The Midden moved on unceasing about him. Much of the city was that way. There were few who knew what came before and less who possessed some idea of what was to come, and they would not tell. Arnem had questions for these mystics. His thoughts swam with them every day, coursing over the foundations of things. And some dimly aware part of him worried that everyone in Sulidhe, not just the Middeners, were once like him and once had questions. That part of him worried that one day he would lose his questions, too.
When that day came, the canal and its sister-rivers would still be there. Just as they had persisted throughout the long ages since Sulidhe’s founding, though everyone who drank from them in that time was less than dust. Arnem licked his lips and was reminded of his own thirst. He did not have the luxury of a waterskin, not even a hollowed out piece of nothing, but like these outlying plasms often drank straight from the canal itself when he could not push through the crowds to receive his water ration at the Cistern. He started to leave Dob’s side, to do just that and quench his need, but a nameless thing stayed him. A fear that was as nebulous and unconscious as that which drives the hunter’s prey before him. The seed came alive against his thigh, as though a thousand Khalkhans lingered beneath the water’s surface, and the fear became pure. He understood.
Arnem went to canal’s edge, fighting himself with every step. There was a hand and a mind engineering these things, and the boy wanted to hit himself for asking the wrong questions. The bodies were always near the canals or found floating in them, clogging the drainage and flooding the already flooded Midden. Mutilated without purpose, scavenged by not even the basest carrion. And then there were the heads, Arnem remembered. The protuberances which strained against the skull of the corpse that he and Verem pulled from the Tulzkr Street canal. The water carried everything to the outer wall and thence to the rivers far away in the wilderness. The sower of these cadaverous seeds knew that, if a boy from the Midden knew. Very little could remain long enough to contaminate the constant flow of the canals, so very little could be gained by hoping a dead body would lead to something more than an unpleasant morning for whoever was tasked with flushing or fishing it out.
The boy looked to Dob, who looked back at him with something like understanding, encouragement. “That doesn’t mean something didn’t stay behind."
His throat rode the currents of the stench of human waste as he got onto his knees beside the canal and tried not to give up what little food was in his stomach. He heaved when he thought about what was to come next, but settled into a grimace and rolled up his sleeve. Dob looked on quizzically as he laid himself down onto his stomach. The seed twirled and wrestled out its enigmatic message inside his pocket. He ignored them both and, his fingertips brushing the cool slime of the surface of the waterway, plunged a hand into the sludge.
The wall of the canal was no less disgusting than what it transported. Years, perhaps ages, of effluent and waste was encrusted on the stone among other substances that the opaque surface of the water kept secret. But nothing else, nothing he didn’t expect to find. Shaking his head, he edged out farther over the lip of the canal and sank his arm deeper. He did so again when that availed nothing and was far enough below the edge that he felt Dob’s teeth delicately take hold of his foot. The boy could feel against his cheek the imminent touch of the water rushing just below. He strained his neck close to snapping to keep his head above the surface, and still he felt only the layers of grime caked over the trench of the canal.
“There’s nothing,” he said to himself and then shouted up at Dob: “There’s nothing. Pull me back up, will you?”
And the beast did so. He withdrew his hand from the deepest parts of the canal that he could reach, letting Dob drag him out like a freshly caught fish, and something else grabbed back at him from below. It felt like cords of fire on his skin, and they pulled hard enough that his arm strained in its socket. Arnem didn’t cry out. He wound his hand around to grip the cords in turn and sank his other hand in to do the same. Hot tears flooded his eyes from the pain burning into his open palms, but he didn’t let go. He pulled, and Dob snarled and pulled harder.
The strength of whatever held him gave way, as if he were peeling something from its grip on the stone of the canal wall. Dob, now suddenly uncontested, launched him from it by the heel. Arnem rolled to a stop far outside the beast’s reach. The tendrils entwined about his arms still wrestled with him and stung like fire, but moment to moment lost their torsion and went limp. The boy disentangled himself and winced at the sight of the flaring red imprints left along his skin where he was held. Blood and pus seeped out of the tiny abrasions within the ruts. A tear escaped him and joined the fluids.
