Wrath-Bearing Tree (A Tournament of Shadows Book Two) Paperback

by James Enge

  It paused again and said, “I am this place. I cannot leave it. And there is another thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I abide by my instructions in addressing all who come in their own language. The problem here is in your language. I do not see that it has the ability to refer to such as me. It constrains me to refer to myself as a self. But in truth, I am not a being who carries out instructions. I am, in fact, merely the instructions of the Keepers, woven into the weft of a talic structure.”

  “You don’t choose. You don’t think.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “All right, then. Take me to the Wheel.”

  The jelly-thing stood and walked straight through the crowd of beast-people as if they weren’t there. They made way for it without fear, without even seeming to notice it or Aloê.

  “Do you keep them alive?” Aloê asked. “Do you run the food-cars, or whatever they are?”

  “Yes, and provide fresh water, and healing, and all that they need.”

  “Why?”

  “I am instructed to do so. Also, their tal is necessary to the maintenance of this place.”

  “This place. That’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you do it for yourself.”

  “I might, if I were a self.”

  “Maybe you are and you don’t know it. Maybe selfhood can grow from the circumstances you find yourself in.”

  “Or maybe I am not a self, and you do not know it. I was instructed to act as a self, to deceive those who could be deceived.”

  “What if you yourself were deceived? That would prove there was someone there inside you, a self who could be tricked.”

  “My instructions tell me to avoid such paradoxes. We are here.”

  The jelly-thing stood still and gestured at a pit in the icelike stone of the street. There was a stair descending in a long spiral down the hole into darkness.

  “Descend to ascend,” it said. “Good-bye.”

  Aloê thought for a moment. It might be she had learned as much as she could, that there was no point in descending. She had no thought of actually ascending the Apotheosis Wheel, but it might be dangerous even to be near it.

  Still! There was knowledge here about how gods were made. Perhaps there was some way to use that knowledge to ward off angry gods, or even unmake them. Perhaps Torlan and Zahkaar had come from this god-factory; perhaps not. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the knowledge, and she wouldn’t get it here contemplating her navel.

  “Good-bye,” she said to her guide, and took the long spiralling stair downward.

  The stones darkened as she descended, from the crystalline clear of the street paving to ebony black at the stair’s end.

  At the bottom of the stair was an empty room. Opposite the stair was an arch, and through the arch was the Apotheosis Wheel.

  It was in use.

  As she stepped through the archway she was struck by a wave of sound and heat and stench and something else—a nonphysical shuddering like flame rippling through her: talic distortions, strong enough to echo in her flesh.

  The sensations were strong enough to knock her down, but she struggled to her feet again and strove to keep order in her mind and body so that she could observe what was happening.

  The Wheel was enormous, almost filling the great graystone chamber that contained it. It was golden, with many spokes, bright and, it seemed, hot. In the center, where the axis was, lay a bound form that screamed and screamed as the Wheel spun. The heat of the Wheel seemed to be cooking or burning the figure like a webwork griddle cooking a sausage. The figure was hard to see clearly, shrinking to mouselike smallness, billowing out under its own smoke like a storm cloud of indefinite shape.

  Here was the former heresiarch, aspirant god, who had killed his oarsmen as a first sacrifice to himself. Was the Wheel killing him or making him into a god? Maybe the processes included each other, or at least overlapped.

  She walked around the Wheel, fascinated in all its blurry details. There was a long basketlike object along the wall in the back of the chamber. She was tempted to investigate it, but didn’t want to interrupt the process of the Wheel—or be drawn into it, either. She might be able to ask the newborn god after it descended from the Wheel, if it ever did, and if it wasn’t so hungry for worship that she didn’t have to fight it to retain her selfhood.

  The Wheel began to slow. She turned from the basket thing to look at the wheel. The being at the center was still indefinite, cloudlike, but somehow still within the blinding golden motion of the Wheel. She thought about arming herself, but decided not to: she would have a better chance at friendly contact without her staff in her hand, she thought.

  There was a sniffling sound behind her.

  She turned back to the basket thing.

  It had raised up from its wickerwork body a tympanum of wet gleaming flesh. A mouthlike opening appeared in the tympanum as she watched and drew air through it: that was the sniffing sound.

  The tympanum was facing her—looking at her, it seemed, or at least sniffing at her.

  She reached over her shoulder for her staff.

  The basket-thing unfolded arms and legs and leapt to its feet.

  She got in one strike on the creature’s outstretched right arm. But its left arm struck her on the side of the head and she fell to the ground. As she lost consciousness, she saw the basket-thing’s chest open up like a mouth. Inside it was a body-shaped cavity. Darkness swept over her before she saw more.

  Morlock was gathering bones on the beach in the red light of evening. He didn’t think there was enough undamaged wood to make a two-person boat, and so his thinking had turned along different lines. In his mind he had sketched out a design for a boat with a small hull, and bony rails or skis on which the craft would ride, skimming along the surface of the water like a skipped stone. (Swimming Morlock avoided whenever he could, but he had skipped many a stone in his time.)

  Of course, the speed of the craft would have to be very high for the skis to work, but Morlock had some ideas about that.

