There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  "Come forth, come forth," the cowled man said as he turned to face the gathered crowds, voice graveled with age and beleaguered with the same. "Extra water ration today. Let this godsforsaken rain be good for something." A mixture of cheer and obscene relief moved across the crowds of water-petitioners in waves, such that they surged forth even in the presence of the behemoth of vicissitudinous flesh. "But stay your need! You filth. I'll not hesitate a moment to set the gol'yem on you."

  Buckets, pots, pans, bladders, anything at all that would hold any amount of water were held out like talismans over heads and in outstretched arms while the cowled man's subordinates fought to rein in the gol'yem from carrying out its intended purpose. The Stormcrows, who watched from the safety of a nearby alley, knew that bloody havoc would fill the day if even one of them let slip their chain. The cowled man, bothered as if by no more than rascals and indolent children, turned grumbling to the stout walls of the cistern and went along them with his torch and crystal. Again and again, he shined the refracted rosen light against the worn and grime-covered glyphs that were cut into the ancient metal. The antique characters brightened and fizzled and died, but the cowled man went on and on in studious attempts until all of them remained alight. Then began the rumbling.

  Four great pipes set into the base of the curvature of the Cistern's outer shell roared forth with life-giving water and the crowds did the same in pursuit of it. The slight basin surrounding the structure, created from the passing of so many prior assemblies, filled easily with the brackish rainwater and overflowed. Men and women fought and abused each other for the choicest spots near the fonts. Even the children were not spared, those who were near enough to full-grown that they could be of use to their parents. And amid them all, barely restrained, the gol'yem thrashed the air and water with its many dozens of screaming limbs.

  "Fucking fools," Quarr grumbled. "Use a fucking raincatch."

  "Not everybody's got the roof space," Muro said. "And them that do, how many's got the silvershot to pay us for the right?"

  "Or the next gang over," Dura said from her perch upon a tree branch that bridged the gap between the alley's broken masonry. "And we charge less than they do."

  "What," Quarr said and looked back at them as the chaos unfolded before the cistern. A perfect parody of the moments before the brawl with Segved's Crowbills began. "Are you fucking community men now?"

  "Merely explaining the realities, my fat chum."

  "Aye," Quarr said and delicately laid a hand to one of the vines that hung down into their cramped conference space. "You've a smart mouth, Dura. But you're none too bright."

  He tugged violently on the vine with both hands and heaved the branch, with Dura on it, downward. Dura caught herself and had almost scrambled back into the tree, thence probably up the wall and out of sight, but then Quarr let go. She was launched skyward and came crashing down at the other Stormcrows' feet, whereupon their lieutenant laid hold of her. A knife slid from its sheath. Kurr and Burr looked between themselves, and Muro fought with himself over what to do. There were three of them and only one of Quarr, but the fear he held in his closed fist was palpable. They felt it often enough. Confusion and then desperate fright passed over Dura's face. But Quarr had not even brought the edge to her throat, for whatever his purposes were, before a stone cracked against his skull and he went sprawling too.

  "Quarr, sometimes you're as useful as a stump." The boots of the speaker stamped down the rough stone and undergrowth of the deeper alley, clothed in shadow. The Stormcrows squinted into the dark, Quarr through his wavering vision, to find him. "The rest of the time, it's only because you're stubborn as one."

  "Verem," Muro shouted when the man finally stepped into the frail light eking into the alley from the Cistern's courtyard.

  "And Arnem," Kurr and Burr were both quick to follow.

  At sight of the boy, Quarr bristled as if he were the one to career the rock into his head. When he tried to stand, he fell again and the twins had to help him up. Dura promptly climbed out of reach and away from any mechanism by which the big man could arrest her again. Verem crossed his arms, surveyed his gallery of rogues, and sighed heavily through his nose. His men came out underneath whatever quarrel had given them their scuffs and wounds and bruises. He thought he knew them better, trained them better, and likely he had done so. A talk, with Quarr, was in order.

  "A simple job," he said to them all, but kept watch on the barrel of a man. "That's what you owe me for getting yourselves caught in such a stupid trap."

