There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Violations of form piled around him like starved hounds. Flesh and sinew and bone were contorted in attitudes for which there was no discernible mechanism to move or strike or eat. The joints and hinges of their limbs were motivated each in their own unique way until any pretense of uniformity was done away with. The resultant aberrations undulated in a wave held at bay only by some unspoken tune for which they had the only ear. Then the wave receded, and its conductor made himself known amid the neap tide.

  It held the shape of a man, but only just. Its bones wanted free of its flesh and by any means, leaving its towering form disjointed and misshapen. Tattered wrappings sheathed what parts of it were not clothed in plates of armor so corroded that the metal threatened to disperse into clouds of rust. Neither succeeded in containing its twisted flesh, thick as if calloused all over and ridden with open sores seeping with the juices that yellowed its bandages. One massive hand clutched the hilt of the stubby broad blade that hung at its hip, more appropriate for butcher’s work than fighting, and the other devolved into writhing tendrils at the beginnings of his mismatched hips.

  The voice of slow decay rolled out from its putrefying throat, but another lingered beneath: The deep intonations of one used to command.

  “You are the boy from the Cistern,” it said and paid a glance to the same and took another halting step forward. Arnem scrambled away and to his feet. “Your friend was a gift well taken.”

  “Who are you?” Arnem asked, naked in his terror but bringing his truncheon to bear all the same. “What are these things?”

  “I am called Valharc, and by some the Great Catalyst. Worshiped in small circles in secret cloisters. Venerator of the Pale Childe, the Black Tendril.” Its head, squat and hunkered atop its shoulders, then craned and twisted in impossible contortions to take in all its childer. “They have been perfected.”

  “Perfected?”

  A long shuddering snort took in the scents of the putrid air. “A noble human. Clever, resourceful. But no more. It is well that you were not changed. We have no need of you. Your ilk.”

  “What do you want?” Arnem asked. He knew the question for one as stupid as he felt holding the truncheon out against this creature and its hounds of twisted flesh. “Stay away from me.”

  “And having no need, we have no need for words.” A distant howl chased the sound of its voice. “But you will do for the umbilicus.”

  Valharc shambled forth, and Arnem recoiled. The black of the Cistern was at his back. Slavering abominations, at once so much like Khalkhan and so removed, hemmed him in on all sides. There was nowhere for him to retreat, but no matter. The boy could not have fled far. The tendrils of Valharc’s hand animated and shot toward him like snakes possessed with demonic speed. Their sinuous grip enfolded him thrice around the stomach and began to squeeze. He could feel the totality of their strength, knew that this was an act of pleasure. Valharc withheld from crushing him in an instant.

  The thunderous padding of paws was heard so briefly that Arnem believed he imagined the sound until Dob gored Valharc at a full sprint. Both hound and creature were reduced to a blur and, not long after, Arnem’s view of the world with them. Its tendrils released him at the apogee of their reach, just as Valharc and Dob collided with the long-abandoned dormitory which flanked the Cistern. Arnem was flung through the air. He crashed down through the rain-rotted roof of a plasm hovel grafted onto the heights of the ruin.

  A woman and her daughter whimpered in the shadows of the far corner before the dust could clear enough for him to see. They were Urakeen by the look of them, but the gloom and the dirt plastered to them nearly buried any identify they cultivated. Their room—small and dank with only one bed and a table beside its single window—reeked of disease and desperation. He hushed the two to calm them; but, upon seeing that he was only a boy, much of the work was done for him. The floor rumbled under his feet as Dob, with snarls and roars, contended with Valharc and the strangely inert tones of the Great Catalyst's exertions. But soon the dilapidation and its parasite plasm shook with the presence of many more.

  Arnem sped to the only window and threw aside the table that was there. Outside Valharc’s beasts choked the ingress Dob had made in the foundations of the old dormitory, defying their own attempt to pour in and surround the boy’s companion. It was not a moment later that he saw Dob leap through what must have been another rift in the wall and tear into the hindmost of the abominations before bounding away. The mass of them followed, but his heart sank. There were many, and they gained despite their horrible deformities. He could see from afar the wounds his only friend bore already. But there was little time to worry: Tendrils whipped through the window and, affixing themselves to its pane, hurled Valharc’s weight against the room’s exterior wall.

