There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  The aberrations of form made the Provost’s stomach swim. Spires hung off the body of the Hall like the blooming stalks of a vast and twisted growth. Immense weights were upheld by buttresses so finely worked and stylized as to be useless. The domes of massive vaults undulated throughout the structure, their insides riven with ventricles and atriums petrified hearts. A violation of the material world had been grafted onto Sulidhe by its ancient masters. Oren itched as if he could feel the hive of their servants, charged with continuing their mandate, squirming inside the obscenity as Trease conducted him into the Hall's honeycombed exterior.

  A web of spindly corridors, punctuated at turns with malfunctioning lifts and stairwells, immediately took them into its fold. The hallways and few common areas that intervened were dense with Adjutants and their Auxiliaries. Trease remained at Oren’s side only by the intervention of their escort. For himself, the Provost was glad of it and to his surprise. The innards of the Hall were too much like the nest or catacombs of things divorced from reason, made commonplace only by the presence of so many but always rebelling against the imposition. He pictured himself alone in the sprawling labyrinth, as he always did on these visits. Swallowed into a monolith that the mundane of humankind were never meant to inhabit, listening to a jealous silence that hungered.

  “Provost,” Trease said, calling him back from the place he was drawn, and laid a fleeting hand on his arm that he was glad he could not feel through the rough wool. “Am I to understand you’ve been here before?”

  “I’ve been a Provost for longer years than I care to count,” he told her, paying her only a passing glance. He did not like the fixity of her gaze. “You’re new to the Hall.”

  “Quite. On the recommendation of my father. He’s an Adjutant himself, has been for some time.” She waited for him to comment on the fact, to ask who her father might be or if she enjoyed her role, but he did not. “I would not normally intrude or trade more words than are necessary, but you seem ill at ease for one who has made this trip before.”

  “It’s never an easeful time when I’m occasioned to come here.” They passed another veil shimmering at the ingress of an intersecting passage in which the glyphs had failed. It wound away as all the others did and then fell into darkness as if wrenched into a sinkhole. Oren wondered into what subterranean vault it fell, what secrets were mouthed in its lightless gloom. He understood at times like these where Arnem found the paths his mind went down. “And anyway, I don’t like this place. How many corridors have collapsed? How many courts, archives, offices and quarters? How many aren’t in the right place when next I’m up here?”

  Trease drew them to a stop before the orbicular protuberance of a door that could not have existed anywhere else. “The dark is not so frightening here, Provost, whatever you might think. You are a man of faith. Men of faith do not like the dark, and I understand. I understand faith.” Her eyes fell on the effigy of Utquod hanging from around his neck. “But before Sulidhe, there was much dark in the land. The Mageblooded Caste illuminated our way through its secrets. Now we stand here, in the light of their truth. I will not fear the dark where I know there to be light.”

  Mention of the Caste sent spiders of ice and metal through his marrow and reminded him where he stood, further divorcing him from the alien place. “I trust you didn’t stop me just for a nice chat.” He indicated the door beside them. “Is this where I take your leave?”

  “If you must, Provost,” she said and strolled past him, running a hand lingeringly across his shoulder. “If you must.”

  Oren did not watch her go, though something in him longed to do so. Rather he touched his reflection that was distorted across the orb of the door. Its golden surface rippled and then erupted outward in a reaching tide. The substance enveloped him into total darkness and a moment later deposited him on the other side, its ooze slowly relinquishing him. He whirled around abruptly to steady himself against its new hardness before he puked.

  “Oren?” a man asked him that he could not see in the gold of the door, his hands pressed firmly against its face, and whose voice he did not know. “Oren Zados? You must be, you are the only one who has yet to arrive. And you’re late.”

  “Not by choice,” the Provost said to the door and turned around to face the gathering, almost all of whom were familiar to him. All but one. “Where’s Malthek?”

  “Adjutant Malthek,” answered the man whom he didn’t know, seated at the head of a long table that rose from the floor like a suppurating wound, “has been elevated out of the Lower Functionary. I am his replacement: Adjutant Varzestel. You have met my Auxiliary.”

