There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  “You have glimpsed the cusp of the universe,” the Matron told him. “Kissed the horizon of true knowing. What we see is so little of what there is. Go on.” She laid a hand to that which Yrsted had plunged into the night. “Know yourself now for what we all truly are, when the curtain of mortal flesh is pulled away from the presence of the void.”

  Yrsted did as he was bade, and Yrsted did see what was promised. He saw the three pincers clutching madly for purchase on soft tissue, the tendrils which sought to pull the same into their grip, the toothed beak which clucked and snapped amid them all to devour whatever it could. New tears sprang from his eyes, new screams from his mouth, and both were mimicked by the mouths and eyes that lolled open along the tumorous hide of his hand. He fell backward onto the floor in the vain impotence of terror, scrambling from his hand as though it could not follow, and burying his face in his robes as if to not see was to not exist.

  “Shadows contain terrible things,” Sohrabaia said, watching her acolyte as he wailed and held his changed hand as far away from the rest of him as he could. The beak mouthed the open air, searched him out with madly flicking tongues. “I trust you understand the nature of your gift, if not its lesson, and that you will use it well. A task needs doing.”

  Chapter Ten

  Ambition

  There was age and mystery in every stone of the Midden, inside every cupboard, hidden beneath every floor. Treasure hunters, scoundrels, and the simply unwary daily pulled artifacts and relics from the ruins of a world they did not understand even through the remove of time, shared and flattened into chronicle. That history was forgotten, lost as much as anything in the nebulous and protean Midden is lost. There were few who could find its secrets again and among them not a soul with a mind to share.

  Arnem’s mind in the days of his extreme youth was as inconstant and ever-shifting as the Midden itself, save the foundations of the blind alleys and towering derelicts that it was built upon, and it was often that he imagined his future as a renowned scholar. It was his fate to be the first to piece together the record of Sulidhe as it was in the long ago. Before the Mageblooded, before the Magi, when the city was called Sul and only Sul. But tomorrow always came. It might find him a budding alchymist. The day after, the unwitting scion of a wizard-king soon come to collect his lost ward. These imaginings were like nectar and his mind, a moth suckling at them. They replenished and nourished him. His place in these far flung futures built resting places for him in the here and now, until he was ready to press on. That is the way of dreams, to keep us when we cannot keep ourselves.

  None of these fantasies inhabited him today. Year to year, season to season, these personas began to feed into a different kind of dream. Something more akin to a word that was foreign to Arnem and most in the Midden: ambition. The boy mused instead how he would map out the complex chemical interactions required to make a bomb lethal only to bowershranks. His imagined scholarly pursuits were limited to poring over mold-eaten grimoires and volumes of bestiaries written in dead languages. Year to year, season to season, Arnem busied himself with how best to hunt monsters and how best to kill them. And today that meant pulling from the Midden a mystery that had nothing to do with antique weapons or thaumaturgical wonders, but a corpse stripped of its flesh and where to find one.

  “Why the canals?” he asked Dob and himself. “They drain to the wall. The water’s always moving. If someone’s trying to poison them, poison whoever draws from them, the bodies won’t do it.”

  They looked down on such a canal from the heights of a nearby tower. The frail daylight turned the waters’ muddled brown to a thread of silver that wound out of his sight, disappearing into a nest of ramshackles that was built atop a series of fallen pillars. There was nothing unique in this, the boy knew. Many of the outlying plasms, as Oren referred to the transient communities that parasitized the Midden’s ruins, were situated around or abutting the canals. They were the Midden’s rivers, supplying water to those for whom the Cistern was too far, though anything drawn from them needed thoroughly boiled and filtered. This one was likewise no different from any other the boy had seen: cobbled together hastily, prepared to collapse in a stiff wind, and densely settled. But of these settlers, he saw and heard nothing.

  Arnem looked up at the hazy nimbus hanging in the sky. “Midday,” he said. “Could be at market. Or digging through the ruins.”

  Dob huffed at him.

