He rocked forward as the horse and wain struggled to a halt, holding the litter in place as best he could to keep the old man steady and undisturbed. Looking at the pallid, wheezing visage, he faintly understood the ridiculousness of the attempt.
The younger man undid the latch of the door and leapt from the wain. He rushed to the hovel, little more than a mound of carefully stacked stones daubed and wattled, as soon as he divulged it from the surrounding haze of the withered heath. His knuckles stung from how hard they smarted against the simple door. He did not notice.
Dirty ragged fingers, thin as sticks, opened the door enough to admit the blowing rain and daylight onto a woman’s haggard face. Whiskers started from her jowls, her eyes like black marbles flicked in her skull between the man at her door and the wain behind him. Rogue tufts of hair stuck out from her headwrap, and she pulled at them with the hand that did not hold the edge of the door.
“Are you her?” the younger man asked. “Are you the wytch? He’s sick.” He gestured blindly at the wain, kept his gaze madly fixed on hers. “Very sick.”
“Who told you about me? Them fools in town again.” She shook her head, a rictus maneuver atop a stiff neck and stiffer shoulders. “So what if I am? A wytch. Does that mean I have a remedy for every problem? No, no, no. I don’t have the time and like as not I don’t have the reagents. Sorry.”
She started to shut him out, but the man interposed his hand between the jamb and the door. “I’ve seen this old woman show enough times to see through it. Turn me away, but don’t try to fool me.”
“I can see you’re not a man to shoo off,” the wytch said and heaved a sigh before opening the door entirely. Her spine was straight, her shoulders thrown back and wrapped in a shawl against the cold. There was nothing left of the twisted old crone that had first greeted him. “What have you got to give me? Wytch I might be, but a woman’s got to eat in this world of walls and roads and farms.”
“I have nothing. Just these hands.” He held them out to her, and they shook in their heavy leather gloves. “I can promise they’ll be of no use to you here. The work they do is all but gone in these times.”
“No money, no work, nothing to trade even? Are you mad? I’ll trust you’ve seen enough of my ilk to know I have other ways of beating unwanted men from my door.”
“Please,” the younger man said and slapped the frame of the door. Idle or no, his hands were strong. There were tears in the rain that rolled down his face, a face that had seen something like the end of the world, or at least his part of it. “Do you have anything? Anything that you can spare. Please.”
There was death in his eyes, but not to be leveraged on her. Not on anyone. It was the death roosting above the wain, waiting on the old man inside. It was the death he was prepared to face, at anyone’s hand, so long as it meant driving off that which haunted his companion. She was only half present in his world, as he was himself. His was a madness she only knew by one name: love.
“Bring him inside,” she said and vacated the doorway while he went at once to retrieve the old man from the wain.
The younger man laid the older onto the table that the wytch had cleared for the purpose and as sure as if he was glass. His bones were so light under his husk of skin, nothing like the leaden man he knew. Sweat beaded up and rolled down his brow that was cold to the touch. The younger man’s hand shook when he brushed it away with the hem of his sleeve.
“What’s wrong with him?” the wytch said from over his shoulder.
“He’s–” The younger man trailed off, shaking a hand aimlessly at his companion. “He’s going away.” He sat down on the roughly fashioned stool beside the table and the fire. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. He’s going away.”
She looked at him long and hard, though he looked nowhere but at the old man. She read the creases in his face, as sure as if they were carved out of stone to depict something other than human frailty. Her hands fell on his shoulders like feathers.
“I think I understand,” she said and went away to search among her stores of chymicals and solutions, powders and dusts. “Wizard?” she asked, turning to put the question to him.
“Of a sort,” he said. “We use magick. He does, I should say. Sometimes just enough to get the stiffness out of his limbs. Other times, enough to close a wound as soon as it’s made.”
