There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Chapter Six

  Arnem, Tamer of Beasts and Slayer of Beasties

  Anyone whose birthright it was to be a Middener knew that the stone memories of their ancestors were buried somewhere around them. Across the ages of Sulidhe, ancient when Del'Urak was young, they had been overtaken by vine and shoot. Rumor said they were put to other uses in these times, that drums sounded in the deep woods and man's oldest memories made echoes into his recent past. But no one could say to a certainty. Except that something more than weeds had taken root in the ruins that skirted the forest and most Middeners had eschewed their shelter for years. Those that did not, often did not last long. Treasure hunters and slaves to debt, chasing rumors of relics and artifacts from the wars that birthed Sulidhe out of the ashes of Druidism, lasted less—if they returned at all.

  No matter how hard the rain came each year, the Witherwood never flooded. Every canal in the city above flowed into the Midden, and every canal in the Midden flowed through the black wood to the culverts in the outer wall. The floodwaters turned the streets to rivers, market squares to lakes, and created lily ponds from the drowned dead every year, but subsided before they reached the domain of the Druidic Cults. There were as many tears as raindrops in the stormy months of Del'Urak, and, when they passed, sorrow never failed to well into rage against the secretive druids. Surely the inheritors of the legacy of Sul, Sulidhe's ancient predecessor, weaved foul spells in their hollows and grottoes and brought the rain against the Midden in their crusade against the masters of the city. It didn't matter that no one remembered the last time they crossed paths with a hierophant of the cults, that the Provision of Tiers was written by Magi and authored their fates as Middeners by virtue of being born a Middener.

  The pale of the Midden, where what could still be called habitable steadily gave way to dense forest, was a thicket of rumors. Mosses and creeping roots ensconced the once proud edifices there so deeply that only a column or lonely terrace showed from the green and black, and only where the putrid mists endemic to the Witherwood did not conspire to conceal them entirely. Crooked trees, warring for space amid the festering pools of the wetlands they grew from, created the only clearings. Mud and loam and other smells of the deep earth laid heavily on the air. Even the littlest animal cry or scurry was taken and made weird by the fogs, such that any misfortunate listener found themselves turning with blade drawn on every sound or whisk of movement. Foreboding was written into the name of the Witherwood, begging not to be entered and not least by the secret kings who minded its copses and dens. And yet there the Stormcrows found themselves—by bonds to one another, if not by choice.

  Verem kept at the head, his shoulders relaxed but his feet poised and possessed with withheld movement. Arnem watched him from behind and, whensoever he wasn't jumping at ghosts, tried as best he could to fit his much smaller feet in the bootprints his cousin left in the muck. Their road was only a road by virtue of its ghost as a path of high grass that wound between the overgrown husks and collapsed remnants of settlement. A child's mind found much fodder in the dilapidated carcasses, cages of roots and weeds slowly pulling them back into the murk, and the dead and forgotten artery that still divided them. A thrust of leaves from the leaning window of a tall dwelling, two of them glistening with damp just right in the pale day to be eyes, was the head of a druid's beast. Horribly contorted vines and roots, awkwardly climbing and descending the walls of an alleyway, marked the dimensions of a tentacled beast that haunted man's infancy.

  These things were made real in Arnem's mind alone; but the boy knew their lesser kindred truly did stalk the Midden's nights, and he was not alone in keeping his shoulders hunched and eyes on alert. There were enough reminders that things watched: triptych idols of bone and tanned skins hidden where the uninitiated in the Midden's dangers did not know to look; effigies obscure and horrifying in their proportions; and the root-caged reminders of what befell trespassers in the druids' demesne. But of the cultic hierophants themselves, the Stormcrows saw curiously little. And they were too wise in the Witherwood's ways to take that as a boon of chance.

  "What's that there?" Muro said.

  "What're you on about now, Hawk?" Dura said and plodded past him. "Keep up."

  "Ye fools might see something if you ever looked." The Hawkfaced pointed his long arm towards something off the road and to their right, the lingering sigh of a collapsed building. "So look!"

