There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  "Manlings," the voice of the forest, the voice of the light of the spirit, said.

  Then the creature was off, soaring over the company and shrouding them in a verdant cloud. It wore the verdure as a man might a long cloak or frock and the cloud moved with it, disguising the being. The Stormcrows coughed and darted about in search of their quarry, but could see nothing. A scream sounded and was lost to the thrum of the winds. The scent of blood told its secret for those who were not splattered with a red tide. Kurr shuddered at Arnem's feet, eyes alive with terror and her swordarm torn from her body. The boy took up her blade at once.

  “Where’s it coming from,” Quarr shouted. “Damn these leaves!”

  “Damn them all you like,” Dura said, her words half stolen by the whirl and tumble. “Won’t get rid of them any quicker.”

  "This ain't good at all, lads," Muro said. "Oh, this is all sorts of wrong!"

  Verem started to berate his men back to their senses; but the words were choked off with a cry and he was thrown from the others, crashing hard to the earth some distance away. Arnem made to rush to his cousin's side, though managed only a few steps before claws longer than his arm laid hold of him about the shoulders. Inarguable strength hefted him into the air. The winds died, the cloud of dead life returned to the ground. The boy looked into the light stemming from the body of the spirit and fell silent.

  The well of ghostly fire rapt him with the substance of long, incommunicable ages. The boy saw nothing, heard nothing, but felt everything. His inner flame curled around the tendrils of the spirit’s, both searching out something new, but not unfamiliar. Tears sprang as Arnem came to know the Witherwood’s name. The spirit let fall the boy and, when he met the ground, it was as if the roof of the world descended with him. He could see the beams which held it up, could name which were necessary and which were not, and he understood how near everything was to collapsing around him.

  Kurr’s cries woke him from this other place the spirit took him. She lay cradling the stump of her shoulder, panting harder than if she ran ten leagues and back. The earth soaked up her blood greedily. Arnem scrambled to his feet and helped Verem to his, who only cradled a bleeding arm. The Stormcrows came together again and together they cowered before their lofty foe, who hovered in silence above them. Anger nor fear nor cunning could goad any to strike.

  "Bring me the boy," it said. "Willingly. Or I will take a head of ye."

  "What will you do with him?" Verem said, leaning on his cousin's shoulder. "I'll know what you'll do with him."

  "Do nothing, steal nothing."

  "I'll go," Arnem whispered to his cousin and parted from him.

  Verem reached out to stop him, but would not stray a pace too far. The boy stepped towards the tall creature and looked up again into the fierceness of its bleeding light, awaited its desire. The Stormcrows behind him retreated the farther he advanced.

  "Something and only for you,” the spirit said and swept down to meet him, rustling the leaves of its cloak. The claws of thumb and forefinger came up to his eyes. "A gift–for an hour such as this."

  A seed, the meager size of a pebble, was clutched between the bloodied tips of its talons. Tendrils twirled and reached from the base of its grey shell. Barbs ran along its cusp. The boy looked between the seed and the being that offered it, a moment's hesitation stretching to breaking, then plucked the thing from its grasp and recoiled.

  "What's it for?" the boy asked. "What do I do with it?"

  The creature drew silently away to its full height in answer and drifted away. Its form crumbled into soil, its leaves becoming again only leaves.

  "Wait!" Arnem shouted and ran to lay hold of only the inanimate vegetation from which it sprang. The spirit was gone, returning to its slumber within the earth.

  Silence took hold. Verem and his Stormcrows stood about the boy in disbelief. Their company was alone again now but for themselves and the dead and wounded, those who'd been bartered in whole or in part for the spirit's gift. The seed's small vines curled absently around Arnem's fingertips. He fell to poring over it until his cousin stormed past and toward the clearing's edge, disappearing briefly within.

  “Kurr, old fellow,” Dura said and cradled her friend's maimed body. “Hold on just a while. We'll see you're fixed up proper.”

  “There’s no proper for this,” she said. “It took my swordarm, Dura. It took my brother.”

