Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(58)

“No.” He turned his back to her, crouching down. “Not for the new railing. Put your arms around my neck. Make sure you have a strong grip.”

Unar blinked, frozen for a moment by the realisation that he intended that she cling to him while he swung down lower into Understorey. He hadn’t made another harness for her, nor offered to rope their bodies together, as he and Bernreb had been roped. No. If she weakened and fell, he wouldn’t be sorry. It would be, as he saw it, her own fault.

She threw her arms around him and closed her eyes as he kicked back, hard, away from the platform.

Then they fell.





THIRTY-FIVE

IT WASN’T long before Unar opened her eyes again.

Rain, mist, and falling leaves whirled around her. She sank lower, parallel to the great tallowwood river. Spray from it wet the top of the ropy-barked lateral branch where Esse eventually landed with a lurch.

Unar’s arms jolted in their sockets. She made herself wait until Esse found his footing before her kicking feet found the branch, too. It was barely wide enough to stand on, and the top of it was neither flat nor smooth. Not like a Canopian road. The wood god, Esh, held no sway down here to form wood into functional structures.

Fibrous chunks broke away beneath her feet. She raised her arms to keep her balance and opened her mouth to accuse Esse. There were no structures at all here that she could see.

Then she smelled something awful and familiar. Issi’s solid waste and whey-like sick, mingled with somebody else’s menstrual blood. A smell, she supposed, that was irresistible to dayhunters. Past Esse, she finally saw the hollow in the tree. The smell was coming from there, and she squinted through the gloom, trying to see better.

Only then did she realise the opening into the hollow was too regular to be natural, and that there actually was some sort of structure built above it. Something weighted with a cross-section of tallowwood trunk, with perhaps a crumpled leather chute and several sharpened stakes. It was disguised by a net of leaves and bark, but it was there.

“Is it a trap?” she asked Esse, putting her hand out to his arm, half to steady herself and half to get his attention. “A trap to catch the demon?”

“One of my own invention.” He did not sound proud, or excited, or doubtful. He sounded far away as though envisioning what would happen. “Inside the hollow, the bait is suspended by a rope. When the rope is pulled, the door will close. Can you see?”

He pulled Unar close and put her on the other side of him, pointing to the mechanism, and Unar could see. She was impressed by it, actually, but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of saying so.

“The weights will serve two functions. One, to drive the stakes into the holes I have made for them, deeply so that the demon cannot brush the door aside. It can dig out with its claws, given time, but by then the chute will have diverted the river’s edge, directing the water into the hole. It will fill to the brim in mere seconds and the demon will drown.”

“I’m glad,” Unar said slowly, “that if we had to fall into one of your traps, it was the net and glue trap, and not this one. You’ve kept your word, to keep us safe.”

“I am glad,” Esse said, “that you see the necessity now.”

“Wait. There’s no metal in the trap. Surely you didn’t use my little bore-knife to make that hollow.”

“No.” Esse unclipped his harness from the rope. He undid the knots and allowed that end to fall. Unar supposed he would haul it back up when they stood again at the railing. The S-shaped piece of metal, he held in front of her face. “Here is your knife. I lost my other piece when we sawed through the yellowrain tree.”

“I see.”

He tucked it into his pocket and turned away from her. Then he crouched again, one foot in front of the other on the narrow branch.

“Hold on to me. We must climb back up.”

Worried that any sudden moves would send them hurtling to their deaths, Unar slowly eased her weight onto his back. No sooner had her feet left the branch than Esse took a quick skip, hop, and jump to the right hand side of the hollow, away from the river, and there was the soft sound of his forearm spines sliding out of their sheaths.

Then, the axe-biting sound and shuddering impact of Esse embedding himself in the bark of the tree.

Unar tucked her face into the back of his neck as splinters flew. Swiftly and steadily, Esse climbed.

She thought, How those red-and-yellow puffed-up parrots calling themselves soldiers of Odelland would tremble at the sound of a hundred Understorians climbing their precious king’s blue quandong tree.

And she stifled a laugh.

Had she gone crazy? Whose side was she on? The barrier would keep Esse and his ilk from Odelland. From Ehkisland. From Audblayinland. From all of Canopy. It was trespass there that had seen Hasbabsah made a slave, her spines broken.

Yet the magic bed of the decrepit princess was the neck bone of an Old God, Hasbabsah said. There had to be a way through the barrier.

Unar became aware of the heat and movement of Esse’s muscles. His arms and legs seeming untiring. Both his thighs together made up the width of one of hers, yet he didn’t labour for breath. When he lifted one knee to stick his shin spines into the tree, she thought again that he had the longest shanks she’d ever seen on a man or woman. Edax had long legs, but not so thin. He hadn’t wanted to remove all his clothing, but Unar had made him when they had been together during their lessons. She’d wanted to see all of the non-owl parts of him as clearly as possible by meagre moon-and starlight. There had been knife-scars on his skin, sparse body hair, and very little padding, but several knotted veins had stood out on his calves, and his no-longer-youthful knees had been cracked and saggy.