What authored his pain was no larger than a cat. The ends of its tendrils lay a perilous few feet away, but without the life to animate them. Its gills worked furiously at the traces of water left on its leathery hide. A viscous fluid seeped out with every exhalation that became less and less as they began to choke on the air. The ochre excretions pooled around its long, fat body so that if its mouth were not atop its bulbous head, the thing would have drowned in the absence of gills. Eyes were clustered haphazardly around the maw that flitted and dilated in the manner of all dying things. Jagged teeth fought for space. Arnem imagined them chewing their way through brain matter, and the tiny jaws worked at the air in anticipation. He thought of a baby bird.
Chapter Eleven
“I Remember Everything”
The grind of the pestle against the mortar made a lonely sound in the cold, steady grey of the day bleeding through the opened flap of the tent. The younger man worked the oats in silence to cook into porridge later. His eyes were like coals, heavy in his skull and ready to burn. There was no sleep for him while the old man rested.
The tent rocked as the wind snatched at it, and the younger man hoped the old would go on just resting. He would not look at him, for fear that acknowledging him would bring him around. His mind was on his task. His task had everything to do with the old man; but his hands were tools now, his task divorced from its object. The younger man was divorced from his world, and so much so that he nearly dropped his instruments when the old man spoke—sudden as the sunrise.
“There’s a sadness. In the mornings, before you wake. When it's just me in the cold and the grey. I look at you sleeping. And I ask myself something I do not want to ask. That I do not want to think, but think anyway. Always. Why me?” He shuddered as he breathed. “Why him?”
“I made my choices,” the younger man said, resumed the melodic grind of the pestle.
“And I made mine,” said the older, his voice possessed of its old power, remaining like a shadow in the shadows of the tent after it passed. “Do you remember what I told you, boy, before I took you from the place where you were born?”
“I remember,” the younger man said, but would not look up. He would not let him see that he was less than steel or iron or the hardest thing. “I remember everything.”
“Look at me,” the old man said.
“I see you.”
“Look at me!” he tried to shout, and finally the younger man did.
He had pulled back the covers to reveal his truth, the shriveled husk beneath the wool. There were bones. There was distension. The cheeks were sunken. The veins stood out blue and purple and black under skin too thin to retain anything of life or warmth or youth. And everywhere upon the crumbling parchment of his flesh: the warped tattoos and scars and leavings of old wounds. The record of his punishment for being about his business. The old man’s jaw trembled now. The tears fell free in their steaming tracks.
“Why do you want this for yourself? Why would you ever want this?”
The younger man stood from the table and went to him, a deliberate calm in his pace that allowed them to find each other in each other’s eyes. There was confusion in the old man’s, and the younger man did not know what was in his own. He knelt down beside the skeletal creature and pulled the covers back over him a
nd wiped the tears away from his cheeks, trying not to feel too much the too sharp angles of bone.
“I wanted to be you,” he said and took the old man’s hands in his.
“And I am dying.” The palsied, brittle fingers squeezed his tighter. “Don’t walk the path that I have walked. You must find your own. Your spirit is true enough.”
“I told you I won’t leave you.” He took his hands away. “Save your strength, and stop thinking of ways to ask the same question.”
“Please,” the old man said. Again and again, speaking the word like a talisman. Like the first and last word in the litany of their lives. “Don’t let yourself die with me.”
“You’re not going to die,” the younger said and felt his own shame like a heat. He could not remember the last time he dared raise his voice within striking distance. The realization hurt more than any blow. “People in the last village we passed say there’s a medicine woman not far from here. And after that, plenty of game and flowing water to last us in between here–”
“And where?” the old man asked. “To what place are you torturing me to get to?”