  At the moment he was chiefly seeking shoulder blades from the bleached bones on the sacrificial beach. Many of these had moldered away over the ages, but some were still in usable condition, and Morlock had a fair pile of them before him when his world was completely overturned.

  A beast made of wickerwork vaulted like a porpoise from the sea in front of him. At the top of its arc, it unfolded wings from beneath it and began to fly away.

  As it went, he saw through the basket-surface that it held a prisoner within: Aloê, her dark face slack in unconsciousness, but her arms bound by wickery bonds. Her hand still held the glass staff he had made for her.

  The wicker-beast flew eastward, straight into the red eye of the setting sun.

  Fear, and the rage born of fear, threatened to toppled Morlock’s mind: for a time his rage was redder than the sun. He clenched his shaking hands, unclenched them, clenched them again.

  He fought the rage like an enemy, threw it from him like a slug or a parasite trying to drain his blood.

  There was no time for this. He must go after her. Either she was alive, in which case he could help her, or she was dead, in which case he would have his vengeance. In either case, he must go after her.

  The shaking in his hands receded. He went back to his task. And, bone by grim bone, the boat began to take shape as the sun set and the stars wheeled above.

  What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

  or the son of man, that thou visitest him?

  —Psalm 8

  Aloê woke to an aching head and the blissful knowledge that she was at sea again. She could hear creaking (like ropes, sort of); she felt and smelt the salt breeze of the Sea of Stones.

  Blissful enough simply to be alive, she realized, retracing the steps of her memory. She was captive of the wicker-beast, or whatever it was: she could feel the bonds on her limbs. But she could also feel the comforting smoothness of h
er glass staff in her right hand. She was alive and at sea, and still armed. How bad could it be?

  She opened her eyes and found out.

  Far, far, below her, moonlight glittered on the rough surface of the waves.

  She was not exactly at sea. She was many hundred feet above it.

  “Ugh,” she said, feeling vertigo. A stinging, stinking fluid worked its way up her gullet and tried to force its way out of her.

  She spat and cursed and kept herself from vomiting. Not that vomiting was so bad. But this was a bit of control she could have when almost everything happening to her was out of her power.

  To distract herself, she tried to think about what she knew. She did not know if Morlock knew she had been taken, so she could not count on some crazed Ambrosian rescue mission. No doubt he would try to find her, but it wouldn’t be easy for him. She was on her own.

  The rough water below her told her they were not far from shore. The fact that she was not dead told her that the wicker-beast (or whoever had sent it) didn’t want her killed, at least yet. She would have preferred to do something, but sometimes effective action requires one to wait. She waited, and watched.

  The sun rose abruptly, transforming the world with light. She gasped at the green-blue gilded water below, as she had never seen it. There were shadows deep within it: sea creatures. How enormous they must be if she could see them from this distance. Or maybe it was just their shadows she saw, distorted by the angle of the sun. How she longed to dive into those waters and find out the truth of it.

  But she was bound just as firmly as before. If she fell from this height, it wouldn’t matter whether it was water or stones awaiting her below; she would die either way.

  She waited, and watched.

  They came to the long muddy margin of the sea; the green lips of the land bristled with reeds and wetland trees, hardly a beach to be seen.

  The basket-beast was descending a little; they were closer to the green-brown land than they had been to the sea. Aloê realized anew how terribly fast the basket-beast was flying. If it continued its descent (and it was continuing its descent) and if they crashed into the ground, she would be killed without question in a most horrible way. That was stupid, of course. Whoever had sent the basket-beast had not done so to kill her in such an elaborate way. Unless they were mad. Or the basket-beast was mad . . .

  She fought against the fear creeping through her. There was no point to it, even if everything she feared was true. If these were the last few moments of her life she would use them like a person, not blubbering or wailing. She waited and watched.

  The land below was strangely empty. It didn’t seem infertile; there were the marks of roads, and they passed over at least two cities. But the roads were broken by wild greenery and unused; the cities were smokeless and lifeless. If people could live here, and had lived here, why didn’t they still live here?

  She thought the wickerwork beast was slowing at last, straining the wickery cables it used as muscles to turn its wings as brakes against the air. Aloê watched as well as she could, from her bound perspective: she had designed many a ship, but not for the air; it would be an interesting challenge to fashion an airship, and she used thoughts of this as a distraction from the fear that she was about to be smashed into the ground. The sense of foreboding could not be escaped, but increasingly it didn’t seem to be in her but around her—part of the air they were flying through or the land they were passing over.

  The basket-beast began a long spiral downward. Aloê had the opportunity to see their destination long before they actually arrived. It was like the barn or outbuilding of a farm, but there was no farm nearby; the building was in the middle of a clearing deep in a forest.

  The wicker-beast landed, a little roughly but not hard enough to kill anyone. It wrapped its wings around its midsection again, effectively blinding Aloê. It lumbered for a few moments—evidently into the building, from the change in light—and plonked itself down against a wall. The bonds restricting Aloê loosened and slid away into the wickerwork, and the basket confining her stretched out enough for her to lie down, but the roof was just high enough to allow her to sit up, not stand.

