There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  “I didn’t intend for this, you know,” the old man said from across the makings of the fire.

  “Only a madman would,” the younger man told him, cracking sticks into kindling in his hands.

  “My sword was going to be something set into a corner. Something I would forget about, or try to.”

  “And where was this corner to be?”

  The younger man hoped the older did not hear the gladness in his voice for fear the gladness would earn only silence. It was not often the old man spoke of such things. To disturb any part of the moment, to give any inclination that its moods had changed, was to remind the old man of his harder surfaces and reinvoke their presence over him.

  “There was a contract, one of my first, before the Delvers’ Guild even admitted men like us.” Us, the younger man thought. Yes, us. “Far to the west of here. A coastal country, called Dunmordia by the unfortunates who live there. A simple enough task. Extricate a few dozen vhirkes inhabiting a cliffside too close to the nearest town.” He stopped as if arrested by that moment again. When the blade was new and the blood on it. “I’d never been a place that I wanted to stay. Or would have me. But I can still hear the waves against the rock.”

  The younger man thought about what he wanted to say and his thoughts were sparks in the wind. He did not know how to understand this creature, finally unearthing itself from under the stone of its skin. He set aside the bunch of twigs he had broken and, when he gave the attention the moment deserved, found the old man not at all present with him. His eyes were seeking a far off place. The younger man went back to his kindling, heaping it in the ring of rocks that lay between them.

  “I dreamed I would build a house there one day, by the waves,” the old man finally said. “A strong house, a good house. One that would not fall down into the sea. I still remember the smell on the wind when the tide–” His words fell off into a coughing fit and were lost. He wiped his mouth when it broke off with the hem of the blanket and hid the blood that was there from the younger man. “Have you ever smelled the ocean, boy?”

  “You’ve never taken me there.”

  “You are a man. I don’t need to take you anywhere.” The old man fixed him with a stare that went unmet, gave pause for his words to be met, and when they were not he went on. “Is that where we are going? The sea?”

  “We’re headed east,” the younger man said and went on stacking the kindling in the pit, tossing onto it the little dried peat they had left. He struck flint over the meager pile and smoke started at once, then frail licks of flame.

  “There’s nothing east.”

  “There’s work east.”

  “No more than anywhere else. Less. There’s enough work to be had in the southlands for us to smother ourselves.”

  “Us, ourselves.” The younger man looked up from the pathetic flames of the fire and finally found the old man’s beady, spiteful eyes. “What work can you do?”

  “More’s the reason, then. Why east.”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “Nothing,” the old man rasped and coughed. The fluid in his lungs grew thicker by the day, his skin a burning husk. “There’s nothing east. Where are we going?” The younger man got up. “Don’t walk away from this.”

  “We need more wood for the fire,” the younger man said, ignorant of the hefty stack beside him, and made for the edge of the forest.

  “There’s nothing for you in the east,” the old man called after him. “There’s nothing for you. Nothing!”

  The younger man went far enough into the trees that he could not hear the old man. He knew what that meant, and his legs almost started back for him. Nothing was safe in the countryside anymore. The old and the infirm, least of all. But his legs went out from under him instead. He fell to his knees and looked at the sky, so much like the one he remembered. A light drizzle fell onto his face from the slates of cloud, the start of something greater. The season was growing warmer and darker. Soon there would be no end of rain.

  Chapter Eight

  An Hour of Pain

  The fire was warm, and in its twisting flames Arnem saw many things. Images coalesced in the dance and dissolved into the same, in the way that faces can be found and lost forever in the eroded face of a stone or the barefaced grain of sawn wood. Bowershranks pendulated on long claws through the rafters of abandoned attics; entomophages stalked the darksome vaults of the bowels of the earth, feasting on the monstrous hives of the insects that aboded there; blatherskites guttered senseless obscenities out of hideous, disjointed mouths. They were fitting distractions for him. Fantasies often were, and the boy retreated into them often. These dreams were the only place he was allowed to feel whole.