“A safe place.” The younger man stood. He was surprised to find his fists clenched at his sides. “Is that not enough? Do you trust me that little?”
“I trust you to tell me where we are going.” When he turned and went, the old voice wheezed hard to be heard still. “How safe can a place be when you will not even tell me where it is?”
The younger man disappeared into the lingering day. A heavy pall had slid over the world outside. Dark clouds brewed a spiteful deluge of rain. The days ahead would be hard going in the mud and storms. He dug out the map stuffed deep into the corners of his memory and referenced it again, as if each time would bring them any closer to their destination. A long road remained. They would skirt the Mereshaid soon, camp within a bowshot of the gloom-haunted corridors that ran between its ancient trees. It was the madness of the world alive on the surface of its flesh. Friends lingered there, but amid things that were friend to nothing and no one. He did not know which would greet them. They cleaved now to one of its child forests, farther south and west, where it was easier to find game, and along its borders he was uneasy enough already.
A last look to the horizon—dithering steppeland that unfurled everywhere but to the mountainous north—spelled nothing for them. Satisfied, the younger man turned to go back inside the tent when a branch cracked among the thick trees of the wood they camped beside. His hand went to the sword at his hip, and his eyes, better perhaps than anyone’s save the old man in his youth, strove deep. Nothing moved. The leaves did not even breathe.
Chapter Twelve
The Interminable Bloody Present
Shouts from the dig-gangs all around them formed an envelope of noise against the outside world. Verem watched them work their shovels in the mud like fiends, warring against nature to keep the trenches diverting rainwater away from the tunnel mouth in which he stood. Crows circled over their heads and around the pale halo of the sun behind the clouds. Looking at them, up the uneven and root-strewn declivity leading down into the tunnel, Verem imagined himself in a buried command post on one of the battlefields that outsiders said littered the distant west. Those would be abandoned in these times, haunted only by the scavengers of loot and flesh, the ghosts themselves fearful to tread there again. The last days of glory had passed, long before he was born, and there were no great hosts to join anymore.
“Are you listening to me?" the man said who crouched beside the fire in the mouth of the tunnel. "I said: what'll it be, you daydreaming git?"
Verem turned to face him, and his Stormcrows dispersed themselves between them. "Being in with the smugglers now doesn't mean I won't slice your warty face, Czerk."
A sneer split the man's scarred and, indeed, wart-strewn mug. Distended by the smile, the contrasting dance of flame and shadow against these hills and valleys threw weird and reaching shapes across his cheeks. Czerk pulled the hood of his cloak closer about his face and starved the phantasms of their light. In his head, Verem thanked him.
"I’ve done heard enough of your threats when I was in with the Crowbills," Czerk said as he stoked his fire. "The cant is that they gave you a good thrashing over by the Cistern yesterday."
"I trade with you for supplies, not rumors from the mouth of whatever boy you gobbled up on the corner last." The snide pretenses decorating Czerk’s pockmarked face fled in the wake of pure, unabashed spite. Verem looked past him into the torch-lit gloom of the tunnel. "Maybe your new masters are more interested in what I got to sell."
"Lay it out, lay it out." Czerk grabbed hold of the handle that hovered at his side in the twilight of the fire, tarnished brass embossed with a cat's paw. Pulling it, he brought a slab of pink stone between them. "But make it worth my while."
Verem nodded to Quarr, who brought forth the sack he carried and emptied its contents onto the inspection table. The miscellany represented their most recent haul from the chambers of the Midden's most outlying ruins before crossing over into the Witherwood, some of them only lately excavated. It paled in comparison to the loot of their previous expeditions. There was less and less of the old world left in its ashes. The relics and artifacts sparse, stores of hidden knowledge no longer of consequence in a world steadily falling apart. At once, Czerk fell to picking at the pile of its memories like a vulture descended onto a freshly ripened corpse. He sorted and inspected and muttered.
