapped that hand down on the wet scales, and found she was able to grip like a gecko. Her left hand took a turn scraping at the demon’s vent. The stuff smelled strongly of fresh-cured leather, and it burned beneath her fingernails.

What a mighty story this will make. How the storytellers will sing my praises!

Unar had no way of spreading the sticky waste any further. She let her knees squeeze and her toes scuffle as best they could. Seizing the protruding scales on the leading edge of the dayhunter’s hindlimb, followed by the frilled rim of its rib cage, she struggled up the length of it, expecting its huge head to come curving down out of the dark and snap her head off her neck any second.

Then she was standing on the broad shelf of its skull, making a final, desperate leap for the gap between the lateral branches. The dayhunter lifted its head. It hissed. Unar ran up the ramp of its snout. The forked tongue flicked her heel as she flew forwards.

She landed on the trunk of the yellowrain tree and kept running. There was no sign of Oos.

I do have a destiny.

Unar laughed maniacally, running along the tapering trunk, until she crashed into Oos’s back.

Oos and the child had been seized by Esse, halfway back to the tallowwood. How he’d gotten into the fishing room with the tree blocking the door, Unar didn’t know. It felt strange seeing them, after the completeness of her isolation only minutes ago, suspended in the forest with the demon. Oos held her tattered shirt to her breasts and shivered in the rain.

Unar would have told them at once how she’d dangled from the demon’s tail and then jumped off its head, but they were already speaking.

“What kind of demon?” Esse was asking, shaking the child.

“A dayhunter.” The child was out of breath. She wore rags. Her black hair was hacked off close to her skull.

“She’s Canopian,” Oos said. “She’s fallen, just like us. She survived.”

The child turned and looked up into her face. “None of us will survive this, lady. Not unless you can fly.”

Then both turned away from Esse, towards Unar.

“You’re alive, Unar!” Oos blubbered.

“Get between me and the tallowwood, the three of you,” Esse ordered. “Go back to the fishing room.” Unar wasn’t going to argue with him. He’d taken her knife; let him try to fight a demon with it. She’d had enough heroics for one day. They grappled on the narrow walkway, and as soon as they were behind him, he began uncoiling something heavy-looking like a rusted rope. No, not rope. It wasn’t woven, but made of multiple metal links that clanked and jangled in the rain.

Marram and Bernreb erupted out of the river, shouting and splashing, forcing the trio to stop short once again. For a second time, the women tangled with the men, who tried to let them past without anyone falling off the log. Bernreb carried coiled rope, nets, and a spear with a long, wickedly serrated metal blade.