There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Voices erupted from within the stairwell that melded into one another and their own echoes so that only panic was clear above the sounds of pain. They scrambled away from each other as if something putrid had crept between them, but not soon enough that Kurr had time to cover more than just the verdant stump of her arm. Verem burst from the threshold of the stair with Quarr in tow and hauling behind him a screaming Muro.

  “What happened?” Kurr said. Too loud, too directly. “Gods below and above. Is Muro alright?”

  “He doesn’t fucking look alright, does he?” Quarr said, laying the Hawkfaced down beside her to at least lean against the cushion of her berth. “Segved and his fucking Crowbills.”

  “Word’s circulated about our manpower issues,” Verem said and finally registered the state of her, the presence of his cousin kneeling next to her. His face twisted into a kind of irascible confusion before being sucked away into simpler questions and the matters at hand. “What are you doing here, Arnem?”

  The boy’s answer was simple. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Your hands,” his cousin said, bending down to take hold of them. “Your arms.”

  “Like I said.”

  “Verem,” Quarr said.

  “I know,” the voice of the captain came back into him. “There’s no time. Does it hurt at least? Are you alright?”

  “I gave him some of the sap to use,” Kurr said. “He’ll be healed up, no time at all.”

  “I’ll deal with you later,” he snapped over his shoulder, then turned back to the boy. He found shame there, in his young cousin, where he did not mean to put it. “You’ve played at being a physik enough for today. If you’ve got something to tell me, then come along with Quarr and me. Otherwise fetch your beast and get somewhere safe. With your Provost if need be.” Verem craned his neck to look back around at Kurr. “Where’s Dura?” he asked of her.

  “Out,” she said. “To make the rounds again, I mean. Stock up on what we’ve used to get me well.” She gave a look to Muro where he writhed next to her, trying not to squeal for the bolt in his gut. “Guess she anticipated what was coming.”

  “She stays when she gets back. Til then, since you’re keen to nurse, nurse him.” He nodded at Muro, whose eyes stood out and jaw quivered with the pain he kept to himself. “We’ll be back quick as we can. Meantime lock this place up tight. No one in or out except us.”

  Quarr snatched Arnem by his collar as the big man went to follow his captain and pulled him along. The boy felt Kurr’s gaze lingering on his back as sure as he felt his own being drawn around to her. Unanswerable questions surrounded the look in her eyes. He was much too young to know the right answers to them. But he knew the answer in his own. There was a pull suddenly between them, a mooring on the air that could only be sensed by its imminent absence. The Midden was pain and longing and hard struggle. The night did not end when the sun rose; tenderness and its vulgar approximation were doled out in rare chances stolen quickly by fleeting lovers. This moment had been stolen back. Its loss was something felt. Watching her recede into his distance, following along behind his cousin, it was like watching a sun go down that Arnem feared would never rise again. Kurr had started to speak, and Arnem felt that he would wonder forever what she was going to say.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Hole Without a Bottom

  The great gears churned, just as the hours wore on since Oren Zados, Provost of the Fourth Ward of the Tradesmen’s Tier, received his summons to the courts of the Hall of Adjutants in the Circumspex. Glyphic magick, bright geometries of characters and sigils, motivated the machinery and impelled the lift upward along its tracks. In days that were now not even dim memories, there were only the glyphs. The lifts were not even called so, instead going hither and thither among the mansions of Sulidhe at the whims of their passengers. That was in the time when the legacy of the Magi still ran strong in the guise of their inheritors, the Mageblooded, when their childe-kingdoms ranged unchecked and unequaled across the Urakeen Shelflands and beyond.

  The Giants had been laid low, their realms to waste. The Northmen who fought for them were subjugated under the vicious, insurmountable lash of Magi suzerains. Empires had submitted themselves to their yoke, spilled tides of blood to elevate their majesty. The Mage was at last the ultimate creature; and yet, the demands of war had twisted something inside him.

