There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Yrsted was not farther away than the reach of his arms and still they did not regard him. A man, only a man, struggled in the grip of something that was once like him. That thing had changed, just as Yrsted had changed. Bandages covered what its armor, weeping with rust and decay, did not. The wrappings themselves were yellowed, soaked almost through with ichorous pus. What little flesh showed beneath was mottled and riddled with open sores. The man in its grasp struggled, but his struggle was futile. He could not argue with the strength of the change. Broad hands held him still by the shoulders and the tendrils that stemmed from the same restrained the rest of his body.

  But this child of Utquod, though thoroughly changed, was not who he was sent to seek. The one to whom the signature belonged, that the tongues of his hand followed, lingered in the shadows. Yrsted could see little of him, only that he was half again as tall as his companion, and that the silhouette of his skull moved as if the flesh boiled.

  “How did you find us?” said the servant, its voice no more perturbed by the struggles of its captive than if it held some limp and dead thing.

  “He is Sohrabaia’s creature,” said the master. “I have no doubt.”

  “I am changed.” Yrsted presented his hand, hidden until then for fear of the Midden’s ever-present eyes. The tongues licked the air and mewed like cats in the back-alleys of forever. “I have supped at the zephyrs of your bedlam.”

  “I don’t share your madness. But if you would make yourself my worm, at least speak while you grovel.”

  “The Matron Sohrabaia only wishes to judge the progress of Sulidhe’s conversion, and consider whether its authors are in need of our assistance.” Yrsted diverted his attentions to the man still struggling in the servant’s grip. There was the glint of metal on his breast, a brief touch of the glyphs’ light amid his futile movements. Closer inspection revealed a hand with a serpent in its grasp. “This is a Provost’s man.”

  “Only a man,” the servant said.

  “Permit a little less derision, Valharc,” said the master. “Soon we will all have been men once.”

  “Is he to be a vessel?” Yrsted asked and crept closer to the one called Valharc. An acrid rankness immediately pervaded every part of him. The putridity wafting from the servant was enough to bleed the life out of anything, but for Yrsted it was as pure as freshly fallen rain. Valharc smelled of the shoals of the black seas Sohrabaia’s well had shown him, and Yrsted envied him. He leaned closer to join with the greater whole. “I need this man.”

  A hand that was in the process of outgrowing itself snapped out of the shadows surrounding the master and laid hold of his face. The cooly damp flesh crawled with things underneath. “You need nothing. Your Matron forgets, but I remember. Necessity finds me in this cesspit, but I will ascend to the Varazsalom again before long. She will whisper my name, and I will hear it. ‘Zos’rel’ will be worn on the lips of the saved and the damned.”

  “Your name,” Valharc said. “His ears are unworthy.”

  “I am only a tongue,” Yrsted said and fell to his knees, relinquished from the grip of the thing called Zos’rel. “No more, no more.” He tried to cover his face with his hands, but forgot himself and the tongues of that which touched the well nipped at his fleshy cheeks. “The change has been too slow. Sohrabaia fears that the Embers will not outlast our efforts here. The Midden will be lost, certainly, but the rest of Sulidhe will feel that little.”

  “And so you need this creature,” Zos’rel said and flung a long-fingered hand at the watchman.

  “What is he to you?” Yrsted asked and tensed at his own words, bowed. “I mean only to say, if he is just another vessel, why not put him to better use? Give him to me. I will take him to where he can be put to better use.”

  “What of the boy?” said Valharc.

  “Boy? What boy?”

  Zos’rel drifted nearer the light, skidding the edge of the glyphs' twilight. Yrsted anticipated the full revelation with ecstasy. “He brought this one here. Meveled, he called him.”

  “But a boy,” Yrsted said from his knees, pleading with his hands. “Only a boy. He can’t know anything. What is any of this to a creature of the Midden?”

  “The Midden is not his only home,” Zos’rel said and moved to put Meveled in his shadow. “Here is one of the Provosts’ men. What can this one tell us, I wonder.” The watchman shouted muffled nonsense into the tendril holding shut his mouth. The eagerness to be useful poured out of his eyes. “I do not need your words. Only your thoughts.”

