Wrath-Bearing Tree

by James Enge

  “Um. Ambrosia. I can’t sit comfortably in a burning house.”

  “What? Oh. Oh. Of course not. Sorry, Aloê; I was forgetting you’re not one of us.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Listen, I said I was sorry!”

  “And I said, ‘Thanks’ and I meant it. Calm down, honey; we’ll think of something.”

  They listened for sounds from the next room. There was a kind of wet crack, and Merlin made a kind of clucking sound.

  “It got him,” Ambrosia said glumly. “I guess the fire didn’t work.”

  “One bone, Ambrosius,” the dead throats chanted in the other room. “One bone I will break for every time your bells made me cower.”

  Aloê speculated on how many times that had happened, over the months Merlin had been travelling with his bodyguard of demons. From the look in Ambrosia’s wide worried eyes, she was making the same calculation. Hundreds of times? How many bones were there in the human body? Would the demon double up when it ran out of bones to break?

  Another crack, and a gargling sound from the old man’s throat.

  Ambrosia’s expression was now getting frantic. As for Aloê, she was sickened . . . but she remembered the crypt in the graveyard, and the empty faces of the townfolk whose souls had fed the demons, and she was disinclined to risk her safety for the sake of Merlin’s.

  Still, their turn might come next.

  A door slammed open in the next room, and the winter wind howled through it.

  Someone took a long single stride into the smithy.

  “Put the old man down,” said the newcomer. “I would have words with him.”

  “The old man has spoken his last words,” the eight dead throats of Andhrakar replied. “Leave him to the pain he has earned, and you will earn no pain for yourself.”

  “Eh,” said the newcomer, and drew his sword.

  Ambrosia was staring at Aloê in wild surmise. Aloê said, “Let’s go meet your brother, honey. He’ll need us in half a hot second, or I’m very much mistaken.”

  “Right!” shouted Ambrosia.

  Aloê seized the door handle and pushed on it.

  It rattled but did not move. The harthrangs had barred it from the other side.

  “We thought we locked them out,” Aloê observed wryly. “But we really locked ourselves in.”

  Morlock had been running for days before he caught sight of the burning building. At first he passed through settled lands, where he could acquire food and gear for the road for some scattered hours of work. As he came closer to the source of the talic wave, settlements were scarcer, and then vanished entirely. He sometimes saw fragments of walls and houses, but no people, no animals or birds. The trees were all dead. He noted all this, and thought about it as he ran. When he could not run any longer, he walked. He slept as little as he could.

  His course, after all, was clear. He would run toward this thing that he hated and dreaded, in the hope that it masked the person he loved.

  Then: the eucatastrophe. He awoke one night to a soaring feeling that everything would be all right, that the world had been healed of a terrible wound. The absence of dread and terror was exhilarating, disorienting—like drunkenness.

  Finally he realized: the talic wave was gone. And that was a disaster. He had been assuming that Aloê had been carried eastward because the source of the talic wave was there. Now he had no guide, no way to find her.

  Still, he smiled to himself. “They got more than they bargained for, I guess,” he remarked to the dead land, the moonless night.

  He risked ascending into vision, hoping to see something to give him guidance.

  And he did. To the west and north—far away, but too near for comfort, were the grinding, hate-filled avatars of the Two Powers.

  And there was something nearer at hand that he had seen/felt before: the flaring convulsed talic imprint of a choir of demons. It was due west of him, but moving south rapidly.

  He returned to himself to find his body half buried in snow. He shook loose from the deadly white cocoon and slogged through the storm. Not toward the thing he had seen, but south of that, tracing a line in his mind on an imaginary map of the world. Somewhere on that line, he would meet someone he knew, or so he guessed. It was all he had to go on.

  When day came, so did a sign of hope: a shelter made of wood and clay, with a fire burning in its heart.

  No one was there. But he could sense Aloê’s presence. She had been here; he was sure of it. He slept a couple hours in a heap of dried grass, and dreamed they were wrapped in each other’s arms.

