There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  The way was hard going back into the thriving pulse of the Midden's inhabited reaches. The smugglers' pits were secluded in places that had been called abandoned generations ago, where even the glyphs had aged past their use and the walls were weak enough to dig. Now the memory of life laid over them like an ill-fitting cloak. Save for the diggers and the hired men, the immediate surrounds did not hold even an inkling of settlement. The ways to and from the entrances to their network were hidden and labyrinthine merely by virtue of how long ago they had been built, forgotten and then built again. Only in times such as these, when plague turns men against each other and makes exiles of honest neighbors, did any but the smugglers and those who had dealings with them grace the talus of the Midden.

  Verem mounted to the highest floor of the last tower before civilization began again and heaved a heavy breath. Below him, Muro and Quarr navigated the mound of rubble that once constituted a stairwell. When their climb was done, he helped them both up over the edge. His grip was faltering, his arms like atrophied jelly. They had only just reached the last thicket of decayed insulae that demarcated the edge of the smugglers' labyrinth. The Vertabrae still waited to be crossed and The Strait after that. Much of the journey yet remained, but the floor that he could hardly trust to walk across invited him to lie down. He made this trip many times each month. His hands and feet knew it well and never tired of it. They did not tire of it now. Something was at work in him, and he needed to kill it at the next alehouse.

  The first knurl of the Vertebrae rudely ended the chamber to which the Stormcrows had ascended, having fallen there long ago when the Magi obliterated the behemoth it once supported. Its yellowed, pockmarked surface was at odds with the debris piled around its intrusion into the tower. Verem wondered if there were not a few splinters, some cracked masonry that did not still lay where it had fallen a thousand years ago when the Vertebrae first fell in the Last Siege. He wondered how mammoth the beast to which it belonged must have been, and how the Daerians could have failed against the Magi when they commanded such a thing. More than this he asked himself—and all the gods that remained who listened to secret things—what new and different world awaited if their final challenge to the dominion of magick had won out.

  "Can you imagine what the battle was like," he said to his men and tried to imagine it himself. "The last real battle we had with the old world. The Last Siege. Before the other tiers were built and there was any Midden at all. Before Sulidhe was Sulidhe."

  "You say that every time we see this fucking thing," Quarr said and advanced toward the knurl as if it were no more than the beginnings of the bridge they took it for. "Me, I prefer not to think about what's been. Makes it a lot easier to deal with what's now."

  A voice stilled him that spoke from the deeper shadows, farther into the apartments of the leaning tower. "I'd've thought your one too many hits to the head would remove the need, dear Quarr. Thinking must be so burdensome for you.”

  "Segved," Verem sighed.

  “Oh, it’s not just me.” The Captain of the Crowbills stepped into the weird light pouring from the threshold to the Vertebrae, an interplay of its sorcery and the frail day. His head was shorn of the Crowbills’ distinctive mask, but the effect was not lost. The dark shock of hair, plunging to a widow’s peak, and his terribly black eyes stood in well for its absence. “I wouldn’t do you the disservice of a solitary showing.”

  Other shadows, five in all, became animate in the dilapidated reaches of the tower. These did wear the metal-beaked, glassy-eyed masks of the Crowbills, but Verem had wrestled with all their forms enough to know them by their bodies. Qurzin, Segved’s second, was surely the tallest and lankiest of them, though Verem could not see his rotten teeth and mangy hair to be certain. There was also the Bogscag, evident straight away by its stink of festering swamp and bent misshapen body. He never learned how the creature was called or how Segved even communicated with it, only that its loyalty to him was unswerving and its long knuckle-dragging arms were powerful with hate of Stormcrows. Of the remaining three Crowbills, Verem could not be sure and did not care to be. He preferred not knowing into whose heart his knife sank.

  “I don’t suppose I could appeal to your pity,” Verem said and leaned into Quarr, whispering, “the death rattle.”

  His lieutenant indulged a moment of thought and said, “death rattle?”

  Verem cast him a sidelong glance. “Don’t be thick, Quarr, not now.”

  An epiphany worked its way across his lieutenant's face and he nodded curtly, saying, “right.” He began to dig in the folds of his vest at once.