  “Your daughter, you mean,” Oren said, taking the seat left for him at the foot of the table.

  “I’m certain you would look after your own.” Varzestel’s sallow face split into a smile, lips stretched thin over pale teeth and fit to burst in their need to be believed. There was much and little of him in Trease. “I won’t do any of you the disservice of pretending it is not obvious why you are here. As I understand it, there has been little other cause for you to be summoned. Your presence here is a unique occasion.”

  “Aye, that’s well,” one of the others seated around the table said, a Provost whom Oren knew by the name of Sofis and whose charge was the First Ward. One of the last of the old guard, his parchment paper skin and stark white mustaches said as much when his words did not do the job for him. “We’ve enough to do without hearing any blithering about formalities.”

  “Certainly,” Varzestel said through another smile that the rest of him did not match.

  Oren surveyed his fellow Provosts and found them to be doing as he did. It had been a long time since they were sat together thus. Sofis paid the others the least mind. He was old enough that Oren did not remember his predecessor, and Sofis never ceased to remind him that his own was a much better Provost than he could aspire to be. Nilbod whispered to Iurkha and she to him, as Oren often saw them do, with touches and nods. He judged it a considerably shorter time since they had seen each other last. She was just coming out of the bloom of her youth, dark hair only showing the slightest signs of grey and her body still firm with the demands of her station. Nilbod smiled at her like a wolf, as indeed he was. The glint in his deep, too closely set eyes gave up all but his farthest corners. Oren felt his veins flood with acid at the sight of them.

  “A cursory review of soultrap incidency in the Midden Quarters is enough to assume that the population there is becoming a bit thin,” Varzestel said. “Another plague, our friends in the auxiliary guard tell me. So you’ve said yourselves. The Embers, they call it? Clever creatures.” He stopped long enough to sift through the chaos of papers set before him across his end of the table. “And at the same time, the Judges’ most recent accounting of their market activity alludes to the beginning of a plateau in an otherwise startling period of growth. Such is our fortune. With that said—”

  Sofis opened his mouth to speak, but Oren surprised himself by cutting Varzestel off first. He did not miss the look of derision on the old Provost’s face. “Just tell us what we all came to hear. Don’t do us the disservice, as you said.”

  “I admire your brevity, Provost. Of all the traits of the Tradesmen, I wish most that we retained that one following the Circumspex’s elevation.” Varzestel let the words hang between them in a web of unspoken understandings that not even Sofis dared to disrupt. “A Censorian Edict will be enacted and facilitated no later than the conclusion of the next Market Day.”

  A communal breath was caught around the table and, for a moment, the other Provosts hardly moved. Oren sensed the nebulae of tension expanding from each of them. Nilbod’s smile was gone, Sofis’s bluster evaporated. Iurkha was like any other woman. The air felt just as it does before lightning meets the earth, just as it did with Huer on the lift up to the Circumspex. It was the only unspoken understanding that mattered to Oren. Hard days were ahead and behind.

  “Forgive me, Adjutant,” Nilbod said, “but
that’s only a few days away.”

  Varzestel regarded him with a slight nod, an indulgent nod. “You are forgiven.”

  “What will you do?” Iurkha said. Oren enjoyed the vindication of his guesswork in how quickly she came to Nilbod’s defense. “March them straight out of the Crucible and onto the lifts? How will they collect their possessions?”

  “Of course you mean: ‘what will you do?’ The dictate has been inscribed and sealed with the brand of the Caste.” The Adjutant retrieved a polyhedral block of crystal from within his nest of papers, no larger than his thumb, and held it out to them. Only those nearest him could define the innumerable scratchings across its surface as lines of glyphic characters. The stone was inert, but a spark of only the Adjutants knew what would reveal the extensive contents of the missive. “No alterations may be made. As you know. I am only their mouthpiece, as all of us in the Hall of Adjutants are, and it is your duty as Provosts to orchestrate their will as best your nature enables you.”