  Verem appeared from the forest again, and the boy pocketed his writhing treasure.

  “There's no sign of Burr,” he said. “Even the blood's been swallowed up into nothing.”

  “Echoes to the last,” Quarr said. “I hope you've got what you needed, boy. I hope it pleases ye.”

  “Ease off,” Dura told him. “The boy can't have known. We've made this trip and worse before.”

  “Aye,” Muro said. “The cults have been hard at work.”

  “They'll be at work on us before long.” Verem tugged at his cousin's shoulder. “Come on. It'll be night soon.”

  Bloodied, they quit the canal and its mysteries. The drifts of fog amid the trees had thickened since journey’s start. The wisps that moved among them were redoubled, but Muro could no longer be tempted by the lights that stewed within. There was an alien calm to their winding march home, an uncaring rooted in demise and that the bogs of the Witherwood received with pity. Arnem went with a heavy heart. The seed yet stirred in his breeches and its movements brought the twins' faces before him. Not even the ghostly utterances of the forest could draw his eyes from the road at his feet, and there was no one now to touch him on the shoulder and set him at ease.

  Sight of the Midden, when it came, did not inspire joy and even set Verem further on edge. Arnem knew that his cousin's eyes searched the boughed rooftops for Segved and his Crowbills, knowing also that their passage into the forests had not gone unnoticed. The other Stormcrows paid no heed, though their steps went as ever on their toes. Shadows shifted in dark corners and many an eye watched the Stormcrows as they went. Seeing them, their faces, there were none who came forth with challenge. One by one, Verem’s band disappeared into the Midden’s crowds—dwindling off as night approached.

  ◆◆◆

  The air was not so foul high in the branches of the great tree. Arnem, if he sniffed hard enough, could almost smell the cleaner air of the Tradesmen’s Tier. Its smog-belching Forgeworks gave it the twinge of coal smoke and metal, but anything was better than the ever-present human stink of the Midden. The polluted aroma of the smelteries meant comfort and safety for the boy, the feelings of home, but home was not where the Tradesmen’s Tier lived in his mind. Neither the Midden. Home was elusive. Home was constancy, and his constancy was danger and movement and living under threat.

  "What do you think will happen to Kurr?" Arnem asked.

  "I expect she'll live if she makes it through the night," Verem told him. "We'll do our best after that. She's a Stormcrow, able to hold a sword or not."

  The puffs of smoke from his pipe were all that the boy could distinguish of him in the branches a bit higher above. Night was fast approaching, and all was becoming shadow. The latticed geometries and characters of the Midden’s roof of glyphic wards steadily resolved into being with the growing absence of day, far overhead and just beneath the parapet of the inner wall. Soon the dome would light what the moons and stars could not from behind the heavy, saturated clouds.

  “I’d live up here if I could,” the boy said, his voice riding the upper zephyrs of the Midden, high above the ambient nonsense of the tiring city below. That comforted him, the height and the distance. “Someday I will. Someday I’ll build a house in the branches and never come down.”

  “But there’s nothing to eat all the way up here,” Verem said and took a drag on his pipe. “You’d have to come down eventually.”

  “I’ll bet there used to be. I’ll bet there was fruit as big as your head hanging from the branches. And music! Music in the leaves. Spirits, even, telling stories to each
other.” He could almost hear their songs and tales, almost taste the juices of the fruits running down the back of his throat. He was hungrier for food and sound then than at any other time in his life. “I’ll bet there used to be lots of things in the Midden.”

  Verem imagined the boy floating away with the whimsy of his words. The sound both pained and revived him, allowed his heart to live and die in the same moment. Hope was dangerous to keep around for long. Best to bar it from the door at the outset, before its glimmering poison took hold.

