by Holly Lisle
Pain. It flowed into her, its conduits the points on her body where she joined the tree. She didn’t know if she was brave enough to burn the tree again. She didn’t want to hurt like that again, and she didn’t want to die—no matter what the voices in her head told her. Better live than die—it was always better to live than die—
The tree began to burn again, the fire initiated somewhere else, by someone braver, or stronger—or by someone who couldn’t feel the pain. The tree-voices fought in her head while the pain grew. They screamed and cried out, their anguish echoing hers. Agony—she writhed, tossed, squirmed, and lightless fire blazed through her body. She forgot herself, and screamed, and when she did, she threw her head back—
The mass of tree-stuff filled her mouth and her nose and stuck on her open eyes, and stopped her breath.
Her mind swarmed with panicked thoughts. I don’t want to die, and Kirgen, gods I’m going to miss Kirgen, and, with the desperation of a drowning woman, while she drew in all the magic she could hold, Get this stuff AWAY from me!
The result was instantaneous—and impressive. The massed stuff vanished from her nose and her mouth and her eyes, and the tangles that held her lost their grip. Once again she fell to the ground. All around her, she heard the tremendous ripping sound lightning made when it struck a tree and exploded it into splinters. And the lesser darkness of night in the Wen jungle replaced the total darkness of her prison in the tree.
She could breathe. She was free. The frantic babbling voices of the tree were gone from the inside of her head.
She lay on the ground, mostly hidden inside what remained of the tree-stump. Flickering green faeriefires and hell-red magefires cast long, jerky shadows, and threw the Wen, her colleagues, and the hulking, malignant trees into high relief. The noise of the fighting was immediate again—close and terrifying. Wen ran by her, so close she thought they might have touched her. She didn’t know for certain. Her arms and legs wouldn’t move. She couldn’t feel them at all. She could turn her head from side to side, but she was afraid to. If she moved, someone might notice and realize she was still alive. Then they would kill her, and she couldn’t fight back. She couldn’t even tap back into the tree’s power to hold them off. The magic had slipped from her grasp the instant she shattered the tree.
She was helpless.
* * *
Medwind fell to the ground, and drew in a long, shuddering breath. Burn them now, the new voice in her head insisted. Kill the Godtrees. The urgent mindspeech came from whoever or whatever had saved her life.
Yes, she thought. The power was there. And the network of the baofar tree ran farther than she’d suspected. She’d felt the mass and range of the thing when she’d been trapped in its grasp. Now she had an idea of how to kill it. She forced herself to her feet and ran between two of the huge ramets, burning the tentacles when they reached for her. Outside of the circle and out of reach of the tentacles, amid trees that grew in orderly ranks, she sank to her knees and dug her fingers into the soft, moist loam.
She gathered the night’s darkness around her and inhaled through her teeth; soft hissing—the Hoos mantra for quick, deep trancing. She let her eyelids lower, forced the air out. She dug her bare toes into the earth, pulled the air in. Forced the air out and with it visualized her fingers and toes putting out roots and spreading them deep into the ground. Hissed the air in, and pulled after the magic bound into the baofar the way rootlets probed after water. Nothing, nothing, but her rootlets told her the power was close…
Exhale, grow deeper—inhale, pull in the strength—
Exhale—inhale—
She had it! Inhale—deeper, fuller; her lungs were near bursting with air; her body overflowed with magic. She held her concentration and twined the rootlets her mind created into the baofar’s deep-buried, far-reaching, tangled network of roots and ramets. She took in its shape, its extent, the myriad branchings of its form and fixed those paths in glowing traceries in her mind’s eye. She paused—breath caught—shaped the magic into slow-burning magefire that was impossible to put out; that would burn under the ground; that would, eventually, reduce the monstrous baofar to cinders.
She touched the familiar shapes of minds she knew—Faia and Nokar, Thirk’s less familiar thoughtforms, and the mind of the stranger who had saved her life. She couldn’t find any of the rest in the mindnet—but she pushed worry away. Later, later.
