His shadow drew out long across the dwellings on his left, cast by the dome’s prismatic glow and the light of the moons beginning their evening descent. The windows sat dark and silent. Not even a candle burned. The Edict had smothered the life of the city, as it always did. Words would be passed in muted tones, eyes averted and downcast. The Crucible would sit half empty and unused, and he did not know when the craftsmen and merchants would regain the energy to challenge one another to the Judges. The span back to normality seemed to grow longer each time. Oren wondered when the day might come that the span did not end, that the span was the darksome span of forever. The lives along it, brief winks in the black.
An easeful breeze washed through the Tradesmen’s Tier that made his weary thews want all the more for rest. The earth itself desired for the day to be done. And Oren, it soon appeared to him, was not alone with the world in this. The next bend in the road saw him joined by two others, farther ahead, but coming toward him. It was a moment that the Provost felt he had lived before, sickeningly so. The one shambled along at the shoulder of the other. One robed, one in the leathers of a fighting man. His mind reeled. Then his blood went up.
“Ho there, lads,” Oren said and drew his truncheon. “What business does the night find with you?”
An answer did not come. The robed figure dropped his burden to the ground as he had done the night before. The man squirmed at his feet, whimpering in pain and holding his head. The silhouette of his skull moved in the half-light, bubbled like boiling water. Oren tightened and relaxed and tightened again his grip on the handle of his truncheon. He took a step forward, reconsidered.
A thing parted from the other man's robes that ought to have been a weapon, as it certainly could have been nothing else, but was neither. It writhed and flexed, a bulbous creature at the end of his arm. Then Oren remembered in full. The night before the Edict went into effect, the man at the mouth of the smuggling tunnel. But he remembered too late.
Sinuous tongues crossed the gap between them and took hold of his truncheon. Oren felt himself a child being deprived of his favorite toy, such was the strength with which his only weapon was taken from him. It twirled out into the bright dark of the dome beyond the wall. Flight occurred to him no sooner than he was made prostrate, the tendrils entwined now about his ankles. The heat of their touch seeped through his breeks as intimations of the agony if imparted onto raw flesh. They withdrew as the robed man's shadow fell over Oren, protean with the hand’s incessant squirm. The light of the dome crept across his features.
A different kind of shock overtook the Provost then. He knew this man. His face was one that he had seen often on his pilgrimages to the cathedral and, most recently, exiting the Circumspex while he entered to receive his part of the Edict from the Hall of Adjutants. This had been an acolyte of the Matron Sohrabaia, but only a part of that man remained now. The hand guided him. The hand licked at Oren’s cheeks. The hand savored the taste and mewed with expectation. His lips muttered prayers to Utquod that he did not realize he spoke until the man laughed at him.
“We serve the same god,” Yrsted said to the Provost. “May we then inhabit the same form? As he wills?” The snakes of the hand nipped at Oren. “Yes. All will be one. The veil of life shall have nothing to separate, and death shall be no more.”
The tongues slithered about his neck, tightened. They drew him in as they constricted and toward the maw that was cold with the void that lay within. Oren closed his eyes. Then the rush of something massive disturbed the air between them, and he was released.
A shape dark with the feathers of a crow carried the man by its talons through the air and dashed him against the stone of the dwelling opposite the wall. It bent wing and wheeled away and collapsed itself to dive again. But the shape changed as it swept down, caught in a moult of black mist and castoff feathers. A man alighted on the road. Oren saw through the domelit gloom that the feathers remained as a kind of mantle, though no more than that. A staff of gnarled blackened wood was his only other possession. The Provost knew him at once for a Druid.
The newcomer thrust his staff into the empty air before him like a spear and indeed a spear of barbed and naked wood erupted from its striking end. It bit like a serpent at the bald man, snapping down at him and turning aside when it struck uselessly at the stone of the wall behind. The spear thus snaked around for what Oren was sure to be a killing blow, having missed his throat but curling straight away to drive up through the pit of his arm and thus into his heart. But the tongues of Yrsted's hand were quicker. They lashed out and arrested the spear, pulled it between its jaws and snapped off the barbed head.