  The clumsily set and nailed together boards burst inward like so much piled kindling. Arnem was thrown backward into the same corner as the room’s tenants. The daughter shrieked, and the mother did not think to hush her. Her mouth was agape. Tears welled in her eyes and made clean tracks down her cheeks without her uttering a sound. Arnem shouted for her to run. She did not. Valharc’s visage, the heavy thud of his steady approach, transfixed her. Her daughter struggled and wailed in the tightening cage of her arms.

  Valharc took them both in the grip of its writhing limbs and squeezed them until all the sound died in their throats, until their bodies collapsed and red pulp oozed from between the coils that bound them. It threw them aside in a spray of formless viscera and flesh. Arnem screamed as he leapt back to his feet so suddenly and so violently that he went hoarse, and struck out with his truncheon. Its studs did not even meet air. A tendril wrapped threefold around his arm, another around his waist. The bones buckled under the stress like metal under heat. His breath seeped out of him as Valharc pulled him so close that the foetid stink invaded every part of him. Its eyes were rheumy and dark in the narrow slit of its corroded helm, portals into nothing. The seed began to squirm madly inside the fist that Valharc did not hold aloft.

  “Your will strives in too many directions,” the Great Catalyst told him. He kicked and fought in a blind haze of rage and pain and terror. “An imperfect consciousness.” The tendril pulled, his arm strained. “Humanity will not survive what is to come, not for all its noble humans. It must transcend the end. An entity that is beyond time and age and purpose. One singular will.”

  Drums answered Valharc's proclamation, distant but rising and importunate. Above their horrid rhythm came a howl that contained in it the death knells of all those whose skins decorated the fringes of the Witherwood. Theirs was an eerie heraldry that was much nearer at hand than the frenzied pounding. Arnem had heard the call before, when the Bloodbriars tore through the spellwright's men before the Gol’yems barely drove them off.

  “They’re coming for me,” Arnem said. “Is it worth the time for one little boy? Even a clever, resourceful, noble one?”

  A grunt escaped the rotten plunge of Valharc’s throat. Then the flesh tore and the bone snapped at the boy’s shoulder. His cries were so loud that he did not hear them, the new agony so great that he did not feel it. Valharc pivoted and threw him through the hole in the wall that its passage had made. The stone rose up to meet him, already spattered with his blood.

  ◆◆◆

  A shadow loomed over Arnem that his shut eyes, his unconsciousness, registered only as an absence of light. Cracked lips parted in a grin that was as rotten as its teeth were missing. Qurzin could hardly contain the throaty chuckle that built in him as he fairly pranced around the boy’s body, the dance at odd with his lank and violent frame. That blood pooled in a lake beneath him, that an arm was torn away and nowhere in sight, posed no real concern to the Crowbill. He had envisaged this in his mind often enough, and Segved did not say he wanted the boy alive. Neither did Qurzin. His fun would be had, dead or no. He felt the warm flush even now.

  He bent low to Arnem’s ear as he grabbed hold of his ankles, started to drag him. “If
ye ain’t dead yet, my pretty rat, you will wish it soon. Afore we’re through.”

  A delirious wakefulness animated the boy, enough to see but far from voicing more than confused murmurs. His head bounced in and out of the cracks in the broken street. Weeds brushed his cheeks as the darkness of an alcove or a hidden court took him in. The wind moved in the night, and the trees groaned that dominated the secret place to which he was taken. The rags of his shirt tore easily in Qurzin’s hands. He could smell the Crowbill, if he did not have the strength to raise his head to look at him. Somehow he did not care. His breaths came harder with each successive one, his head lighter so that he felt at any moment he might lift free from the earth and away forever.