  Aloê couldn’t watch anymore, so she just waited.

  Eventually a girl’s voice said in Wardic, “So you’re here at last.”

  “Are you talking to me,” Aloê asked, in the same language, “or this motile basket here?”

  A long pause. The girl said, “Who or what are you?”

  “I am Aloê Oaij, Vocate to the Graith of Guardians. And you?”

  “I don’t get it,” the girl complained. “I don’t get this at all. Do you mind giving me a little more detail?”

  “Not if you tell me who you are.”

  “Because I really expected you to be Morlock Ambrosius, if you know who that is.”

  “Slightly. Who are you, again?”

  “As far as I know, I don’t have any sister named Aloê. He is a randy dog; we all know that. But until my mother got pregnant he was under a self-set infertility spell. I wonder if—”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Do you always answer a question with a question?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Do I always answer a question with a question?’?”

  “Look, girl, if you want to talk to yourself, that’s fine with me. If you want to talk to me and have me answer, you’d better tell me who you are.”

  Silence. Then, grudgingly, the girl said, “My name is Ambrosia Viviana.”

  “Oh. Any relation to Merlin Ambrosius and, um—”

  “The Lady Nimue Viviana? Yes. I’m their daughters.”

  “Their daughter, you mean. Singular.”

  “Oh, so you know all about it, then? Why are you asking me, if you know so much?”

  “No, but the way grammar works—”

  “Listen, I don’t need grammar lessons from you, Santra.”

  “Who’s Santra?”

  The girl sighed a lonely sigh. “This guy who liked grammar. Never mind about him.”

  “You must be Morlock’s sister, anyway.”

  “A remarkable deduction. Yes, a woman born from the same parents as a man is usually considered that man’s sister. Likewise, the aforesaid man may be considered the woman’s brother. At last we make some progress! Let us continue our search for truth!”

  “Sister, singular? Not ‘sisters’?”

  “Listen,” screamed the girl, “you don’t know anything about it, so just shut up! When I speak, I speak for myself, and that’s it! Got it?”

  Aloê rolled her eyes, and then closed them. It felt wonderful. She leaned against the wickery bonds of her captor’s innards and went to sleep. She heard the girl Ambrosia railing at her a few times, but ignored her. Sleep was good and didn’t shout at you. Sleep good. So tired. Sleep.

  When she awoke considerable time had passed—the ambient light was red, as if it were evening. She wished she could sleep some more. She wasn’t hungry yet but was likely to be soon. And there seemed little to look forward to but more conversation with the bratty Ambrosia.

  Unless she could get out of there.

  The wicker cage she sat in was long, but not wide. She placed her back against one side, her feet against the other. Then, gently, testingly, but firmly, she began to push.

  Green reeds like tentacles extruded from the walls, binding her feet, arms and head.

  She stopped pushing and went limp. After a moment, the reeds withdrew and left her free.

  “All right, you bastard,” she said to the wickerwork beast. “But that’s not the end of this.”

  “Who’s there?” asked a woman’s voice. “Do we have a new arrival?”

  Aloê thought for a second before answering. But it really didn’t sound as if it could be Ambrosia’s voice. It was deeper, indefinably older.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I am Aloê Oaij, Vocate to the Graith of Guardians. I guess you didn’t hear me come in ea
rlier.”

  “No, I was . . . sleeping, I suppose. I’m Elpis. Or you might call me Hope—Hope Nimuelle.”

  “Oh? Another daughter of the Lady Nimue?”

  “And the Summoner Merlin Ambrosius. Mother isn’t strictly speaking a lady, as I understand the term.”

  “Nor is Merlin any longer a summoner. Strictly speaking.”

  Hope laughed. “True enough. I don’t think he makes the claim himself—anyway, I’ve never heard him do so.”

  Aloê was intrigued. Hope seemed much more conversable than her bratty sister. “Then why do you make it for him, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  There was a long pause, and Aloê was beginning to worry that she’d pushed her new acquaintance too far, when Hope answered, “A kind of nostalgia, I suppose, for a life that I never had. Exiles dream about the Wardlands, you know, and so do their descendants, to the last generation, it seems. Some portion of the Coranian religion is based on it. I’ve often walked in dreams from Tower Ambrose down to the ruined wall at the edge of A Thousand Towers, where the Station Chamber of the Graith stands over the River Ruleijn. We live the life we are given, of course, but I think I would have preferred that other life, the one I was not given, to live in the peace and music and learning of the Wardlands.”

  Aloê felt a pang of guilt. She, after all, and her comrades on the Graith of Guardians, were the reason why this apparently gentle and reasonable woman could not go to the place where she felt she belonged. “Well, if it’s music you want . . . I can sing a bit,” she offered.

  Hope laughed a warm generous laugh. “We may have time to put that to the test.”

  Aloê didn’t like the sound of that. “Oh? How long have you been prisoner here?” Or was Hope a prisoner? Until she spoke her question, Aloê had never even doubted it.

  Hope sighed. “My affliction makes it hard to trace the passage of time. Some months, at least, though.”

  Months? This did not sound good. “God Avenger! Are you trapped in a sort of basket, too?”