  “Your truck is not with me, loathe as I am to say,” Segved went on. “Your men got away from mine by just a hair. No, I am just an interlocutor here. On behalf of Black Iosif. You crossed out of the Witherwood and through his border-shanties without consultation of him or his Blackbodies, which I know that you know the outcome of that territory’s last dustup demands you seek.”

  Segved gestured to the threshold of the Vertebrae, where a clutch more of fighting men crept out of the shadows in which they had secreted themselves. True to their namesake, the Blackbodies were slathered in the fuligin paint without which they were never seen. The pigment made them nigh indistinguishable from a dense patch of night and came from a source that no one knew but them; but Verem had on some authority that it was druidic in nature, from the buried trove of a long dead hierophant.

  “Iosif,” Verem said and nodded to the man who was distinguishable from his men only by his massive frame and equally massive bludgeon, then turned back to Segved. “Are you the great peacemaker of the Midden now?”

  “Someone’s got to keep your lot in line,” Iosif said, his voice a scratching terror from the overwhelming dark of his body, and pointed with the heavy head of his great club. “Mayhap I’ll make your lot my lot, and we can have done. Though I won’t make promises on how Segved’ll settle with you yourself.”

  “Piss off, you painted cunt.” Quarr took a step closer to the giant, neverminding that he was the largest of the Stormcrows and still came up short against Iosif. “I’ll work for you when I’m dead and there’s just my bones to play with.”

  “Well,” Verem said and drew both his wickedly serpentine dagger and long slender blade. “Let’s be about the knives, then.”

  “I admire your eagerness,” Segved said. “I’ve always admired you, Verem. Much as I imagine your cousin does, the little rat. Well, we’ve set a fine trap for him, haven’t we, Qurzin?”

  “Oh aye,” the Crowbills’ lieutenant said from under his mask, torturing his banal monotone into a missive from beyond the grave. “A fine, fine trap.”

  “What’s he mean?” Verem asked his men and then leveled his sword at the Crowbills. “I’ll know what you mean.”

  “He’s fucking fooling,” Quarr said to him. “We only saw him just the other day.”

  “You must understand your chances,” Segved said. “If your dogs won’t submit, then at least do yourself the service and come with me. I swear on my honor that you’ll be rejoined with your cousin straight away.”

  “A vulture has more honor,” Muro said.

  “You’re crows, yes?” Verem said to the Crowbills. “You pick at the dead, stripping what you’d never dare to take. Why else would you bring a brigade of goons against my three? There ain’t much I can say for myself, but if I die I’ll die with my honor. And Iosif.” He turned to acknowledge the dark giant. “I thought better of you.”

  "Thoughts are cheap." Segved punctuated himself with an all too familiar thunk.

  Verem spun to the side and felt the bolt pass harmlessly through the trailing hem of his cloak, but behind him Muro cried out and tumbled to the crooked floor of the tower. The captain of the Stormcrows turned only long enough to be sure the crossbow hadn't shoved the Hawkfaced's heart from his chest or broke open his skull. The bolt stuck out from just under his breastbone. He might live, he might die; but he still breathed and that was enough for V
erem.

  The Bogscag was already on him by the time he turned to face his foes again, meaty claws swiping at him from far beyond his reach. The stink of its mottled, warty flesh swamped his nostrils and was joined by the stench of decaying things each time its expansive maw opened to snap or snarl. Its long arms swept in low. Verem jumped over the swipes and lashed out with his sword, but the Bogscag bent itself unnaturally to the floor and scurried about him on its hindquarters. He spun to face it and dashed inside of its reach, bringing up his sword to guard against the bite that he guessed would come and came indeed.

  "Quarr," he cried out, wrestling with the Bogscag. Its teeth had clamped down on his blade and its arms sought to get hold of his legs. Its scaly hide turned his dagger each time he tried to puncture the nerve clusters in its shoulders. “Quarr!”

  "Bit busy," his lieutenant said and ducked the sidelong swipe of a warpick even as he closed inside the reach of another and grabbed hold of its haft.