  Arn peered hard into where the bony finger extended and reached at once for his little rusted dagger when a light flared suddenly. Others soon became apparent, like specters in the mists.

  "He's not fooling," the boy said and ran up to tug on his cousin's jerkin.

  "I know what he saw, Arnem," Verem said without stopping or diverting his eyes from the road ahead. "They're a wytch's spell. Follow them on out if you don't believe me, see what beast's stomach you end up in."

  "A fog-frog's, no doubt," Quarr added and thrust the image of the towering, mouth-breathing horror into the boy's mind. Its long claws reached for him, long teeth glistening in the dark.

  "They're smiling at me," Muro said of the wytch-lights. "Look at them!"

  "Come on, Muro," Dura grumbled and pulled him along. "You've the eyes of Hawk, maybe, but the brains of a pigeon have got nested in that skull of yours."

  The Stormcrows stole deeper into the withered forest, drawing Muro away from his fancies. The shadows of civilization gradually fell away and the brambles and trees crowded in on their absence as they came to the absolute edge of what could still rightfully be called the Midden. Stranger apparitions began to greet them in the fogs and to Arn the radiant circles of their eyes seemed fixed upon him. Others took the orbs only for more wisps come to haunt them. He shared a knowing glance with Muro, and the Hawkfaced placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. Ahead, Quarr growled into the ear of an uninterested Verem as the two guided their band onward.

  "Never been this deep before," Muro said, his constantly shifting eyes belying what that meant for him. "Goes without saying my knees are weak."

  "Nevermind your spine," Dura chided from behind.

  "Pay no attention to that fucking marmot." Muro spared a glance back at Dura, her broken smile relishing the rise she got out of him. "There's a place for fear, my young son. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise that ain't ever afraid. Only the brave can be afraid, just you remember that."

  "Do you think we'll run into Druids?" Arnem asked, every part of him alive with fright and excitement. "Or their Bloodbriars?"

  The last of the color in Muro's face disappeared. "I certainly fucking hope not. But aye, they're watching us." The Hawkfaced cast about at the twisted boughs of the trees, watching back. "I don't believe every story I hear. I'd be a fool if I did. But methinks this place is like a second skin to them who abode here."

  A hand slapped Arnem's chest then, and he jumped as sure as if a hair-trimmed javelin of graven bone had sunk into his heart. Instead, it was only Kurr and Burr pulling rude faces and pointing ahead.

  Verem stood at the van gesturing for the boy to come to his side and, when he was close enough to whisper, said to him, "It's not far now. You'd best think on what needs doing and how quick you can see about doing it."

  "How long will I have?" the boy asked.

  "We've only got so much sunlight left," Verem said and looked about them. "I don't much like this place."

  The calm rush of the canal came into earshot and, after a few bends more in the road, the winnowed edge of a clearing presented itself. There were no trees, nothing larger than a sapling, around its border and in its midst the land was barren. Even the edges were uneven, as if the otherwise tenacious verge were reticent to encroach. And indeed it was. The black creep of weeds and moss and withered vines recoiled from the poisonous gleam of the glyphs that sputtered and sparked at the edges of the canal.

  Not a single shoot of grass crept up from between its ancient stones, laid down before even the outer wall was built that now shrouded much
of the Midden in shadow. A blanket of desiccated leaves and branches and verdure, all the dead of things that grow, was strewn across the stone of the canal and struggled in vain to smother the shining geometries of the glyphs. Their power remained total even as it faded: Wherever the rain fell, it was drawn into the glow of the sigils and disappeared. The canal went on to carry what it could to the outer wall and no more.

  "Druids?" Arnem asked his cousin.

  Quarr scoffed. "Why would Druids poison their own ground? What kind of–"

  Verem silenced his lieutenant with a look, then turned back to the boy. "He's right. And besides, these symbols look too much like those on the dome at night."

  "Mageblooded work?" Muro said. "Down here?"