  “How many times have I got to tell you?” the Provost said and paced the corridor between the chair in which he had sat Arnem and his desk, scattering the parchments there with the swiftness of his passing. “You're to stay out of The Lows after nightfall.”

  “But–”

  “Leave alone that you shouldn't be in the Midden during the day!”

  “My cousin–”

  “Your cousin is a tinpot thief and a bad one at that. With just a few boys to avert wandering eyes.” The Provost sighed through his hand, fell to smoothing his greying and haggard beard. “They won't be any help with the mongrels and heathens that traipse about down there. They'd make a meal of you, they would!” A fat finger was shaken in his face to impress the point.

  "It's not all bad. Most are just like me."

  "It's a bad place for bad people and best kept clear of by those who don't belong. And that means you!" The Provost tousled the boy's hair, his touch stony and awkward, like a greeting made simply to fulfill the obligation of acknowledgment. “Stay up here in the Tradesmen’s, where I can protect you.”

  "But I have work to do!" the boy protested.

  "There aren't any monsters except the ones you seem not to be worrying about! And you leave those to me; it's my job to corral these deviants." Oren fingered the iron talisman about his neck, dangling obscenely beside his silver badge of office. Arn squirmed at the sight of the squid-like effigy and was consumed with incredulity that the fist should be strangling the serpent while the tentacled horror looked on, content to be ignored. “I’m hard enough put to my purpose without worrying about you.”

  "They're out there, Oren," the boy pressed. "I see them all the time, find their tracks and leavings twice as often.” He shook his head and then all over, a fit of realization. “And this is different, besides. You don’t understand, the bodies–”

  "Listen, lad," the Provost said and took hold of the boy's chin. "It's enough that I let you stay here in the markets and ignore the heaps of trouble that come my way for it. Most urchins would get thrown down into The Lows for good and most Provosts would have done then and there. You're my responsibility. What does letting you come to harm say?"

  The Provost paused to let these words sink into the boy.

  "I need you to promise me that you won't go sneaking into your cousin's thieving embrace from now on, that you'll do as I ask and keep clear of The Lows! Alright?"

  Arnem beat his fists onto his knees and stood so fast that the chair fell over behind him. “Will you just listen!”

  Neither of them could remember when last the boy screamed. Dob sat up from where he lay beside the hearth and eyed the Provost eagerly. Arnem was as surprised as anyone, and the silence of it filled the space between them.

  “You’ve had a long day,” Oren said, looking him up and down. The boy could not help but feel measured and found wanting. “By the looks of ye. Let’s us not make it a long night.” He nodded toward the stairwell behind Arnem. “There’s water up there for washing. I advise you use it.”

  Arn’s fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, the motion his only vent for the expansionary force inside that otherwise threatened to pop out his eyes. He held the Provost’s glare, cold as dark river stones, until finally letting all his frustration out in one great
breath and stomping to the stairs. He mounted to the third before turning around.

  “This is why Verem left,” he called. “You want everything in its place!”

  “He left because he forgot who pulled you boys from that fire,” Oren shouted back, leveling a finger at the boy like the castigating image of a god. “His place was in that burning Middener shitheap.” The solid thuds of worn, wet shoes against wooden steps were the boy’s rebuttal, and Oren went on directing his tirade at the stiffened shoulders disappearing into the shadows of the stairwell. “I pulled him out of it! And he’s gone back. That’s my thanks!”

  There was none of the glow and warmth of the fire in the upper floor of Oren’s home. Arnem did not often remain the whole night through anymore; but there was a time when he spent every evening creeping through the cramped halls, candle in hand, to a little room where sat his little cup of tea beside a made bed. Those days were long departed, and he navigated his memory of them now more than he did the heavy gloom. The cold damp of the winds outside seeped through the ever-present gaps in the masonry and, though the Provost’s fire provided a salve to every part of him, the touch of the storm was that much more familiar.