  Quarr drove his elbow into the man's gut, forcing the air from his lungs and the weapon from his hands. He parried the downward strike of another warpick, throwing the Crowbill who levied it away behind him, then turned with the momentum and sank his own pick deep between the man's shoulders. The force of the blow was enough to send him to the ground, pinning him to the floorboards. Quarr extricated himself from the reach of the Crowbill who yet struggled to breathe again and retreated just as Qurzin made to join the fray.

  "Quarr," Verem shouted again, having got free from the Bogscag and given it a smiling cut across the mouth for its trouble. But its rage was enormous, and in a moment he was sure his gift was to be a parting one. "The fucking death-rattle. Now!"

  "Oh, where did I put that fucking thing?" the big man muttered, tearing through his pockets as Qurzin charged with warpick raised and voice shrill with the Crowbills' call.

  In his periphery, Black Iosif and his Blackbodies arrayed themselves at the edges of the melee and prepared to glide in on a tide of blood. Qurzin crossed within striking distance. Quarr’s hand latched onto the familiar cool of the rod, deep in his vest pocket, and drew the instrument out. The Crowbills' lieutenant took a final step and let fall his warpick with all his weight behind the strike. Quarr fell back onto his knees, raised the death-rattle over his head, and shook it.

  A sound not unlike rattling, if that rattling came from a sea of bones locked deep within a cave, trembled through the air. The crystalline bulb atop the short rod flared a terrible bright white and lashed out at Qurzin like a ghostly whip, sending him tumbling through the air and across the floor. When he finally came to a stop, his body smoked and fumed with the vapors of a lightning strike and his crude battledress was in tatters. No one among the Crowbills or the Blackbodies went to him. Segved spared him the same glance he might give a dead animal lying in the gutter.

  "Now if it's not too much fucking trouble," Quarr said as he stood up from his knees, "I'd like to hear a single reason why I shouldn't blast the life from every one of you."

  "I don't care the reason, Quarr," Verem said. He disentangled himself from the Bogscag, who had relented with the rest of Segved's men, and went to help Muro to his feet. "Clear a path if they won't. Iosif," he said to the black-painted hulk. The whites of his eyes were all that remained of him in the slight shadows that hemmed the corona around the Vertebrae’s ingress. “We've never been cross til today, so I'd like to leave you breathing. Let us pass."

  The Blackbodies and their captain, exchanging wordless looks of deliberation, began to make a way for the Stormcrows to go out and onto the Vertebrae when Segved flung out his hand and said for them to stop. And stop they did, much to Verem's surprise. There was more than a convenient alliance to this charade. Something like loyalty, perhaps; but more probably the worst kind of leverage.

  "How much go is left in that little trinket, I wonder?" Segved said and leveled his crossbow at Quarr, who held up the death-rattle at him like a ward against bolts. "Another lash, maybe? Two at most."

  The captain of the Stormcrows kept on hauling Muro toward the Vertebrae, ignorant of the wall of Blackbodies that had reformed in the wake of Segved's remonstrance. "Keep that thrower handy and find out. We're leaving."

  "Come now, Verem. You didn't seriously think I'd risk letting you slip away. Not now, when you're so weak. And after just a few barbs? I thought you knew me better than that."

  Segved produced from within the folds of his Crowbill vestments a polyhedral stone. Its surface was comprised of a confusion of knots and ringlets, at the center of which glowered a red gem pulsing with life. He held it aloft, dangling the artifact on a thick length of steel chain. The links strained impossibly under the weight of the object.

  "Fucking try it," Quarr said and raised the death-rattle. "I'll ghost you like I did your dear old Qurzin."

  Segved made to toss the stone, Quarr to lash out with the death-rattle, when a series of creaks shook the tower around them that were too loud and too many to be nothing. A groan ran the length of the wooden support beams overhead. Dust fell in shimmering curtains as it crossed into the Vertebrae's shafts of ghostlight. Every man and woman beneath the beams and in the light became as still as stone, and they did not think to move until there was no one in the world fleet enough to evade their fate.