The Druid had retreated almost to the edge of the wall when Yrsted held the hand out as if offering to make amends. The beaked mouth at its heart opened wider than any mortal creature could pretend. Inside was a deep and cold and starry black, a void without end that began to howl with the voices of all the world’s mad and all the world’s dead. The wind itself shifted and was drawn into its depths. Oren pressed himself against the doorway in which he crouched. His savior fought in vain to resist the pull. He stumbled fatally toward it, his own cries lost in those of the yawning pit.
A twist of the Druid's staff threw the defanged spear away like a dead limb, and another thrust conjured dozens of hands from the stone of the street between them. Their flexile digits arrested the alien hand and the man to whom it belonged. The earth then began to rumble, such that Oren saw pebbles leaping before his eyes in the cracks of the road. An outcropping of rock erupted from between Yrsted's feet and drove deep into his breast. Blood spewed from the wound, poured effusively down the spike and pooled at its roots. The Druid kept his staff leveled on him even so and took a step forward. His caution was rewarded by the scourge of sinew and bone that whipped out from Yrsted's mouth and knocked him aside like a sheet in the wind.
The sound of ripping flesh and snapping bone made Oren retch. He looked to find Yrsted's body tearing itself free from the stone. The tissue that remained to one side of its gaping wound separated, and his body slipped away to the ground. Yrsted caught himself on his hands and then arched backward like a contortionist or street performer. It gave Oren full view of the maw that had been made of his wound. The exposed bone of his ribs and pelvis gnashed like teeth. The tongue that had slapped aside the Druid lashed out a second time to take hold of Meveled and then, walking on all fours like an upturned beast, Yrsted disappeared shrieking into the alleyways nested amid the houses.
The Druid leaned over onto their knees, his shadow rising and falling with the deep breaths he took. Oren got to his feet. His world spun with the motion, still caught on the fulcrum of what he had seen but should not have been. A fluttering part of his mind chased after Meveled, but no more than a part. He took a faltering step toward the figure yet in the distance when it straightened. The Druid stood immensely tall in the moonlight and, but for a raggedy cloak that hung tightly around his shoulders, was unclothed. His approach was almost regal, head raised high on a long neck and staff held close to the breast like a scepter. Oren stood his ground. His legs felt as solid as old trees in uncertain earth, and it shamed him.
“Oren Zados,” the Druid said, his voice a gravelly ruin. “I thank you.”
“Keep your thanks,” the Provost said. “You know me. But my friends are few that can wizard a staff, much less the stone. Speak your name.”
“Your friends are none, and you would not understand if I truly spoke.”
The Druid entered the greater light that surrounded Oren in the open street, the residual effulgence of the dome seeping over the crenellations of the wall, and he retreated from the revelation. There was less of humanity about him than of the many other beasts that comprised his form. No needle had threaded its tattered cloak: Long, crow-black feathers stemmed straight from the skin of its shoulders and arms. His legs terminated in the claws of the sort of beast that roamed the plains outside Sulidhe, and black eyes stared out at Oren from pits set deep
into a hairless skull. A beak clacked and snapped in place of any mouth or nose, as if some cruel god threw the flesh of a man together with that of a hawk. Oren clenched his fists until he was sure the nails would punch through the leather of his gloves and draw blood from his palms.
“Forget what you have seen here tonight. It will do you no good to remember.”
“You’re a Druid,” was all that Oren could manage.
“I am he to whom you owe your life.”
“Never mind my life. What’s a heathen priest doing in the Tradesmen’s? The dome. How did you–”
The druid shook his head and turned from him. “Go home, Provost. See to your boy.”
“My boy?” Oren could not figure what he meant at first. He had no sons. Then he remembered Helyett, then Arnem. “What have you done with him?” He advanced on the Druid’s back, gathering speed like a slow-rolling boulder. “Where is he?”
