There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  The gateguard who first addressed the merchant burst forth from the outer edges of the cloud and screamed up at the watchtowers, “fog wizards!” The easeful passing a knife promptly cut across her throat, loosing a tide of blood, appearing and disappearing with as much practiced haste. Archers from atop the ramparts loosed arrows into the spot from which the knife sprang but to no effect. The whooping and the screeching carried on unabated, punctuated by the groans of the dying and wounded, the chorus to arterial sprays and metal biting soft flesh. Kviter trusted to luck and urged his horse onward, hoping the rattle and shake of his wagon did not rise above the commotion of battle. The wall neared. He steadily began to eclipse its edge.

  Then his mind fled, chased away by reverberating tides of a language no human throat could give voice to and no human mind could render into intelligible sounds. Each pulse thrummed in his mind and tapered off to whispers only to bear another thunderous cacophony on their heels. His spine radiated like forked lightning. He stumbled once and then again so that he tripped over a stone lodged firmly in the hillside and fell into the mud. Stahlzald went on blindly without him, and Kviter thrashed in the wake of another babbling clamor that also served to disperse the fog around the gatehouse in a shuddering tumult of force.

  The covering of the merchant’s wain had been thrown back and was empty, likely having contained the fog wizards of which the gateguard spoke. The merchant himself struggled in the grip of the creature’s tendrils. His compatriots lay variously in attitudes of agony and death at the threshold of the gates. Dozens of petitioners with the grave misfortune of proximity to the creature were prostrate and paralyzed with the same pain that gripped Kviter. The twisted, gnarled flesh of its head split open with clusters of fine lips that gibbered incessantly until happening upon a choral perfection that sent lingual waves of anguish and confusion over those near enough to hear.

  Kviter fought through the arrest of his nerves brought on by the effect of the creature’s voice and fingered the levers beneath his left ear, depressing all three of them. The world became blissful silence, for which he was thankful and not only to be freed of agony. Screams were as common to him as the voice of the wind in the trees. But the terrible cries, which no mortal wound from any mortal weapon could endow, were of the like that no man ever found easy to hear. The merchant, so-called, was let go from the creature’s tendrils and rose slowly into the air of his own and alongside all his secreted fog wizards. There, as signals to the gathered petitioners to the gateway into Del’Urak, their bodies drifted in slow revolution about the fulcrum of the creature and began to bend. Bones cracked, flesh burst, as they were contorted into crude knots. Only when their screams ceased did the creature let them fall to the earth, so horribly interwoven with themselves as to no longer appear readily human. Silence fell, but was quickly replaced with a new scream.

  “Thraigh,” a voice cried from within the crowds along the road.

  The challenge heralded a bright flare of verdant light that conjured from the road, like an uprooting of the road itself, a spear of brambles that erupted from among those gathered immediately behind the merchant’s wain and scarcely missed the creature that guarded the way. It tore into the eastern watchtower and threw down the fortifications and the archers atop them.

  The battle was joined again, and Kviter did not remain to watch its course. He sprang from the mud and ran to spring atop Stahlzald, who had nearly circumvented the low wall already. A shout rose up that was different from the rest, and an arrow sank into the earth next to him. Another two hit the ground nearer their mark. Kviter raised his right arm and the fourth met the buckler that unfurled from its encasement along his wrist. He was deaf to the high tang of metal on metal as the arrow was deflected uselessly away.

  Briefly he thought about stopping, diving into his armory and returning the favor; but he would soon be at the edge of the range of their bows and little more than a distraction from the Daerians assaulting their fort. Instead he urged Stahlzald on anew toward the horizon. The fastnesses of the Cordon loomed large across its expanse in the full array of their dying beauty, radiating out against the residual sunlight like the children of Sulidhe itself. And yet the brocade of keeps only portended the beginnings of a horror unknown to slayers of beasts and monsters. If he had known, Kviter would perhaps not have chased their light: These had become the gleaming incidences of a world best left to founder before it is saved.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Secret Sorrow of Man

  The falls pounded onto the rocks below, tumbling from such a height that the spray came into their shallow grotto and made the edges dangerously slick. The bow sat astride the knees of the younger man, who struggled to get the fish off the barbed heads of the arrows. The old man looked on at the creatures, trying to remember what holding one felt like. His hands remembered the delicate, slippery scales. The wriggling and the wrestling to get the thing to stop. Those were good meals, had after a hard day’s trek, and he remembered them fondly for a long time. But looking at them now, tasting the air and tasting how it was different, bile rose in his throat. These things were passing away. It sickened him that he had some small and gruesome part in that. The old man had to look away.