  A reminder, Arnem thought, a warning from the city-above-the-city. Like the canals that cut up its interior, the Midden existed at their pleasure. The lesson was so implicit that life itself became host to its parasite. It was a mere fact of existence in The Lows, so inherent as to go unquestioned by anyone party to the miserable farce. And yet the Magi's missive gave itself up easily to anyone with a mind to look: True pain is not inflicted–but built.

  The boy dared to step nearer the edge of the clearing and so brought Verem's hand down onto his shoulder. "Are these glyphs why the Witherwood doesn't flood?” he asked.

  "I thought it was Druids," Dura said, fidgeting with wanting to climb out of harm's way but fearing that's just where the trees would put her. "Suppose I shouldn't be surprised that them up above would protect their fucking wall and nothing else."

  The dark behemoth of the outer wall loomed massive before them now, at city's edge as they were, and Arnem studied its illimitable expanse as if the stone had ears and a mind to think. He only hoped that other thoughts entertained that mind then and none concerning him.

  "Maybe there aren't any Druids," Kurr ventured and Burr swiftly concurred.

  "That would figure, too."

  "I've seen them," Quarr said and shouldered his way between the twins and into the clearing, beyond Arnem and his cousin. He kicked his way through the withered verge, uncovering the lesser strings of winking glyphs. "We've all seen them. Heard their chants, seen the dead next morning when one of their Bloodbriars attacks in the night."

  "Quarr," Verem said.

  "It's just the fucking canal. We'd be dead already if there were Druids afoot. Fuck!"

  Quarr, agile as the stump of fat and muscle he resembled, slipped on the slick stone of the canal walls in his effort to get away from what he saw in the waters. The others were quick to arrive at his side, Arnem foremost among them; but they at once recoiled as he did from the dozens of bodies and fat flies that marauded them in buzzing clouds.

  The dead were mashed against the culvert that lay at the foot of the outer wall, contorted and jumbled in attitudes impossible to achieve in life. The channel was one of many that ringed the base of the city walls, each collecting their share of the combined runoff of the estuary canals strewn throughout the Midden. In better times they offered the venturesome Middener a means to escape his condition that was otherwise painfully scarce. But here the Stormcrows found only rotting corpses, thrown by the force of the canal onto the culvert's broken bars and impaled like wards against the hope.

  "I knew the smell wasn't just the shit," Dura said, covering her mouth with the hem of her cloak.

  Muro squinted at the macabre display, so chaotically perfect that it seemed the effigy of something terrible. "What's wrong with their heads?” he asked no one.

  “Like empty bags, almost. No bone at all,” Burr said and Kurr concurred.

  "It's like before," Arnem said, sparing a glance at his cousin. "Just like the one we found."

  "One we found?" Quarr said and finished dusting off the dead vegetation he’d fallen into.

  "By Tulzkr," Verem answered. "The one that caused the flood this morning, blocked up one of the drainage troughs. Some imps were hired to watch the thing by the watchmen and they ended up flushing it into the canal. That's where we found it."

  "Well, what the fuck is wrong with their heads?"

  "Something moved in it," Arnem said and started for the edge of the canal.

  "Something fucking what?" Quarr asked, but the boy's cousin rather than the boy himself.

  "Go on, Arn," Verem said and nudged his cousin forward before turning to his Stormcrows. "Scatter yourselves, boyos. Keep an eye out or two."

  "He'd better not be long," Quarr said. "This is deep Cult territory, and I ain't about to get skinned."

  "Don't mind that bluster, Arn," Muro said, coughing away the reek and swatting at flies. "He's important things to return to, see? The ale can't drink itself."

  "Keep your mouth closed, Hawk," Dura called to him.

  “His beak, more like,” the twins giggled out and hooked a finger beside their noses.

  "Nothing's lost on you two," Muro said and jerked his head at the pile of festering corpses.

  "If all these are down here," Verem ventured, muttering almost only to himself.