  “It’s not enough time,” Sofis finally said. “Whatever your bauble says. The Slaughterhausers and the Foundrymen will close ranks around any of them who gets drawn up. And their families.”

  “As they should,” Oren said. “These have been good years for the Tier. They’ll see this as punishment for good work. A Tradesman prides himself on his work.”

  “We don’t have the men, much less the time,” said Nilbod.

  “This is becoming ridiculous,” Varzestel said. “You will have the assistance of our gol’yems. And the Sundered Faith has volunteered members of the Church-Oppugning, should the need arise.”

  “Gol’yems against our own people?” Iurkha asked no one.

  “There will be no issue with manpower.”

  “The Faith approves of this?” Oren asked Varzestel.

  “The Judges will not take their help kindly,” Sofis said.

  “And yet they will take it,” said Varzestel. “As all of you, will take it. I might remind you of your station. It should be implicit. We are here, in the Circumspex, and following this you will go back down below. Down below our walls, our offices and chambers. You will look up as we look down. Ours is the only conduit to the Mageblooded, and we rule in their stead. So please, no more of this.” The Adjutant stood, much taller than Oren expected. “Each of you has been supplied with a writ of sanction, effective until the conclusion of the Edict, to travel freely between the three tiers. Let there be no excuse for any lack of coordination.”

  One by one, the Provosts stood. There was no dismissal. It was in his voice. As implicit as the delineated geography of Sulidhe’s disparate tiers. They began to filter out of the Adjutant’s chamber, but Oren was the last to leave. He stood at the foot of the table, Varzestel at the head. Neither spoke and both waited for the other to break the silence. There were many things in Oren’s mind to do and to say. But the wall separating the Tradesmen from the inhabitants of the Circumspex was just as present between them, a prism of which they were both immutable refractions. He did only as he could and turned and followed the others. Anything else was tantamount to shouting into a hole without a bottom.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dancer in the Mist

  The tunnel was not dark so much as it was tight, so that the Stormcrows brushed shoulders no matter how they configured themselves. At the end laid a place that none of them were eager to see. Enough light spilled through the latticework of bramble, conspicuously shaped to serve their purpose, that they did not risk a trip into the thorns that waited all around them. But that didn’t prevent them from sweating out the danger. There were enough stories. Beetles and other carrion worked the shreds of flesh that yet remained on the fibrous hooks. Crows screamed and circled overhead, eager to pick at anything that they might find stuck in amongst the verge.

  The tunnel walls grew loose enough that Arnem could still see through to the outside. The structure for which they made seemed to loom no closer than when they first entered the passageway. Its walls arced out from amid the foliage heaped against it and came together in two domes, a second set on top of the first, as if in the long ago a Giant had set down a bell of stone and never returned to sound its solemn toll. Any feature that might have decorated the surface was worn away long ago and reduced to only pitted nondescript rock. And this was strange to Arnem.

  The ruins of Sul that were situated around the bell still retained elements of their fluted columns and intricate statuary, as though it belonged to another even older time and would remain long after Sulidhe. The shadow of its age fell across Arnem like a weight. Phantom memories crowded in around him as they did nowhere else in the Midden. Here was a relic from before humankind had learned to call itself so, and he went forward as if upon their bones.

  Their advance was halted at last by an archway that was woven across the breadth of the tunnel as though it had formed a clot against them. The skins of men were hung across it, where only scraps of meat ornamented the passage behind. They were drawn taut over the thorny brier as if set to dry for the ministrations of some deranged leatherworker. All definition had been shorn from them and any indication of shape cut away until all that remained were flayed sheaves of humanity: the perverse vellum for a mind wholly abandoned, its portraiture done in an ink darker and fouler than blood.