  When he awoke he broke up the shelter into sticks, wove twine from the dried grass, and made snowshoes for himself. He went faster after that. He was heartened to see snowshoe-tracks leading away from the shelter, and followed them.

  He was not surprised to see two sets of them. The snow shelter had been cunningly made by experienced hands. He had all the respect in the world for Aloê’s cunning, but making snow shelters was not a skill she would have acquired in the Southhold.

  He saw the snowshoe tracks joined by sleigh tracks and then disappear.

  A tracker he was not. But the imprints clearly told him the sleigh was drawn not by animals, but by things wearing snowshoes. Men.

  “Or harthrangs,” he remarked to the brilliant blue-and-white day, and ran on.

  His guess was confirmed when he came across a corpse lying beside the sleigh tracks. Its skull had been shattered, and the brains were scattered in a pinkish gray splash along the nearby snow. The corpse was void of any kind of life, but it bore the talic stress of recent occupation by a demon.

  He ran on grimly in the sleigh’s wake.

  At last he came to a dead town, not too far from the warm embrace of the sea. He unbound his feet from the snowshoes and approached cautiously, loosening Armageddon in its sheath.

  In the center of town was a building with a fire in it. But he went first into one of the dark houses.

  Lying prone on the floor were a man, a woman, and three children. Two of the children were dead as stones. The other bodies were still breathing, but they bore the talic imprint of lettuce: their rational souls had been eaten from within.

  Morlock left the house with its door open behind him and crept closer to the occupied building in the dead town’s heart. A smithy, almost certainly: that great central chimney was for some kind of furnace or forge, anyway.

  There was not only a fire in the building, he saw. It was on fire. There was smoke leaking from the roof away from the chimney.

  He had a dreadful feeling he had come too late. He kicked open the door and stepped in.

  Eight harthrangs stood in various places about the room. There were three beds, one of which was on fire. And one of the harthrangs was holding an old man by the neck and carefully, deliberately, breaking his arm.

  Morlock had never seen the old man before, in a way, but he knew his features well. It was his ruthen father, Merlin Ambrosius.

  “Put the old man down,” said Morlock. “I would have words with him.”

  “The old man has spoken his last words,” the eight dead throats replied in chorus. “Leave him to the pain he has earned, and you will earn no pain for yourself.”

  “Eh,” said Morlock, and drew his sword.

  “I will kill the old man, and you will have no words with him,” the eight dead throats spoke in chorus.

  “I was never that fond of him,” Morlock said. Partly he was bluffing. But he also felt the shape of his world changing when he noticed that the door to an inner room had been barred shut and someone was rattling it from the other side. There might be many people with the reckless courage it would take to force their way into a roomful of demon-possessed corpses. There might be many, yes. But he knew only of one.

  The harthrangs rushed at him, their hands weaponless, hoping to bear him down with their numbers.

  He took a long leap back across the threshold so that they would have to come at him singly. He stood in the
dark wintry wind, facing the light and warmth filled with demons, and waited through the long seconds he must wait.

  The bodies of the harthrangs were well-matched in size and strength (the better to pull a sleigh or row a galley together, he supposed). But they were coming from different parts of the room, and they arrived at different moments. When the first harthrang stood framed in the doorway, Morlock kicked him with one foot high on the chest. The harthrang tumbled backward, its hands flailing for purchase that was not to be found. Morlock leapt atop it, landing with both feet atop the harthrang’s head. It crunched under his heels like a gigantic bug.

  The corpse began to convulse desperately. Harthrangs did not feel pain, so Lernaion and the sages of New Moorhope had taught him. But they hated to lose the cruel pleasures of a stolen body. He stabbed the corpse in the neck. The dead heart of a corpse did not make fresh blood, as a living one does, and without blood not even the pseudolife of the second death can be maintained. This, too, was wisdom from New Moorhope.

  But the convulsing corpse threw him to the floor, sprawling in the middle of a cluster of harthrangs. He leaned into the roll and tumbled past them on the cluttered floor of the smithy. He jumped to his feet and ran to the other side of the room, where he saw another door open to the chill white night.