"A thaumatrope crystal, some components still attached," the smuggler said, inspecting the partially disassembled device with an eye that Verem knew to be practicing appraisal without doing much appraising at all. "Worth a tidy sum, if you'd brought me the rest of the machine." He dropped the thing back into the pile.
"No one can find a whole fucking thaumatrope," Quarr said, looming in the shadows of the tunnel wall.
Verem held a hand up to silence him.
"What," his lieutenant said. "The Magi stepped into different worlds with those things. They aren't just lying the fuck around."
Another swift, curt gesture eased the big man down before he started to froth. Verem did not pay him a glance to do so, but kept his eyes firmly on the plucking and turning and tossing fingers of Czerk.
"Defenstrator lens," he went on, casting aside a dusty crystalline ovoid that was of a hue not unlike the soultraps that steal away the dying before they are dead. "Again, a pittance on its own." Czerk laid this on Quarr with a grin that held less mirth than it did teeth. "Junk," he said, poking through. "You've brought me junk. Ah, but what's this?" His talons latched onto an intricately worked rod, all of silver and as long as his arm. It was riddled with glyph-inscribed gems and the mechanisms by which they could be configured when held in trained hands. "Now this," Czerk said to Verem, tapping the rod with a forefinger, "this is a find."
"Do you even know what it is?" Quarr started in again.
Verem called Czerk’s attention before it could even be diverted again. "How much for the spellblade?"
"A tidy sum," the smuggler said. "For this, the lens and the crystal, I'll throw down my heaviest pouch of silvershot for the day. Two, three hundred pieces."
"That'll feed us for a week," he heard Muro ejaculate behind him.
"It's not for food," Verem said to him, then to Czerk: "Deal."
The smuggler's rueful grin returned and he took his items, dispersed the rest into Quarr's pouch, and slid the slab back into its place among the immaterium. The Stormcrows took their leave of him lighter in burden, heavier in heart, but heavier too in currency. The air at the top of the descent to the smugglers' tunnel was putrid after the mild earthen dank below, but that was just as well. Verem's face, and the faces of his crew, were twisted with the taste of something awful.
"We could have gotten four times that," Quarr said and said what everyone was thinking. "If we'd waited, we could have gotten more than our worth."
"Patience is strange coming from you," Verem said, lightening a thi
rd of the newgained pouch into his hand and tying the remainder tight to his belt. "Were you going to infiltrate the smugglers' network yourself, then? Climb all the way into the Tradesmen's Tier and find a buyer?"
"That's not the point," Muro said and Dura nudged him. "Captain."
"We need the money now. We're down men and Segved won't just leave us to mourn and lick our wounds."
"Who can we recruit?" Quarr asked, not wanting an answer, and threw his arm out at the hoary desolation of the Midden. Verem couldn't see more than one or two of them—slouching in doorways, coughing into beggar's cups—but he knew to whom his lieutenant referred. "Word's got round by now. The other gangs probably soaked up the few odd fools already who ain't sick and can hold a knife."
"Dura," Verem said and, when she loped to his side, laid the silvershot he took from the purse into her hands. "Make the rounds of the usual chymists, physiks, and dolts who fancy themselves wizards. Find something for Kurr’s bleeding. Throw the rest at whoever seems credible for a scry of Burr’s body. I'm not convinced."
"You want to go back in there," Quarr fairly laughed, a grisly hacking sound to which his throat was not given.
Dura nodded her assent and hurried off. Verem turned to face the two of his men who were left of his gang, such as they were and howevermuch loyalty they still possessed. He didn't blame them their feelings. Events took an unforeseen track. History absolves its characters of the betrayals of fate, as surely the Stormcrows suffered in the Witherwood; but this was the Midden, and there is no history where there is no future. No absolution for foolhardy thinking.
"What's the rest of the silvershot for?" Quarr pressed.
Muro took Dura's place beside him. "Captain, where are we headed?"
"I already told you," Verem spat. "Both of you. Now keep your teeth together and your eyes about you."
There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well Page 10