  The rotted, aged wood gave way in a spray of splinters and broken timbers that barely concealed the chitinous bulk which tumbled out amid them. The creature struck the floor with such force that it was a wonder it too did not collapse under the weight. A scything tail of bone, sharper than any sword a man could make, cut through three of Black Iosif's men in a single lash. Iosif himself gave a strangled cry and swung hard with his great club. It fell with a dull thud on the interlocking plates of the creature's carapace. The beast turned like a serpent and swatted him aside with one massive claw, out into the darkness of the tower's inner apartments.

  "Dweller!" Verem heard a woman scream somewhere in the dust and blood, and every part of him went still and cold.

  The initial carnage subsided and, through the dusty haze left by the fallen debris, Verem viewed the clear image of the terror so named. Half-again larger than the largest horse, the Dweller raged amid the chaos of its entrance into the fray. Serrated mandibles tore into the corpses it had made, masticating and gulping down torn gobs of flesh. The ghostlight of the Vertebrae oozed across its sleek chitin, the plates like a mantle of black across its shoulders and spine and powerful tail. Its pallid underbelly alone was naked of the carapace, instead sagging with loose folds of skin, and accounted for its single vulnerability; but the rare moments in which the creature chose to expose itself were only ever the preludes to the swipe of a claw, the scything of a tail. The Dweller’s absence of legs made it impossible to slip past and underneath its bulk to drive a blade into the unprotected flesh of its abdomen. Several had tried it already. Often enough they failed to even breach the wide reach of its arms, evolved as they were to brachiate through nests strung high in the deep forests of the world, but adapted now to just the sort of ruins in which they found themselves.

  Eyes glittered like minute beads within the dark mound of its head and stared at Verem like pinpricks into eternal night. A low growl issued from the Dweller’s throat. Verem swallowed, and Segved turned to run. The sound drew its attention like a cat to birdsong. It launched itself at Segved. The Bogscag leapt up and sank its claws into the ceiling above, using the leverage to swing around with its legs and snatch Segved out of the way. The Dweller crashed into the space the Crowbills had been and tumbled upright not a breath later. It made to pounce again.

  "Farewell, Verem," Segved called. "I trust a little delay won't sour your mood. If you survive, that is."

  He threw the stone he held at the midpoint between them all. No sooner did the object meet the floor than it exploded into a rapidly expanding network of interlocking and shifting rings. It drew the dead into the compounding patterns and crushed them, tore them apart. Dwellers were not stupid creatures,
Verem knew, though no one had ever heard one speak. It saw the ancient weapon unfurling and disappeared through the hole it had made. He saw nothing more of Segved, and the Blackbodies had scattered variously deeper into the tower or out onto the Vertebrae. These last Verem struggled to follow, fighting with Muro's weight as the Hawkfaced drifted further and further from the world of the living for lack of blood. Quarr had hurried ahead of them and already stood at the door. Verem could guess what was running through his mind. The same thoughts ran through his, but he found enough shame to beat them away. Of his lieutenant, he could not be certain.

  "Verem," Quarr shouted, the unspoken meaning implicit in the tones of his voice.

  "Don't leave me," Muro said. "I can make it."

  Verem ignored him. Behind, the rings multiplied rapidly and enfolded everything he could see in a backward glance. One snag on his boot or the shoulder of his jerkin would spell the end for him and for Muro. Quarr did not move to help, but stood there solidly before them like a promise. It was a promise he would not let Quarr keep. He would be captain for a little while longer.

  A final shove put Muro into Quarr's arms and Verem tumbled into them not long afterward. The three of them spilled out from the tower through the Vertebrae’s makeshift egress and with nothing to spare. Each of them hit the ancient bone of the spine and nearly rolled over the edge. The rings bit into the edges of the opening and stopped.

  The Stormcrows lay panting atop the first knurl of many, taking strange comfort in its radiance and the slight buoy of its place in the Midden's sky. They were safe, but this did not feel like safety. Home was still far off, a crossbow bolt still sat in Muro's gut. Today was only a day. Many like it came before. There would be many to follow. For Verem and his men, past and future were less than words. There was just the interminable bloody present. And the Stormcrows, as ever, held the brutal distinction of being among its vanguard.