  He ran through it and took his stand outside the second door, waiting again for the harthrangs to form up and attack. There would be one less, now. And they were armed. He saw five grabbing up iron implements from the smithy: tongs, shovels, a string of horseshoes. The sixth stood in the center of the room, watching the fight, holding Merlin (whose face marked him as unconscious or dead). There was something there worth thinking about, but a more urgent matter suddenly occurred to him.

  There had been at least eight harthrangs in the room when he arrived. There were now seven. Where was the other one?

  And this door had been standing open.

  Morlock turned left, not quite in the nick of time, to confront the missing harthrang. Before he was set to strike with Armageddon, it had gripped his sword arm with one dead hand and his throat with the other. The dark world began to get darker.

  Morlock took a wrestler’s stance, gripped the harthrang under the right armpit with his left hand, and threw it with all his strength rightward, toward the open door.

  It lost its footing and its grip on his throat, but not its hold on his arm. The body fell across the threshold of the open door.

  With one eye on the approaching crowd of corpses, Morlock dragged the fallen harthrang partly back over the threshold and, using his free hand, slammed the door shut against its neck. It began the flail and kick at him. He put his left and lower shoulder against the door, set his feet in the hard snow-covered ground, and began to force the door shut against the harthrang’s neck.

  Letting go of his arm, the trapped harthrang kicked and punched and threw itself about. It wasn’t giving up easily. Plus, its fellow corpses were now pounding and pushing at the door from the other side.

  The door vibrated with a solid chunk, and the shining edge of an axe-blade was protruding through its surface, about a thumb’s width from Morlock’s straining shoulder. It disappeared. Morlock knew it would be back soon.

  Morlock pondered various unpleasant alternatives when suddenly came a sound he had been dreading: splintering wood.

  But it wasn’t his door that was splintering. Two new pair of footfalls stormed into the room inside.

  “Hey, Morlock!” joyously shouted a voice he seemed to know, but didn’t quite recognize. “Save some for us— Hey, where is he?”

  “Door,” said the most glorious voice in any world.

  As if it had heard, the door suddenly ceased to press on Morlock’s shoulder as hard as it had been. Most of the harthrangs had turned away: toward her.

  He stabbed Armageddon into the heart of the fallen harthrang and twisted the point once it was set, so that the corpse would bleed out faster. Then he threw the door open.

  One harthrang remained on the threshold within, the axe-bearer. Morlock thrust instantly at its neck, but it was ware of him and parried with the axe. It tried to trap Armageddon between the axe and the doorpost. Morlock slashed down and cut at the axe-wielder’s right knee. By the time the harthrang realized what he was doing and desperately slashed at him with the axe, it was falling aslant in the doorway; the axe buried itself in the hinges of the door.

  Over the slumping harthrang, Morlock saw Aloê and a young woman (or older girl) in fierce combat with a crowd of demon-haunted corpses. Aloê was dealing her glass staff with deadly efficiency—or it would have been, if her opponents weren’t already dead. The crowd of them didn’t give her time to spin it and build up an impulse charge. The younger woman had a two-pronged hay-fork in her hands and was using it with enthusiastic skill as a spear.

  Then the maiden unleashed the most dangerous weapon in the conflict: her voice. She screamed, in a prolonged and precisely ululating wail, “AN-DHRA-KA-A-A-AR!”

  The harthrangs were disoriented—one could almost say dismayed. Morlock was fascinated. He risked ascending to the lowest level of vision. It lost him considerable mobility, but he thought it was worth it to understand what was happening.

  And it was. The girl’s intention, woven into the pitch of her scream, set up a kind of ripple at the border between matter and tal. It distressed the demon inhabiting the corpses.

  The girl ran out of breath and the scream ended, but the memory of it lingered in Morlock’s mind. If he could project the same effect, using the talic lattice of his sword as a focus . . .