Join with me, she whispered into the minds she recognized. Draw strength from the tree you touch and feed it into me.
She felt their surprise, then their elation—and then the incredible surge of magic that flowed into her and almost overwhelmed her. She exhaled slowly, and slowly fed the magic in the form of magefire into the baofar’s roots. She felt the roots catch, and traced the dying of the tree by the blacking out, one by one, of the glowing rootlines drawn in her mind.
She came to the end of her breath, held the magic tightly, inhaled and filled again. The baofar attacked—sent surges of its magic against her. She caught them, changed them, turned them—exhaled. The tree-death spread.
Inhale and fill. Exhale and burn.
In her mind’s eye, the center of the baofar’s root system was gone—a circle of spreading darkness. Inhale. Exhale.
She felt hot. Ignore it. Inhale. Exhale.
One edge of the uneven circle of roots disappeared—the remainder, still glowing behind her half-closed eyelids, looked like a skeletal drawing of the Tide Mother, waning, its cup dipped and spilling fire.
Chill bumps raised on her arms, and the hair stood on the back of her neck. The omen she’d seen that morning—bad omen. She pushed it out of her thoughts.
Inhale. Exhale. Sweat dripped from her hair, along her neck, down her back. Ran off the tip of her nose and down her arms and thighs. The heat became terrible, the world around her changed from darkness to the light of first dawn. In her mind’s eye, the last tiny remnants of the baofar’s roots blinked away to nonexistence.
Dead! The tree was dead.
She hung her head, gasping and exhausted. The backwash of energy escaping from the dead baofar drained the strength out of her. Rest, she thought Gods, I need to rest.
Medwind opened her eyes.
“Oh, farkling gods!” she yelled. Tiny magefires trickled out of the ground all around her. They licked at the bases of the orderly rows of slender ramets and flickered up the giant ramets that formed the heart of the baofar. People screamed. The air was scented with smoke and a few stray ashes that caught in the nose and stung the eyes.
The whole of the keyunu village had been one tree—one overgrown, twisted baofar, with ramets that formed the tree-circle, the houses, the walkways—oh, no—even the paths! she realized. The whole village was starting to burn. And, even though magefire burned slowly, if they didn’t get out soon, Medwind and her colleagues would be trapped in the center of it.
She kept low and ran between the giant, predatory ramets of the baofar. The palps twitched and spasmed as she passed. The movement seemed to her more death-throes than any sign of awareness in the baofar. The Wen ignored her. They beat at the flames, stamped the little blazes with their feet, flapped their robes—they used anything they could get in hand; a few got too close to the fires and ignited into greasy, shrieking human torches.
Meanwhile, her people—where were they? As it died, the baofar was releasing the magic it had trapped. Medwind could feel power again within her reach. She centered and caught it—shielded herself as best she could, and peered into the otherspaces for some sign of Nokar, Faia, Kirgen, or Kirtha, Roba, or Thirk or the tagnu kids.
Faint familiar glows came from inside several intact ramets and from the blasted remains of a trunk on the other side of the circle. Medwind ran to the nearest of the ramets—she could feel Nokar inside it. She shove
d the frenzied Wen out of her way, and when they tried to attack her, blasted them with a bolt of faeriefire. The Wen retreated. As a precaution, she created a shield around herself—just in case they changed their minds. Then she pressed her palms against the tree-mouth, and channeled energy into the closed aperture until the wood burst apart in a shower of splinters.
“Nokar!” she yelled over the riot of noise surrounding her. “Nokar—get out of there!”
She didn’t see him—but she could feel him. Movement caught her attention. A white man-shaped sac glistened in the dim firelight. It was suspended at her eye level and attached to the far wall of the trunk—at the sound of her voice, it writhed and shuddered weakly. Her breath caught in her throat. “Nokar!” she screamed. She recalled the magic the stranger had used to save her life—Dust, she thought. Turn the stuff into dust.