  Before the killing began, there were only the Books of Rudiment: the foundational principles of the world’s being. These were the Magi’s provinces; these, and no more. But from the ashes and bones of enemy and thrall alike, questions were awakened. The map of the mind of the World-Spirit, the Thought Tapestry, was discovered to be incomplete.

  Newer concepts, their nodes and the threads that linked them together, begged understanding. Vast and uncharted realms of experience had been unfettered in their triumph and lay open to the Magi. The knowledge need only be drawn from the fathomless well of blood and strife to which they had lately sacrificed so generously. It was a wound already made and wanted only for expansion; but, in the end, it was a wound carved too deep. For the conquest had left the conquerors too weary to plumb further.

  And so the Magi left, drawn by the studious familiarity of their sanctums across the sea or lured by the promise of redemption that only the horizon can hold. They left in their wake a land absent of succor or tranquility and an order not merely disrupted, but shattered. The ground was fertile for nothing save those with the will to reap the seeds of its discord; and a few among the Magi, a perilous and fateful few, remained—whose thirst for dominion, now tasted, could not be slaked.

  From the once unconquerable kingdoms of the Northmen to the most distant Daerian tribes that ranged the swamplands of Medraun in the south, a new power subsumed the polities into which humankind had divided itself. The powermad renegades carved out their dominions from the earth itself and the lives that came before them. Theirs was a crusade and a reign which could end only through their own boredom. The Magi who remained were held in awe as living gods by those who resisted them in the war with the Giants and in the wars that came after. Soon they were revered as such, and they gloried in their reverence. But in their apotheosis, they nursed their undoing.

  They, whose only currency had become power, found their coffers were insatiable. Their reserves unable to be replenished with the vitae of conquered peoples, they found debtors before there was debt to be had. They turned inward and grew haughty and went beyond what was in their strength to hold. Decadency and lust for conquest drove Sulidhe to the brink, Bilious Om’qyl in the east to ruin, and the celestial lands of Old Qel’Vyria in the north to collapse. Warring for supremacy with one another, with the full powers of the Druidic Cults and the flesh-gods of Daer, their strength eroded until only chance governed their fates. Of the three great realms descended from the ancient Magi who threw down the Giants, the Intransigent City alone still stood.

  Only threadbare shadows remained of its legend. Glyphs daily flickered and then died out. All of what passed for the Mageblooded’s spellwrights were tasked with their upkeep, lest Sulidhe’s enchantments fail and the Intransigent City become like any other. The lifts were the first of these to lose their power, and the tools of Man were implemented to do what magick no longer could alone. Oren did not know for how long the charade could be kept up. He felt the slow decay as if a shade were being drawn in around him that only he could see. How soon before the outer wall lost its potency? What awaited the Midden when the canals could no longer hold back the flood waters that, unleashed, spelled total doom for its people? These were not his concerns, he was told. He expected to be told that again today.

  “What news from them in the Circumspex, Oren?” the captain of his escort asked, a blunt man called Huer whom the Provost always knew to be just as he was. “Word is that you’ve all got news from them in the Circumspex.”

  “You know the rules.” He paid the man a small glance, looking into the balancing scales emblazoned upon his
helmet, just above his eyes, instead of the eyes themselves. “I won’t break them, not even for a Lictor of the Exchange.”

  “I’ve got family, Oren,” Huer continued, and gestured around at the other Lictors who were with them. Their swordstaffs leaned leisurely against their shoulders; but Oren counted them anyway and didn’t know why. “We’ve all got families.”

  “If it feels like a knife in your gut not to know, it’s misery to know and be kept from saying. But saying that, I don’t know.” Oren looked up into the rain-thickened sky to see how much farther there was left to go, and was relieved that it wasn’t far. “I can imagine, but you don’t need me to tell you what. You’re imagining the same things.”