  His bed, feeling to grow smaller over the years as he grew himself, had not been touched since his last visit. Its covers were arrayed with stern simplicity as with everything else in the spare room, and a fine layer of dust covered all of it. When he pulled the blankets back from the pillows, Arnem felt as though he disturbed a preserved artifact of the long dead. A part of him could not escape the idea that an eternity spent in the guise of a needful child would be just what Oren wanted of him. A thing, a creature, a token of his protectorate against the world outside.

  Claws scrabbled against the threshold of the door, and he turned to find Dob hopping up onto the bed with him. Together they watched the world outside the lone window of his bedroom. Thunder rolled on the heels of dancing lightning, the storms raged, and they were starved of the moons and stars hidden behind the omnipresent sheets of dark cloud. But their view was not a dark one. Light of a different kind kept the city’s nights bright during its most tempestuous seasons.

  Oren’s home sat on the outermost ring of streets in the Tradesmen’s Tier and so overlooked the Midden. From his window, Arnem could see the brilliant roof that hung over the city-beneath-the-city and its vast skein of arcane sigils that remained unseen until deepest night. The rain fell onto the complex geometries of its surface as if onto a prismatic sea, sending out great ripples of emerald and sapphire and ruby with every drop. These luminous waves were like echoing reminders to Arnem of what power and awesome wonder the world once held in its pages. Even in the terrible culmination of their dominion, when the Magi cast the magickal barrier over the Midden, they crafted a monument to a more magnificent time—when the weaving of spells did not founder in the hands of an inbred and decadent caste of Mageblooded inheritors.

  Verem told him once that only the rain could pass through the spell-wrought dome. A crow crashed to its death now and again, trying to get in or by some rare happenstance trying to get out, and sent waves scintillating over the heads of the poor folk below. Watching the earth and the magick meet in their dance, Arnem could forget the wintry presence of Oren under his feet. But no matter how much the sight comforted him, he never wished to be back in the Midden more than when he watched the glimmering lake. For that was just how the vault appeared from beneath, as if the Midden waited at the bottom of a lake of light. Its ancient glyphs were scriven across heights that not even the loftiest of the Midden’s ruins could touch, bridging the stars themselves on a clear night. Somehow that never made Arnem feel trapped, but safe.

  Only a Middener, of all the peoples there are in the world, could understand such a thing, if not take comfort in it. Death, and more often misery, was the price put up for a moment of beauty. And so while the men of the upper tiers or even the Mageblooded themselves—if their whims could be imagined by those below—complained of the rainy months’ damp crawl, the Middener held his festivals amid the murk and floods. For they were the only stretches of time that wonder didn’t cost anything, when dreams were more than impossibilities, and missives might be read from somewhere beyond the waking world.

  “There won’t be any festivals this year, will there?” Dob raised his three eyes to the boy’s at the question. “Not with the plague again, and not three years since the last one. Old folk say that there’s never been so many so close. Everything’s getting worse. All the time.” Arnem tried to find some answer in the beast’s gaze. “Sometimes I wish I was a dob like you or even just any old dog. But then who would take care of you?”

  Down below, with night in its full descent, every Middener with sense was shutting up tight. Arnem could almost hear the throwing of bolts, the chaining of shutters, heavy stones rolled into place as if covering a tomb. The Midden became a land of tombs during the long dark between sunset and rise, where the living were sealed away from the world. All manner of things knocked at the gates of their self-imposed mausoleums. Some with the voice of a loved one, some with the methodical insistence of the mad or the horrifyingly patient. Others tore and smashed and filled the night with their cries and, too often, the cries of those inside their uncovered abattoirs. And underneath everything, like the beautiful rug obscuring the stains of a thousand crimes, was the haunting and steady chorus of drums.

  But these Arnem did not hear. Tucked away in the sanctuary of the Tradesmen’s Tier, second highest of Sulidhe’s four, his music was of a different kind. The notes of its symphony reached him by the fickle hand of the wind and more often than not was stolen by the storm. He gave praise for this to any god of such that might still walk the paths of the world. Sleep was alien to him when those praises failed or when he did not find himself in the Midden, caught up in its special cacophony. For there were screams in the quiet of the upper tiers’ nights, screams which carried on during the day but were subsumed in the undertow of the day’s business. The cries were not of pain or acute sorrow, neither rage nor hate, but the moans of the dumb and interminable agony of those entrapped in the soulhouses.