  Finally Zos’rel bent into the light of the glyphs, which was swallowed into the many mouthing holes that sheathed his naked scalp. The flesh of his face, too loose and cold with a saturated pallor, worked into a strain. The orifices strained too. Something like seeds labored out of the recesses of the master’s skull and tumbled out.

  The shadows in the Cistern were too dense for Yrsted to see clearly what they were, but he did not need to see them clearly. The pods fell over Meveled’s face and, while most of them bounced harmlessly away onto the dank stone at his feet, a few latched on. Spindly arms broke forth like a spider hatching from an egg.

  Delicate forms emerged that would blow away in an amaranthine cloud if a wind somehow chanced to find its way into the Cistern. They crawled on their many legs over Meveled’s cheeks and through his hair to reach his nose, his eyes, his ears. His cries meant nothing to them and did not reach beyond the ichorous sinew of Valharc’s tendril. The world did not hear them. Only Yrsted was there to witness and remember with joy the violet things disappearing into his cavernous channels, chewing their way into his tear ducts by means of mouths so little as to be invisible. His screams tumbled into nothing.

  “I trust you understand what will happen in time,” Zos’rel said, speaking to Yrsted but beholding his creations. “He is a vessel, as you said, one among many others. Take him, but preserve him. I need his memories, if I do not need him. I must learn all that I can about this boy who presumes himself to be more than he is. And in Sulidhe, that is and always shall be our greatest crime.”

  Yrsted did not pollute the ensuing silence with the dissonance of his voice. Something like awe tortured his face into a mirror for the sublime. He had seen the avatar of the change. His hands obeyed its words and took Meveled from the sinuous cage of Valharc’s limbs. The body shook and squirmed as he dragged the watchman back through the corridors of the Cistern and out into the dense night of the Midden. Yrsted took the greatest care with it. He had been given a great gift, and the deepening of the Well hungered for the fruits it would bear.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Many Legends and Half-truths

  The old earth had opened and swallowed Arnem into its blackness. Roots and rocks stemming from the walls of the shaft had hammered at him as he fell, but slowed his descent enough that the broken slabs on the other side of the fall only served to knock the wind from him. The crumbled remains of a stair—basalt, inset with chalcedony motifs—lay about him now and hemmed in the light of his torch. The rubble was all he could see. Strange broken creatures studied him from within the shattered motifs. He did not like the look of them. Their images were horrifying in the way that aspects become foreign and gruesome when kept from comprising an unknown whole. The boy wanted to disappear without moving.

  His torch lay a short distance away, the fire still feeding off the alchymic resin. Something kept him from reaching for it or coming closer to its glow at all. Shadows from the world before there were walls and fires, when men ran heedless in the night of the killers all around them. Their ageless whispers reminded the boy that sometimes it is better not to see than risk being seen yourself. A long time passed of absolute stillness and absolute silence—but for the guttering of the flame and his own deliberate breathing—before he dared pick up the torch again.

  The light did not travel far. The musty air was close, smelling richly of loam and mud, and the dark was closer. He shuffled forward, fearing every step would tumble him ove
r the maw of a vast emptiness, until huge columns of dark and scraggly hair broached the edge of his torchlight. They disappeared into the black overhead, as if an enormous wytch looked in on him from above. He shined the torch closer and saw only pillars thickly ensconced with the frail cilia of roots. Several continued to just hold the shape, the stone crushed and entwined within. The mimicry was both strange and familiar to him.

  Arnem stretched his torch as far as he could above his head, and no more of the dark was revealed than when it lay sputtering on the floor. The column nearest him had crumbled into the roots enfolding it long ago, that much he could see, and its verdant ghost still climbed to the level above. He tried to find the points in the dark overhead that might indicate a hole at its terminus like the one he had fallen through, the weird confluence of the dome and the night and the Vertebrae eking in from the main hall of the temple. There were none visible, but the roots were exceedingly dense. He would need to climb to be certain. His hand shook as it took hold of the thickest strand entangling the remains of the pillar.

