“Do you see Szrima?” Verem shouted to Muro, turning aside the falling edge of a warpick with his dagger. “Do you see anything?” He put his sword through the Crowbill’s beak and watched the bone turn to powder, then to blood. “Anything at all.”
Muro did not answer. The Hawkfaced called out another distance, and Quarr made another adjustment. The Sling thundered. Verem started to hope the spirits hit their mark, but the flash of an ax at his face drove all pretense of thought from his mind.
He leaned back just as its arc would have taken his head with it, so far that he retreated a step to keep his balance. The axewoman, a Scaletail by the snakeskins dangling from her skullcap, filled his place at the top of the stairwell. She made way for two others, low grisly men with fillet knives and clubs and whose naked bodies were sheathed all over in the fuligin paint of the Blackbodies.
The axewoman rushed him while the others made to flank him. Verem threw his dagger and cut out to the side with his sword. The axewoman fell back, a hilt protruding from what remained of her right eye, and the right of the two Blackbodies toppled over. Most of the tendons and muscle were severed in the leg nearest to Verem. He threw himself at the remaining Blackbody, slipping past the thrust of a knife with almost drunken grace, and took hold of the man’s beard. He swung on its length, swiveling as he did, so that he threw the man back down the stairwell. Those next in line to try their luck caught him and fell back under his weight.
Verem was almost pleased with himself when his left shoulder rocked back and bloomed with white-hot pain. Nerveless fingers dropped his dagger. The black shaft of a crossbow bolt stood out from the leather and mail, the wound running with blood. He took his eyes from it as soon as his senses recovered and dashed in like a fencer at the Crowbill who had filled the threshold. She entertained his attacks as the distance-keepers they were until his leg seized. Its sinews, hobbled by the earlier wound left by the spear, were exhausted. It did not escape her notice.
The Crowbill swept in with her warpick and swept him off his feet with an expert hook around his ankle. His feet went out from under him as easily as a babe having just learned to walk. There was enough of her grimy face visible beneath the mask to know she smiled; but in the glass eyes all he saw was himself, fatal horror making a grotesquerie of his own reflection.
The warpick swung down at him. Verem brought his sword up to meet it and the blow batted the blade out of his hand and across the floor, far out of reach. The Crowbill took a step nearer, as if she were not close enough already to dismantle him. She set her heel against his breast and flattened him against the stone. Figures shifted in the stairwell behind her. Quarr shouted a warning and a curse, the others shortly after. There was and would be nothing between Verem and the steel. The ache in his limbs, the wounds and bruises across his body told him that was alright. He was tired, and nearly nodded when the Crowbill raised her warpick again.
Fog rolled in around her shoulders that she did not notice until the frail wisps had already invaded her nostrils, her mouth. Not a moment passed before her lungs could no longer contract for the fullness of them. She collapsed unable to even gag, swiftly followed by those who had brought up the rear to her advance. Muro squirmed beneath the bulk of the Blackbody who had meant to end him. Quarr deflated with relief, still at the Sling and looking down at the two dead men before him and their fallen cudgels. Verem permitted himself the same before rising to his feet again with his body screaming that he lie still.
The mist left the innards of those it had drowned with its kiss, its twisting zephyrs coalescing in the air before them. Verem nearly sprung into the fog’s midst before it even held enough of a shape to embrace. Dura called out, and the thunder of the Sling shook the wispy form that slowly resolved into being.
Szrima sank to her knees no sooner than she materialized. Her dusky skin moved and shifted, less than substantial. Sweat beaded on her forehead only to disappear into vapor. Verem feared to touch her, lest she discorporeate entirely.
“Who do I owe the money?” Verem asked. “The wizard or the fog?”
“You’ll pay me with your life in a moment,” she said, the huge breaths she took cutting up her words. “There are more. Below. But they aren’t coming up. Warned off. And the Bogscag is in the water.”
“Fleeing? After all this?”
“Not fleeing, not fled. Waiting.”
Muro looked back at them from beside his present embrasure. “Verem.”
The captain of the Stormcrows opened his mouth to speak. But a quake ran through the world that was not born of the powers of the Sling–and silenced him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Aegis Between Being and Not
The sounds of the night filtered through the slight crack in the doors of the Cistern. Screams, the distant collapse of huts plastered against the Midden’s ruins, thunder that suffused everything like a low drumbeat. A glow flickered across the floor in a narrow slash of light that was given off by the still burning fires. For Arnem, in that moment, these were the throes of another world. A veil had descended between it and that which he occupied now. The dark before him was separate, distinct, the bowels of a realm he had violated with his foreign presence. A human child come away from all that he knew. He struck a torch to light, tested his grip on the truncheon Oren had given him, and ventured deeper.
His pack was heavy with all that he had stolen from the Tier and the meager contents of his life in the Midden. More than once he stopped to heave it back onto his shoulder, giving an eye as he did to the dark ahead and that which steadily coalesced behind. There was the rope, the net, a few jars of pitch and rags to set them alight. The fillet knife was stuck into his belt. The burden felt awkward and in ways more than just his footing. Something was missing in the inventory he took, perhaps many things. He understood only what he could figure out for himself. There were persons aplenty who could and did teach him how to steal, how to hide, how to stand straight and act on principle. But no one knew better than he what waited at the edges of the Midden’s consciousness.
