There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Arnem felt it before he saw it, like the breath of something antithetical to even the idea of him wafting out over the Midden. The Cistern’s massive archway lay open and housed a deep emptiness. Its immensity jutted out against the night like the gourd of a metal giant set into the Midden’s interior wall. The domelight brushed the shadows from its intricate network of pipes and filtration mechanisms. Their own glyphs glowered dimly, held in dormancy until a spellwright should activate them at the next water rationing.

  Meveled tripped and almost fell before he steadied himself on the boy’s shoulder, hidden in the dark. "What have you gone and stopped for?" he said, eyes all about them as if an enchantment had been thrown off and they were naked again before the visible world. "No place down here is a place for stopping."

  "There's supposed to be people here. Guards," Arnem said. "To run off any water thieves and keep the verge back. All day and night, there's men here."

  "What a piddling life to lead." The watchman nodded at the vacant blackness of the Cistern's entrance. "No bodies.”

  "Maybe they decided to go in to get out of the rains."

  Meveled held out a hand to the sky. “There isn’t any rain.”

  “We should look inside.”

  "Hold yourself," Meveled said and grabbed the boy's shoulder. "I took you to the Cistern, like you asked and the Provost ordered. We've got here and there's nothing. Now you want to check inside? Who knows what's shacked up in that place. And who knows where your little guards got off to. Nearest tavern, most like. I ain't going in there and I ain't getting wrung out by the Provost if something happens to you. So come on."

  "I've got a job to do," Arnem said and spun out of his grip. "You go on if you want, you coward; but I'm staying. Something's wrong and it'll only get worse if no one does anything."

  "Coward, eh." Meveled’s eyes grew blacker than the pit. "Call me coward? I'm going to enjoy watching you squirm and wail once I turn you loose into some boy-lover's den. Enough of them down here, I'd wager."

  A sound came between them then that was not unlike the night hacking up all the dead it had taken. Their disagreement, its nuances and mislaid promises, was forgotten. Meveled drew his sword, the boy his truncheon, and each scanned the endless crevices and couched shadows. Shuffling footsteps entered their landscape and a groan that at last turned their attentions to the Cistern. Someone retched inside, and the dank vaults took the heave and twisted it until they were certain a thing not remotely human stirred in its lair. A man stumbled out of it instead, garbed in the humble leathers of a watchman.

  “I fucking told you,” Meveled said and sheathed his sword. “Drunkards. Do we pay you to be drunk?”

  No answer came. The watchman clung desperately to the heavy doors of the Cistern, his head lolling down between his shoulders. Another retch worked through him. Meveled shook his head in disgust and started over to the man.

  Arnem grabbed his hand before he took more than two paces. "What are you doing? Don't go near it."

  “It, you fantastic waste of an evening?” He took the boy’s hand away slowly, making sure his grip was strong enough to make him wince. “It’s only a layabout sop. Got his jaw broken over a game of dice inside, most like.”

  Meveled got to the man in a few paces more and hauled him to his feet by his jerkin. Arnem tried to make himself follow, but the stone held his feet fast. He could only watch. The watchman wobbled as soon as Meveled’s hands left him, so he braced the man on his shoulder. Arnem tightened his grip on the truncheon and stepped forward. But it was only a step.

  "Here we go. That's it,” Meveled said, helping him across the courtyard to what was to be a makeshift bench of broken stone. “Bleeding drunk. We should have your head for leaving the Cistern open.” He looked up at the boy. “Well come and help. Little rat.”

  The watchman retched again, and his teeth cascaded from his mouth on a tide of tissue that craned around like a serpent to gnash at Meveled’s face. The teeth—the man’s teeth, Arnem understood, beyond just seeing—sank into the soft tissue of his cheek. Meveled's cries filled the night as he shoved the man-thing off. Half his face came away in its maw. The skin hung torn and bloody from the orifice, jaws gently masticating the shreds as if allowing the taste to settle over the tongue. Meveled retreated and drew his sword. The sinuous trunk swayed drunkenly, savoring as it fed. He bore down on it with a scream that twisted rage with terror and severed mouth from body with a sickening squish. As if the blade mashed, more than cut, the thing in two.

