There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Suddenly Arnem remembered the butchered bodies and understood. There had been no misdirection. Those fleeing the infected plasms did not simply bleed into those neighboring them. Khalkhan and his child were not alone in their condition. The meat had been kept. Their fellow childer supped in the dark. That the plasms lay downstream of some source of the infection mattered not at all. The plasms were a source in themselves; of something worse, but incomplete, that gathered at the heart of life in the Midden to spread its touch until everything felt the caress. And so, slowly, the boy laid a finger again on the map. He traced the serpentine tracks of the canals as if resisting the terrible understanding that they stirred in him until he arrived at their beginnings—at the Cistern.

  “Oren’s not going to believe this,” Arnem muttered to Dob and to himself. “Not a bit. Not even if we show him the other… thing.” He cast a glance at the lumpy sack in the corner, nearly invisible in the gloom, and wrinkled his nose at the smell that had started to settle in between the winds. Dob rubbed a huge paw down over his nose. “We’re going to need to do one better, Dob. And being honest, most of me doesn’t want to find out what that means.”

  Arnem cleared away the kernels of silvershot and set the charcoal stylus aside to set to rolling up the maps again, but stopped when the dreamtowers of the hierophants of Sul threatened to disappear back into ageless time. Their soaring pinnacles stabbed through the puffs of cloud which had been drawn innocently over them. The rays of a stylized sun danced askance across their walls. Birds that were not crows—and so unfamiliar to the boy—wheeled forever around them, magnificent plumage trailing behind.

  Most days Arnem refused to register the embellishment: He could not bear to look at it for long, if at all, and then find himself forced to look around at what remained. The boy’s heart protested with every turn of his hands around the rolled parchment, pulled at the map when he slid it back into the barrel with the others. He tried to make his mind like the barrel and store away the knowledge that something else laid at the center of Sul in these times, a thing that did not know the majesty of birds in flight or the warm rays of a sun. A thing that festered in the dark and would drown what light was left in the world.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Last and Only Things

  The lift groaned along its track as if against its own desire to remain, tired and decrepit, in the Midden. Arnem jockeyed for space amid all the desperate mothers and fathers and dirty children, the starving and the poorer-than-poor. He was packed so tight with them, and they tight with each other, that the air came to him hot and recycled by so many other mouths. The stink of the Midden was fragrant by comparison.

  The lift was not like the others the boy had seen in the Tradesmen’s Tier. There had never been any magick in it, and was purely a rudimentary abstraction of the same mechanism that the foreigner who built it had designed in his home country of Gilderon, with their Machine City and their Machine God. A council of Provosts—preceding the present by so many years that even Oren did not remember their names—commissioned its construction on the orders of the Circumspex, to better sustain the perfect balance between terror and the resignation inherent in exile to the Midden. The starving and the mad make ripe recruits for the Druidic Cults, they learned, and good eating for the creatures attracted by an easy meal. And of the sane and well-fed: Exile without the promise of some sort of life in the city-beneath-the-city was fast becoming a source of unrest that burgeoned upon open rebellion. Sulidhe demanded a careful understanding of the wages of cruelty.

  The massive plane of metal inside its massive cage neared the apex of its track. Arnem could see the lift gates of the Tradesmen’s Tier stabbing at the iron-grey sky like teeth. The Lictors of the Exchange waited beyond it, ready to extract their miserable charges and hurry them to the markets inside the Crucible. The boy hoped against hope that there were more drunkards on duty than vigilant, serious sentinels. His mouth had already begun to salivate at the thought of a crust of bread, and the smell on the stormy winds set his stomach rumbling. He quelled his hunger as much as he could. There was more to steal today than food.

  The piercing whine of rusted metal on metal heralded the lift as it clanged home against the gate. Its passengers pressed like water against the doors and spilled out just the same when the Lictors undid the latches. Arnem let himself sluice with them, let them carry him unnoticed along the usual route through the Tier’s swept and orderly streets. One of Oren’s men spotting him was tantamount to death in that moment. There was precious time. Something seethed in the atmosphere, waiting to be born. It was in the faces of everyone around him. The grips of hands around the hafts of swordstaffs were tighter than last market day. Arnem could not think of a more useless place for him to be than held safely in Oren’s custody until the specter assumed its hideous form and came for them both.