  “I know, not everyone. But where else?” He looked over the dwellings again, making a hard search for anything amiss or moving, and found nothing. “Well, we certainly won’t find anything out by sitting up here.”

  Arnem flung himself over the broken edge of the balcony from which he watched the plasm and began the climb down the face of the tower. Dob followed by way of the impromptu landings left behind as the slow collapse of everything continued in that reach of the city’s ancient residuum, leaping and clawing his way down to the street below. The settlement was draped like a dreary tableau over the leaning, sunken goliaths of the pillars. A great portico once rested atop them that now lay in ruins amid them. The yearly floods had washed away all but the most substantial remnants and the plasm had metastasized onto them when the fallen pillars alone could not hold it. The rude hovels, set against the worn carvings and frescoes of the stone, were like growths upon the face of a once beautiful thespian doomed now only to mockery.

  Arnem searched the driftwood husks of the dwellings, the black of windows and cracked doors. His insides started to float, and the sensation kept him from taking a step nearer. The feeling was a rare one for the boy. He’d spent his whole life in a place that gave pause to grown men who were unfamiliar with its ways and places. Empty archways, dim alcoves, and long stairwells held no fear for him. Only the black and withered trees at the edges of the Witherwood set him on his heels, its wild and fatal mystery that was nightly given voice by heathen drums. But the plasm he looked upon now was not the Witherwood or anywhere near to its borders, but firmly in the most civilized reaches of the Midden. And that twisted his gut more.

  Dob started off, scrabbling in the mud to get ahead of the boy and begin his slow creep toward the plasm in the van. Arnem followed at a close distance. His hands clenched at his hips in want of something with which to stab or beat. Silence hung like a mist over the ruined concourse, the empty and crumbling husks that lined its length shutting out all sound that could come from elsewhere. A hinge creaked. Dob stopped and the boy did too, still as the earth until a quiet moment passed. Then both moved on.

  An obelisk lay at the center of the hovels. It was transmuted by the deafening calm into some horrid and outlandish monolith. As if the Druids had spilled deep into the Midden and left it to attest to what they had done. But Arnem knew different, and not least for the fact that these crude amalgams of debris and mortar were commonplace in most plasms, as their inhabitants made renewed attempts at civilization. The boy stood at the center with it, surveyed the lashed-together dwellings a last time, and crept up to read the notices painted onto its five sides only to recoil. Brushed hastily over the mundane happenings of the day—a request for washing powder if there was any extra on hand, offers to barter nails for a hammer by a man named Khalkhan—were warnings repeated over and over in every attitude of legibility. ‘Stay away’, they read. Nothing more.

  “What do you make of that, Dob?”

  A low snarl answered him. Arnem turned to find his companion fixed upon a dwelling at the edge of the obelisk’s makeshift courtyard. The beast’s hackles were raised, and that made his raise too. The door to the hovel swung idly, but the air was dead. There was no storm to speak of in the stubbornly grey sheets of cloud that still covered the skies. He exchanged a look with Dob, and the two advanced into the outer miasma of a stench so profound that it was unfamiliar even to them. The kind that comes with moldering tide pools, further defiled with all manner of rotting things. Arnem had smelled the victims of the Embers before, left to rot in the building heat of
the season, the victims of every plague before that one as well. This was not that. This was different.

  The door opened as if inviting him to come inside. The full weight of the stink struck him as if with a hammer, so pungent that it forced him from the threshold. A shake of the head to clear his senses, burying his nose in the collar of his rags, he forced his way through and into the lightless corridor beyond. Dob pushed him aside from behind and trotted forward warily. His long claws made no sound as he disappeared into the further dark. A moment later and the boy’s eyes adjusted to the interior shadows enough that he could follow.

  Everywhere the structure leaned and heaved, its basic symmetry and geometry the casualties of a transient and improvised construction. Trash and debris crunched underfoot and frittered away from his feet as he made for the opened door at the end of the hallway. A frail eking of daylight spilled out, as if from a window in the room beyond. Dob’s shadow stood unmoving and resolute in its halo. The boy let out the air that his lonely skulk through the hall bade him keep inside. He went and joined his companion and gave pause at what the beast gave pause.