  A human face was fixed at the peak of the arch and alone retained some sense of itself in life. Its flesh was drained of color but supple still, and merely appeared to be caught in a long and peaceful slumber. Sinuous coils of flesh, laced all throughout the bramble, connected its countenance with the sphincter that glistened darkly across the threshold. The sour unnamable stench that assailed them from beneath the sweet rot of blood was not unlike that which confronted the boy only lately in Khalkhan’s plasm. And yet, Inside his pocket, the seed was absolutely still.

  “I fucking hate this part,” Quarr said.

  Verem separated himself from his lieutenant and his cousin so that he stood alone before the threshold. “Nothing we haven’t seen before. We’ve seen worse before.”

  “It’s the eyes,” Quarr went on and looked at them, but they were closed. They could not look back.

  Arnem’s mouth went dry under the watch of the visage. He studied the living bulwark with as much caution as he would a sleeping beast that might wake at any moment and take him into its maw, but in vain. The cryptic markings painted across its skins drew his eyes as invariably as ships circling a maelstrom, hopeless in their flight. Their complex patterns, so different from the harsh angles and characters of the glyphs, spiraled in whorls of color and language. An unsettling calm stole over the boy that he noticed no more or less than he did the shuffling of his feet. The shapes seemed to waver and shift the nearer he came to them. Frail but delicate voices manifested on the edge of hearing into a beautiful song that was only for him if he could just come close enough to discern its melodies. His nose nearly brushed one of the skins when Verem hauled him back by the nape of his neck, nearly tossing him to the ground.

  “Don’t,” his cousin said and shoved him back to stand with Quarr, who arrested him at once by the shoulders.

  “They’re wards, you know,” the big man said to him. “Like the glyphs in some ways, but more. They’re older, tap into something deeper. I don’t understand it enough to explain half of it. But look how the flesh is shaped.”

  He had bent down over the boy, to trace the secrets of the primal markings, like a father elucidating the doings of mariners setting a ship to sail or how an animal leaves its mark in the forest. It was something Arnem never saw in him, something hidden under the flint of his scowl. Arnem played the part and hoped that the farce would loosen the gravel behind his features.

  “It’s the same with their flesh-gods,” he went on, “or so folk tell. I’ve never seen one. But we’ve all seen a gol’yem and that ain’t far off. The Magi stole their secrets in the long ago, when their Siege failed and the Mageblooded built the Circumspex. They left this shithole to the Druids and
what was left.”

  “Szrima,” Verem called up to the face. “I’d rather skip the dance if you’re in there.”

  Its eyes slid open, deathly white and possessed with the inert life of one who does not know if he is awake or dreaming. The pearlescent orbs stared fixedly ahead, not turning to regard their audience, but the face was abundantly aware of them. The sphincter beneath shuddered and hissed, as if what it contained was not simply what lay beyond.

  “Name the speaker,” the face said with a voice that was like thunder forced to roam the empty halls of a catacomb, “and speak his name.”

  “Verem,” he shouted at the gatekeeper, before lowering his voice so that only he could hear it. “You half-dead cunt.”

  Its face went slack and the dead eyes rolled back into its skull, a movement distinguishable only by their slightly darker pupils. A silence followed that went uninterrupted save by the rare sound to travel into the tunnel from the outside world. Men shouting in the nearer streets, some distant ruin finally collapsing. Verem wiped his nose on the back of his hand and scowled at the blood there, offended by it.

  “I ought to have known,” a woman said, though none had appeared. Her voice fell from the mouth of the face atop the arch. “Word of your little spar has traveled far already.”

  “Is this game necessary, Szrima? I know you scented our approach. There’s only two of us.”

  “Three. You Urakeen give us so much trouble for being backward, but at least a Daerian can count.”

  “I don’t think my cousin quite counts.”

  “I’ve seen the company he keeps. Where is that beast, incidentally? If I admit you, will he make himself known at just the right moment?”

  “I sent him away,” the boy said, came forward.

  “Arnem,” Verem hissed.

  “I like to let him run around sometimes. When I feel safe enough.”

  “None of us should feel safe now,” Szrima told him. “Least of all, you.”