Echoes of Understorey by Thoraiya Dyer

Author:Thoraiya Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

TWENTY-FOUR

IMERIS HESITATED at the edge of Southeats, looking down at Mistletoe Lodge.

It was late in the day. The open, mistletoe-draped windows should have echoed with guests, and the insect-repelling braziers should have been lit. Neither of those things were true.

Oniwak spoke with the owner of a crab-stick cookery. They stood behind the barrow a dozen paces away, at the edge of Imeris’s hearing. The owner’s story sounded similar to all the others’. A hundred bystanders or more had seen something like a great black bat drop down onto the slightly lower canopy of the smaller tallowwood tree, covering it like a sheet over a bush.

The shadow had shrunk into a denser, four-footed shape and begun sticking its maned, tusked head into the windows of the lodge. At the same time, men and women had run screaming out of all available exits and along the branch roads to Northeats and Southeats.

Nobody knew why the creature decided to crush the innkeeper when it found her hiding under a bed in one of the rooms. Nobody could say why it left all the others unharmed, including the terrified patrons of Southeats, by which route the monster departed, or why it went up instead of down into the darkness where it belonged.

Imeris thought she had answers to all three questions, but the answer she spoke aloud was in response to the final one.

“It cannot go into Understorey.”

“What are you mutterin’ about?” Daggad asked, spraying saliva and bits of soft tree-hollow crabshell from around the stick it was skewered on.

“The creature. It cannot pass below the barrier because it is made of magic and the magic of the Temples will not work in Understorey.”

“If you are right, that might be a good wayta kill it.” Daggad wiped his mouth with his leather bracer. “Make it fall.” He let go of his crab stick.

They both watched it fall.

“I do not know enough about magic to be sure,” Imeris admitted. “Do you?”

“The only magic that concerns me is this,” Daggad said, sticking out his tongue to show the emblem of the House of Epatut to which he belonged. “Let us bother the Lakekeeper about the barrier.”

Imeris hesitated. The House emblem had seemed suddenly familiar, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

Ay slumped gloomily against a stack of empty barrels. His robes no longer looked fine. They were stained and rumpled. He missed his lake, Imeris supposed, and his goddess. At least they were now within his niche, where his powers were strong. When he had fought Orin’s beasts and the king’s soldiers, he’d occasionally flung his tears like acid at the enemy, but mostly he’d ducked and weaved and used a green branch broken from a tree to block edged weapons and bodily beat the attackers away.

Here, he could walk sideways and upside down, call a thunderstorm inside a man’s lungs to drown him, or boil the eyes out of an enemy’s head if he chose. According to Ingaget, anyway.

Daggad repeated Imeris’s speculation about the beast, but the Lakekeeper only shrugged.

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