  The man-thing fell to the earth beside the severed mouth. The bulk of his head reclined against his neck like a cheap mask tilted back onto the scalp, but here to admit the stem of the thing that had burst from his throat. That had become of his throat. The trunk and the mouth wriggled independently of one another. Arnem felt his bowels churn and, when Meveled chanced to glance upon him, the little in his stomach came up in his throat. His knees shook. He never felt more a child than he did in that moment.

  “Run,” Meveled said, his shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths, and surging with enough adrenaline that he was somehow oblivious to his own pain. “Oren needs to kn–”

  A tendril pulled him off his feet as quickly as another had enfolded his neck. Fluid wept from its many open sores and flew free at the force of the movement. The droplets ate voraciously into the surfaces of whatever they landed upon; stone, root, skin, leather: It did not matter. The burns hissed with vapor that stank of a rotting body lanced open, its putrefied organs spilling out in a slurry of viscera.

  Arnem had less time to cry out than he did to grab hold of Meveled’s foot before the watchman was dragged strangling into the dark between the doors of the Cistern. At his feet, the corpse began to move. Its cast-off head and body hung limp upon limbs that had grown too long in the time they were not watched. He stood in dumb horrified shock as it contorted itself—bones arguing but ignored—onto its hands and feet like a beast. Then he remembered the truncheon in his hands, but did not know where to strike. The throat lolled dead from the man-thing’s neck, the severed portion squirmed its last between them. When its abdomen split open–ribs rising as strangely limber stalks, limpid eyes at their ends studying him curiously–Arnem lunged forward screaming.

  There was a satisfying crack as the truncheon connected with the left of its two forelegs, the joint bending awkwardly, and the creature toppled forward. The stark white bone protruding from its flesh scratched against the stone of the courtyard as it scrambled to regain its footing. Arnem looked between it and Meveled’s sword, dropped at his feet when the watchman was pulled into the silent dark. He stashed the spellblade and the truncheon in the rope of his belt and snatched up the blade just as the creature’s protruding bone came down on where it had lain. The broken limb was gone, he saw, the flesh sloughed off from the chitin now beneath. It sliced out at Arnem like a talon.

  The boy dodged backward and retreated. It advanced clumsily, awkward on its lopsided limbs. Meveled’s sword hung heavy and useless in his hands. The night pressed in on him at his back, impenetrable with shadows cast by the domelight. His mind searched frantically and of its own accord for all the places he could go, which were the nearest and which were the quickest and which drew the least attention. A sudden disjointed charge, the flash of bone scything across the space just before his eyes, made the choice for him.

  Arnem turned and ran and the night took him as if in want of him and any who would enter its depths willfully. His legs whisked through the tall grass, the rags on his feet soon tore and his hands were scraped bloody on the rough edges of broken walls. The awkward scraping and thumping gait followed him all the time, stopping only for as long as it took to sniff him out again. There was no other sound as it pursued him through the lonely paths of the Midden.

  His mad flight at last spilled him out into the open and the nighttime majesty of the Tree of Sul. It glistened prismatically with the light of the dome, reflected in the rain that had lately fallen
across its boughs, so that the giant did not appear wholly real. Rather that the Tree visited from some other empyreal world, a beacon to light the hearts of this one. Its radiance drew out all but the farthest reaches of Marskol Square as if it were a fourth moon bound to the earth. And, in its beauty, he found himself alone. Only the candlelight that flickered out from the cracks of barred doors and windows gave any indication that the Midden was not a truly barren and sorrowful ruin.

  “Help,” Arnem shouted up at the painfully warm and inviting glows. “Anyone! Please!”

  He knew what he did was useless. No doors would open to him. No shutters would draw open to at least view his plight. He hoped at least that a spellwright had heard and cursed himself for it, for wanting anything of them. The rod in his belt would give them reason enough to erase him, anyway, after they had dealt with the creature on his trail.