The Druid matched his advance pace for pace, as if he could see Oren without looking, could see all around him with the watchful eyes of the crows that roosted here and there in the Tradesmen’s Tier. They had reached the edge of the roadway and the beginnings of the wall when Oren grabbed for him, but the Druid was gone. He leapt over the wall without hesitation. Oren drew back from the place where he stood only a moment ago, as if to go further meant he would follow. A shape drew up out of the domelit twilight that hovered over the Midden, beating wings of shadow toward the star-mantled mountains to the west.
Chapter Thirty
A World Best Left to Founder
The letter was such that he could no longer read it. Mud from many roads, the rips and tears of many snatchings out of his hand for inspection, and the elements of every type of storm had warped the script into illegibility. But the seal of the man called Oren Zados, at least, Provost of the Fourth Ward of the Tradesmen’s Tier of Sulidhe, was clear and unspoiled. That symbol, he hoped, was all that would be required of him to pass over the border and into the Urakeen Shelflands and the dominion of the Mageblooded Caste. At the very least, its presentation was sure to distinguish him from the throng that shouted to be admitted through the gates and pressed against the halberds of those who guarded the way.
Even before the world had its way with the Provost’s request, the man who held it then did not find his name addressed in its contents. A request was all that the letter was and forwarded to him by way of the Delver’s Guild. He was considered a member of that loose confederacy of adventurers, thieves, graverobbers, and general miscreants only in the most peripheral terms. For he was none of those things. His name was Eusius Kviter, and he was a monster hunter. He made sure the broach that clasped his cloak, that clasped every Delver’s cloak, was clean and ready to make this known.
“Come along, Stahlzald,” he said to his horse. The pistons of its artificial limbs fired alongside the clop of its natural hooves. The ominous bulk of the caisson groaned forward behind them. “Best to meet whatever this will be and have done.”
He shut his right eye as they approached—choosing the rugged slope that the road ran through rather than the road itself, packed as it was with those petitioning for entry—and touched hand to his left ear. Practiced movements, as embedded in the adroit muscles of his fingers as in his memory, worked the two knobs of the apparatus there. The lenses worked inside the eye to magnify the fortifications that formed a bulwark against unauthorized entry into the nation of Del’Urak.
The crude gate, flanked by a pair of watchtowers, looked newly built. The carefully laid stones, which comprised most of their construction, were unworked and not unlike those which littered the surrounding hills. The wood of the gates and necessary elements of the watchtowers was supplied by freshly cut timbers from the few trees that dotted the landscape. The entirety had suffered weathering from what could not have been more than a few storms, and the confusion that stymied the flow of traffic was evidence enough of what the rest did not suffice: The checkpoint was a recent development and not well taken to. None of this, of course, explained why.
The defenses ended a short distance to either side and could be easily bypassed, but any such trespasser would have to contend with the massive keeps of the Cordon. He could see two such fastnesses, one erected to watch the highway and principal point of entry into the Shelflands and the other far in the eastern distance to act as a forward command post against the trackless wilderness of the Daerian frontier. Both were decayed and decaying further every day in this pale age of man, but his telescoping eye told another separate truth.
Built by the true Magi, in the aftermath of the last Daerian invasion that meant anything, the fortresses of the Cordon gleamed day and night with powerful wards and bristled with towers and turrets and weapons that were obscure beyond their destructive power, even to those whose charge it was to man them. There were cracks in the foundations now; some of the glyphs comprising the wards sputtered or had faded altogether; vast and complex machines were little more than toppled clumps of metal and once-enchanted power cores. But there were still soldiers patrolling the ramparts, manning what was not broken, and Kviter knew that even the waning power of gods was still godly. He had viewed the dread majesty of their predecessors, laced in ancient times throughout the northern mountains. They had been built for similar purpose after the Magi had thrown down the Giants who ruled there, and their offspring in Del’Urak were impressive enough to thrive in their shadow. Those on the road had ample reason not to try their luck with the Cordon, as did he.
