There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  "There is much you will not understand," Haldok said as he drifted off to sleep. "But you must struggle to."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Abattoir for All the World’s Dying

  Brannig’s Shroom and Steam was singular as an establishment in the Midden that Oren could say outlived his knowledge of it. Its familiar, static place in Sulidhe’s buried tier was like an anchor for him in the otherwise everchanging effluvium of human life that was his charge to manage. The tiers above boasted nothing like the teahouses of the Midden. Every pub demanded pretense, a mask, of those who crossed its threshold. The drinking of ale was as much a duty as the butchering of meat that the Slaughterhausers daily performed. There, at Brannig’s, the outside was a place better to be away from, as if indoors from the torrents of a storm that presaged the end of everything. A weary kind of solitude was expected. In it, he felt solid. And, leaned over the small tin cup of mushroom tea, he felt whole.

  There were only a few others sat at the bar with him that he considered company. They were men and women like him, tired and in need of quiet, and for that he was glad. The muted calm of the teahouse was a departure from the preparations being made in the Tradesmen’s Tier. He left more interested men to the tasks of what was to come in the morning. His hands had done the work too many times before. Like the workman whose callouses know too well the sit of a hammer, he grew tired of it.

  “Getting low, Provost?” Brannig said, his one good eye thrown over his broad shoulders.

  A chuckle escaped him at the sound of the barkeep’s voice. It was abrasive in any other place but the teahouse, as much a part of it as the failing stone of its walls and the soggy floorboards. Brannig was busy at work rinsing the tin teacups and refilling his many kettles over his many fires. The hearths were there when his brawn and prodigious belly wandered into the ruin he later converted into his establishment. Furnaces, Oren often thought, perhaps a smithies once. Churning out blades and shields and spears in place of small and steaming pots of comfort made from the mushrooms sprouting atop overgrown graves.

  “Is there any other place to get?” Oren said.

  “Lots of places, but only one worth getting to.” Brannig set a frothy mug of spiced mushroom tea in front of him. “What’s the story?”

  “I am here,” Oren said and slurped up the froth, always richest in the flavor of the spices. “The story is the same.”

  Brannig said nothing, but pursed his lips beneath the broom of his mustaches and turned away to the roar of the flames. Oren watched his muscles work beneath the thin dirty linen shirt he wore, studied the angle of the slope of his shoulders. He told himself the man would be alright. Brannig was old, but still strong. There was the wisdom of past edicts on his side and his strength and his standing in the community. The Provost made a list of the reasons in his mind not to be worried, so much like the lists that nightly fettered him to his desk. But the image remained invasive: Brannig lay dead and burning in one of his own furnaces, and the teahouse was emptied of everything that meant anything.

  A glint of gold in the dim interior of the teahouse, the sudden burst of lard frying, and a richly sweet, earthen smell stole him back from his reverie. A malformed brick of something the color of amber, the consistency of congealed treesap, reduced in the pot that Brannig was presently swilling the contents of. Oren felt the old frustrations of the day settling back onto his shoulders that he had come to the teahouse to shrug off.

  “Not you, too,” he said and, when the barkeep looked up, pointed at the gelatin in the pot. “Nothing good will come of that. I ought to confiscate it right now.”

  “I haven’t had cause to use it meself,” Brannig said, tilting the pot this way and that to watch how the foreign substance moved and separated. “But I’ll stake what little life I got left on this: I saw a little girl come down with the Embers, she eats this stuff mixed up in her porridge and next day she’s as right as you or me.”

  “Fevers break. Diseases subside. But go on, trust your druids. We’ve seen what good comes of their kind.”

  “I got it off an uroch, not a cultist. Them’s the only sellers, far as I know.”

  “Even worse.”

  “You sure you don’t want any? Not even in your tea? Sweeter than honey, I’m told.”

  “I won’t have any of that heathen brew,” he said. “And I’m not ill, anyhow. Just tea for me, Brannig.”

  The barkeep took the virgin kettle off its hook over the fire, tossed a mix of mulched mushrooms in Oren’s cup, and poured him another tin of tea. “You ought to have something in it. Awful tense, you are, this eve. Something afoot?”

  “What you can probably imagine,” Oren said to his cup. “The list is short of things that can bring a Provost down to the Midden for nighttime tea and quiet. Terribly short.”

  He did not need to see him to know that Brannig’s shoulders sank, that he stood a little less tall than before. All his usual congenial bluster had deflated when he spoke again. “How bad will it be this time? Gods above and below. And so soon? The last one was not near a few years ago.”

  “I’m bound to say nothing,” the Provost said as he stood away from the bar. “But I’ll say to do more than board up and stay quiet. What more you can do is a matter for your own discovery.”

  The world outside was as he left it. Nothing changed, nothing ever did. Except perhaps himself. He grew older while everything around him slipped steadily into the surrounding murk. Ancient, but shedding its age until it became nothing at all. There would always be life in the Midden, of that much Oren was certain and the Circumspex demanded, but only life. A transitory kind of creature would exist here, without knowledge of the passing of years, living without understanding an eternally recurring hardship of torment and imprisonment, far away from anything resembling youth. The Middener would be in life what he was destined for in death: a demented and insensate engine for the Caste’s dominion over Sulidhe.