  It was starting again, and to Oren it was the phantom pain of an old wound. The slow, cloying grip that started at his heels and then climbed down his throat. He sensed the presence of the Lictors around him like a bat senses the boundaries of its world, invisible fields bristling at one another. Huer was not a friend, but neither was he a man that Oren saw himself trading blows with over a spilled pint or some other minor transgression. The days to come would transmute many such relationships. He knew. He had lived these days before. But he could not deny that this time there was an edge to how deeply they cut. Something was different, and the not knowing what tortured him.

  Above, the lofty dark of the Circumspex neared. Its undulating ramparts bristled as if with spears and leapt with the glyphic energies that powered their enchantments. Each of his visits, numbering not more than the fingers of one hand, Oren was gripped with the converse needs to bow his head and to square his shoulders. The seamless, crawling surfaces were not worked from any material known to him or by any craftsman whose trade he knew. The Circumspex was built in haste, as a safehold against the Last Siege that almost destroyed Sulidhe, and mortar and stone were not among the tools of the ancient Magi.

  All the powers of the earth and the earths beyond laid before them, and they drew insatiably on their reserves to create this final gluttonous citadel. Its walls swam with enchantments, arcane characters girding their unnatural structure with unnatural power, and gleamed in the night like a fourth moon for the Tradesmen below. There were more glyphs kept alight in the Circumspex than anywhere else in Sulidhe, save the abodes of the Mageblooded themselves. Their heavenward manses towered far above even the Circumspex, perched atop the spire that rose like a stem from the unglamorous bulk of the Hall of Adjutants.

  Oren cast an eye there, tracing the impossibly thin line of the spire until its heights disappeared into the clouds. He did not know what he expected to find there. The Varazsalom—the city’s fourth and highest tier, the demesne of its true masters—was a mystery that was inscrutable save on the clearest day and even then only as a spike of darkness cast into relief by the azure of the open sky.

  The lift slowed to an easeful stop at the threshold of one of the Circumspex’s ports of entry. Oren marked the difference from the halting beginning of their ascent. The magic of the glyphs, and not simply those intrinsic to the lift’s operation, was far more intact above than below. A lithe trestle arced between the walls that formed the archway and was bathed in the light of the incantations that covered its surface. They were the genesis of a veil of glimmering immaterium that gently wavered across the lift’s egress.

  A cadre of Circumspex functionaries waited beyond, dark with robes as finely tailored and appointed as those of a king. Oren knew the way, the path laden with memory of the burdens he still struggled to bear, but their smirking faces were not unexpected. What set his jaw to clenching was the armed guard that buttressed them on either side, even as he recognized the symbol embossed on their leathers as that which hung around his own neck. He could not bring anything rational to mind that explained the presence of the Church-Oppugning. And neither the man, garbed in a simple woolen frock and bald as if his pate had never extruded hair, who stood among them.

  “My sincerest greetings to you, Provost,” a woman said who then distinguished herself from the throng by approaching the veil. She stopped just short of crossing through. Oren tried to guess the color of her deep-set eyes, of her close-cropped hair through the haze of the enchantment. “I am Trease, auxiliary to the Lower Functionary of the Hall of Adjutants.” She bowed low, her long arms held out as if accepting tithes from those who stood to either side of her. When she returned to her posture, she leveled a castigating eye against the men assembled behind Oren. “Did the Judges order this escort? Most unnecessary.”

  “They wanted to be sure he got where he was going,” Huer answered for the Provost and surveyed the churchmen who had accompanied Trease. “What business does the Church have with a simple summons?”

  “He is one of the Faithful,” the bald man said and indicated the effigy of the Squid that Oren bore around his neck. “We will vouchsafe his protection.” His voice dripped with something not unlike the scum that remains behind in seaside grottoes when the tide recedes.

  “I trust you understand these men will not be admitted with you,” Trease said to Oren and indicated the Lictors.

  “We’ve orders, adjutant,” Huer said and stepped forth, withdrawing as he did so a rolled piece of parchment. “And a writ of sanction.”

  “A writ from the body of a lower tier,” the bald man said. “It holds no authority here.”