There were few among those queued along the road for entry that paid him more than a passing glance, though he circumvented the lot of them. Their eyes were caught between fear of the sword at his hip and awe of the horse and his cargo. Most were muddy and worn out from long days on the highway, with little more than rags to guard against the elements. They were a motley bunch: families traveling together from towns ravaged by banditry or worse; desperates of who fell in with one caravan and then attached themselves to the next with more food to offer; more than a few deserters from whatever new campaign was being waged in Daer, another in a seemingly endless line; and refugees from the same, fleeing the violence and death of their home country for that of its orchestrators. Their languages were many, but he caught his unofficial title in every mouth.
‘Gilderon’, they muttered amid what were more often than not curses or warnings. ‘Yes,’ Kviter wanted to tell them. ‘I come from Gilderon and am a Gilderon. I was reared in Volkeraad, the Machine City, where men are more metal than flesh. Do I have any less business being at this gate than you?’
But he said nothing. He knew enough to say nothing. Instead the Gilderon adjusted the three tiny levers beneath his left ear and, shifting thus the copper plates and irises within the metal canal, deafened himself to the world within reach of his swordarm and brought into earshot the commotion at the gates. He wanted to get some idea of the process before navigating it himself, which questions would be asked and which answers it was best not to give completely, but found a dialogue of a different kind.
“I’m a merchant, not one of these Daerian savages,” a man complained, loud enough for the savages in question to hear. “I keep my own faith in my own way, but it’s not theirs and I’m not some kind of foreign element. Just a merchant! Urakeen, even. Ours is the same country.”
Kviter magnified his vision to locate the petitioner. He found at once his rich silks and long oiled beard and the wise impertinence in his aged and craggy face. A covered wain drawn by two stout horses, almost as stout as Kviter’s own, languished behind him in the mud and drizzle as he flailed his arms and argued with the impassive sentry at the van of the gateguard.
“We do not ask you to convert,” she said to the merchant. “But we do ask that you submit. Just bend the knee, accept the Tendril, and be on your way.”
“I will not!” the man went on. “What is this nonsense, anyway? I’ve been trading along this route since I was old as yourself, from Port Skalder all the way up to Sulidhe
, and there was never any of this at the border before. Not so much as a gate! Now I’ve got to pay respects to some sea god you’ve cooked up? I won’t have it. Let me through.”
Kviter read the tempers on their faces and slowed his pace, let his hand obey the habit of wandering to the hilt of his sword, then stopped entirely when the gates began to open. The pure white of a cassock appeared at the crack of the doors, its wearer as lofty as the threshold itself. A gorget and spaulders of pure silver caught and threw the frail light of the clouded sun and were embossed with imagery that Kviter expected from adherents to a patron of the deep. Their expert craftsmanship, even at a distance and distorted by the telescopic eye, was undeniable and at any other time Kviter would have marveled at them. But his attentions were called elsewhere as the gap between the gates widened. For, stemming from the innards of the armor that covered the shoulders and the collar, tendrils writhed in place of limbs and a bifurcated tongue of flesh riddled with eyes in place of a head.
All of the pomp and resistance went out of the merchant, and he knelt to the ground as the creature bent down to him like two opposing polar fields that could not occupy the same space. Kviter picked up his pace even as he watched, leading Stahlzald quickly ahead and eastward to where the makeshift wall began to taper away. No one was watching him now that waited to be admitted across the border. He doubted even in coming moments whether the archers posted atop the watchtowers would take any notice of him.
Then the merchant spoke, smiling madly as he said to the thing, “you think you see my mind, thraighaondach?”
At once its many tendrils arrested him, pulling him up from his knees and into the air, whereupon he dropped a crystalline sphere to the earth between them. A dense fog erupted in as much time as it took the creature to lay hold of him and now, together with the gateguard and the merchant’s wain, they were enveloped in an impenetrable mist. Certain drifts of this swirling grey began to solidify and take shape until they finally did so. Men and women manifested who were naked but for the whorls of tattoos overtaking their bodies. They keened and hooted their presence before lashing out with crooked knives and wickedly barbed javelins before dispersing again into the threads of mist from which they had embodied themselves.
There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well Page 29