There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Quarr threw his hands up as if suddenly waking from a bad dream. “Enough with the fucking banter,” he said. “Are we going to have business or aren’t we?”

  Nothing more was said through the guise of the face atop the threshold. Its membrane trembled and then retracted. It was the only invitation the Stormcrows could expect. They proceeded through the arch, careful not to even graze its flesh, and into the lofty chamber beyond. The only light was that which shone through an oculus set into the apex of the bell’s interior. Its frail shaft of sun was enough to illuminate the dirt floor inside, littered with rubble that was too buried and decayed to make much of, and the makeshift throne that lay on the far side. A figure shifted within its deep recess to better regard them. A cat’s eyes winked silver in the shadows.

  “I’m too tired and too bloodied to do anything but lay it out,” Verem said as he came to stand in the fullness of the light shining from above. “We’re down three men, and you know I don’t keep wasters around for fodder. We sold off enough loot to get our wounded well and with some jink left over. What’s left is yours. All of it.”

  A purse filled to the noose with silvershot clinked at the foot of her throne, an amalgamation of bone and sackcloth and twine. The eyes of skulls searched Arnem’s insides, sent quivers through him more than any beast the depths of the Midden could offer. Their pits were hollow of everything but a promise that was implicit.

  Szrima lounged further into the gloom. “A tidy sum, Verem, but it will not do. You really must come better equipped to bargain with me.”

  “You haven’t even looked at it.”

  A smirk wrenched Szrima’s full lips, a deep violet in stark contrast to her dusky skin, and conveyed more than anything she could have said.

  “Segved bought you out,” Verem fairly whispered. “We only just came from our last dustup.”

  “Then perhaps you should rethink your strategy. He came yesterday.”

  Verem hung his head. Blood pattered into the dust at his feet from a broken nose. Arnem did not know what to do for him, though felt powerfully he should do something. But before he could even put a hand to his cousin’s shoulder, Szrima’s voice filled the throats of the shadows again.

  “But you are in luck. Fortune is a strange beast. I have other considerations weighing the scale. Heavily in your favor, you’ll be glad to know. Expedite the slaughter of Segved’s only real competition, and I would be powerless to dictate a price at all, much less tidy sums. I’d be at the Crowbills’ mercy or, worse, forced to leave out altogether. So pick your head up, Verem. You aren’t going to die quite yet.”

  She had no sooner finished speaking than her body dispersed into a cloud of the densest marsh fog. The thick vapors blew through the air toward them as if pressed by a stiff wind and washed over Verem, tails of mist seeming to linger and caress, before reshaping into the form of a lithe woman on the other side. The facsimile gently lost its amorphousness and resolved itself into broad hips and broader shoulders and the defined curvature of waist and jaw. Finally the thick braids of her dark hair, the contours of the animal bones that ornamented her leathers and furs, coalesced and Szrima came back into being.

  Verem did not turn to regard her or show at all that he had heard what was said, but Arnem saw his shoulders finally slump with the weight of the day. He looked to have already fallen asleep just where he stood. The boy would not wake him, not then or for as long as he could neglect to warn him. His impulse to share the secrets of Khalkhan’s plasm, to not be alone with the burden of its knowledge anymore, only served to conjure the Witherwood before him. The Echoes, the blood, and Muro who would perhaps not live through the night. This was his fight, and the fighting of it as fruitless as Oren’s Fruitless Plain if those he fought for died in his stead. Arnem would say nothing, and keep his doom to himself.

  “Oh just cheeky,” Quarr said as Szrima passed between him and the boy. “Where are you off to now we’ve paid you?”

  Her stride did not falter. “I sold my allegiance, Quarr, not my business.”

  “What did this place used to be?” Arnem blurted at her back, and Szrima stopped.

