There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Chapter Thirteen

  There Will Always Be a Map

  The sun deigned to show and dispelled the possibility of another in the long line of grey mornings that came before. But Oren saw little of it from behind his desk, just what showed through the windows of the study and that he could not afford to waste time looking out. He did not see the peaceful gleam of lately fallen rain against the cobblestone of quiet streets. He did not feel the weightless exuberance of a day at the market absent the cold damp of a nearly interminable storm.

  Those were not the day’s pleasures for him. Instead he watched the candlelight flicker against his signet of office, laid aside until he later hauled himself forth into the city again. He drowned in the crackling murmur of the hearth and the drone of his subordinates, varyingly seated or standing about the huge block of a table that dominated the common area of his office. Above them, a gently jockeying flotilla of luminescent stones—a gift from the Judges of the Quality, the Tradesmen’s well-heeled masters, for breaking up just one of innumerable smuggling rings the year before—framed them in stark repose. The shimmering used to annoy him, a protean fixture in the firmly rooted confines of his home and workspace; but, in time, it had found its place in his landscape. Everything had its place. That was the law of Sulidhe, the City Intransigent.

  “Oren,” Kodes said, recalling him from his mental retreat. “What do you think? Helyett thinks we should be marking these corpses the boy keeps finding.”

  “Or that we do,” Helyett broke in.

  “Or that we do,” Kodes repeated. “But Mevel thinks that they are just some nonsense the Druids are kicking up. Nothing to worry about.”

  The Provost looked up at his watchmen, poised over the immense and ancient map of Sulidhe that the table was built to host, and looked down again. The Forgeworks and the Slaughterhauses sprawled in their reaches of the Tradesmen’s Tier like consumptive and wanting behemoths, districts in their own right. A snarl of dwellings, shops, taverns, merchants and merchant-complexes, and other outfits individual lay between them. So many and so changed, even in his time. And amid them all, like a pustule of steel and rock protruding from the earth itself, loomed the Crucible and in it the courts of the Judges of the Quality: the nailhead that fixed the Tradesmen’s Tier. The stone remained. The lives lived inside dissolved. Memory became the only house for them, itself a catacomb that knew no structure or purpose but its own. For Oren, the cartographed ways and places of the map were only the lid cast over a deep and welling sarcophagus that soon must bear out.

  He knew every wrinkle in its parchment, every tear in its edges, every stain of ale, and which were his and which were those he inherited. A long history was writ in these defects, and his part in its time felt the longest. He certainly felt his age, as any man does. His joints were hoary stone. His eyes watered at their edges. But the damage that ensconced his interval in the stewardship of the map contained generations, lifetimes more than the wearing out of any body could describe.

  And yet there remained the map, its graven complexities of a city that was inexplicable except in how it was managed. A flimsy thing that could burn up in an unlucky fire or dissolve in floodwaters if they somehow ever reached the Tradesmen’s Tier. But, come the worst storm of rain or flame, there would always be a map on the table. As long as there was a Provost to sustain its ink with their blood, to keep the lines straight and the letters legible, there will always be a map.

  “Oren?” Kodes said again.

  “Of course mark them,” he barked. His growing proclivity for reverie sat like a heap of coal in the fire of his belly, the flames of which he used his men to smother. “We mark everything else the Druids do.”

  “If it even is Druids,” Helyett said.

  “It’s thrice-damned Druids or I’ll eat my knife,” Meveled shot back.

  “I’ll swear on it if that’s the wager.”

  “Enough,” Oren said and thumped his desk with a meaty fist. “Fucking mark it!”

  Kodes leaned back in his chair so that it teetered on its hind two legs and plucked a pouch from the shelves that lined the wall behind him. A sprinkle of pink dust fell from its mouth as he undid the noose and fell onto the map. The little motes flared to life in a smattering of crimson beacons before he scattered them away with a brush of his hand, an apology working its way gruffly past his lips. He pinched another dash from the bag as though to let it fall would destroy them in all in a conflagration of balefire and sprinkled the luminescent grit onto the Tulzkr Street canal. The dust settled into the parchment like a drop of blood and continued to shine with a faint glow, joining the myriad others that dotted the map in as many varying colors—a prismatic tableau of threats.