  A faint luminescence bloomed under his touch, just as the skin warms to red if gripped hard enough. Arnem let go and stumbled backward, but did not know why: It was too late. The light traveled the length of the root as if he had brought the dawn. He followed its sinuous track into the upper dark and watched as it burst across the roof of the vault, bathing everything in an azure glow. As if the veins of some great beast lay exposed there, waiting for him to give them life in the interminable black. Hundreds of flowers, pale with a simple radiance and growing so thick that they left no trace of the stone underneath, blossomed along their lengths.

  All the chamber was put to celestial light. The darkness kept nothing from him, and Arnem deduced immediately that this was more than some hollow opened by chance beneath the foundations of the temple. Corridors ran away from the chamber that led to places secret in their tombs beneath the murk, no doubt once containing the ancient priests' reliquaries and coffers. All of which appeared to the boy to have been emptied: Their contents now lay heaped in the muck before him. On the far side of the morass fecund with all manner of mosses and fungi, interrupted only by the blocks of stone that still refused to be taken into their fold, he saw in the new light a great mound of the treasures.

  Arnem dropped down onto the mossy bed beyond the edge of what remained of the floor and crept out into the heart of the chamber. The verge underfoot blossomed in the wake of his steps with the same flowers as those which cloaked the ceiling. The seed struggled madly in his pocket. He felt its tendrils grip and seek as if they would tear through and entwine him whole. Finally he stopped and withdrew it into the light and cursed himself straight away.

  A groan like the creaking of an ancient wood emanated from within the mound, such that it reverberated from the walls and made the boy stop his ears. Idols, sculptures, caskets, talismans and staves shifted and fell away into the mud. Black and twisted branches, covered over with bramble and flowering vines, were steadily unearthed. Limbs stretched out from its central mass that easily claimed the room's breadth for its reach, so that it had no need to rise if it rose at all. A withered cage housed a pale light in its breast. Arnem remembered Hjaltimar, though the spirit had more of green and growth about it than the behemoth before him now. The resemblance was enough that the boy regarded it with something less than terror, but enough to fix his feet. He was paralyzed with the various ways to run and hide.

  It regarded Arn with a curious drone.

  Any words he had died in his throat.

  "Welcome," the spirit said. Its voice filled the buried chamber with the noise of spring. “I am called Haldok. Who might you be?"

  "Arn," the boy stuttered. "Arnem, if you're being official-like."

  "Arn? Arn," it said, feeling out the name. "Arnem. I knew an Arnem once, many thousands of moons ago."

  The spirit reached with one of its long arms to pluck among the artifacts that had fallen into the mud, inspecting them one by one and replacing them carefully atop the mound in which it sat when they did not satisfy.

  “I’ve met one of you,” Arnem said. “Before. He was smaller, and angry. Or just didn't want to be talking to me.”

  "The saplings of my kind have known only your cruelty and have already dwelt with you too long. In my youth your kind danced through our realm when our realm still was. Ah, here we are." The spirit held up a cracked bust to the light of the flowers across the ceiling. "Arnemetorix. A violent fellow. He and I crossed paths many times when I walked the forests. This was made at the behest of his conqueror, I believe."

  A hand of spindly twigs interwoven with the branches of great trees set the worn sculpture before him. Arnem knelt down to it, feeling its heavy features as if blind and the touch of raw stone where its nose and ears had broken away. Violence translated across death and time through the likeness of the dead man’s eyes. Thick beard, more scars than wrinkles, the scowling lines of a face lived on battlefields: Arnem tried in vain to imagine who could conquer such a man.

  “No relation, you can be assured. His bloodline died out many turnings ago, before the Magi ever came to this land. But I choose to think that events would have borne out quite differently, had he been there to meet them.”

  “He could’ve died yesterday. I wouldn’t know him. I only have my cousin. My parents died before I could remember them.”

  “The Spawn of Nej’Ud forget so easily,” Haldok said, almost to itself.

  “Nej’Ud?” asked the boy. “The Fruitless Plain?”

  The unfamiliar note of surprise came into the spirit’s voice. “You are young to know the meaning.”

  “My,” Arnem started, but did not know the word for what he was about to say. “The man who takes care of me sometimes, he’s a man of the Faith. He tells me, whenever I do something I shouldn’t, that I’ll be sent to Nej’Ud for it.”