Perfect silence, perfect darkness followed him. Arnem had known a sightless passage, in which he was the loudest thing, awaited within the bowels of the Cistern; but its purity, its oneness until it became a kind of presence, set him on edge more than any simply dank or quiet place ever could. The void around him was complete, as if he really had left the world behind. His torchlight was strangled, fought against the dark. The stamp of his feet scuffed overloud until the sound was swallowed at the edge of the glow. He steeled himself anew with every step.
And yet, not a few paces more, his heart nearly failed him in his desire not to turn back: His steps had begun to squelch. Trails of a viscous substance, almost glowing it was so pale, came away from his boot. The pallid, wet flesh of a membrane sheathed the floor like a growth and left only a few swaths of damp stone. Nodules throbbed across its surface that pumped their contents through thick veins that in turn wound away in confused, directionless patterns.
Arnem took the fillet knife from his belt and knelt down to the nearest capillary, gave the slightest prick. A flood of the same fluid issued from the incision that had pumped out of the gills of the thing in the waters of the canal. Arnem scrambled away from the spreading pool so quickly that he almost lost his footing. Horrors flew through his mind as he watched the bleeding, of all that should happen if the substance intermixed with the season’s floodwaters.
Arnem put what he came for out of his mind and set the torch aside on the nearest virgin breadth of floor. The jars rattled inside his pack as he set it down and fumbled with the ties, his fear outpacing his hands. The cage of darkness that ensconced his light throbbed closer. He scanned its depths, unscrewing the jars and stuffing the rags into the pitch. Something fell to the ground behind him as he reached for the torch and landed with the wet thud of meat smacking stone. An inarticulate moan, so divorced from purpose or reason that its speaker no longer had a conception of these things, filled th
e empty dark.
What should have been anything else save what he found awaited him when he turned on the source of the cry, truncheon raised for a killing blow. Death was not yet come for the trembling, senseless thing. Lidless eyes spasmed inside sockets that were more bone than flesh. Its hair was gone, its teeth were naked of lips. A mucosal ooze stood out all over its body and sizzled as it went on melting away the remaining tatters of skin and dissolving the tissue beneath. The only part of the living corpse that remained intact and unspoiled was the enormous pustule seething upon its breast, the beating of which contributed more than a share to its shuddering. Arnem looked behind him, at the other things pulsating and thumping across the ichorous carpet of flesh, and understood.
He took up one of the jars of tar, held the torch close to the pitched rag, and swiftly pulled the two apart at the sound of another thud. A second corpse writhed at the absolute edge of the light. Its screams took up for those of the first, which had been reduced to gurgling murmurs by its disintegration. Arnem cast his eyes upward, set aside the jar. He stood as tall as he could and stretched his arm as far as it would, thrusting the torch into the dark overhead and peeling back the shadows.
Bulbous protuberances grew as thick upon the ceiling as the nodules across the floor, but shared no other similarity. Sphincters contracted and mouthed at their ends that seeped with fluid. A forest of them dangled above him for as far into the Cistern's depths as the torch dared to admit. There were no veins that connected them, but the thick contours and ridges of a kind of throat that churned and urged the visible bulges of its contents through. A lazy groan entered the insensate choir of pain, and he saw a head protrude from the orifice directly above him. At his feet, that soul which had fallen first, retained the absolute least of its features. The flesh crawled and smoothed into the stuff of the membrane. The veins of the dissolved body stretched out from the nodule it had hosted and interconnected with the veins of the others. Weirdly salient eyes stared at him until they too were smothered with pale tissue.
Arnem’s hands worked fast. The imperative of why he had come overran his fear as a cavalry charge. One after the other he put the jars to light and threw them. One landed with a crash farther into the dark ahead and flared to life across the swaths of membrane there, thicker than where he stood. The strange flesh crackled. Veins popped under the immense heat. The remaining two he lobbed into the field of birthing canals pendulating above him. An animal mewling joined the roar of the flames that did not come from the half-alive things they had extricated.
The fires began to spread until none of them were separate from the other. Arnem gathered his supplies as pieces of the burning growths rained down around him. The dark taunted him that lingered still beyond the spreading flames. Brightness invaded its depths, but only so far, and he could not escape the feeling that what he had seen so far was only a prelude. His thoughts broke apart when he tried to form the image of what festered inside the ancient heart of the Cistern. It was more than outside his ken, this understanding that his world and that which labored beyond the dark did not share a common plane. Just as there was Sul and there was Sulidhe: The fire was the aegis between being and not.
Something terrible sounded its coming from beyond that aegis, from within that realm in which reality was not even an abstraction. All the bravery in Arnem’s heart drained out of him by his extremities, his selfless intention torn to tatters by the talons of a night beyond night. The cry, a thousand voices shrieking through one throat, echoed again throughout the darkness of the Cistern and from all around him now. There was a call within its proclamation, a beseeching that caressed the disavowed fragments of him buried far down inside. It nursed these pieces, made them fuller and brought them closer. His pack lingered useless and sagging as he sped blind back the way he had come.