  The stunted grove that enfolded them groaned so loud that it was all Arnem could hear, though the wind no longer moved amid its trunks and branches or strained its roots. Qurzin ran his hands over the boy until coming to the waist of his breeks. Then hands took the Crowbill. A fierce amber light bloomed behind him. Arnem did not fight as his consciousness road out again on the river of Qurzin’s screams, the spray of his blood as his arms were ripped away as easily as a fly’s wings. A smile, at least, would be on his lips as he died.

  The earthquake rumble of Hjaltimar filled the ensuing silence. “You play a dangerous game, Druid. The boy was a fragile vessel at the outset. And now there are the true Spawn of Nej’Ud to contend with.”

  “You must trust me,” a voice said, close to Arnem’s ear. The ambient agony of his ragged shoulder subsided as quick hands spread a poultice over the wound, as words were whispered of a language so ancient that they barely resembled articulate sounds. “There is no other way. We are weak, whatever the other Hierophants believe, and this chaos is no more an opportunity than an inferno ripping through the Witherwood.”

  “And what does the uroch say?”

  “I do not know. What do you say?” A pause. “We can expect another shipment of the Sap soon; our friends in the north are readying more even as we speak. I say again, Hjaltimar, trust me. We must bide our time. And in that time, this boy must be kept safe.” A hand smoothed the bloody locks of his hair. “We might hollow out the world ourselves and be done with it if we fail.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Darksome Span of Forever

  Oren rubbed the grime and sweat from his brow and looked at the palm that he drew away. As if he could read in the damp creases whether the perspiration was from a warm fire on a warm night, the close quarters of Sofis’s office, or the hot air that bellowed between himself and the other Provosts. Oren looked between them and saw the same exasperation on their faces, except for the old soldier among them. Sofis, he believed, was content to sit and haggle and debate the issue until the whole affair was no longer his concern—if only because he died before anyone’s mind was made up.

  “It’s been a long night,” he said.

  “And it’ll be that much longer if we don’t come to a decision,” Sofis said. “I’m not leaving this room–”

  “Til we’ve made a decision,” Iurkha said. “We know.”

  “Who will we hire?” Oren said. “Who worth having will come here and do the job? I wouldn’t come a hundred leagues within this city, if I had my own company. Not for any amount of wages. The plague besides, now I’m told the water supply is compromised and nefarious agents is involved.”

  “On whose authority?” Nilbod asked, knowing the answer.

  A map of the Midden, Sofis’s own and the only such map Oren had ever seen, stretched between them. Its streets were a web that connected all of the Provosts together. The ink moved and shifted, brought the avenues and byways and makeshift trails blazed through the ruins all to writhing. A faint incandescence emanating from the edges of the map hinted at the reason. Glyphs glimmered there like windows onto a realm of permanent sunset.

  Sofis never explained and Oren knew more about Giants than he did of magick; but he knew from the soulhouses and their transmutative effect over Sulidhe's walls that the spellwrights needed a source of power and a proper canvas for the inscription of their insights. The map was not inscribed onto parchment, but the tanned hide of a creature Sofis could not pronounce the name of. It still thrummed even across the metamorphosis of death with magick of its own.

  “What would you suggest, then?” Iurkha said to Oren. “We can’t very well do nothing.”

  “Send for a Delver or a group of them. No one will know them, they can even enter the city without going through an official entry. Get them in quick and quiet and let them do their job.”

  “The Delvers’ Guild?” Sofis said. “A bunch of rootless adventurers and wanderers for a quarantine procedure? Oren, you’ve taken to drink.”

  “Be lucid for a fucking moment and forget your jokes.” He waited for their silence to clearly give him the floor. “I don’t want to imagine I’m the only Provost who goes down to survey his charge. But just in case and just for you: This plague is the tamest I’ve seen. The infection doesn’t spread quick, doesn’t kill everyone. Above and below, most everyone survives who can get their hands on that bug syrup the urochs are smuggling into the Midden.”

  “On with it,” Sofis said, flailing his hand so the old bone might break and send fingers flying.

  “Plasms are emptying all the same,” Oren said and bent over the table to indicate where on the map, his finger leaving smudges wherever it touched. “Here. Here. And here. Everywhere that’s near a canal. If you haven’t caught up yet, the Embers don’t spread through ingestion.