“That is his sickness, then,” she said. “But you knew that, didn’t you? There’s no cure for what sorcery does to our bodies.” The wytch pulled a phial of something from her endless racks of them and held it up against the light from the hearth, inspecting its contents. “Save perhaps more sorcery; but a look out the door and we can see what that’s done to the world. I have a little something here, at least, to help with the fluid and to break the fever.”
She came around to the old man’s side and bent down to him, tilting his head back and unstopping the phial. The thick, crimson liquid poured perfectly into the pit of his throat. He gagged and then coughed, but soon settled back into his unconsciousness. When she withdrew her hands, the younger man grabbed them. She felt such a grip only once before, pulling a man from the rush of a river.
“Thank you,” he said and let go.
“How old is he?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows. Younger than he looks. Much younger.”
“Is he your father?” Again the feathery fingers fell on his shoulder, so delicate against the rigidity of night after night of worry.
The younger man looked on the old one for a long time. “Yes.”
“Death is hard, I know.” The wytch stepped away to add another log to the fire. A bit of dust from a pouch at her waist set it alight immediately. “I’ve lost. Death has kept me alone in this hut. But he’s better to know as a friend than someone who stalks our steps.”
“Is there nothing else?”
“To be done for him?” she asked, but knew he wasn’t listening any longer.
“I’ve known death too long. He,” the younger man said and pointed to his ward, “showed me a way to get away from it. But the shadow’s still there. It’s waiting for me. It’s always been waiting for me.” His face fell into his hands as if he were at prayer. “I don’t know what to do. I won’t know what to do.” A huge breath went in and out of him. “When he’s gone.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The Corpses of Gods
"Fool of a Provost," Meveled said. "Sending me down here in the night with just my wits. With just a boy, what’s more. Fool of a fucking Provost!"
"Quiet," Arnem whispered.
He peeked out from behind the crumbling corner of a hodgepodge of stone, fallen timbers and overgrowth. Oren had told him once that every dilapidation around the Cistern had either been the dormitory, court, or offices of the primitive ancestors of those that now inhabited the Hall of Adjutants. The Circumspex had not yet been built by the magicks of the ancient Magi, and Sul was only a suzerainty of theirs. Then came the Last Siege. Sulidhe was born and the city-beneath-the city with it. The halls of the old Sul were now filled only with the dead; on their graves, vines and plasms grew.
"Quiet, he says. Don't you know what lurks down here under the moons and stars?” Meveled said. “We'll be captured, most like. Done up for some Druid's ritual."
"Keep your voice down,” Arnem said again, withdrawing from his lookout to look the watchman in the eye. "Or it'll bring what you're jabbering about."
"Sod it, you whelp. What's down here for you at night that can't be down here during the day?"
"There ain't no other way to find more than leavings."
“Leavings of godsdamned what?”
A noise drew the boy back to the edge of his cover, the shuffling of some great mass. The many-mouthed braying call of a gol’yem followed not long after. Arnem felt his bowels shift. Silence stole across urchin and watchman both. The heavy, lumbering steps drew nearer until they could hear the clink of the dozen chains that yoked the construct to Su
lidhe’s will. Arnem dared a glance around the corner at the hulk of gnarled flesh and its minders.
The lanterns of a night patrol were cutting through the dark of the boulevard that lay beyond the wall. A pale-haired woman followed at the rear that Arnem knew at once for a spellwright by the violet mantle thrown over her simple coat of plates. She held the gol’yem in thrall with the magick of a gemstone embedded in the hollow of her left eye, surrounded by a maze of glyphs carved into the skin. Its twin was driven into the nearest approximation of a spine that the gol’yem could be said to have, and flared with a rosen light in response to that of the spellwright. Zephyrs of the same hung on the air, briefly connecting them as she communicated her will to the creature.
Two men flanked the spellwright with shields almost as large as they. The others were members of the Circumspex’s own guard, as most night patrols were, looking for Druids and anything that looked like a Druid. Meveled envied them their lamellar plates and mail hauberks, feeling small in his worn leathers and rusting chainmail.