  She turned and leaned down to meet his eyes, her own still swimming with fog around irises that were like purple moons. Her lips split into a smile that he could not help but match. Something stirred in him that he would not be able to name until many years thence, something that she tried to fish out of his depths in that moment. He felt searched out and naked under that gaze. As if she were waiting for an element in him to resonate with an element in her. Arnem did not know if she found it. Szrima touched a finger to his nose and turned and went, leaving her payment sitting on the floor like an offering.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Woe That Hope Brings

  Tentacles slithered out from the dark and corpse-strewn waters he hovered above and took hold of his limbs, constricted them. He flailed against their grip even as they began to tear him apart. Others fought with him. Oren was among them, his cousin as well and all the Stormcrows. The verdant giant Hjaltimar was bound in the writhing nest, its immensities and greater strength met with the sort of impassable resistance that comes only in dreams. The harder that they pulled against their bonds, the closer the tendrils held them. But it was not to break free that they struggled. None of his friends sought to break free. It was for him that they reached, and the sight of their failure saw his limbs split away from his body in a shower of pain.

  Arnem woke screaming. The crude mat of straw and sackcloth lay in disarray beneath him. Pieces of it prickled him all over, stuck to his skin from the sweat that made a cool night colder. He slapped them away as if they were the curious tips of the tendrils which held him in the dream, invading his every pore, and studied all the shadows to make sure nothing burgeoned within them.

  The candles had burnt low throughout the cramped and musty garret. All was left to darkness but for the few uneven splotches of moon and domelight that stretched across the floor, lancing in through the broken windows. If whatever thing lurked in the depths of his sleep, haunting his dreams, sprang into the middling light then, the boy would have half expected it. The veil between the real and the incomplete chaos of the mind had been shaved thin for him. It grew thinner with the rise and set of every sun. But he was alone, save for Dob, as he was every night. And the knowing of it left him with such a hollow feeling he nearly wished otherwise, that something horrible truly was there with him.

  There were only memories reposing in the watchtower below and the empty casern of which it was a part. The exiled Tradesmen who had repurposed its confines—billowing fires into infernos such as born Middeners had never seen, smelting the scrap of generations to smith it anew, forging a semblance of normalcy for themselves in the city-beneath-the-city—had gone and would not return. Their wives and husbands and children had died of sickness or starvation, washed away in the suddenness of a flood or fell awry of the endless gangs that haunted the alleys and alcoves. The hope died with them. They learned quickly the lot of a Middener and the woe that hope brings, that the only Fruitless Plain was that in which they now found themselves.

  Gloom pooled in around them both like a smothering blanket, the boy and Dob, and the cool damp of the rainswept night hung close on the air. The moons were yet high when Arnem looked and hardly visible through the bright latticework of the dome. Dawn was a faraway dream, kept at bay by the drums beating deep in the Witherwood. Screams floated above their mad rhythm like a chorus; the singers, those caught out of doors when the plasms shuttered against the night. His sleeping mat beckoned him invitingly, but he could not find it in himself to face the realm of sleep again.

  Arnem rubbed the cold from his shoulders, blew into his hands. A stiff wind had whirled in from the centermost window on the far wall and snapped at the papers strewn across the desk beneath it. It was an old, rickety thing. Only the chair shoved against it was older or ricketier, and neither suffered being moved well. Arnem worried that one or the ot
her of them would collapse each time he sat down to work, but not tonight. Collapse was a distant and unreal thing for the boy as he took the chair. Something was growing in the Midden, solidifying, that had no thought for collapse.

  There were not enough candles inside the box beside the desk to replace those that had burnt out, but he withdrew what remained to replace what he could on the desk and the sill. He took a ledger from the only drawer and turned to the next of many other blank pages, the fruits of a long labor spent scratching the ink from an unintelligible volume drawn from the casern’s archives. Arnem took up the charcoal stylus that laid among the papers already scattered haphazardly across the desk and commenced to think with his hands as well as his head.