His feet found every crack and snag in the stone floor that they did not on his ingress. Mucosal pools sucked at his boots til he feared they would come off. The howling vortex pressed in around him even as he flew through the black, as if the black itself was the screaming thing but could not make itself truly known. Things—not hands not claws, not anything which gripped or tore—things pulled longingly at him that surely could have taken any part of him that they desired. Like the inarticulate, inhuman cries that dogged him, these graspings pushed against something that they could not yet overcome but were perilously close.
The great doors of the Cistern smashed home against his nose so hard that Arnem heard a crack. He had not seen them, did not see them now. Full dark pressed in on him still. All its voices and all its lingering touches begged him to remain. Their pleading was interrupted by the groaning of rusted hinges and, as if a signal, silenced them. The doors were opening, but not for the boy’s frail weight thrown against them. Arnem got to his knees and then to his feet, taking his truncheon into both hands.
Nothing held him back when he reached out to feel his way through the pitch. The doors to the Cistern had been drawn back. But Arnem grasped only at air when he tried to find the threshold. He stood alone where it should have been, his eyes darting everywhere as though the interminable black would become only shadow if he could just find the light. His hands shook so violently that he almost dropped the truncheon. The boy swallowed the words his terror would not let him speak. To break the silence of the abyss would break his pact with it and make his presence known, objectionable. Arnem tightened his grip around the truncheon until his fingers burnt, clenched his jaw until his teeth threatened to shatter. A deep breath went in and out of him.
“Dob?” he called.
A howl that was unalike that which hounded him through the corridors of the Cistern—distant, frail and weak—bled through the dark toward him.
“Dob!” he screamed and charged into the nothing before him. “Dob!”
Arnem’s legs wheeled beneath him, eating up the sightless expanse of earth newly under his feet. The stone of the Cistern, of the City was gone. He did not even sense the ever-present stink of the Midden that reached the nostrils no matter how many doors deep into a dwelling one could sequester themselves. A different smell hung on the air, stale and biting at once, as if all the world were a tomb that safeguarded the malodorous decay of its builders. The reek grew the farther he ran and did not stop until he did, tripping on a stone and into the fold of a nest of outcroppings.
A far distant light, strangled by the consummate night, rendered the rock as more than just another hard surface for him to collide with in the black. The horizon burned green as with the thin glow of a blaze that raged on the other side, as if a million emeralds were set alight by eldritch flame. There were no stars in the sky, no moons, and the balefire did not light the underbellies of clouds. Arnem dared not take the passage down between the rocks—growths sheathed their ossified surfaces, spindly red limbs clutching for morsels from within grey shells—and besides, there was no need. A darksome sea consumed all that he saw, a black mirror save for the froth and smack of its anguished tides against the pale stone of the shoal below.
An endless quiet cloaked the world with the distilled essence of absence. Nothing remained that perhaps once was, and nothing would rise again from its wrack and ruin. No field would ever grow again, no fish would ever swim the shallows of the sea he looked upon. A place so empty that death could not even be said to still linger, to haunt memories in the times to come. The ghosts were all fled, and time was finally an illusion of some other distant creature. But Arnem felt in all the instruments of his mind and his body that he was not alone. His thoughts were no longer a realm distinctly his own. Inside his pocket, the seed stirred.
The fingers of an immense hand broke the surface of the silent waves and interrupted the light on the horizon. Another soon followed, another after, until Arnem understood that these were not hands. The behemoth tendrils were discernible only by the light that failed to encompass them and rose into the skies until all but the faintest traces of the burning horizon were subsumed into their sh
adow. Nothing was so great, not even mountains. The wake of their eruption on the seas was the only sound until, as if on a crepuscular sea wind, Dob howled plaintively.
The sudden pain of something biting and clawing against his skin broke the spell of his awe. His pocket was alive with movement. When he dug his hand into his pocket, ignoring the ragged touch of thorns, the seed was lost inside a mass of bramble. The vines grew and snaked down his arm. Barbs sank into his flesh. He felt them sprout inside even as those without flowered. A gigantic lowing sound filled his ears as the bramble continued to engulf him, as though all the ocean moved at once and surged forth. As indeed it did, for the tendrils that dwarfed the heavens curled forth against the land. Their massive cage threatened to enclose entirely all that he could see. Then the growth of the seed enshrouded his eyes and he could see nothing. His mouth filled with leaves and burrs before he could think to scream.
◆◆◆
Everything remained black. Then he sat up. Dead leaves, dehydrated vines and flowers, barbs so ancient they crumbled to dust, fell away from him. He felt the small hardness of the seed enclosed in his fist. The doors to the Cistern stood open. Moon and star and domelight oozed through the night outside. There was no shore beset by an eater of worlds, hauled forth from cosmic depths, but another kind of sea remained.
There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well Page 27