  “You’ve been trying hard to find the stars beyond the dome, methinks.” A laugh settled down to Arnem from the limbs above. “Ah, no, you’re right of course. After a fashion. To hear the cultists tell it, when you can find one and they don’t try to gut you straight away for being an Eater, this place used to be the wonder of the eastern world. The great city of Sul! And this tree?” A rap of his knuckles against the old dead wood tolled like a bell through the gathering twilight. “The great tree of Sul, for which the city was named and Sulidhe after it. All these ruins were palaces and temples and bathhouses and gardens back then.” He swept a darkened hand out at the cityscape sprawling beneath the heights of the tree, its fullness slowly ebbing with the day and turning grey desolation to black. “Should be a lesson to them above who likes to look down on us, but it never is. What do I know anyway?”

  “A lot,” Arnem was quick to say. “I wish I was as smart as you. Or at least knew as much.” Verem gave a laugh to his cousin’s protests, and the boy shook his head. There was an impenetrable secrecy in the laugh that Arnem wouldn’t be able to name until the shame would one day become his own. “How did the tree get destroyed? What happened to the city that was here before, the people?”

  “The Mageblooded,” Verem spat. “Magi. Wizards, spellflingers, castermen. Whatever you want to call them. They’re a poison to the world just by existing, but cross them or tell them they don’t own the world they’re destroying? We’re sitting in the memory right now of what happens when you challenge gods. Ask your Provost. It’s probably all in one of those books he never taught me to read.”

  Arnem ignored him, wanting more to forego the diatribe than not agreeing with the sentiment. “It’s not just Sulidhe, then. There’s nowhere left? They rule everything?”

  “Enough of it, by the gods. If there’s any gods left. They did away with the Giants. The Daerians and their flesh-gods, too, in the Last Siege.” Verem paused to spit and took another pull on his pipe. “As far as the eye can see from the tip top of the outer wall, at any rate.”

  Arnem tried to relax despite the beating in his chest and crossed his arms behind his head. “What’s it like, Verem,” he said, “outside the wall?”

  “Would that I could tell you, cousin.” Verem sighed. “In my head, there’s women everywhere and you can pluck finely-cooked and seasoned crows right off the trees.” Arnem didn’t know anything about the women, but his mouth started up at the thought of roasted meat. “I know it isn’t true, though. Strange feeling, eh, Arn? When the clouds clear in the summer, just before the sun goes down for true and the dome isn’t aglow and you can see the stars: those little bits of light feel nearer than the top of this fucking wall.”

  “Someday you’ll get out,” Arnem said, fairly shouted and didn’t know where his passion found its fuel. “Someday. You can’t give up if you say ‘someday’, that’s what you always tell me.”

  “Oh aye, aye,” his cousin said and took another long drag. “Don’t worry about me, little Arnem. What would those dullards back at Camp do if I left out?” Camp. That was how Verem always called the rundown derelict that the Stormcrows called home. As if they were only on an extended adventure and could go back home to warm beds and tearful parents at any time. “The bastards can barely feed themselves, let alone keep Segved off our trail.”

  A swift bark of laughter escaped the boy before he could remember himself. “I ain’t little.”

  “Little you may not be, but what about yourself? Don’t forget to extricate yourself, cousin.” Arnem wanted to ask what that meant, but bit his tongue for fear of showing his age or what was to him his stupidity. “Throw in with that Provost of yours, make a tidy sum, and light out for the road when you’re old enough. Or don’t! I’m sure they got fireplaces and walls and roads and all manner of good things in the upper tiers.”

  “Piss on being a Provost or a watchman,” the boy said and sat up on the limb he was sprawled across. “I’m going to be a Stormcrow. We’ll be knifing Crowbills in no time.” He worked his hands in the dark. “See how long Segved lasts then.”

  “Forget about Segved,” Verem said and the boy straightened at the desperate seriousness in his voice. He found himself searching the ground below for fear that speaking his name summoned the man himself. “He’s a monster, but not the kind of monster you used to hem and haw about. You’ve dropped off on that of late. What happened to him, I wonder? Arnem, Tamer of Beasts and Slayer of Beasties?”

  “It’s silly,” Arnem spat. “A dumb old nothing.”

  “That your Provost talking?”

  “No it’s me! I can speak my own words.”