  “This isn’t a job for any band of mercenaries or hired men as such to come in and tidy up with quarantines. And I’ll stake my name as Provost on this not remaining just the Midden’s problem.” The ghost of what he’d seen at the mouth of the smuggler’s tunnel slid across his eyes, but he kept the dead silent. His counterparts were not long for silence anyway.

  “So we’ll contract the Plagueguard,” Sofis said into his cup, the bristles of his white mustaches moving above the wine-stained red of his lips. “What’s the hesitation? Whatever we’re dealing with, they’re immune; they’re trained to handle this sort of thing; and they’re operating in the region already. Reports say one of their detachments just cleaned up swell down in Port Skalder. Daerian shithole that it is.”

  “They’re fucking butchers.” Oren bounced a fist off the edge of the table, rattling its goblets and dishes and soiling the few parts of the map that were not already soiled.

  “And they’re Middeners,” Nilbod chimed in between the two of them, leaning over the table as if to interdict a brawl. “Oren, what’s the damned use of a monster hunter? Let the Plagueguard roll in, do their job, and have done. What do you care? You’re a Tradesman, same as we are.”

  “I made a promise,” Oren said.

  “He’s worried about his boy,” Sofis said, reclining back into his chair, giddy with his wine. “I might’ve known.”

  “To hell, Oren.” Nilbod took a swig of his own cup, into which he was deep. They were all deep in their cups. “We can’t waver from our charge just because you adopted one of the damned natives.”

  “Hire your fucking Plagueguard. That’s what the Judges want, anyway. This council, like godsdamned always, is a pretense. And all I need is your writ. Our writ, I will remind you. I’ll pay out of pocket for whoever comes my way after that. Just sign.”

  “And am I correct in assuming, Oren,” Sofis said, wobbling forth drunkenly where he sat so that his eyes came to glint in the lamplight, “that you won’t sign ours if we won’t sign onto yours?”

  The Provost of the Fourth Ward displayed his best smile, the sort with which he disarmed the highest adjutants in the Circumspex of their authority. “My name’s got to be good for something, hasn’t it?”

  “So it is,” Iurkha said and reached over to slap him on the shoulder. “But ours are just as good.”

  “What, then?” Nilbod said and threw his hands up, for which his lover fixed him with a glare. “Going to stare at each
other until someone breaks?”

  Oren got up from his seat.

  “I don’t know how after all these years you still have the capacity to surprise, Oren,” Sofis said and reclined in his chair until he could put his foot onto the table. “You quibble over a few foreigners and fungus farmers, but you’ll hand down a Censorian Edict onto your own people with nary a question for it.”

  The Provost of the Fourth Ward reached into the sack he’d hung onto the back of his chair and threw the contents onto the map for all to see. Sofis uttered a strangled sort of cry—more for his map, Oren imagined, than for what sullied it—and the others threw down their chairs trying to get away. The badly decayed corpse of the creature Arnem had pulled from the canal somehow wheezed for air still, glanced all around the room at them with its single and too-human eye. Its tendrils were little more now than vestigial and translucent ephemera hanging from its body. The gills along its fat neck worked weakly at water that was not there until Oren took the waterskin from his belt and shook out just enough to satiate. It took only a moment for the fluid to begin excreting that contaminated the canals.

  Oren took stock of them all, and they did not need to speak for him to know that he was understood.

  ◆◆◆

  The air outside was heavy with more than the impending storm. It was saturated with the memory of the day, and the streets seethed with its phantoms. Oren put thumb and forefinger to his eyes, rubbed the image and the sleep from them. He pulled his pipe from the pocket of his cloak, the leaf from the pouch at his hip. The smoke billowed up toward the lazily twinkling stars and dissipated across their distant formation, as if he could give the heavens an inkling of what the earth endured in their stead. Heaving a great sigh and paying a last look to Sofis’s house, glad that none of the others were quick to follow his exit, Oren set off for the long walk home.