  The thing he had pulled from the canal still breathed in his memory, even as it decayed in the sack he stuffed into the farthest corner of the garret. The noxious stench was robbed of its power by the wind that blew uninterrupted through the gaps in the broken tower. He tried to reflect its horror on the page, the oozing gills and its eye that carried too human an aspect. The charcoal made crude, fat marks of its tendrils. He still felt the burn, but the sap Kurr gave him had reduced it to only a small ache. He notated these things beside its graven image and asked questions of them. In a messy scrawl, he wrote: 'stuck to canal wall’, ‘dangerous if touched’ and ‘poisoning water?’ before scratching out this last. After a few moments thought, rattling the stylus between his fingers, he affirmed it instead.

  The teller of this secret would not fit within the confines of what he drew. It spilled over, no matter the faithful sinuousness to its feelers or the rigid angles of its chelicerae and carapace. He put down only what his mind could contain, what it allowed him to remember. Khalkhan developed awkwardly from the confused splay of charcoal lines. Too obviously random, too contrived in its attempt to escape contrivance. The boy wanted to throw the ledger out the window and into the wind. The memory was alive in his mind’s eye, but his hands defied him. He could not escape the feeling that they were dumb and insolent things, and indeed his were an amateur’s hands; but a master of the art could not capture Khalkhan. His form would violate the tools of the gods themselves. Arnem remembered the deranged corpse of his daughter, impaled and burnt and hacked until finally it had died. He scratched a line beneath Khalkhan and marked it with a skull, writing the words: ‘threat unknown’.

  Arnem reclined as much as he dared in the ancient chair and glanced between the sketches on either page of the open ledger. They were paltry, not enough, his notes the ramblings of a mind in want. The vastness of the unused space taunted him. There was more to be put down, he knew, but his mind refused to set its cogs in motion. He sat fixedly and staring at the empty parchment, overcome with the tyranny of unspoken knowledge. So much, so many, depended on that knowledge. Depended on him and the knowing of it.

  A thought came on then that had come many times before, but never with such sure realization. The boy saw himself fling the book aside, his stylus across the room and himself out into the wind and the rain. The difficulties had built until he could no longer look at them without seeing. There had never been more than his skin between himself and the black. He knew this was the way it had been and the way it would go on being. Oren did not quit his instruction long enough to understand when he tried to speak, and Verem lived uncomprehending along the edge of a blade. Life is unsparing, but grows less tangible the closer one lives with death. Death cleaved to Arnem as well, had nurtured and enfolded him. The boy was reared in death, but the embrace for him was of a different kind.

  Somewhere in the Midden, beneath the slurry of mud and fallen rock, were burnt timbers and beneath them the burnt husks of a family he did not remember. The family he had tried to create did not always want him; and he wanted no part in the family that engendered itself, again and again, from its own demand to exist. These things did not keep him or hold him and never could. Arnem could not live for them, just as his life was only ever an abstraction of their own. Their reality depended on the realness of their roof over his head, their swords at the necks of the shadows of his life, their stories gathering truth and substance only as they came to define his own. They kept him from fear and so fear had come to mean nothing. Loneliness was his poison, and only the hope of tomorrow sustained him. Hope that tomorrow will be different, hope that in time he carried a sword and not a knife, hope that his back would soon lay on the solid earth of an evening meadow with only the stars to see.

  That hope withered, as year to year it always withered, and now waned to nothing. Arnem looked again upon what he had done and at the night outside, his eyes drawn to the lodestone of Khalkhan’s plasm, though he could not see it. The window, in all his too-young days, never invited him more to the freedom from care and from want and from the need to keep going under the weight of a lingering promise until Dob licked his fingers and the boy knew that tomorrow he would need to be fed and would wonder at the empty chair in the empty garret at the page-strewn desk. Instead, Arnem turned away from the window and set aside his materials with deliberate calm and reached for the barrel of maps that sat to the side of the desk.

  Most were done in his own hand. Child’s things, but truer than most. Those few cartographers who had deigned to replicate the Midden had often done so for the narrow purpose of policing its denizens. Their maps were blunt and rudimentary things, absent the everchanging byways created by collapsed and collapsing ruin and the inroads of forest swallowing it all. He had filched them during his enforced stays with Oren, when he still thought to rear the boy in his shadow. The Provost had acquired as many different iterations of the Midden as he could and drawn up as many plans to combat any crisis that should befall the Fourth Ward. Arnem did not think he had a map for this one. So he took none of them that he had made or had stolen, but one that innocently he had found. The only map for his purpose.