  “Promise me this, then,” Verem said and the boy saw his shadow sit up too. The sun was almost gone and the glyphs almost to their full brightness, so that his cousin’s face was caught in the bizarre twilight of the Midden. Arnem bent his ears more than he ever did for Oren. “No matter what happens, to me or to your Provost or the Stormcrows, maybe even to yourself: You won’t give up on that silly, dumb old nothing. Living is hard enough. Don’t do it without something to keep living for. Alright, Arnem?”

  “Alright.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Alright, I promise, Verem. I promise.”

  “You can’t break a promise, cousin. A man that breaks a promise really is a silly dumb old nothing.”

  The sun sank beneath the obscene dark of the city's outer wall, and terrible howls echoed from the Witherwood. There would be drums soon, mounds of flesh and thorns moving in the streets.

  "Ought to be getting on, Arnem. Me, as well." Verem swung around on his branch, framed in the light of the setting sun. "Keep safe, you hear?"

  "You should be seeing about that more than me," Arnem said.

  "Ah, Camp'll hold up for another year or more. She's still dry and locked down tight." The boy could not see his cousin's face, but saw his shoulders heave with a deep breath clear enough. "Don't you worry about your old cousin. Now get on."

  Arnem nodded at the space between his knees and bid Verem farewell, starting the climb down to the roots of the Tree of Sul.

  And as he did it struck him at once that the twists and turns of the day still hung low and heavy over him; for the light of the moons shone green against the trunk wherever he looked for a hold. At first he guessed that the prismatic effulgence of the dome had come full into being and gave off such a glow, but a look skyward told otherwise. There was nothing for it, save the truth of what he saw as he continued to descend. The innards of that decaying eidolon creaked and groaned, though Arnem could place no blame with the wind. The air was as dead as he had always taken the tree to be. He had made the climb a hundred times or more and heard nothing but silence from within, felt nothing but the grey dead wood beneath his hands. The complaints of the old branches were less like condemnations than the day before, and the air was colder than the petrified bark. Alas, his wonder died before it lived as he dropped to the solid earth again. The stern face of the Provost, the boy's ferocious dog bestride and cowed, awaited him at the foot of the ancient.

  Chapter Seven

  At the Edge of Everything

  The wind was dead in the plains, and the hills were behind them now. The younger man tried to place in his head how far they had gone. He did not allow himself the luxury of a map. A map would tell where they were going. Two days ago he almost lost them in the coursing of a river, but Stahl pulled thr
ough and completed the fording. He remembered that. He remembered the name of the river, the Edeirnayek, which flowed out of the deep and ancient mountain forests of the Mereshaid and thence down into the Shelflands. The sea would soon be close enough to smell the salt rolling inland with the winds and, beyond, the hearth of his youth.

  He found himself looking at the old man, again and again. His flesh was weaker than when they first began their journey and grew weaker as the nights passed into increasingly darker days. There would be tempests over the land soon. How much longer the old man would last amid them, he did not know. But, for now, the skies were open to them and he would permit the old man some time to look into their depths and see something other than that which surrounded him.

  There was no more room on the old man’s body for the poison he authored upon himself. The younger man knew less than half of the spells and rites inscribed across his thin sheaf of skin by blade and ink and blood and substances now lost to time. He himself was host to none of them. But for the scars of a life lived outside sturdy walls, of which there were many, his countenance was as clean as the day he chose to follow the old man out from the gates of the place where he was born. It was a price the old man had paid in his stead, unasked.

  But the younger man kept a debt of his own, a deadness and a weight that gained in his center until he felt heavy with it. He could not repay it now. There was no use for such bargains in the new day, at the edge of everything. All the magick was done. The world was spent, no longer as it had been and now never could be again. The pain of the loss was violently near and violently fresh. The younger man felt it always, as the young always feel the ending of things more powerfully than their elders. The old man’s body was the body of the world in his cosmos; the world’s, the man’s. When he felt him breathing, he felt the heart of the world still somehow slowly beating.