Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(94)

Unar shrugged and went to help him.

They dragged and pushed the copper tub all the way down the corridor. Its feet tore up the wood and its weight fell on Marram’s instep once; he shouted an oath loud enough to wake whatever poor souls still slept in the storey above.

“How did you wake up, Marram?”

He lifted his end of the tub again, and hobbled forward with it, turning it to fit it through the doorway to the writing room. Unar backed slowly away with her end, staring into the gleaming curve of its full belly. The thing was expensive. No Understorian, denied the metal-seeded fruit of Akkad’s niche, should have used such wealth in metal simply to hold water. Obviously Frog had friends in all parts of Canopy. Perhaps the bath could contain the power of Airak’s lantern. Perhaps.

“It was a mistake, I think,” Marram said. “Or the work of the Servant of Airak. I pretended to be still sleeping until the other wakened ones were gone, but the sleepers lay on the other side of me like corpses. It reminded me of a joke my brothers played on me when we were children. Left me crying because I could not wake them. Gave me a preview of their deaths.”

“What do Understorians do with their dead?”

“We seal them into the wood of the trees that give us life. Surely you do the same?”

No. Unar wanted to close her eyes again. We let them fall.

“When Audblayin died,” she said, “her body was wrapped up and kept in the Temple. They keep it there until a new god … goddess … comes to the Garden. Then they grind up the old bones and brush them onto the body of the new god … goddess. When he … she swims through the water to reach his … her new home, the bone-dust goes into the moat. I guess.”

“It is strange,” Marram said, grunting with the effort of shifting the bath. “When I fell asleep, there was a sort of cold feeling in the base of my skull. I was instantly convinced that it was the shadow of the first storm of the monsoon. I fell down. It felt like my skin was shrinking in on itself. When I woke up, I thought my own skin was a coating of moss. Then I realised it was still summer, even though the rain had stopped. I could not understand why I had woken early.”

“Maybe the rain stopping helped you to wake, even though the spell was still on you.”

“Maybe. Then I thought it was my amulet, but the amulet was gone. I guess it was just superstition, then.”

“What superstition?”

He laughed.

“That a pendant of bone from the Old God whose essence now belongs to Audblayin protects the wearer from sorcery. Floorians find the bones sometimes under the roots of Audblayin’s emergent. The amulet I brought was given in trade for a bundle of furs. I snatched it up when I saw what Frog had done to Oos.”

Unar frowned, trying to remember where she had seen the amulet last.

“Maybe it’s not superstition,” she said slowly. “Maybe it does protect you. From having your body stolen. Frog put it in my … Frog betrayed me a second time. She thought she’d replaced my weapon with something ineffective, but she didn’t know that Kirrik wanted to steal my body.” Didn’t she? “Kirrik can’t have told her. The amulet is outside. I’ll fetch it.”

But when she tried to give it back to Marram, he wouldn’t take it.

“You put it on,” he said. “If it is your body the sorceress wants to steal, you had better be the one to wear it.” And Unar acquiesced, not believing that the long curve of bone had any power. It felt inert to her, as it had before. Most likely it was not the bone of an Old God at all.

The bathtub wouldn’t go through the front door of the dovecote. Marram set to with a hatchet, enlarging the opening. Unar couldn’t make herself care whether anyone might come, whether messengers or wounded soldiers returning.

Nothing really mattered.

Marram sweated as he worked. Unar watched his strong, slender body in motion and felt nothing. Yellow hair fell over his young face and his odd, pomegranate-pink, Understorian mouth was pinched in concentration. She should have been relieved that he was awake. Saving him, bringing him away from the dovecote, had been one of her important goals. Vaguely, she remembered that before Frog had put him away like winter clothing, his collarbone had been broken and his leg had been all but chewed off. Nothing of those wounds remained, though the scars on his hands and feet remained. She didn’t remark on it.

Soon enough, he tossed the hatchet aside. Unar applied herself to her end of the tub. It scraped through the splintered edges of the newly widened doorway and out onto the path. Together, they wrestled it to the very edge of the circle of blue-white light, where Marram manoeuvred it so that it stood upright on two of its four legs.

“Now,” he said, “Unar, stand back.”

She obeyed and he heaved the tub so that it fell forward, encompassing the lamp, dousing the light.

For an instant, it seemed as if they had succeeded, and would be able to walk over the top of the copper tub and away from the dovecote. Then, the gleaming metal flashed white hot.

Unar might have stood there, gazing at it, until death came, but Marram had the presence of mind to seize her arm, throw her into the dovecote, and push her down among the coats and boots of the cloakroom.

The blast turned her deaf for a few confusing moments. Everything was white, and then black, and then Marram’s lips moved in front of her face, making no noise. She sat up, and realised half the wall behind her was missing.