  “Watch your tongue, squidfucker,” Huer said and came close enough to the veil that he felt its strangely cold heat burning against his nose. “Your lot might’ve inveigled your way in with the Hall, but I’ve got my own masters.”

  Oren’s hand fell heavily onto his shoulder and pulled him back from the threshold.

  “I told you I don’t know why I’m here, not for sure,” he said to him. “But I can tell you it’s nothing good and the more reason you give them, the less good it will be for you and yours.”

  The Provost held Huer’s gaze long enough to be sure that he understood his warning and then turned around to face Trease again. “Drop the gate. Let’s be about this.”

  Trease went to a panel beside the threshold of the gate that Oren could not see but knew intimately for their presence elsewhere in the city. She rearranged the orientation of the sigils and geometries inscribed thereon, sliding the panel’s facets in a complex sequence that she was nearly alone in remembering by heart. This done, she shifted the concentric rings of its frame to realign the thaumaturgic calculus and was rewarded with a faint pale light. The veil reverberated with the new calibration and, with a shudder, dissipated in a cloud of prismatic dust.

  Trease bowed again in the obsequious manner that was particular to her and gestured for him to enter. “If you would, Provost.”

  Oren grimaced at the display, taking it for what it was. The denizens of the Circumspex were the masters of Sulidhe in every way that mattered. Subservient to the Mageblooded, yes, but empowered by the Caste’s complete disinterest in ruling save by their whims and dictates. A Provost in their eyes was a creature not wholly separate from any other and existed on the broad plane of all those parts of life which did not dwell in the Circumspex. He knew that intimately. Provosts were cogs, and Trease thought him enough a piece of machinery to not know when he was mocked. The deepest thorn of that mockery was the obverse of its coin: The rage that came from knowing could not be exorcised and only served to add an edge to the mockery. Oren could do little but listen, and listen he did.

  “Provost,” the bald man said as he disembarked. “I am Yrsted. Acolyte to the Matron Sohrabaia.”

  “I’m honored, then,” Oren said and extended his hand, “as well as pleased.”

  The acolyte Yrsted smiled with his crooked teeth alone and tucked his hand, already stuffed well in the sleeve of his frock, behind his back. The day had worked at him, and would go on working at him, but every instinct told Oren that something more than bone and sinew stirred inside the wool.

  “I weep for your forgiveness,” Yrsted said, as indeed he did. His skin glistened with damp that was neither
sweat nor rain. “My sacrament forbids me to touch. I must endure in solitude of the flesh as well as heart.”

  “Another of the Church-Suffering, then? Kin to you delivered my summons.”

  “Yes,” the acolyte said. “Suffering. Of a like.”

  “Will you be coming with us to the Hall? Do you have business with the Adjutants as well?”

  “Business, I have, yes. But below, not here among you fine folk. My Matron bids me attend to matters of the Church that concern we ‘squidfuckers’ among the Tradesmen.” Yrsted cast an eye toward Huer that seethed with a good deal more than ill favor, a hate palpable in its restraint. “I take my leave, as do you. May Utquod grant us a second meeting.”

  The acolyte slid past and among the Lictors of the Exchange on the lift like oil oozing through water. Trease reoriented the glyphic arrangement on the panel beside the archway and the shimmering curtain materialized into being again over its threshold. The lift began its descent, a ring of swordstaffs and glares enclosing Yrsted’s idiot smile, Trease beckoned Oren to follow. He watched them through the glimmer of the arch until they were gone and hoped never to learn what became of any person to pass through uninvited.

  Their walk was a silent one, the pleasantries having been just that. And that was alright. Oren felt already the perverse weight of the Hall of Adjutants. Its towers, basilicae, and battlements looming ahead were almost indistinguishable from one another and appeared to tumble together as one congealed mass. Only the vibrant shimmer of their innumerable glyphs kept their shapes, as if without them the whole structure would collapse from want of nonentity. Oren knew this wasn’t far from the truth. The Circumspex, like the wall which kept the ways to it, had been raised by the Magi when Sulidhe was still young—and vulnerable.