  Few took the deliberately confused—and, in the Midden, oftentimes impassable—pathways that led to the massive crystals embedded into the walls' ancient stonework and which powered the glyphic enchantments scrawled across the same. Only the deranged sought them out or those hopeful of seeing a lost sibling or lover amid the roiling and indistinct forms, trying desperately and in vain to crawl from their incarnadine prison. Arnem had never seen one, never wanted to, but many times witnessed the taking of those souls that went on to power the relics of the bygone Magi. Death was a close friend in the Midden, and the soultraps that manifested to steal the departed away even as their friends and family watched them die were familiar sights to the boy. The soulhouses were the source of all Sulidhe’s might. Their energy were why its spell-wrought walls had never fallen. Without them, the Mageblooded would lose their irrefutable right to rule by decree.

  It was for this reason that Arnem often wondered, as he did then, if this were not why the city’s druidic remnant found such ready recruits among his folk. They were born into the promise of death, a pact made in their absence and solely to further the aims of those who made it. Theirs was a caste of pain, and, though a miasma of horrific tales surrounded the Cults, the beating drums at the heart of the Witherwood were a call to release oneself. More answered that call every day. No one in the Midden, Arnem least of all, was surprised when those on high started to send gol’yems to police the Midden. For them, the aberrant hulks of flesh were just another thing to beat on their doors in the night and contend with the Cults’ encroachment in the day.

  A writhing lugubrious touch dragged against his thigh in the dark. He jumped, and Dob jumped with him. The slithering came again and his heart hammered in his chest until he dove into his pocket and withdrew the seed, wincing as his haste dragged barbs across flesh. The tendrils, growing from its base where
a stem once appended, probed slowly at the air. It reminded him of an insect as it guided itself along by touches of its antennae. The appendages found what they sought and affixed themselves to his fingers, grasping blind and dumb. Or so the boy imagined.

  “A gift,” he said to himself, remembering the spirit’s words. “For what? What good’s a seed going to do me?”

  A low growl escaped Dob then. The beast scrambled to its feet, the bony spines of its hackles raised and flared. Its three eyes, like a trio of bloody moons amid its shaggy fur, bored into the Druids’ gift with the intensity of waiting for a terrible something that only it could sense.

  “Quiet down,” he said to Dob, patting him with the hand that did not hold the seed. “I don’t like it anymore than you, but we don’t want to give Oren any more reasons to come up here and keep being a bother.”

  The floor quaked underneath him. He sprang from the bed to the wall beside the window. The room glimmered with the kaleidoscopic refractions of the rain-beaten dome, and in the light he saw nothing. But he saw that Dob was not staring at the seed, had not been, but rather at the far corner. Another shudder rocked the room. The wood creaked and groaned, precipitated a loud snap. Dob started to bark, and Arnem could not help but look at the door in fear that Oren would burst through.

  Something crept out of the corner, into the light at the edges of the gloom that cloaked the room’s outer reaches. A squirming mass of roots and brambles. Dob all but charged the thing, if a thing it was at all, while the boy fled down the wall with his back so firmly pressed against the stone as to crack the mortar. Shoulders manifested from the swelling knot, between them a small ridge. Great arms resolved that could knock away the walls with ease. Arnem was crouched in the opposite corner now, and even Dob retreated but kept firmly between the boy and the creature.

  The heap writhed and twisted, taking on the contours of definite form, until a hulking giant stood before them that the room could barely contain. Finally, an amber glow blossomed from deep within the cage of roots that was its breast and challenged the prismatic illumination of the dome. The warm mote beat as a heart does, sending life-giving pulses rippling through its bodily amalgam of creeping plants. It let out what Arnem could interpret only as a deep waking sigh.