  Oren could hear the moans and screams and pleas from where he stood outside Brannig’s. Frail, carried on the selfsame wind that would bring the next storm to the city. The interior wall was not far from the teahouse and would take him to the source. It was a long walk, but a straight one, and the brilliance of the glyphic dome overhead lit his way in the dark night. Even still, he clutched the handle of his truncheon tight. The shadows of what the boy had told him earlier that day haunted his steps.

  The mournful chorus grew louder the further he walked the length of the wall. Like a portent, as if he slowly approached the abattoir for all the world’s dying. Rosen light bloomed from around the bend of the wall like an inferno just over the horizon. Then he stood before them, no more perturbed than if a clutch of babes reached for him in want of succor. These hands did not want succor. Oren was not sure if they could even interact with things of the materium anymore. If it was so, their touch would only harm and maim and kill.

  Their shapes rose and fell within the crimson morass, variously drowning in the illimitable space beneath the crystal and fighting to be seen and heard by the world their souls had departed. Oren wondered dimly if the soulhouse he viewed—that powered the glyphs of this stretch of wall and by extension the dome above—was that which stole Helyett’s sister away from whatever place she had been destined instead. He had read and read the scriptures of other peoples, one of the few worthwhile dispensations that the privileged life of a Provost gave him. Sages and priests beyond count theorized worlds after the world. He did not think they could have imagined the one upon which he now looked.

  The great crystal was cut with inhuman precision into its present hexagonal shape, hewn from a geode that everyone but the Mageblooded could only guess at the origin of. Hedge wizards, perhaps, had an inkling and the captive Druids who knew enough of wizardry to rave like dogs against its excesses. For himself, Oren only knew that somehow the gemstone of which the soulhouses were comprised carried back to the substance of the materium itself and the quintessence of all life: an ancie
nt and vast unconsciousness. The crystal was familiar to it in some way, and the glyphs were its language. The souls taken from the dead of the Midden only served to fire the connection between them, just as the fire inside a shadow lamp is necessary to throw the shapes cut into its shade. And here was a fire that would never burn out. That it never did was all that concerned his masters. As long as things breathed in the Midden Quarters of Sulidhe, this flame was imperishable.

  Oren pulled his pipe from the inside of his cloak and filled it to the brim. “Eager to have me, I’ll wager.” His voice was reduced almost to silence by the incessant wail. “My hands put more than a few of you in there. But I’ll not die down in this muck.” He turned away from the soulhouse to light his pipe and immediately dropped the fire-striker in favor of his truncheon.

  A figure struggled in the distance, lit by the twilight given off by the dome. Oren would not have seen them at all if not for the derelicts there having been cleared considerably away from the wall. They looked to be carrying something large and unwieldy, but this was wrong. There were two. One helping the other. And the Provost remembered where he was, understood the significance of vanished ruins and no rubble to be found.

  Few could stand to live near a soulhouse and fewer, demented or desperate, did. There was little cause for a Provost or his watchmen to patrol nearby. No one noticed when one patch of rubble had been cleared away amid so many others. Oren might, if the ward was his, but Brannig’s Shroom and Steam was not in his ward. It was Nilbod’s, and Nilbod gave little thought to what went on in the city-beneath-the-city. His patrols were lax, and his reports to the spellwrights even laxer that concerned which wards had failed and which glyphs were on the verge of extinguishing. Things had a tendency to grow under Nilbod’s watch that elsewhere had no fertile soil. Such as the smuggler’s den that lay ahead of him.

  Stealth did not come freely to Oren. His body was built for breaking things and people. The night did not help him, the night never truly being night in the Midden, lit interminably by the twisted light of the dome and Vertebrae. He took the precautions he could and crawled and slinked through the rubble that began a dozen paces from the wall. The shadows clothed him and the wails of the soulhouse smothered the considerable noise he made. Finally, raised voices did away with any possibility that his approach would be heard.

  They were indistinct beneath the inchoate shrieks still in their full strength behind him as well as muffled by the interior of the smuggler's den. Fires burned inside, of torches and cookfires. Shadows milled throughout and knives glinted from their hips. The pair that Oren saw from afar—both of them men, he made out in the new light—stood amid them as if in audience. The man burdened with his companion stood tall in his ochre robes, made a diffuse grey by the moonlight, and carried only a mockery of supplication.

  A brief seizure overcame the man he carried, and a cry escaped clenched teeth. Oren faltered and cursed as he saw the silhouette of his head bubble and shift. The robed man rushed to keep him from falling and pulled him closer, forgetting himself, and in so doing exposed the hand that he had thus far kept hidden. Any pretense of interference that the Provost held was laid waste. Tongues swayed and grasped from the mouth of a claw that belonged to no natural creature, much less any child of Nej’Ud. Oren's vantage alone permitted him to see, and they him. The appendages writhed toward him as if they could sense his presence without having eyes to see, mewed though they were too far for him to hear. The smugglers fanning out before the pair were oblivious.