  “How much of that have we got left?” Oren asked.

  Kodes weighed the bag in his hand, glanced at the shelf from which he pulled it. “Taking occurrences at an average, throwing in the erasure dust to make revisions, enough for a few more weeks. A month at most.”

  “Take some money from the pot next market day and grab some more.” Oren removed his bulk from the chair and circled around from behind his desk to stand with them at the map. “I have a feeling we’re going to be needing a lot more before this season’s out.”

  “With the rate of the defections,” Helyett said, “we might exhaust the damn supply.”

  “Well then.” Oren leaned onto the table's edge, wound a finger in the air as if tracing the arc of a vulture. “Let’s be about the reports.”

  Meveled ignored their Provost and gaped at Helyett instead. “How many’s gone over?”

  “Roughly three dozen,” she started to answer before referring to the jumbled sheafs of paper set before her.

  “Only that many.” Meveled sank back into his chair with a sigh. “What are you on about, then?”

  Her eyes flicked up from her report like emeralds turning in the light. “Families,” she said. “Three dozen families. If you’d let me finish.”

  “Above and below,” Kodes said and rolled his eyes.

  “That many?” Oren asked, a dead whisper. “You’re sure?”

  “I walked the plasms myself.” Helyett slid the papers she considered over to him. “Look for yourself.”

  He slid them straight back. “I don’t need to.”

  “Two communities emptied,” she said, fixing each of the men in turn with a look. “A third winnowed almost to nothing. And none of them anywhere near the western perimeter, where the Witherwood grows thickest.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Tell me it isn’t,” Meveled said, slumping forward onto the table as if his spine was a weathervane for his concern.

  “What could drive a man to those woods from so deep in the interior?” Oren asked. His eyes were trained on the map, but looked through, and his hand clenched the squidlike talisman of the Sundered Faith that hung from around his neck. “Who would follow those drums all that way, that far into the dark?”

  “The Midden is a cesspool,” Kodes said, the fact as plain to him as the ink on the map. “Maybe they were just taking their chances?”

  Meveled scoffed. “With the Druids? Who in fuck would throw their lot in with them? And how? We should’ve burned and hacked them out a long time ago.”

  “They must have a way into and out of the city. And they have their own magick.”

  “There’s been an influx of Daerians,” Helyett offered to Oren, cutting through the chatter. “Refugees, mostly, smuggled across the border and into the city. Getting settled in the plasms just long enough to know where to run. They’ve been chummy with the cults since before the Siege. It might be as simple as that. But anyone in the plasms who knew wasn’t around to ask.”

  “It would explain the uptick in gol’yem patrols that the Adjutants keep sending down,” Kodes said and indicated the points of green light that represented their manifold ports of entry over the last month, all of them along the Midden’s interior wall. “The Caste’s spellwrights have been busy, it
seems.”

  Oren tugged through the knots of his beard. “And all without telling us a fucking thing.”

  “A cruel irony, methinks,” Meveled said. “They’re fleeing north from the latest dustup at the frontier just to get policed as Middeners by the abominations they worship back home. Our Mageblooded masters do have a cheeky sense of justice.”

  “Not everyone in the Midden is a Daerian, Mevel,” Helyett said.

  “How is your sister?” Oren asked her.

  “Well.” She nodded fervently, but her eyes danced. “Stable, I should say. We don’t know what she’s come down with. I just hope it’s not the Embers.”

  The Provost shook his head. A bead of sweat ran from his brow and down his nose, then plopped onto the map. The drop sank into the ink of the Tradesmen's western gate, at the end of the bridge which sailed over the Midden from the outer wall.

  “I’m sorry that she’s down there,” he told her. “I knew too late.”

  “An Edict’s an Edict,” she said. “I don’t blame you. The Adjutants say she was caught smuggling, then she was caught smuggling. Whatever the truth is or isn’t.”