  Men and women garbed in the vestments of the Sundered Faith waited at the banks of the river of humanity to conduct pilgrims to the cathedral. Oren was not among them, as he sometimes was, and Arnem was glad for it. Some of those destined for the markets bid goodbye to those they came with—families, friends, begrudging allies of convenience against the Midden’s hazards—and gathered before the wan and threadbare acolytes of the Church-Suffering. Their faces were as pale and damp as Arnem had ever seen them, frail wisps of hair standing out as lone reminders of the clumps that had fallen out. The boy could not fathom what drew any Middener to them. Rain fell over them in a steady dismal drizzle where they stood in the street, the bleak and brutally purposeful dwellings of the Tradesmen’s Tier hulking behind.

  He found little solace in the sight of their failing bodies. There was something less than suffering about them, as if their vitality did not wane at all, but simply drained to another reach deep inside. Arnem could not say where that reach lay or what resided there that hungered so powerfully. Oren spoke often, wonderingly and at length, of their pain and the changing for which it was underwent. And the boy harbored secret doubts that the change was merely spiritual. Their flesh was imminent, but with what?

  The question was pushed from his mind as the course of dirty flesh and rags pushed him out of sight. Their snaking passage ended in what truly encapsulated the soul of the Tier, in the absence of which the Tradesmen could not call themselves so and lost any distinction from the pitiful laborers of any other city. The Crucible laid waste to any common notion of girth or weight or size. The Hall of Adjutants alone, in its twisted and alien splendor, proved greater. The towering buttressed walls of masoned stone thrust forward against its entrants like the thunderheads of a great storm; its breadth, the breadth of the horizon. Its structure recalled the vast and empty arenas scattered throughout Sul and left to ghosts or worse, but within there was no sand and no sun had ever shined. No cries of bloodlust, death or shame ever escaped the darkened innards of the Crucible. It was an arena of a different kind.

  The heat came in billowing waves. Already the broad open floor of the Crucible brimmed with merchants, peddlers, hagglers, thieves, and the odd honest customer. No one could hear anything but the person with which they spoke and to whom they had to shout to be heard. Smoke billowed from great ovens cooking meats brought in from the Slaughterhauses and furnaces smelting metals from the Forgeworks, the two mixing in the open air to form the strangest scents of pork-roasted copper and iron. These uses occupied most of the fixed establishments in the trading halls of the Crucible, built into the stone itself, while the amateur jewelers and craftsmen were relegated to the floor in hastily erected booths that painted them more as nomads than cosmopolitan merchants. The juxtaposition was a ridiculous image until one caught sight of the men and women circulating throughout the hall and among every pair of hands that exchanged goods for silvershot.

  A share of each transaction was either set aside or dutifully extracted from the proceeds of any sale and immediately placed in the box belted to the nearest Proctor, the severe underlings of the Judges of the Quality. Their blac
k caps and skirts and doublets set them apart from those they minded. Mere shadows moving in the essential dimness of the Crucible and taking their share. No one had a mind to be cheated of a wage, even in payment for use of such a well-trafficked venue, but any defiance was stayed before thought could become action: The Lictors of the Exchange lingered at the edges of the tiered room, vicious wraiths waiting to be called upon.

  Competition amongst the purveyors of like goods was fierce. It was often that traders went hoarse trying to be heard over one another, and far too frequent that the Lictors of the Exchange intervened to break up a contest that had fallen to blows. But no matter how they bloodied or impoverished each other, in one thing the Tradesmen were united: their disdain for those come from without Sulidhe’s walls to auction their wares. Pereseian silks sailed across the sea and carried far overland, gemstones from Irmiddian desert mines, Vyrian blue steel that could bankrupt a king and which the smiths of the Northmen guard so jealously. These were the riches of the world, but sat mostly untouched in the booths of unconcerned merchants for whom Sulidhe was merely a pass through on to some other more friendly market. Protective tariffs catapulted their prices far beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest Adjutants, whose Auxiliaries formed the bulk of these foreign merchants’ customers.