“You think that thing needs your help?” Meveled whispered to him. “Whatever’s down here, the spellwrights have got it in hand. Come on, boy. Let’s get us to a teahouse and have done.”
“Oren asked you down here,” Arnem snapped back over his shoulder. “Ask me, I don’t care where you end up. The spellwrights are here for cultists and nothing else. I’m doing what I came to do.”
The gol’yem stopped, and the boy’s breath caught. Its vestigial limbs shuddered as if they shook out an urge. Nostrils snorted and sniffed. The eyes that were scattered at random across its misshapen body flitted about at the shadows. Its mouths lowed guardedly.
A whistle cut through the night and one of the shieldsmen dropped his shield with a heavy clang, gurgling and coughing as he clutched his throat. Blood spilled out around the shaft of the arrow. He was dead before he fell to his knees. Confusion reigned for a perilous moment, and the spellwright ducked under the legs of her remaining bodyguard just as he pulled his shield to bear against a volley of arrows.
“Formation,” she shouted, so loud that Arnem covered his ears.
Wild, animal shrieks answered from the deep of the dome-lit night and the shadows that roosted everywhere. The patrolmen each drew from their waist a long silver rod, the length black with the geometries of innumerable glyphs, and stood with them held out as if they meant to duel against the dark. Their other hands fumbled with the pouches at their belts and withdrew a single pink gemstone not unlike that which filled the eyesocket of their mistress.
“Spellblades,” Meveled whispered behind him, as much the boy as Arnem.
The spellblades knocked the crystals against the hafts of their rods, broke them as easily as an egg into clouds of brilliant dust. The glyphs along their lengths sucked in the motes and came alive with their light. Another volley issued from the impenetrable gloom. The thunder of a charge chased the quiet twang of bowstrings. Arnem held his breath in anticipation, waiting for bodies to collapse riddled with arrows. Their iron tips glinted as they crossed into the light of the lanterns.
The rods of the spellblades bent and twisted and flowed outward like water until solidifying into tiny bucklers for every arrow loosed and turned each harmlessly away. A berserker that was adorned only sparsely with wooden armor, a dull and nicked felling ax held high above his head, emerged wailing from the outer dark and threw himself against their line. The fabrications of the foremost spellblade withdrew again into a singular length and then pressed forward violently as a spear. The point, so fine that no human process could ever achieve the like, punched easily through wood and flesh and bone and then again through the other side of the man’s body. Momentum carried his corpse forward until the spellblade dismissed the spear and held only the rod again. The cultist fell limp at his feet. Arnem wondered in that moment how there could still be cults to flock to in the Midden.
“This isn’t even going to be a fight,” Arnem said. “How didn’t they burn out the druids ages ago?”
“These aren’t druids, you miserable pile of lice and rags,” Meveled told him. “These are just cultists, sorry sacks of self-loathing that they are. We’d be dead already if there was a druid here.”
Darkened shapes poured forth from all the nooks and alleyways and broken walls that led deeper into the vast desolations around them. Drums beat loud from secret places, soon accompanied by keening howls as the cultists charged. Their bludgeons and spears and stolen blades of every kind tested the terrible power of the spellblades’ defenses. The metal of their rods leapt about in silver fountains, blocking the fell blow of a mace or turning aside the thrust of a spear. When it was the turn of the spellblades to make their assault, the metal of their rods slithered around weapon and shield alike or shifted form entirely to deliver the blow of a flail at the end of a sword cut. Arnem was held in awe and forgot his reasons for braving the night entirely. And lurking behind his amazement was the knowledge that this was a mere cantrip of the powers of the old Magi, the true spellwrights. The rods were trinkets in their time, perhaps doled out to even the basest of slaves.