  Chapter Five

  A Game of Fates

  "A gol'yem!" Arnem cried. The boy had to be kept from running out into the midst of the Cistern's petitioners by the Echoes, posted to keep watch over the alley's ingress. “I've never seen one so close.”

  "Something is wrong," Quarr said to Verem and took a swig from his wineskin, pointed a shaky finger at the boy, "with your cousin."

  "Don't worry about little Arnem," his captain told him. "Not yet at least." He turned to face the others. "Gather round, gather round. That means you, cousin."

  Kurr and Burr pried the boy away from his fixation on the gol'yem and rejoined their fellow Stormcrows deeper in the shadows of the alley.

  "What do you mean not yet?" Quarr grumbled. "And what's this about a job?"

  "Arnem," the boy's cousin said. "If you'd like to begin."

  Arn shook off the twins' grip and composed himself. “Have you seen any activity lately? Stranger than normal. More than strange.”

  “Any activity.” Verem grinned down at him and then around at his fellows. Arnem had seen that same smile many times and, when he was grown, wanted it to be his. And he wanted friends of his own to charm with it. “Do you hear that, boys?” he went on. “Any activity! All official-like.”

  “Why've you got to go and embarrass me?” Arn whispered to him, as if the others were not near enough to hear. Perhaps, beneath the rain and the clamor of the Cistern, they did not. “They think small of me as it is.”

  “Alright, alright. Quiet down. There's always 'activity' down here. I don't know why you bother asking."

  The boy rolled his eyes. "There's been killings," he said, painfully aware that he was a child and these were men and the question of why they should listen to him. "The kind that don't make sense. Nothing taken. Hacked at, but not eaten. So I'm asking: Have you seen anything? Anybody who did something like this?"

  "This is the Midden, boy." Quarr spat blood and dabbed at the cut above his brow that Verem's stone had made. "Deaders might be an uncommon sight up in the Tier, but not down here. I'm sorry to cut off your investigation. Now's not the time. We got Segved breathing down our necks, a plague starting. What would you know about that, boy?"

  "Verem," Arn whispered through his teeth. "Tell them."

  "Young Arnem's got us bound for the Witherwood," the young rogue said and crossed his arms.

  Quarr’s face screwed up at the revelation as it never had for a fist."Fucking what?"

  "I told you what I'm owed for your getting thrashed. A jaunt through the Witherwood might serve to keep your enterprising instincts in check."

  “What are we to do?” Kurr and Burr said, one after the other.

  “You heard right!” Verem cast a stern eye on them, but wore a smile when he glanced back at Arnem. “My cousin's got his business as we've got ours. And we're to help him do it. It ain't just any deaders he's found. My trust on that is vouchsafed.”

  “We've got protection to collect,” Quarr said and pulled his cowl up against the thickening downpour, looking to the boy then like a rain-drenched mountain of leather, muscled fat, and ale. “Not to mention it's almost nightfall.”

  “It'll wait, won't it,” said the Hawkfaced. “How often have we got a chance to see the black forests?”

  “Little and that's just as well!”

  Dura appeared from behind Quarr’s big shoulders to pull his hood down over his eyes, winked at the boy and then disappeared before th
e big man could throw it off. When Arnem saw her again, she had climbed onto an overgrown trellis that covered the wall behind him and clung there like some outsized ape.

  “Don't be such a rube,” she said from her new vantage.

  The barrel of a man shook his fists at her. “Quit your games and I'll show you a rube!”

  Dura only bit her thumb at him.

  "All of you shut up. If I wanted to be a father, I'd have done," Verem said. The Stormcrows snapped to at their captain's reprimand. "Quarr is right about one thing."

  "Even a stone faces the sun once a day," Dura whispered down to Muro, and the Hawkfaced sniggered.

  Verem silenced them with a quick glance. "It's getting on, and I don't want to get caught anywhere close to the Wood when night comes. So," he said and grabbed one of the many vines that hung down from the ruined promontories above, cast his eyes up into the rain. "We'll take the high road."

