There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  "Meveled!" Oren cried again and this time the watchman turned. "Pry your preening face away and come when you’re called. Those girls want nothing to do with your like."

  "Their rosy cheeks beg to differ, sir," Meveled said as he drew up to the two of them. "But aye, my preening face is here. What do you want with it?"

  "I need nothing with it. The less I see of it, the better," the Provost said. "The young master here, of course, is another matter."

  "What am I to do with this creature, eh?" Meveled started and shot the boy a dagger-filled glare. "Throw him back into The Lows at last?"

  "After a fashion," Oren said and nodded, grim satisfaction on his lips. "So long as you make sure to throw yourself in with him and drag the both of you back out again."

  "What's this?" the watchman balked. "I can't drive off the bugger's little nightly excursions—on account of your directive, I might add—so you send me in with him? Is this serious or are you having a laugh?"

  "The news couldn't be grimmer," Oren said.

  "Looks like you're stuck with me," Arnem said and shrugged. He was only half as pleased as Oren: He wanted no more to do with Meveled than the watchman with him, but could scarce hide his delight that he was party to ruining the night of his nemesis among Oren’s watchmen. “You’ll be alright. I’ll get you back in one piece, don’t you worry.”

  "You scrawny imp," Meveled said and made for the boy.

  Oren swiftly interposed. "Easy, lad. I'll hedge you double your wages the days you take him down and bring him back up—unspoiled. But if word reaches my ear, as it does, that you've had fun with him and in any way: We'll tumble one, you and me. Have we got a deal?"

  "We've a deal," Meveled said and straightened his surcoat, smoothed the chainmail beneath. "But he'd better not get out of hand. Or ask after the forests, cause I ain't going in there. Or even near there!"

  "Oh stow it, Meveled." Oren made a flippant gesture before turning back to the boy. "Now: Does this all fit to your liking?"

  "Fit to his liking," Meveled mocked quietly.

  "It's fine. More than fine," Arn said. "My cousin can't be around all the time, waiting on me."

  "That he can't," Oren said, clucking his tongue and looking off at something only he could see and Arnem did not know to ask after.

  "Thank you. Again," the boy said and offered his hand in official fashion. "I won't let you down. Sir."

  "Now leave off of that nonsense," Oren said, but took his little monster hunter's hand anyway. "You've a long way to go yet before calling anyone 'sir'. Remember that, if nothing else."

  "Might I go, sir," Meveled said, twisting the last word. "I'll want triple soon enough. If I'm to be witness to your heartwarming moments."

  "Scuttle off into whatever hole you crawl out of at dawn. And don't come back out again til nightfall comes," Oren called after his watchman, already departing. "But meet the boy at the lift once it does!"

  “I can take care of myself, you know,” Arnem told him. “I mean, I’m grateful. But he’ll only get in the way.”

  “In the way of your usual mishaps, yes. But listen close. I know more than anyone how well you handle yourself. And I also know that you don’t listen. That’s why Meveled is going down with you. Something bad is coming, Arnem. His sword is the surest we have.”

  “I know,” the boy said and started to dig into the sack he’d brought along that nothing had yet gone into. “I know. That’s why I came up. Aside from getting the things I need for my mission.”

  “Mission,” Oren scoffed. “Sometimes I understand their jests. Have you listened to a word I’ve said?”

  “Look.” Arnem pulled something out of the darkness of the bag that announced itself with such a stink that Oren almost retched. “I found this. In the canal. I told you something’s wrong down there in the Midden. Real wrong, Oren. Those bodies are just being made to look like someone killed them. I don’t know how,” he said and held out the sack for him to take, the creature within so decayed that the Provost could not begin to guess at what it was, “but this thing’s got something to do with it.”

  The translucent skin had given way to necrotic sores along its length. The tattered shambles of tendrils hung limp at its sides, a mouth lined with dozens of needle-sharp teeth hung limp and bloodless. Gills sagged open and leaked a yellowish fluid that had a stench all its own, overpowering even the rot.