  Draped across a broad and heavy table, the kind that butchers keep to perform their trade, was the inert form of something that defied the boy’s understanding. Perhaps anyone's understanding. Arnem dared to creep closer. Its various limbs were contorted and curled and stretched in the attitudes of creatures to which the earth claimed no belonging. Limp tendrils dangled to the floor, chitinous legs folded in on themselves, pincers hung open and lifeless.

  The thing’s body, the size of a child’s, was no less confused. Dry, cracking globules that the boy took for eyes sat awkwardly amid the dark flesh of its abdomen. Many of them were put out by what looked to have been a knife. Such knives were impaled all over its body, along with many other implements of the day’s work in any plasm. Not a few of Khalkhan's nails were driven into its limbs to hold them fast. An ax was buried into what was probably a shoulder, another into its groin. There was a hammer laid by on the floor, black blood heavy on its head. The boy picked it up and held it close.

  “I knew something was wrong,” he said to Dob. “Now everyone will have to believe me. It’s not just the Embers.”

  A sound answered him that issued from the deepest pits of Nej’Ud, the Fruitless Plain, that Oren and his holy book spent so much time talking about. Only a moment later did he realize that Dob was the sounder. It was a bark he had never heard before, a snarling roar that settled into a spittle-flying growl. The beast pounced at the shadows of a pantry just before the door was shut against him. He clawed and bit and beat at the flimsy barrier with his huge paws. Someone whimpered on the other side, muffled by the door and nearly consumed by Dob’s ravenous intent. The tendrils of the seed pawed at Arnem inside his pocket. Begging his attention, pleading a warning.

  “Please, young sir,” a man cried, wept. “Call off your hound. I mean nothing by being here. You’ve seen the thing on the table. I was only hiding!”

  “Dob!” the boy shouted and straight away the beast quit the door and returned to his side. He faced the pantry and hefted the hammer up over his shoulder to ready a strike. His arms quivered with the effort. Its great stone head could have brained him in a single blow if the situation was reversed, and he was keenly aware of the ridiculousness. “Who are you? Come out. And show yourself!”

  The door, splintered and holding on by a single hinge, parted and opened. The total darkness whimpered. A hand emerged from the shadows and into the light as if from behind a curtain of black, a hand like any other in the Midden. Nondescript, broken nails, dirty and worn with either labor or time or both. It shook with the residual tremors of withstanding Dob’s assault. The boy’s heart hammered in his chest, but gradually began to slow. A man could hurt and even kill, but he could understand a man. A man was familiar. The creature on the butcher block behind him was as divorced from a man as the heavens to the depths of the sea. Arnem dared to let the hammer fall a little and rest its weight against his shoulder. Dob was stiff with the barely restrained need to pounce.

  A face followed the hand like a crescent moon slowly waxing full. The single eye full of fear, dried blood spattering the cheek above the mangy tangle of beard. But the light took more of his face as the man drew himself out from the pantry, and the boy’s hammer came up again. For his other eye held nothing of fear, held nothing at all. A putrescent gouge oscillated wildly with an orb the hue of spoiled milk, and the flesh in which it sat gave no more an indication of anything natural. The rest of him came into the light sluggishly, as if resisting on its own the idea of being seen, and indeed the flesh fought against existing at all.

  The motley of limbs and substances of which his other half was comprised was no less confused than that of the creature pinned to the table. Tendrils at the ends of long, brittle stalks that perhaps once were fingers strangled the air and strained against the man’s will to reach for the boy. His other leg dragged behind him, a twisted club of sinew and bone and oily chitin. Encrustations of shells opened and closed absently along his shoulder and much of the upper arm as if breathing. Long cilia danced out from the clasps of their mouths. Arnem felt himself float as his legs recoiled for him.