  “Let us just pray that another censoring is not on the horizon,” Kodes said and, so saying, said what they all were thinking. “Anyone we condemn to the Midden, with a plague like the Embers running rampant, we will be condemning to death.” Oren coughed, and he remembered himself. “Not to worry you,” he said to Helyett.

  She opened her mouth to respond when a melodious hammering on the Provost’s oaken door silenced her and everyone else. Oren and his watchmen looked at one another like children caught in some rude act, the unspoken question in their eyes of who would pound so at a door that all knew was his. A list of names came to his mind, and he held no love for the idea that any one of them stood at his threshold. The chair creaked as he pushed himself up from it in the silence that followed the knocks, the floor as he lumbered across to the door.

  “Circumspex,” Helyett mouthed to Kodes, a question on her face.

  Kodes shrugged. “It could be the Judges. The Lictors of course, on their behalf.”

  “Quiet,” Oren said from the door, laying his right hand on the latch of the door and his left on the haft of his truncheon that leaned against the frame.

  He opened the door onto a greying day, the skies darkening in the west as the violently purple horses of cloud trampled over the sun. In its pale light waited a pale waif of a creature. A nearly sheer frock—as white as its skin and damp with something other than rain—cloyed against its shape so that Oren viewed the curvatures of ribs and hips. Its hairless head looked nowhere but down at its naked feet, at the iron talisman of a squid that hung from around its neck. Oren considered the visitor for a long moment, trying to discern if it was man or child or a man at all, when its voice illuminated him.

  “Brother,” the woman said, having glanced up enough to see the symbol that the Provost wore in common with her, and extended her hand to him. There was a letter in the cage of its spindly fingers. “A summons to the Circumspex, to the Hall of Adjutants.”

  He took the missive from her delicately, as if the slight tug of the parcel from her hand would throw her to the ground. “I’ve a fire going inside if you’d like to warm up and dry off,” he said and immediately she shook her head. “Is this some kind of contrition, then? This season is not one to be caught out of doors without more than what you’re wearing. Let me give you something.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself with me,” she said, airy as the subtle winds blowing over Sulidhe. “This is necessary for my pain, for my changing.”

  “You are of the Church Suffering, then? May Utquod find you on the shore.”

  “And you,” she said, bowing slightly and then shambling off the way she had come.

  Oren watched her go until he tired of watching her go, slowly and determinedly, like a wounded animal or the risen dead. The door shut with a soft breath of saturated air. Rain was sure to come. The letter felt heavy in his hand, as heavy as the club beside the door would have felt if he’d have had cause to pick it up. He felt faintly ridiculous, looking at its studded length, in light of who had come to call, and groped to understand why he had felt that they called for the club at all. More and more, just as the smell of rain on the air outside presaged the coming storm, his body answered for him and in ways his mind struggled to justify.

  “The Circumspex is sending the Faith in its stead now?” Kodes asked. “How soon before the Church-Oppugning is policing the streets in our stead?”

  “There’s not much their tendrils don’t stretch into anymore,” Helyett said, shaking her head, then looked up at Oren. “I don’t mean offense, of course. The Faith isn’t always dealing in matters of faith, is all that I mean.”

  “Nothing with walls and a foundation can afford not to,” the Provost said. “The affairs of the world always wind up at your door.” He scanned the one that he held in his hand. “Best to meet them before they choose to go ahead and meet you.”

  “Sending their followers around like that, suffering as a rite.” Meveled scoffed, looking at the map as if it offended him. “Madness.”

  “What about the summons?” Kodes said. “What does it say?”

  “It’s a fucking summons. What do you think it says?”

  Oren’s shoulders sank as he read on until his hands followed suit and the letter fell to his side. “Every Provost,” he said. “From every Ward, tomorrow at midday.”