  The Stormcrows watched as their captain shot up the creeper vine quick enough that even Dura, the best climber among them, struggled to match his pace. The rest followed suit with their own vines or the ivy latticing the edifices enfolding them, the stone itself where there were holds enough. It was a kind of rite, each year, to see who would attempt the highways that the growing world had made above their heads. Only thieves and scoundrels did so, and it was as though they walked the threads of fate instead of the earth's. Some fell or were pushed and left the corpses Arnem found every summer, sometimes of children like himself. Others he did not find, but followed the trails of blood to where the masters of the night had disposed of them. That was a fate of another kind, just as the boy had his own.

  Indeed, Middener life was a game of fates. Their frayed ends were all around him. Hundreds of lives, brilliant with terrible possibility, snipped well short of their fullness. The motes of their termination were almost manifest to him in the night, haunted him and his own imagined path. He worried then, as he worried always, that these motes would one day be his own. That today might be that day, that his gravemarker would decay through an endless night in the Witherwood—and the world would forget his memory before he had ever lived it.

  Soon only Arnem remained in the alley below and with Dob as his only company. "You have to stay here if I'm to follow them," he said to the beast, grumbling and whining. "I'll be back soon enough! Don't worry. It's almost night and I'm not stupid. Go back home and wait for me there." Dob huffed at him, gave his face a rough lick, and trotted off toward the alley's end that gave out onto the Cistern's courtyard. "Not that way," he called after it. "Our home round these parts. It's been a while, I know; but you remember the way. Don't you?"

  And the beast did. Dob sprang away with the simple enthusiasm of simple creatures, bound for the places that only he and the boy knew. For himself, Arnem grabbed hold of the same vine that his cousin had and did what he could to match Verem's vigor. A quiet frustration built in him with each grasp and pull, the seepage of the hatred he stowed within himself and against himself: He was not yet as great as those who occupied the plinths of his soul. Every stroke upward seemed to put him farther from where he thought he wanted to be, just as every flourish of Verem's blade made more pitiful his blundering with whatever makeshift weapon he had managed to dig up. Arnem drew his own portrait with these carefully laden sores. They would fester for as long as it took for him to become what it was in his mind to become, and though the boy himself did not know this, Verem could see it in him. He only hoped that the disease did not take hold of Arnem before his young cousin had discovered the antidote for himself. It was a hard going back from that precipice.

  When Arnem finished his climb, navigating the transition between vine and tree and ruin with ease, he joined the others atop the leaning column of a fallen spire. Its pinnacle, once numbering among the many dreaming-towers of the Druidic Cults' hierophants, rested against the behemoth obelisks and steppes of an ancient temple. The tower was an old route for them, known to many and by ever-changing informalities, but most often just as The Strait. Its span delivered travelers from one end of the Midden to the other in half as much time as it took by road and with less trouble. By the same token, the makeshift highway was highly sought after by any gang who stood to profit from the expediency by way of tolls. Tolls that the gangs not in control of the span often refused to pay, making good grounds for a skirmish if not all out war. Its secondary function as a staging area, from which to launch expeditions anywhere in the Midden, was prized for this expressly bloody purpose.

  The Stormcrows were its holders for now and for three seasons had gone unchallenged. Their streak was impressive, but not uncommon. Other gangs had held it for longer, most for not more than a few dozen turnings. And yet not half these capitulations were extracted by force: The Strand was vacated as often as it was won. The scoundrels set to watch its passage, even rotated out as they were, could not stand for long the sickly whispering light of the Vertebrae suspended in the air above them.

  The vast knurls of bone twirled sluggishly overhead even now and pressed the weight of their glow down onto the shoulders of Verem and his men. The desire to fathom their origin was never kindled in them. It was enough to know that the ancient Magi drew out and ensorcelled the spine of a conquered god as a monument to their triumph in the Last Siege—a reminder to all creatures for all coming time the futility in struggling against their yoke.