  “You’re right to keep your distance,” the man said and cast a fretful, fleeting glance at his changed limbs. “They don’t listen, so you’d better. My daughter didn’t.” Tears fell from his remaining eye that he did not seem aware of and without stopping. “My name is Khalkhan.”

  “Then,” the boy started, swallowed to conceal the tremor in his voice. “Then these are your nails?”

  “You can read,” Khalkhan said, a question in his voice. “Then you read the stone. And came looking anyway. A brave boy who can read. And in the Midden? I’d say this is a trick and the wytches have come out of the Witherwood to play games, but I know better. I’d believe anything now.”

  “What happened here? What,” Arnem said and chancing a glance back over his shoulder at the creature, “what is this thing?”

  “My daughter.” Khalkhan's voice broke, and he almost did too. The limbs that were changed began to win their struggle against him for the moment it took him to realize there was no time for grief. “We were the first. We won’t be the last.”

  Arnem looked again at the thing on the table, at the knives and axes and pokers impaled into its flesh, and saw what he did not before. He traced the line of what he knew in the jumbled mass now to be her shoulder, having seen what had become of Khalkhan, and found the barest trace of a girl’s face. Some of the teeth were hers, the boy could see, knocked awry by the metamorphosis that had overtaken her body. Her tongue was cleft and torn into something unrecognizable. Above it, a lone eye contained the kind of terror that is reserved only for the passive accomplice to absolute atrocity.

  “I tried to keep her safe, to keep her away from the others. So they wouldn’t see. But my mind is only half my own now. And when the ropes couldn’t hold anymore, I couldn’t stop her.”

  “The others,” Arnem said. His arms grew heavy with the weight of keeping the hammer held at the ready. “Where did they go? They left you alive?”

  “You’re surprised. You have a right to be. I hid.” The admission came out of Khalkhan like one of his nails, pried loose from the corpse of what had been his little girl. “I hid and watched while they cornered her like a rabid dog. I knew she wasn’t my daughter anymore. The way she turned and screeched and tested them as they closed in around her. Still. I don’t remember who struck first, but I remember the sounds.” He winced at the mention of it, the thud of metal on meat playing again and again through his mind, the inhuman howls. “That’s my hammer you’re holding. Fitting. Use Khalkhan's nails and Khalkhan's hammer to skewer Khalkhan's child.”

  “Maybe,” the boy said. “Maybe they didn’t know it was her. Like you said.” He tightened his grip around the haft of the hammer and planted his feet. “But you’re not trying to kill me.”

  “You mean why is she
out here, and I was hiding in there? I don’t know. I don’t know that I won’t be like her. The change has been slow for me. It creeps, you see. Like an itch, one that you can scratch until your skin breaks or your nails and it’ll still be there. Itching.” A tremor worked its way across Khalkhan that stemmed from the parts of him that were no longer him. When it passed, his shoulders sank further than they had sat before and the little color that was left in his face went entirely. “You should go. I don’t know anything more than you.”

  Arnem left him in the dark with his daughter. The air of the Midden was no more or less foul than an open sewer, having many, but smelled fresh after the close and diseased quarters of the hovel. The boy breathed eagerly and only then noticed the weight of the hammer still in his hands. He threw the thing down as if barnacles were soon to start spreading across its length, opening their needful mouths and stroking his fingers with their tongues.

  There was nothing of life to speak of in the plasm. No one had returned in the time that he spent inside Khalkhan's self-imposed mausoleum. Marskol Square was not far from where he stood. The Witherwood lay on the other side of a day’s walk and travail through miles of ruin and makeshift byways circumventing blocked or collapsed streets. A feeling worked its way through the boy that he struggled to name. It was as if the air no longer stopped where his skin began and the world was losing its barriers between things. He steadied himself against Dob’s shoulders, reeling from the thought that whatever had taken hold in a plasm so far into the Midden’s interior had done so with such speed that no one noticed.

  “How many more did we miss?” Arnem asked his beast. “How many farther down the canal are already gone?”