  “A curious religion,” Haldok said and rearranged some of the idols which decorated its eye-height. “The birthplace and place of damnation are one and the same.”

  “I don’t know much of anything about it, except that it’s made him a right prick. My cousin says he’s always been a prick.”

  “Prick?”

  “And maybe he has.” Arnem spared himself a laugh before a shadow came back over him. “But he never bothered to tell me about any of it. Like it’s secret, for himself. I never asked, that’s true. And I won’t now. Not since that green man gave me that seed.”

  “Now the question is mine to ask,” Haldok said and quit the inspection of its trove to regard him fully.

  The memory of the glade beside the canal, of the blood and viscera and claws like the thorns of the world’s pain, overtook the boy. He did not wait for the spirit’s question. Arnem rolled onto his feet and sprang toward the edge of the broken stone. There was nowhere to go save the hole he fell through and the chance was slim that he could climb out in time. But it was farther away from the spirit than he was now. That was all that mattered.

  The branches that were Haldok’s fingers snagged him by his cloak, the ratty fibers of which tore so that he tumbled free, but its other hand was swift to catch him. Arnem cowered in the flowering, vine-entwined cage. He was wrong to take its sluggishness and repose for more than a choice. This creature had once made corpses of men by the hundreds, and Arnem wondered then if the spirit were not among the besiegers of ancient Sulidhe that Verem once told him about. The light of its heart poured over him as through the bars of a cell.

  “You mistake me, little one, and I do not know why. For did I not grow from a seed? Is a part of me not as green as the verge?” Arnem did not speak, and so Haldok unclasped his hand. “Hark. Your name does not pass through the halls beneath the earth. The roots say ‘child’, the flowers sigh ‘pauper’. The winds that wash over them, the rains that water them, they whisper a tale of two worlds and a creature that bridges them as they do. This is your story, isn’t it, little Arnem?”

  “I don’t have a story,�
�� the boy said.

  “Everything has a story. Even the stones are not silent. This world is alive, child. You are still small, and already you have forgotten it. Will you let that be your story? Listen to one whose tale it has been: The legend will write itself if you do not choose the words to use.”

  The spirit set him down beside the bust of Arnemetorix again and returned to the arrangement of its collection. “Now tell me, if you would, and share your burden for at least a little while.”

  “The one of you that I saw before,” Arnem began. “His name was Hjaltimar. A man made of leaves gave me the seed, but Hjaltimar came to protect it. He said it had something to do with a sleeping father.”

  The spirit quit its doddering repairs to the heap. "You must speak of this to no one."

  "I haven't."

  "Keep even your thoughts close. And among those of the Squid, keep none at all. Your caretaker as well. They will try to take it from you, if they can. This is why Hjaltimar appeared to you."

  "Why is this thing so important? He wouldn't tell me. What's it for?"

  "Many things, many legends and half-truths. Hjaltimar spoke of the Sleeping Father?"

  "I didn't understand that either," Arnem said and dug for the seed in his pocket, as if seeing would make things clearer. “I don’t understand any of it.”

  The spirit stayed him. "Always keep it from sight. It is His creation, made long ago and the making of it put a sleeping upon him that no spell or force can break. But he spoke nothing of its purpose, or why it should be given to a child of Nej’Ud. A boy, no less. The Mother is our steward in His absence, as she was His queen in the fullness of their time. Whatever she knows is nothing she will speak.”

  “But—”

  “What I have said is what I know, and now we will dispense with talk of secrets. I see the weariness of the day’s travail in you. Do not let your night be weary too.”

  A little of the light alive in its breast traveled as an echo down the length of its arm until gathering in the palm of its hand. Haldok urged the radiance on with the slightest gesture and it drifted down over Arnem in lazy motes. At once he let out a sigh under the weight of a sudden exhaustion. The fear was gone that had kept his limbs taut since the Cistern, a terrible energy sapped and turned to heavy lead. All at once, the sleepless nights and trying days since Burr’s death raced to meet him. His thoughts, of the seed or otherwise, were driven away into mist no matter how hard they tried to form. Sleep, and a warm place to have it, was all that Arnem desired in that moment.