  The whole crew of them mirrored their captain at his words, slouching where they sat or deflating where they stood as if all the aether were sucked out of them and left them as husks. Two words were on their lips that none dared to speak. They would portend a day of tears and blood and hearts sheathing themselves in stone with every shove and thud of the club. Hearts would break, too, but not those of the Provost and his watchmen. Familiarity kept whole the parts of them that duty did not shield: Their shame—the shame of authoring sorrow in another’s stead—was to be a secret kind, even to themselves.

  None dared speak the words. To leave a thing without a name is to leave it unreal. Its ethereality allowed them to ignore the assuredly outlandish fear that their own names, the names of their families, might be present on the lists as long as a man. But they themselves could not ignore the horrible certainty that Oren was sure to return speedily from the Hall of Adjutants—and with a Censorian Edict clutched tight in his hands.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Out of Slumber

  Marskol Square was worse than empty. The sun was not far past its zenith behind the grey sheets of cloud, when the meager markets of the Midden were often busiest, and only a few merchants had dared the specter of plague. The Embers seemed to burn at the foot of the Tree of Sul itself. Those present only sold the mushrooms and water they had harvested the day before, meat of dubious origin, the odds and ends that helped the days pass with less complaint. The uroch was there again, too, and Arnem noted that the creature had more customers than all the rest.

  The boy wavered and fell heavily against the Tree. His arms burned fiercer than when the thing had first laid hold of him. The bleeding had stopped, but the pus still welled up in the tiny lacerations that lined the red grooves in his skin. The creature was tucked away in the remains of his shirt, safe and dead in its improvised sling, and the rain seemed to come all the harder against his naked skin. A shiver worked through him that he was glad to tears was not a cough.

  It took everything to press himself upright from the Tree again, and, when at last he did, he felt the touch of moss cool and soft under his grime-covered hands. His surprise and his fading strength were such that he would have fallen over if Dob had not moved to brace him. It girdled the foot of the Tree in a fur of purest green. Tiny flowers, white as the snow that capped the western mountains, had burst forth from its furry clumps. Arnem glanced at Dob as if the beast could confirm what he saw. There was nothing starting to bloom in his fur, and the rest of the Square was merely a
hollower shade of itself. He ran his hand across the moss again, felt something stir inside him as if an animal were shifting out of slumber. He was certain of the flowers. Looking up, there were buds newly sprung from the lowest branches. Arnem half believed then that tomorrow he would find the Bridge newly built.

  “It was dead,” the boy said. “Dob, as long as I’ve been breathing, the tree's been dead.”

  Dob’s tongue scratched across his shoulder. He nearly doubled over again from just the slight force of it. Sweat beaded on his brow, standing upright made his head swim.

  “I know,” the boy said and scratched the beast between the horns, where he liked it best. “We need to get to Camp before it gets dark. I just hope we find Verem there. I hope we find Verem at all.”

  A mute stillness had taken hold in the streets and alleys beyond the Square that was poised on the edge of something no one could name. Those who traveled to market did so quickly and with shoulders hunched, as though anticipating a coming blow. Not a few were stalled by the brutal, hacking coughs that overtook them every third step. They were spurred onward again by the portents that lay collapsed in the gutter. Stones thrown from a river, forever stilled.

  The infected tried in vain to hide the telltale signs of the Embers beneath deep cowls and the smell beneath heaps of rags and worse fragrances; but these became signs in their own right, and Arnem gave them a wide berth. He was young when last a plague swept through the city. His recollections were dim and many of them from the safe remove of the Tradesmen’s Tier. Nothing could touch him in that place, in that time. He remembered this remove while he tried to forget it. This was better, he decided. Whatever happened, he was here. He would be a part of what followed.

  His legs fought with him when the road turned and began to climb the steep hill that sat opposite that of the Tree and the Square. Looking back, Arnem could still see the crooked branches reaching out over the Midden's ruination. They drew long shadows under a sky the Tree would never grow to reach. He imagined Verem cradled in its highest boughs, as they often sat together, high enough that he could almost touch the arc of the outer wall. Almost, but always too far. So distant that, like the broken ascent of the Bridge, the far side ought not to exist.