The sac shifted—she could tell Nokar was trying to turn his head toward her, though his features were unrecognizable beneath the coating. He twitched—his body was attached to the tree-wall at belly and knees and feet, palms of hands and chest.
She ran to him, pressed her hands against the tough silk membrane, closed her eyes, and let energy race from her fingertips into the web. Dust, she thought. Become dust. She felt the tingle of magic surging through her and sensed success. Drained, she sagged against the tree-wall.
Flakes and strips of the stuff began to peel away from Nokar. The fibrous bands that attached him to the tree broke one by one. His hands came free, then his feet and legs, and then the band fixed to his belly broke, and he dropped. She blocked his fall with her body, and let him slide to the tree-floor. His head lolled back and forth, and he blew a long, slow breath that sent a stream of white silkflakes out of his mouth into the air.
“Nokar! Up!” she shouted.
His eyes stared at her, unblinking. He didn’t move.
Her lungs ached from the smoke that collected in the confines of the hollow trunk. Every breath burned her. She sobbed, and grabbed the old saje and dragged him out of the baofar ramet. She left him on the ground, but formed a magical shield around him that would keep the Wen away and protect him temporarily from the magefires, then ran to the ramet that held Faia.
When she blasted it open, she found the hill-girl leaning against the inside wall, spitting dust and gasping. Faia had freed herself—though shreds of silk tattered from her bare skin so that she looked like a corpse escaped from its mouldering shroud. Thin trails of blood ran down the girl’s left arm and leg. As Medwind helped her out of the ramet, she saw more blood on the girl’s back.
“Hurts,” Faia said, and sagged against the Hoos mage. She, too, stared blankly in front of her and made no move to protect herself. Medwind dragged her to Nokar’s shield and shoved her inside.
She didn’t know how she was going to get the rest of them out. She was so weak, so close to exhaustion. Thirk was still trapped—Kirgen was, too. And Roba… there was something wrong with Roba. The tagnu kids were safe—Kirtha was with them. She could sense the little cluster of them hiding nearby.
And she was running out of time. The fires were spreading. The tree-path out of the circle already glowed in places with the red gleam of magefire.
Then energy came to her, energy she didn’t have to fight for. She let it flow through her, into the tree that held Kirgen. It was raw power, unshaped, and with it, she split the ramet open at the base—as the power poured through her, the tree kept on splitting. The magic grew stronger as it flowed. Strength added to strength, as small energies within the tree itself combined their magics with Medwind’s and the stranger’s.
She was shocked. She’d thought the baofar completely dead—but there was still some life in it, and at least part of that life was trying to suicide.
The ramet twinned, and the two sundered halves toppled away from each other in slow, graceful arcs that seemed immune to gravity. Both halves hit the ground and bounced and shuddered—one half outside the circle, and one half into the clearing, where it crushed several of the hapless Wen who had not yet fled beneath its huge branches. Flames from the bases of the other trees licked at the downed treetop, and it ignited.
Medwind called a faeriefire to light the interior of the ramet—it was hollow, as the others had been, and full of white, squirming shapes from bottom to top—and she wondered where in that mass of heaving tree-silk Kirgen might be.
The faeriefire appeared—a small, pale green light that flickered into existence in front of her, and moved, at her direction, to the center of the fallen baofar ramet. It cast soft green shadows down into the deep crevasses in the wood and made eerie shadowshapes among the many shifting forms inside. Medwind moved closer, looking for a human form within those oddly mottled bulges of silk.
Then one rounded bulge turned toward the light, and Medwind recognized it for what it was—a human face—eyes blinded by a coating of silk, half-opened mouth filled with rootlets. She could suddenly make out the lines of the body—palp-pierced, silk-coated, child-sized—and saw that it was marked beneath the silk with bands of dark and light. Medwind’s breath caught in her throat. Still alive, she thought. Oh, dear gods, it’s still alive.
Other bulges shifted; turned toward the light as best they could; opened mouths in silent cries. Most were small forms—the Wen were small people—but the bodies in the trees were smaller than any adult. Surely, Medwind thought, they didn’t sacrifice children to their Godtrees.