Even so, for all the prowess of the spellblades and the power of their tools, a dozen cultists filled the gap left by every one of their dead. The fresh combatants came on just as frenzied, as if some demonic animus possessed them, screaming and throwing spittle. It was not long before one of the patrolmen was overwhelmed on her flank. She was first brought to her knees by the slice of a spear through her thigh and then brought to the earth by a cudgel against the ear. The spellwright cowered behind her lone shieldsman and, seeing the first of their casualties, unleashed the gol’yem.
The greater of its mouths brayed a gibbering roar that drowned out the mournful cries issuing from the rest. It swatted aside one of the spellblades and then charged headlong into the shadowy mass of cultists at the edge of the lanterns’ light. Arnem felt the impact as the patrolman collided with the same wall he and Meveled crouched behind. A clinking behind them told the boy that his rod fell to the earth there, and already he was upon it. Briefly Meveled wrestled with him for it; but, seeing he would not get it from Arnem without a fight, let him have it rather than alert any of the many killers to their presence. The glyphs’ light along its haft died in the boy’s hands.
“I think we can get on now,” he said.
Meveled nodded his bald head with enough enthusiasm that the beads of sweat tumbled off. “I think you’ve got the right of it.”
Arnem edged closer to the broken end of the wall, collected all his energy into the springs of his legs, and then fell flat on his back as a shape more massive than the gol’yem surged over him. Its passage was as quiet as fallen leaves on a still day, but the cry that rose from the creature as it joined the battle filled the darkest nightmares of many a Middener. The skins of men that draped its bramble skeleton squealed and moaned their death-sounds, somehow carrying within their voices the rattle of the bone-chimes that lined the edges of the Witherwood. And bones there were, inveigled with the blood-soaked briar to give shape and structure to the horror.
“Bloodbriars,” Meveled nearly wept and grabbed at Arnem. “You little fucking cunt. I’ll be a skin to add by the end of tonight. And if you’re stretched onto the same thorns as me? Oh I don’t want to look at you for eternity.”
“Shut up,” Arnem said and threw him off. “And find your spine. Or your balls. Whatever’s missing. They’re not here for us. Now follow me.”
The boy disappeared into the rubble and undergrowth that rimmed the impromptu battlefield, the tumult of the dying and fighting smothering whatever noise he made.
“Me following a boy,” the watchman said and crawled after him. “Where are we headed?”
"I want to check the Cistern," Arnem said. "If there's been bodies at all the canals, then something’s got to be at the Cistern.”
Meveled stopped with his hands and knees sinking in the mud. "We might as well just go into the forests! What with all the gol’yems st
anding sentry in there.” But the boy said nothing and the distance grew between them. “Get your head back about ye, Mevel. Campfire tales, that's all this Middener talk is. Will the wind keep you from sleeping now?"
The fear, if not mortal terror, in his voice was plain to Arnem. Its sibilations were as familiar to the Middener as the crash of waves to a fisherman, an element of their being. For all the cold and the wet of the night, it brought a lightness to the boy. He was not alone in his desire to be someplace else entirely. Beside a fire perhaps, tucked safely away in his bed at Oren’s redoubt in the Tradesmen’s Tier. A part of him wished that some nightmare come out of the night ahead would transform that desire into necessity, and he could flee and not blame himself for fleeing. It grasped for any reason to go back and even to return to the Tier for good, accept that it was time to choose and only one right choice laid before him.
Their skulking path took them through the cages of thick roots, the rubble and statuary that provided their soil, ditches carved into the soft bed of the Midden by year after year of receding floodwaters. The canopy overhead fought with the remains of domes and clerestory roofs, tower walls and terraces. The trees grew straight into the masonry and leaned as often from parapets as from the earth. Beside them and amid them: the hasty patchwork of plasms lashed to moldering heaps of ruin, built on stilts and walkways. Patient flies buzzing about the corpses of gods, laying their eggs without discernment. Eyes as sharp as they were inquisitive marked the passage of boy and watchman.
There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well Page 19