  The futile plea took all of a single moment, and he had been standing still only a little longer. Already the thing had found him. It crested the rise by which he and Dob had entered the Square in what seemed a bygone age, to go and find the corpse Meveled and Kodes spoke of. Now he was sure to be a corpse himself. The knowledge of it, the fear of its certainty, reduced him to only his most animal parts: He turned and ran toward the Tree of Sul and started to climb.

  His hands knew the way if his panicked mind did not. He scrambled up the trunk of the Tree as if he was the spider and not the thing that pursued him. Moss came away in his fingers, and the bark felt soft and alive with a damp that was not of the rain. When he crossed into the lowest of the Tree’s boughs, he saw that they were replete with buds. The life of the Midden and the Witherwood depleted and flourished with the seasons, but he had never seen the Tree of Sul grow. It had grown, and it had died. He wanted to reach out and touch one of the buds, to touch its reality, so badly that he forgot the creature that lurked below. His throat closed and his heart stilled.

  But it was gone when he looked.

  ◆◆◆

  "This boy is becoming troublesome," Zos'rel said and folded his arms into the sleeves of his robes. He ignored the pain in his head as the flesh bubbled across its distended surface. Another spawning burgeoned on the cusp.

  "Exceedingly," said Valharc, his Catalyst, and struggled with the man held in its tendrils. "He knows more than he ought.”

  "You saw him leading the watchman?"

  "As I tracked them from the rooftops."

  "Only a boy, with one Provost's blessing or another. And a wastrel, not a wealthy craftsman’s son or an Auxiliary’s catamite." He waved a dismissive hand. "No setback is without its small victories; we have learned as much tonight. Our friends in the Circumspex have found a way to mimic my secrets—and for some time, if the boy had a name. Gol’yems, he called them?"

  "Not so great as your creations. Not so perfect."

  "Sohrabaia." Zos'rel spat the name as if it were a foulness on his tongue. A wind seemed to pass that only he could feel, and he shivered all over. “Why has He granted her such favor? His whispers bind me to her will. I am her tool, yet she has failed to restrain even the Adjutants' most basic machinery."

  Valharc stiffened. "We are all His tools.”

  “I am the Change! I have seen His mind. His touch is upon me. A Matron is an acolyte at my feet, not my minder. Her failure has led to mine, but I will be the one punished.”

  "The boy cannot escape the Midden, alone and at night. Not with the fledgling hounding him."

  "The change is too slow in the vital, the body too useless before transcendence. No, the fledgling will not catch him,” Zos'rel said and stepped out from the darkness of the Cistern, into the moon and domelight.

  “Send me. I will find him.” Valharc skulked out after him, dragging the man it held behind like an inanimate burden. “I will author his changing.”

  "He has escaped already, be assured, and enough times before to warrant a deep knowledge of this cesspool."

  "His word alone will not bring him far."

  "He has earned the trust of a Provost and such that a watchman had been supplied for his expeditions, frequent as they are," Zos'rel said. "Whether his word or a lover's bond has done this means nothing. I expect we will have new watchmen here before long."

  "Where is there more fertile ground than this?" Valharc asked. “We cannot abandon it.”

  Zos'rel turned suddenly to face his Catalyst. "Indeed not."

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Far Gone Sorrows

  Rain lashed the city in the night. In a season of storms it was perhaps the worst. Floodwaters pooled around the roots of the Tree of Sul. Arnem found little protection in the high roosts of its boughs. It would not be long before swimming out of the Square was more likely than walking. The creature had fled not long after he had begun the climb, and he had seen nothing of it since. He tried to find where it might be lurking in the honeycomb of ruins that girdled the Square, but gave up. There was little time left for fear. Another hour bare to the storm, he knew, and the slow blade of sickness would start to cut through him before sword or talon ever could. Lightning flickered and danced a scintillating path across the wards of the dome overhead. The new light bore nothing from the dark. Arnem began the climb down.

  Dark water sloshed as high as his ankles, his feet sinking into the mud beneath. The land was highest in the surrounds of Marskol Square and already was beginning to flood. He needed to find higher ground quickly and could think of none higher than the Strait. It seemed months ago that his cousin led him across the fallen spire, longer still that the Witherwood separated Kurr and Burr forever.