  “What is this thing?” he said, smothered his nose with the collar of his mantle. “Arnem, the fucking stink of it. Some kind of fish?”

  “I don’t know.” The boy looked over its length like a physik over a newmade corpse. “I found it near one of the plasms that got abandoned all the sudden. Clinging to the wall in the canal.”

  “No fish has ever come out of those rivers of shit as long as I’ve been Provost. A grown man could fall in and die of plague inside a moment.”

  “People drink it. They boil it. But this thing does something to the water. Changes you. There was a man named Khalkhan in the plasm. He–”

  Oren took the boy by his shoulders. “Arnem I don’t have time for this. There’s work needs doing. To get ready for actual problems like to turn into actual nightmares. With how much time you spend down there in that shitheap, I’d think you’d have learned by now that the world is a scary enough place without this foolery about monsters. You’re almost a man now. Soon enough you’ll have real things stalking your shadow.”

  “Go and look for yourself,” Arnem said and shook so violently to get out of the Provost’s grip that the weight of his supplies almost bore him down. “Go ask Khalkhan like I did. Look what happened to his girl. She wasn’t much younger than me. See if you want to call it foolery then.”

  Oren grabbed him tightly by the arm when he made to leave. “Don’t turn away from me, boy. Have you eaten since I last saw you? Have you slept?”

  Arnem threw off his hand for the second time. He found it easier than he ever had before. Something was softening in the Provost, and it wasn’t his age. “You’ll say it was the Druids if you go down there to see, but I’d know you’d be wrong.”

  “Stay until you’ve had some food in you—that long, at least. We’ll go and see about this Khalkhan and his plasm once you rest a while.”

  "I'm going to go and find my cousin, Oren. It can’t be put off anymore. I have to warn him. If I stay too long, there won’t be none of him left to warn. I’ve seen it; the change happens too fast."

  "What change, lad? You're not talking sense." The Provost started after him, but not far. A display, nothing more. "Have you come down with something? What with the rains?"

  Arnem shook his head, passing to Oren a long look that the two could not come back from: the final culmination of the separation he had sensed growing just as Arnem did. It seemed as if Verem’s shadow drew out between them until the world Oren occupied was displaced to the edges of the boy’s life. Until the ghosts of the walls of Sulidhe sprouted between them. Arnem went further out into the drizzle and the unseasonable cold of the winds, laying as he did the mortar and impassable glyphs onto the phantasmal stone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Reaching In Silence and Across Distances

  The doorway felt like the boundaries of an unwelcome universe. His shoulders almost brushed the worn wood, splintered from age and too many passings of the palanquin that the woman inside then writhed upon. A terribly frail lance of sunlight fell over her grey flesh. The pallor and sheen of sweat were almost too loathsome to look upon. Oren wished she would die and be done with dying. The waiting, the transition between states of being, was the truly painful thing.

  She made little sound, the fluid in her lungs too much to voice more than strangled pain, but the others that crowded around filled her silence with the onset of their grief. Stuck in amongst them was Helyett, the only figure other than him who wore the colors of absolute authority. She wept the loudest, and she wept for her sister. But Oren was a Provost. He was silent. Later, in the lonely evening, wou
ld be the time for feeling.

  A babble of emotions showered the poor woman. Her limbs coiled beneath sheets so damp with excretions as to be translucent. Her eyes rolled, her breathing hitched. It was perhaps the worst thing to hear the motley of agony, expressed through a series of insensate grunts and moans, as it became smothered by the slow failure of one’s own body. And even so, Oren knew the scene he viewed was only a prelude. It was not the worst. The worst would be when she stopped moving at all—which, a moment later, she did.

  “Orsolya,” Helyett whispered, questioningly. “Orsolya? Orsolya.” Her voice rose. One hand lightly slapped her sister’s cheek, the other lightly shook her by the shoulder. “Orsolya!”