  When he smoothed the ancient thing out, so brittle that it would fall to pieces if he did not go at its pace, he unfurled the world that had come before and was forgotten. Sul as it was lay before him. There was no Witherwood to crowd at its edges, no canals but those that the people of Sul had built. The precincts of the city swelled with the living places that existed now only as ghosts. Their neighborhoods were not yet overcome with the slow creep of root and weed, now tools of a world long since driven to parasitism. Marksol Square stood out clear and prominent as the forum for the courts of commerce and state. Plasms did not lie like entrails festooned across their heights. The Tree was aflower and the Bridge was unbroken. It sailed across a gap in the earth to join the city with a glut of towers that diminished the highest precipice in the Midden, so tall that the dome could not have contained them. He pretended with some amount of certainty that these were the greatest of the dreaming towers of the druids, the seat of their hierophants in ages past, where they communed with the earth by casting their minds to the heavens.

  Arnem touched a finger lightly to the Square. He followed the faint lines of the roads that stemmed from it to the straight thrust of Tulzkr Street, though it was not called so in the morning days of Sul. The boy did not know these faded letters, if letters they ever were. Symbols, perfectly square but for the odd ovular icon, decorated plazas and avenues and sites of obscure importance. Stories lingered behind their faces that perhaps would never be revealed, or had vanished with their speakers and been made mute things. Arnem wanted—but did not need—to know these histories and lives. The boy needed to find the canal from which he and his cousin first pulled the corpse that led them to the Witherwood, and he did not need the past for what was true also in the present.

  The fat coil of the canal ran beside Tulzkr Street just as it had the day that he and his cousin first pulled the corpse from its befouled waters. He marked the bridge where Tulzkr leaped its course with a kernel of silvershot from a pouch at the corner of the desk. The candlelight glimmered across the pale veins of silver nestled in the chunk of dark iron like rivers of light lost in a black forest. T
hey were not so different from the canals, new and old, that ran eventually to the Witherwood by the ancient Magi’s artifice. Many of them did not appear on the map of Sul, for many of them had not yet existed to mark.

  The bag of silvershot lilted before he was through, nearly empty. A kernel was laid at some point along each canal displayed on the map. Some, such as that which divided Khalkhan’s plasm, were dotted with several. The record was unfinished, he knew. Arnem rarely passed a night that he did not dream of the great charnel heap at the issuance of the Tulzkr Street canal into the dark of the culvert at the outer wall, deep inside the Witherwood. He could not reliably account for half and was certain others remained to be found or would never be. But that the canals of ancient Sul were replete with those that could be accounted for puzzled the boy.

  A few moments more of watching the bruised clouds curl into dark shapes on the horizon, of envisioning the tethers that bound the kernels of silvershot on the map together, a thought animated him. He shuffled through the maps that remained in the barrel and withdrew one that had belonged to Oren and laid the city-beneath-the-city down over its antecedent. It was riven with additions and modifications and changes made to the same, all of them transpositions of drawings done in the field and the result of a continual effort to maintain some semblance of a map of the metamorphic Midden. The silvershot beneath made tiny mountains across the parchment, deforming Arnem’s markings and the map’s into a changed landscape, but not so imprecise that his suspicions were frustrated: None of the corpses had been found anywhere but near the canals that anciently serviced the city and the drainage troughs that emptied into them. And finally he understood, as perhaps he should have many turnings before.

  The change wrought in Khalkhan’s plasm was a product of the corpses, but nothing more. Just as the other abandoned plasms. Accidents, ancillaries to a greater whole. The canals were not a means of infection, merely the happenstance branches of a tumor lodged elsewhere in the body. The creatures spewing their corruption into the already polluted waters were only an inadvertence. The mass of them had swam on against the flow. If they had swam on at all.