  Morlock began to sing—a single vowel, sliding up and down the scale until he found the perfect painful pitch. As important was the intention—a specific stutter of tal-cloaked rage . . . or maybe it was more like laughter. Morlock sang the note and projected the intention through Armageddon.

  The slumping harthrang in the door ceased its vain struggle to release the axe from the doorpost and fell backward, struggling to escape the deadly song.

  Now Aloê and the maiden had joined in. All the harthrangs were retreating toward the one holding Merlin.

  Even in his light trance, Morlock could see the flaring webwork of demonic tal spreading out from that one harthrang to all the others. That corpse, the one holding Merlin, was the material anchor of the demon controlling all these undead.

  The harthrangs fell, all but the one at the center of the talic web. That one lifted Merlin high in both hands. It seemed to be about to break Merlin’s back. Then, no doubt, it would flee—to eat other souls, ruin other lives elsewhere.

  On impulse, Morlock threw Armageddon like a spear. It passed just under Merlin’s slack body, through the harthrang’s chest.

  “Noddegamra!” shouted Morlock, and the sword burst into fragments, slaying the undead body.

  “Armageddon!” he shouted.

  Spattered with thick cold blood but glowing with demonic life, the sword flew back to Morlock’s hand.

  “Got you,” Morlock snarled, and drove the blade deep into the earthen floor of the smithy.

  He looked up, and in the next instant Aloê was in his arms. All the pain and grief and loneliness in the world ended then forever, at least for a little while.

  “If you guys are done,” the girl said tentatively, after the first flurry of kissing had subsided and Aloê and Morlock were gazing at each other in great and incredulous content.

  “Oh!” Aloê said. “I forgot! Your sisters is here.”

  Morlock looked more closely at her. Was she disoriented? It was unlike Aloê to make so odd a mistake.

  But the girl was looking at him with a kind of hurt yearning, and he said, “You would be Ambrosia Viviana, I expect. It’s good to meet you at last. Is Hope here?”

  “Everybody asks me about Hope!” the girl shouted, in sudden inexplicable fury. “What am I, her housekeeper? ‘Oh, you, here’s a message for Hope.’ ‘Thanks person-who-doesn’t-give-a-fractional-damn-about-me! I’ll deliver it f
irst thing!’ Like that! Only all the time!”

  “What,” asked Morlock, “are you talking about?”

  “It’s a touchy subject,” Aloê said, glancing at him with an odd look—both concern and relief. “Hope is . . . is safe at the moment. Will you accept that?”

  Morlock nodded. Aloê said it; of course he would accept it.

  The girl was standing closer now, tears in her eyes. “Look. I’m sorry. I’m a—”

  He put a hand on her right shoulder. Like his, it was higher than the left. Her face looked a little like his, too. That was no good luck for her, he was afraid. “It’s all right,” he said.

  Then she was hanging on to him desperately. “I’ve missed you so long!” she sobbed, this girl he had never met before. “Ever since I knew you existed. I said, I said, ‘Someday, we’ll meet. And there will be someone else. Someone who understands. And everything will be all right. And now. And now. Here you are. And everything is all right. You say it is, and it is. It is! It is!”

  Morlock looked over her crooked shoulders at the burning room, littered with corpses, centered on the broken body of their ruthen father.

  Aloê hugged her from the other side. “That’s right, honey,” she said, meeting Morlock’s eyes with a sad smile. “Everything’s all right now.”

  Every storm subsides in time, and the violent ones pass soonest. After a while, Ambrosia was snorking back snot and wiping the tears off her face with her sleeve.

  “Hey, we’d better do something about that demon,” she said, pointing at Armageddon.

  The glowing glass blade was showing cracks that widened, narrowed, widened again. It was oddly like teeth champing.

  “Eh,” said Morlock. “I hoped that had ended the matter.”

  “Nope. It was a good idea, though. The angularity of the crystal lattices has a confining effect on the demonic tal, but the bonds need to be strengthened, more lattices added. Maybe they should be Moebius-ed together, if we can work out the geometry.”

  Aloê was smiling significantly at Morlock, as if to say, Now it’s your turn, friend.