  Oren wanted to grab her and haul her away. Nothing hit or shook or bit or squeezed harder than death. He did not find these gestures useless. They would be his also. Rather that it was, again, a prelude. None of the others realized it yet. Their grief was too much. They sobbed it out into rags, the hems of dresses, into their open palms and nakedly. Helyett wept into the crook of her sister’s neck. Perhaps she knew, and would try to hold down the immaterial.

  Then it came. Each in their own time, Orsolya’s gathered loved ones and more spurious connections heard the same high-pitched whine that Oren did and expected so often that he could only forget the noise when sequestered in absolute silence. Threads of light corporeated from a nowhere point of unseen entry, hovering amid the only window and probing the air like aggressively curious worms. Their arrival was enough to keep Oren in the doorway to the room and no farther. Many of Helyett’s family and friends scattered before them, but she remained by her sister’s side and stood to swat at them. Her hands passed through their ethereal presence, trailing vapors of viciously luminescent smoke. She cursed them and next cursed their makers. For the first, Oren felt his blood rise. Helyett went about her protest until the threads reached down and descended into the body of her sister. Then she fought, as they all did, to hold her down.

  The tendrils did not penetrate her mortal shell, did not bite and worm their way into her flesh; but the corpse was wracked with spasms all the same, as if great tugging upheavals within sought to pull out her bones. There were no bones that came. Just light, composed into the broken form of a woman stripped bare of all that was endemic to her. Oren, if asked, could not have produced an answer as to how the passing of Orsolya numbered among the times he witnessed the theft of a soultrap. His status as Provost ensured his presence at such occurrences often. He could, however, hold forth with some certainty that in his time he had not become accustomed to witnessing a theft. That of a friend, he never would.

  Helyett struggled in vain and through her tears to keep her sister’s body from moving at all. She sounded like an animal, wounded and left to die. Oren wanted to tell her, to shout to her that the charade was as it appeared: a charade. The tendrils did not pull on her sister's dead flesh and dead flesh was all that she was anymore. But he kept silent, not wanting his rationality to be perceived by her people as coldness, and reserved his quiet rage at the whole thing for later.

  What truly remained of Orsolya sailed away into the void of the soultrap, and her body finally settled. Its shutting did not induce as much sorrow as its apparition. For her to stop moving, for the taking to be finished, was now all that her mourners truly wanted. Helyett did not watch the discorporeation. Few of the gathered did. Instead, they wept wherever the hollow and inert object of their weeping was not. Oren watched the tendrils disappear into the same infinitesimal point from which they sprang, taking with them Orsolya’s last living remembrance. He stepped into the room to fill the absence.

  “I’ll kill them,” Helyett said, tears and spittle intermingling on her chin. “I’ll fucking kill them.”

  “Helyett,” Oren said, not shouting, but loud with command. Command due him by his authority.

  Helyett rushed him without seeing him, wanting through the door and out into the daylight and whatever that meant for her, but Oren caught her and held her by her shoulders. The watchman crumbled at the Provost’s grip, sobbing into the air between them, Oren needing to hold her up.

  “I’ll break their fucking soulhouses,” Helyett said, but through her tears so Oren knew she was not breaking anything.

  “Shut up,” he whispered to her. “The only thing you’ll break is your neck when they throw you over the fucking wall.”

  At this, Helyett sobered. But only a little. “What do you mean? Tell me what you mean.”

  “I’ve got the reports. Don’t ask me what they say. Things we already knew and knew because this is our lot and we live it. They’re looking for anything, anything at all. And they hear everything. You’ve been with me long enough to know that I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  “Another Censorian Edict?” Helyett almost forgot about her sister. Almost. “Fucking hell, not another. If it’s anything like the last time, I’ll–”

  “This isn’t like last time.”

  A pale came over Helyett’s face. Oren pulled her aside, away from her family and out onto the shoddy walkway that, depending on how the wind turned, either upheld their hovel or was upheld by it. The rains blew in under the awning. The cracked eyes of a titanic but fallen statue leered down at them, the plasm having been lashed straight onto its cheek.