  Arnem padded his way circuitously through the inner Midden until he could see the weird light of the Vertabrae glimmering above the lofty roofs and towers. It became the fulcrum of his compass, the star to guide him. He oriented himself by its massive arch and set off at speed. Ponds had formed in the places where the city-beneath-the-city rose and fell. Rivers took the place of streets and fed them until they burgeoned on lakes. His route evolved around them as he jumped onto plasm walkways and climbed through the higher ruins. Each time the Vertebrae would set him right again.

  By turns the light of the spine delivered Arnem to the foot of the massive edifice which upheld the higher end of the Strait. He knew it at once for the temple that, by reports, few came within spitting distance of and that no one went inside. Its spires stood tall enough that their minarets brushed against the dome. Obscure shapes stood out in relief across its walls, vast descriptions of a time when humankind still worshipped the gods of old, now as weather-beaten and timeworn as their likenesses graven on the stone.

  Arnem started to walk the temple’s circumference, searching for the best handholds, when five shadows separated from their nests in its curtilage. He marked their relaxed gait, their human shapes, the daggers and bludgeons that dangled deceptively limp from their hands. The boy wanted to convince himself that this was only a mortal peril, but had learned this night not to trust that everything familiar came in familiar shapes. He retreated to the base of the temple’s arcaded stair.

  "Out after nightfall?" a voice called from among them that chilled the boy. "Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. How the youth have gone."

  Arnem took the first step blind as backed away and brought Meveled’s sword to bear, trying desperately to keep its weight from shaking in his hands.

  "Leave me alone, Segved.”

  "Nonsense," the captain of the Crowbills said. The glass eyes of their masks shined back at him with reflected domelight and the ethereal shimmer of the Vertebrae. "I've brought a friend anxious to see you again."

  Another of the shapes parted from the rest and took off its mask of feathers and bone. A face that was paler than pale and pocked with sores parted in a brown grin. His perfect silence, as if he had never spoken even as a child, sent a tremor through Arnem.

  "Qurzin," he said under his breath, held the sword out straighter before him. "Keep away from me.” He was less sure of the Crowbill’s humanity than he was o
f the creature that stumbled out of the Cistern. “Keep that, that thing away from me."

  "Come now," Segved said and laughed in the dark, drawing the cruel definitions of a dagger from his belt. "What do you mean to do with that? You can scarce hold it up."

  "It's alright," Qurzin said and settled a heavy foot on the first of the steps. A cold sweat came over the boy. “We won’t have words on it.”

  Arnem started as he collided with the sturdy temple doors at his back, madly wishing that he could meld with the wood and disappear. Madly wishing such wishes were possible.

  "What've you got to do this for, Segved?" he asked and hated the tremble in his voice that he could not keep out. "Why? I’m not a Stormcrow. I’m no one."

  "If you cannot cut off the head," the Crowbill said, paring the dirt from his fingernails with the point of a knife, and shrugged,"stab at the heart."

  "And this'll stab at your cousin's very deep," Qurzin said. "That toy of his made me not work right. I don’t sleep and my food comes up. My hands don’t do what I tell them either, but with you I’ll take all the time they need. I’ll give your cousin such a scar that he’ll not think of anything else. Nothing but a bleeding, mangled strumpet."

  It was difficult to see in the night, and perhaps the boy's mind supplied what his eyes could not, but he knew Qurzin's rotted grin to be spread upon his face. Segved's henchmen had made a cordon of knives at the foot of the stair and about its flanks. Their captain leaned against the arcade's lone standing pillar, looking on with mild interest. Arnem thought of jumping from the staircase's tall balustrade then, intent on sailing over the Crowbills’ heads and into the night's safety. But he was weak. Too tired, too hungry. Their hands would reach his feet long before they ever met the ground. A brief fantasy, as a dying man has of life.

  "Best we handle this part quick," Qurzin said and was near enough now for his stench to invade the boy's nostrils, for the smacking of lips to come into earshot. "It'll make the rest of our time just the same. Promise. That's a good lad."