  “I don’t care about any fucking arrangement,” one of them said, a man’s voice from among the indistinct splotches of shadow. “We must get while it’s to be got, so what have you got on you? A slave? For who? He looks to be of as much use as a blunt knife. He looks sick.”

  “Czerk,” another said, but was kept from saying more by a swift curse to keep quiet.

  The man stiffened whose hand mewled with hunger, with want. “If you will not abide our agreement with your master–”

  “Is Segved here, friend? He’s gone farther out to field than I thought if he thinks he represents any of the smugglers, much less us.” The speaker stepped forward and finally revealed himself to Oren, but not enough to see his face. He made a show of resting a hand on the knife at his hip. “The cant has it on authority that the Provosts are coming down tomorrow. Cracking, you might say. Anything comes my way, agreements or deals and pacts besides, I want my fucking cut.”

  The man in robes let fall his companion without any reservation or concern for him. “I think you will find your share to be more than adequate.”

  Oren did not see the man move. He saw his robes, tattered and hemmed with muck, settle back into place and that was all. The man called Czerk trembled at the ends of the tongues, impossibly elongated and stiffened to spearpoints. He was impaled through the face and neck, but not so his eyes could no longer see or his mouth scream. Oren braced for such a scream, but one did not come. Czerk babbled as an infant does or one whose mind is so demented that speech is an afterthought. He laughed as he wept, interspersed with the kind of guttural animalism that Oren imagined possessed newborn man in the most ancient of ancient times.

  The tongues left perfect incisions when their master recalled them. Czerk’s body crumpled forward to the earth and into the light, utterly in absence of his mind. His legs did not obey him when he made to stand. His hands were limp and dumb things. It was as if the mechanics of his machine remained intact, but were reversed and scrambled and disrupted. And amid the fleeting shadows of emotion that passed over his face, over which he had as much intent or control as his limbs, Oren caught something he wished immediately that he had not: sudden, terrible awareness.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A Wound In the Earth

  Arnem was woken to distant shouts and the sudden light of pale flames. He saw at once it was not his torch, somehow still alight, but fires that had begun to sprout from the weedy patches of earth that had pushed through the stone floor. It would have been an eerie, unsettling glow if not for how much the light resembled Haldok’s own.

  “Ah, awake at last,” the spirit said, its voice filling the chamber with as much warmth as the morning sun that stubbornly shined down into it. “You slept through much of the day.”

  Arnem rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and then shimmied down the mound of artifacts until he stumbled onto solid ground again near to one of the newly sprung flames. The light they put off was bright enough to guide ships to shore, but somehow did not offend the eyes. Neither could he feel heat on his face, though he inched his nose close enough to sear the flesh. Finally he passed a hand through the dancing flame and felt only what might have been cool water defying the pull of the earth.

  "The daylight kindles them," Haldok explained. "A useful enchantment of mine, for you to see by, but harmless. Now come. We must see that you are off before the night comes again."

  The spirit was busy delicately rearranging a display of almost identical idols near the base of the mound, though the robed children they described adopted slightly different poses and attitudes in each figurine.

  “It can’t be that late in the day already,” Arnem said and pointed off to the hole by which he arrived in Haldok’s court. “The sun is still shining straight down into the pit.”

  “Do you hear that?” Haldok asked and the boy listened. The raised voices that woke him along with the flames were stronger now and more numerous. Something wooden crashed, large enough to hear and most probably the majority of a plasm, and added to the din. “There is something afoot that can only grow worse. I fear if too much time passes, there will be nowhere else for you to go but back atop the pile. As much as I enjoy the company, there is nothing here for you to eat or to drink and you look so hungry already. Then there are the many places for you to go that you shouldn’t.”

  A slight wave of Haldok’s huge and gnarled hand brought the boy to notice the architraves of corridors that he had not seen totally in the ni
ght. The immutable dark that lingered in their thresholds pulled at him as if the world suddenly tipped and somehow toward all of them at once.

  “There are other things that enjoy the seclusion of an abandoned temple.”

  "But you’re here too," Arnem said. "What is this place then? Is it part of the temple up above?"

  "It was a holy place of Istadek long ago," Haldok said. "An Old God, now that the new have come. Of the seas, I believe, and that this land's mariners and fishermen once prayed to and gave offerings. The Urakeen have come to worship nearer masters now."

  "The Mageblooded," the boy said, more to himself than to the spirit, and spat into the mud between his knees.

  “You hate them.”

  “More than hate. I don’t know enough words to say what it is.”

  “And yet you have never seen them. Their rule is weak. They are pretenders more than tyrants. The proof is above you when last anyone with the Magi’s blood befouled old Sul with their presence.”

  “Probably the last time anyone called this place Sul. Is that why do you do it?" Arn asked. "Collect these, I mean."

  "Isn’t it true that you are a transient people? You flee from what has passed and desert what you have built. I have chosen to remain, in place of what has gone, and guard its wonders that your childe-race does not seem to care for anymore. Wonders that I think, in their time, even the Sleeping Father could not outdo—may His slumber go undisturbed." The spirit studied an oblong of crystal that it held between thumb and forefinger, a weeping face carved from purest emerald. “But I fear there is something else on the horizon. Worse than before.”