  “There’s no special dispensation,” Oren said. “It’s not just trumped up charges of smuggling or forged writs of sanction. The walls are listening, and you’d do well to pretend that they could speak back.”

  “A woman can speak in her own home,” Helyett said, but did not return Oren’s stare. She looked below, at the drowned street instead. “A woman can speak.”

  “She’d do better to fucking listen.”

  “The Adjutants need us, Oren. To keep order, stability. They can’t, you can’t just–” She worked her hands as though she could draw the words from the air.

  “There’s them that think they can do our job better or think it doesn’t need done at all. We’re to be lumped in with the rest.”

  “We can’t exile ourselves, each other!”

  “The Church-Oppugning would be too willing. They’re just shy of blows with the Judges as it is. Helyett, listen to me.”

  “You’re a Church man! How can you–”

  “Ease yourself, watchman.” The command rolled out of Oren from the official organ that laid deep within his voice. Helyett snapped to attention as surely as if she was clubbed. “I keep my religion in my own way, as any man has a right, but my work is another thing. And this stinks of something other than the teachings of the Sundered Faith.”

  The Provost looked about them then, suddenly aware of the airs that clothed his words, and lowered his voice. “I won’t say more, except that you should heed what I’ve said. Keep your fucking wits about you.” He produced a pouch from his belt, heavy with silvershot, and opened Helyett’s hand to receive it. “Attend to your sister.”

  She did not. She was not listening anymore. He did not try to catch her as she fell against the railing of the walkway, knowing she would want no business with being touched. The rain harassed her as she sobbed and clutched the pouch he had given her to her breast as if it contained all that remained of Orsolya.

  Oren felt the familiar metallic fire seeping out of his gut to suffuse every part of him. His mouth tasted of metal, and this metal wanted to go everywhere and nowhere at once. The days ahead were going to be hard and now harder for Helyett. But he did not begrudge her that, even if a frightfully substantial part of him hated her for it. For making a hard thing harder.

  She was not alone in that. There was the Circumspex as well, along with the pure indifference of a Mageblooded Caste he had never seen. And whatever new herald of plague that brought the Embers to the city’s unfortunates. If Arnem was to be believed—a concept that became more likely each day—there was that too. Then, after everything had passed, there would be what came after. The world was drawing in tight, and he could not breathe.


  “I’ll be at the teahouse,” he said to Helyett, “if you need me.”

  She did, but could not say it. He interpreted this, but could not bring himself to act on it.

  Oren wondered if this was how the boy felt with him. Both reaching in silence and across distances, brushing fingers in the darkness. The fear that this fleeting contact would end and give way to something else laid on him a brief torment. But the thought did not last, as it never did. Tea called him—and a moment’s quiet, away from the weights and deceits of the day.

  Chapter Twenty

  Love

  The mud slapped heavily against the side of the wain with every pace of the horse’s gallop. Rain drove hard against them. Enough thunder shook the skies to wake the Fathers of the Giants from their eternal slumber, but the old man slept on. Every breath was a rasping wheeze. Sweat stood out on every part of him left uncovered by the sweat-stained rags, as sure as if he were left exposed to the storm. His hands were brittler than dried bone, and the younger man was careful when he held them.

  “Just a little longer,” he whispered and leaned to open the shutters on the side of the wain just enough to see the world speeding past outside. “Them in town said the wytch wasn’t far and old Stahl will get us there. He knows the way. I told him.”

  They barreled down the muddy track of the road, heedless of the pits and slides, the horse and the wain unerring in their drive through the storm. There was enough magick left in them at least for which they did not have to pay and with more than they had to give. The old man could not afford a single spell more, and the younger man did not dare broach his master’s forbiddance or his own fear. That twisted at the core of him. The knowledge that their relative conditions were symbiotic, that each one’s pain relied on the other, was a thing he could not bear to bring to words or even to thoughts. But he did not need to give it voice. He read it often enough in the old man’s eyes.