  Arnem approached the bobbing and impaled mound with the kind of awe and dread owed to any monolith to horror. Blood painted everything the color of rust and burbled still in the flow of the canal rushing into the culvert’s maw. Bare bone showed a muted white, ensconced by shreds of torn tissue and sinew. His heaving stomach boiled beneath the mask of detached interest that he showed to the Stormcrows.

  These corpses did not shudder and jolt with the effort of dead minds trying to escape the shells of their bodies. He saw at once that the minds here had already flown, the craniums having burst open like a sack that has seen too many uses or an egg finally hatched. Tatters of flesh hung down like veils over the faces that were exposed enough for Arn to see. Flies nested in the craters of their skulls, squirmed through the openings of crooked mouths and the red craters of nostrils that had been gnawed away. He imagined the maggots that would soon be blossoming forth from those orifices, just as whatever unleashed itself from their skulls had done, and the realm of questions finally expurgated him. He woke up to the stink and viscera and gore, looking around at the others as if newly risen from a dream.

  "It's the same here," he called over to his cousin. "The same as the others, as before. But different, too, worse. Now someone’s got to listen."

  "How can he be so business-like about it?" Muro breathed, muffled by the hem of his cloak.

  “About what?” Dura said, squirming with the need to climb up and out of sight. “What in the hells happened here, Verem? What ghosts are we chasing?”

  "Quiet," their captain said and went over to the boy, dragging him to his feet. "You found what you needed, then? Good. Let's be on our way."

  "Don't you understand? I've got proof!" Arnem said. "Or don't you care?"

  "People have a way of winding up dead down here, Arnem. It's none of my business to go wondering about how." Verem watched the trees and ruins looming around them, listened for the drums and the blood-thick howls of jubilant fury. "All I've got to do is survive. And so do you."

  A fierce gust swept into the clearing on the heels of his warning. The withered verdure littering the clearing spun into whirligigs, and the glyphs it concealed sputtered and darkened. Blackened weeds, grey and lifeless moss, dried husks blew about the Stormcrows, but they did not feel the wind that bore them. The trees surrounding the clearing did not sway or sigh. Absolute stillness, and yet not. Absolute silence, and yet not. They looked to one another—just for a moment, the barest of hesitancies—and then began to retreat towards the forest. Verem snatched his cousin up by the collar and made to do the same, but too late.

  The forest spoke and with a voice that was like dry leaves rasping across bare stone, stilted and disabused of the notion that speech was something more than civilized animals grunting.

  "What is here?"

  Muro drew his blade. "And you told me not to follow the lights.”

  "What do we do?" Dura begged of Verem, who said nothing.

>   "This is the last time I go off on one of that boy's silly to-do's," Quarr said, cudgel at the ready and turning to face every new sound emanating from the woods. "Supposing there is a next time."

  "If you all don't keep your teeth together," Verem said, sliding his long and slender blade from its scabbard, "there won't be a next time."

  “Like as not,” the twins said and stood back to back.

  There was a loud creaking of wood, the earth shook and Burr cried out. Blood sprayed all those around him. An immense root was impaled through him, an aged thing littered with barbs that hefted his dying form into the air. Kurr looked on in horror as the twisted thing cast her brother's corpse away and into the pale of the forest. The other Stormcrows collapsed into a circle, backs to one another, and from which Quarr briefly broke to drag Kurr back among them.

  Flurries blew into the clearing from every edge and conspired to heap all its leaves and scraps of plant amid them. They danced away, bent low and their daggers held at the ready. The winds churned again and stirred the stinking decayed mound up into an impenetrable whirlwind. Blackened claws, not unlike those of the Witherwood’s sun-starved trees, parted the crown of the vortex. Verem pushed his cousin behind and motioned for the other Stormcrows to clear away. Lithe arms followed that clawed into the whirling bracken until they unearthed the emaciated trunk of a man. Flowering brambles pierced its nearly wooden flesh like worms through a corpse. Rising from its broad shoulders, in place of any kind of neck or head, was a gaseous font of light that bathed them all in the resinous hues of fire twisted by its passage through the roots of the world.