But the evidence, the hundreds of little forms among bigger bodies grown into that single ramet of the baofar, said otherwise. The wriggling bodies looked like kittens newly born, still wrapped in birthsacs, helpless. When she touched the wood, she could hear their faint, fading mindcries.
<—feel light I/we feel light there was no light no light for so long now (I WANT TO LIVE!) die we can die let us die *save me!*—> they mewled.
Medwind pulled her hand from the wood as if burned. These were the gods of the Wen—these sacrificed children who had spent years, perhaps centuries, in deathless, grisly captivity. And she had nearly joined them.
She moved to the base of the ramet and climbed into the split. She found Kirgen, not completely silk-covered nor grown through with palps and roots as the Wen children were, but suspended from one side of the ramet. His arms were wrapped around another form in a gesture of protection.
Medwind used the stranger’s energy to change the silk covering him and the other form into dust. Kirgen struggled out of the ramet. The other person, who Medwind realized was the tattooed Wen girl, didn’t move.
“She’s dead,” Kirgen said. He leaned against the ramet. “She was dying when they brought her here.”
Medwind hardly heard him. She stared at the twitching bodies in the ramet. Near the base there was one adult-sized body—a body with one gold-banded braid not coated by the silk wrapping.
“A saje. One of Praniksonne’s party,” she whispered. She stared at him. His body was pierced at a dozen key points by tendrils of the ramet. The tendrils grew completely through him, linking his spine and his vital organs directly into the structure of the tree. She tried to imagine changing not only the silk that coated him, but also those linkages, into dust.
He would die instantly, she realized. His heart and kidneys and liver were all punctured, and from the look of him, the tree had laced itself in and out of his spinal column as if it were running a seam. That series of tendrils probably terminated directly in his brain. He was a dead man—then or later. If she released him to speed his death out of misplaced mercy, she was afraid she wouldn’t have the energy she needed to free Thirk and do whatever had to be done for Roba and the tagnu.
The magefires will give them all grace soon, she thought. That will have to be good enough. She turned her back on the saje.
Kirgen was up and moving under his own power. She saw him at the shattered ramet. She moved to the trunk that imprisoned Thirk. Kirgen will take care of Roba, she thought. With the last of her energy, and the last of the stranger’s magic, she blew open the trunk. She ran through the circle of fire; she avoided looking around her beyond what she had to do to find Thirk. She didn’t want to see any more of those pitiful child-shapes.
Once freed, Thirk was groggy and very weak. She hoisted him onto her back and staggered with him to the shielded circle where Nokar lay. The last Wen kept a respectful distance. Couldn’t do a damned thing to save myself at this point, she thought. She bared her teeth at them, and they backed further from her. Lucky, lucky they don’t know that. She pushed inside, and turned back to help Kirgen—but he had Kirtha riding on his shoulders and the tagnu kids trailing at his heels, and he was carrying Roba in his arms.
The Wen didn’t have the respect for Kirgen they had for her. They attacked—and he blasted the attackers into cinders. He trudged through their smoking remains without seeming to notice, and as he got nearer, Medwind could see tear streaks channeling the soot on his face.
Medwind dissolved the shield. Faia was still bleeding, and she looked sick and weak. But the hill-girl crouched over Nokar, fingers rested on his chest, and Medwind could sense the healing magic that ran from her to him. Faia looked up when the shield dropped and brushed her tangled hair from her face. “He’s dying, Medwind. We have to get him out of here.”
Medwind stared around the clearing. The magefires were spreading inexorably. The smoke was chokingly thick; the sky rained ashes. “Yah,” she agreed. “Now would be a good time. Except I don’t know where in the hells to go.”
Through the thick smoke, several small, quick forms approached. One of the smallest ran straight to the exploration party. She was nearly bald, and every visible finger’s breadth of her skin was a mass of intricate, interweaving tattoos. In heavily accented Sropt, she said, “Quick, follow us. We will lead you out of here, but you must take us with you.”