  Arnem spared a look upward and, against all self-regard, his breath caught. As it always did. Tier upon tier of craftsmen and peddlers and patrons rose into the smoky heights of the Crucible and served as the frontispiece for the offices and troves of the Judges and their designates buried deeper inside. The immensity and labyrinthine complexity induced him to believe that the Crucible was a wholly foreign realm, its connective tissue obscured and operating by mechanisms he could not fathom. The supply chains, the figures arrived at to predict the fluctuation of prices, determinations of value and quality: a gilded bureaucracy that was as strange and opaque to him as the ever-shifting patterns and plasms of the Midden were to an exiled Tradesman.

  Tucked firmly into that hive of commerce, in the greatest chamber nestled within the highest level, were the high courts of the Assay Tribunal. Few ever saw them who did not have some dispute for the Judges to arbitrate. These cloisters were reserved only for the unscrupulous merchants who found it in themselves to be so vociferously dissatisfied with the work of a craftsman as to try and ruin him. Arnem certainly never thought of himself as among that esteemed caste. He knew, as he so often did, only what Oren told him: The Judges were self-important fops, each boasting a mastery over a certain kind of making, and who wrecked the livelihoods of those lesser craftsmen who balked at their authority. The boy never found any reason to disagree.

  Arnem plunged into the shouting morass, kept himself small enough to escape notice even as he shoved his way through. He circled through the stalls at random to avoid suspicion while he marked the appropriate ones. A crust of bread and several stray purse strings filled his time until the right opportunity presented itself. A squat man with a flat face, sweat running down into his thick black beard, lost a coil of his best rope as he entertained a dozen offers while shouting at passersby to place their own. Two scrawny madmen, assuredly from leagues away to the south or east, tried to hawk fishing nets to persons who had never fished a day. Arnem made their first sale for them and free of charge. He almost moved on before catching sight of the fillet knives laid out beneath the hanging nets. Their fervent desperation for customers moved him to leave at least a few rocks of silvershot behind.

  The ease of his transactions brought no delight. Arnem expected ease. It was the end that was always hardest. His last item, whatever that item should be, laid at the end of a long and orderly queue of patrons waiting for the purchases they had commissioned last market day. Stout men and women, as verbal as the metal they handled, sweated out the day’s work before smelters and forges that rippled the air with heat. Their eyes watched everything. Hammers, trowels, horseshoes, awls and chisels and anything else a life could demand of iron were laid out along the long stone edifice that separated buyer from seller. These held no interest for the boy.

  The walls that led back to the smelteries were lined with things that killed. Swordpoints aimed down at the floor, spears to the ceiling, and axes for felling both tree and man hung twitching with the desire to be used. The shadows cast by the light of the forges’ flames through the serving window hardly concealed him. But then, there was not much to conceal. He crept along the wall to its edge and spied around the corner until his eyes found a shortsword not far outside his reach.

  Patience was his closest friend, but speed was all. Prior experience put any notion that he could be caught out of mind once he dove back into the sweltering, shifting pool of the crowd. Trackless time passed until he became a motionless shadow, a fixture to those around him, until finally the moment came. One of the smelters coughed fire and soot as if choking on the ore shoveled into its mouth, and its scarfers stumbled back into the sellers at the stone counter. Silvershot was bumped from open hands, goods were knocked to the floor. A general confusion overtook the smiths and their workmen that only fanned the clamor of their patrons. Arnem reached around the corner for the shortsword, conscious of its presence even as he kept his eyes instead on every other moving thing around him. The tips of his fingers brushed the leather grip of its hilt—hoping to simply lift the blade free and be gone—when the wrist of his other hand was laid hold of with an iron grip.

  The voice of the Provost rolled out of the dun beside him in its most official capacity. "You'll not be needing any of that today, boy.”

  "Oren." Arnem tried to pull away, but to no avail. His grip did not budge the slightest. “What are you doing here?”