  Below the Vertebrae and the Strait the Midden stretched out in all directions like a carpet of sordid confusion, coming to ends in some fashion at the curvature of one stretch of wall or another. The Stormcrows’ fellow Middeners went about as spots of soot and mud and soiled tatters, along wooden walkways lashed onto the ruins, barges floating down streets turned to rivers, and did business with one another where the light of day allowed. Amid the tumult of persistent life, the canals glimmered dully where the Stormcrows could see the fetid waters. The murk flowed in a vast and ancient network of perfect geometry, unerringly into the dense gloom and mystery of the Witherwood. Its pitiful stretches of withered forest crouched beneath the obscene bulk of Sulidhe's outer wall, curving inward over the Midden like an uncompleted dome or a black wave frozen forever in time, casting everything below into shadow. The black and stunted things that grew therein, growing forever and in vain toward the faraway sun, reminded Arnem of claws reaching for succor.

  “Canal’s end is on the other side, boyos. Bodies too,” Verem said and pointed to the infrastructure in question. The Stormcrows all studied the twisted boughs in the distance as if at any moment the poisoned trees would advance upon the settled parts of the Midden, hordes of dark things filled with terrible vengeance. Verem nudged the boy. “You know it might just be the cults and their Bloodbriars," he said. "Not everything's a beastie.”

  “If anything,” Kurr and Burr muttered.

  “Stow it, you Echoes,” Muro said.

  “Are you sure you want to go down there?” Verem asked.

  Arnem shrugged. “Someone's got to.”

  “That don't mean it's got to be you. There's hired men for this type of work. Folk they call up to take care of these things.”

  “No one's got the silvershot that cares,” the boy said. “Are you coming or not?”

  “Alright, cousin,” Verem said. “Alright.” He looked out over the forests again, raking with his eyes the nebulous beginning of what he could only think of as a mausoleum that the earth had made for itself. “But if we get snatched up by the druids to feed the Briers, I'll have it out with you in Hell.”

  With that, he began the treacherous passage over the crumbling skeleton of the Strait. They watched him go, the boy and the other Stormcrows, with something akin to gleeful envy. His form slipped over the immense growths of vegetation that held the fallen tower together, over the crevices and gaps where they could not, and did not slip once on the rainslick stone. They made no move to follow, even as he disappeared into the gloom made by the storm and the mixture of fog and smoke filtering up from the Midden be
low. His display left their limbs feeling like palsied lead.

  Muro spat over their edge of the tower. “Flashy git, isn't he."

  “A right sparkling one, Hawk," Dura said and slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Even in the rain!” Kurr and Burr said to one another, laughing.

  “Let him flash and sparkle, you damned fools,” Quarr said and itched his shock of beard beneath his cowl. “Just so's we get this done the quicker.”

  For all their talk, none of them were the first to move. It was Arn who went out onto the precipice, no different from any of the others that he daily climbed to or swung and leapt from. The boy only made a dozen strides before Quarr, seeing his words upstaged by a creature he routinely disparaged and despised, blundered out and recklessly overtook him. Arnem cast his eyes to his feet when the big man passed him in a huff; but when his back was to him again, the boy let a smile split his face wide. The others when they caught up took the same opportunity, Muro especially, to show their pride.

  Verem wore his own smile, watching them finally pick their way up to him at last. He leaned against one of the temple's four obelisks, each marking a corner. The tower on which they walked had fallen so as to become lodged between it and the higher steppes of the temple. The obelisk's markings that once conspired to show the lofty and detailed relief of some holy image had long since worn away and become covered over by the endless creep of the earth; but their vagaries stood out enough still for Arnem to see that beside them his cousin was such a little thing. The boy did not know which god had called it home of the many his antecedents worshiped. Only that the temple was among the largest of the Midden's ruins, larger even than many of the things that still stood in the city-above-the-city, and so this god must have been very great. So great that the Stormcrows, and any other rogue worthy of their name, dared not enter its shadows in search of ancient loot and plunder. For those foolish or desperate enough to do so did not return. Much better, Verem decided when the coffers ran low, to instead rifle for such things in the Witherwood.