  “There used to be no end of fish in this river,” he said. “The paths I drew across country were molded around it. Bears would come down from the mountains in the mist of the morning and break their fast from the waters. They did not know I was watching. I shared my dawns with them. With the other creatures who came to drink and eat of the river. Little harmless scrimdoks, oily aphors that liked to drift in the rapids. I have not seen these things in a long time.” The old man looked at the younger. “How many fish did we catch?” he asked, but he knew the answer. “How do you say goodbye to your world?”

  “Who can say,” the younger man said and worked his knife across the scales of the fish he’d caught. “I’m still thinking how to say goodbye to mine.”

  A branch snapped in the forest that enfolded the cove and the grotto in which they hid. The younger man snatched up the bow and readied an arrow before he realized he had done it. He searched the spaces between the trees for something resembling life. The old man was right. There was so little of life anymore. A part of him spasmed and recoiled from how willing he was to take what life remained out in the woods. But then not all life belonged in the woods. They themselves did not belong in the woods anywhere. That was the secret sorrow of Man. The earth was so tired of him, and the younger man had learned that mystery a long time ago.

  “They’ve been tracking us, you know,” the old man said as the younger man continued to rake the landscape for anything at all. “Three days past I decided on it. But how long before I decided, only they can say.”

  “I had them almost a week ago,” the younger man said and was thankful he could not see the grimace on the old man’s face. He did not want to feel torn apart so early in the day, pulled between the now and the happier safehold of his memory of him. “As you said, how long before. Probably they’re after our food.”

  “I hope they don’t think we have anything to rob. I wish we had something to rob. And enough food for even the two of us.” The old man sat up onto his elbow, coughing up all his strength to do it, and joined the younger man in watching. “Get back to the fish before we starve. I will watch.”

  The younger man finished the fish at which he worked and tossed it among the others on the rock beside him. He spared a glance at the older man, watched his one murky eye as it scanned the treeline on the far side of the cove. The other was a black pit that at one time could have seen into the deepest parts of the forest, searched out the subtlest signs of life. It saw only a little less than the other now. He picked up another fish and set the knife to it.

  “What will you do when they come?” the old man asked, and the younger man stopped scraping again already.

  It was the question he knew would come, as he knew the old man would discover they were being follo
wed, and the question he wanted the least to do with. “I’ll kill them,” he said and resumed hacking at the fish. “What else will I do?”

  “You’re one man,” the old man said. “Do you know how many lone men I’ve seen fend off a pack of brigands and killers? Or worse? You’re not a casterman, much less a wizard. Certainly you’re not Giantkin, we can rule that one out straight away.”

  “You forget how many roads I’ve walked with you. You forget much. I know the wilds.”

  “You know what I’ve taught you.” The younger man felt himself straighten as sure as if the old man smacked him. “And I didn’t teach you to meet foolish battles.”

  “You didn’t teach me to run either.”

  “It’s not running to keep heading in the same direction and a little lighter.”

  “Stop.”

  “I’m a weight that doesn’t need bearing.”

  “I said for you to stop.” The younger man stabbed the knife through the pile of fish, into a crack in the stone beneath. It stood as if it was meant to be there, its shadow a line of division over the corpses of lesser things. “I know what you’re trying to do. So stop.”

  “Anger,” the old man said. “Good and fitting. That’s something like life. You’ll need to find your own soon enough.”

  The younger man heaved a sigh that matched the falls pouring into the cove below, and everything went out of him. He did not want the breath to come back in and waited for it to be gone. There was so much to understand and so little that could now be said and, if said, heard. He grabbed the bow and held it a moment in the silence, feeling its worn and yielding curvature, then stood and made for the edge of the grotto.

  “You can’t keep running from it,” the old man called.

  “How will we cook if we don’t have a fire?” the younger man answered. He lied to keep the peace, but peace is often kept in lies. “How will we eat if we can’t cook?”

  He took hold of the rocks outside and started to climb. The open air and the light spray of the falls felt good. For a moment, the years washed away with the sound of the river tumbling below. He could pretend that nothing ahead expected him and everything lay behind, that whomever reposed in the grotto was just an old friend with only a welcome to greet him and not a choice. He pretended that for once choices didn’t need to be made. He pretended that when he reached the top of the cliff and disappeared into the forest that it would finally be for good.