  “Searching out the likes of you, aren’t I? Thought that might be obvious. Now come with me.”

  “What for? I ain’t done. It’ll all be picked over soon, and I got more to get still.”

  “With whose silvershot, eh?” Oren asked, picking at the net and rope the boy had draped about himself, but let go of him all the same. “I’ve a surprise for you.” He turned and started off, stopped to see if the boy had followed. He had not. “Well come along.”

  The storm had come in full by the time Oren had pushed their way through the markets’ comers and goers and out into the fullness of day again. Arnem did not mind. He was greedy for the cooler air, untainted by so many other mouths, and the light spray of rain was both refreshing and comforting that the winds whipped into the Crucible’s threshold.

  “Now,” Oren said and knelt down to meet the boy in his world. “I know you can’t be kept out of The Lows, stubborn fool that you are, and I can’t be around every corner every time some cur lays hand on you. Not least one of your monsters.” He undid the ties of something that hung from his hip where the boy could not see. “But, if I can, I’ll see that you meet the least trouble performing your ‘duties’.”

  Oren untied a well-wrought truncheon from his belt, its wood black as shadows and banded with steel rings and studs so bright as to shine like silver even in the weak pale of the day. It was sized to deliver even stout blows swiftly, and a flanged bit of steel capped its head to make the most of them. A hound as like to the boy’s dog as Oren could explain to the smith was carved into it, one great claw slicing at some terrible thing out of view.

  Arnem could not find his words. The Provost held it out to him handle first, its lanyard awaiting a wrist. The boy reached for it slowly, as though the gift would disappear the moment he laid hands on it. His eyes and his smile were as big as Oren had ever seen them. Arnem wrapped his fingers around the leathern grip—one after the other, settling into the grooves—and the cudgel yet remained. It sat heavy in his hands, an unwieldy weight in just the one.

  “Now don’t say anything,” he said and reached inside his cloak. “As it’s not all I brought.”

  The Provost unfurled his fist before Arnem’s eyes to display a shining medallion, darkly bronze in the meager sun, engraved with the familiar sigil of a fist stra
ngling a serpent. It was no different than those worn by the watchmen of Sulidhe themselves, save its material. Oren pinned the badge where the threads of the boy’s rags were strongest, just above his heart.

  Oren held his hand up where he knelt as if taking an oath. “I dub ye Sulidhe’s own Slayer of Fearsome Beasts and Hunter Down of Monsterkind, wheresoever the evil may hide. Neither storm nor war nor brigandry shall stay ye from your new capacity. So sayeth Oren, Provost of the Fourth Ward of the Tradesmen’s Tier of Sulidhe—the City Intransigent.”

  Arnem finally found his tongue after more than a few moments of stunned silence. “Oren, I–”

  The Provost cut him off with a swift gesture.

  "I don’t want your gratitudes and thank-you’s yet, boy." He wrenched his face momentarily in disgust. "We’re not done here. And this’ll be less to your liking." Oren turned toward the folk who milled on the far side of the threshold, waiting to be admitted to the Crucible or waiting on others who had been, and shouted, "Meveled!"

  The watchman stood at ease in his lanky body amidst a gaggle of young Middener girls. Dirty hair and frayed dresses, only some years out of adolescence, their skin as grey and hair as dark as any in Sulidhe. Meveled revolved between them, speaking in soft tones as his long fingers touched a shoulder or cupped a chin before brushing the cheek. Some shied from his graces, the youngest and the oldest, those who knew too little or too much. Smiles and rashes of giggles were his rewards from the rest. They felt his body, brushed his smooth scalp.

  Something boiled over in Arnem’s gut as he looked on. Not jealousy or envy, as these were familiar to him. A solid rage brewed in his little body that these girls, not even women, should be so taken in and Meveled so ready to take advantage. The Tradesmen had already taken everything else from the Midden. Hope, trust, to live free of suggestion or coercion: These were the last and only things. A pauper is rich in them and nothing else. But masters demand everything from their servants. And Sulidhe was a city of masters, a city of Meveleds.