There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  “Worse than the Magi?”

  “I feel it, deep inside. Like a wound but not mine. A wound in the earth that pulls at me.” Haldok’s voice, before so divorced from the world and natural speech, quavered as if something had impaled the spirit’s very heart. “There is a dark place inside the wound, a place that darkness does not describe. And the wound travels far. I think you have seen it and perhaps known it all your life.”

  A rumble passed through the earth that temporarily silenced the commotion outside, only to return twofold in the moments after.

  ”Now you must go.”

  Haldok extended his hand to the boy and laid his fingers down to the floor like a gangway for him to climb aboard. Arnem deftly hopped up onto one of the great twists of vine and bramble and took his place in the palm.

  “What about those things up above?” he asked.

  “Things?”

  “They’re like flies or ants, but like me too. Like a magus cursed an insect or a man or both at once.”

  “The Jedezi?” The spirit lifted him from the earth and ferried him to the top of the broken stair. “They are a quiet and furtive people, and certainly not the product of a curse.”

  “People?”

  “Yes,” Haldok said. “You do not think everything not a man is a monster, do you? A hunter of monsters should know better. And is that not your calling, little Arnem?”

  “I’m not a hunter of anything,” Arnem said and shrunk inside the cage of the spirit’s fingers, so much like roots at the foot of an enormous tree. “I got someone killed trying to hunt something.”

  “The thing you hunted killed a man who made the choice to help you hunt it. You are a wonderful boy, Arnem, and I am glad to have met you. But all things come with time, and you are still just a boy.”

  “I don’t know how much time anyone’s got down here now, but we could have all the time there is. This is the Midden, Haldok. The best I can hope for is a hut that doesn’t get washed away every year. And anyway, how do you know anything about me and hunting monsters?”

  “I have told you: The eyes of the earth never shut, for better or for worse.” The spirit lifted Arnem up to the broken thrust of stair that hung down from the hole he’d fallen through. “And they do not see a stable hut beside a roaring flood.”

  Arnem disembarked onto the pitted marble steps and found three sets of yellow eyes, perhaps the same three, peering down at him from the top of the ascent. His memory of the night before, of spectral shapes diving at his little husk of torchlight, produced a terror so stark that he nearly retreated into the open air at his back. If the Jedezi sensed this, he did not see it. Their heads twitched as they had before and the same guttural clicks and squawks echoed in the lofty expanse of the temple hall.

  “Fear is often senseless,” Haldok said from below him, “but in this case, I am persuaded to call it ridiculous. Now stand aside if you would.”

  The spirit reached past him, as if it meant to shake the hands of the Jedezi, and the light that suffused its core branched out along its fingertips and entwined the creatures. Their arms fell slack at their sides, their papery wings ceased to flutter, as if in a daze but one of absolute concentration. They were linked in this way only for a moment, and then Haldok’s light retreated to its source and the spirit withdrew its hand.

  “They will take you to safety,” Haldok said and nudged Arnem up the stairwell, but the boy turned around again at once.

  “The other one of you I met,” he said.

  “Hjaltimar.”

  “Is that something we call him?” He looked back at the Jedezi waiting fitfully to obey Haldok’s request and spirit him away. “What do they call you?”

  “Haldok is an old word, as old as these stones. It means simply ‘temple-guardian’ in the ancient tongue of Sul, and those who kept watch over this one wore the title before me. But it is not my name, just as Hjaltimar’s is not his name. The Jedezi are creatures of the earth, and they speak my name as the earth does.”

  "Then I'd rather learn that one, if it's all the same," Arnem said. "It seems the righter way."

  “You are a Fruit of Nej’Ud, young one, an Eater on the Fruitless Plain." It made a gesture that Arnem could only describe as a shake of its head. "If you can loosen your barren earth, as your ancestors once did for the Giants, then I suppose I shall try and water it.”

  The boy nodded to show that he was ready and stood as still as if he kept ranks against an enemy advance. Haldok’s gently luminous heart germinated with bright wisps that reached for him like a drift of fog caught in moonlight. Something screamed for him to run into the claws of the Jedezi or leap madly back into the hole and sprint into the darkness of the temple’s vast underbelly. It screamed like a sickness withering under the heat of a fever. An image came to him unbidden of a shriveled thing upon a desolate and fallow field, wailing under dark rolling skies. As if the Fruitless Plain had once birthed a second part of him that now was being fatally severed. Arnem shut out these cries, tore their sounder down to the foundations of himself and deeply tilled the salted earth that remained.

  The cool touch of the light washed over him, and he grasped for the briefest moment an unbroken chain that traveled far back from the trammels of his present. Unbeaten paths stretched everywhere, every step taken was new and never trodden twice. Arnem fed off the vitae of its age, of all the age in its cruelly burdened memory. He beheld the morning of the world. The temple around him was populated with the barely there phantoms of worshipers and priests and ceremonies and celebrations. Its walls were sturdy, its statues upright and proud.

  These were the things that Arnem had never seen and still did not see now. His eyes were Haldok’s in that moment, Haldok’s his, and the boy understood the world as the spirit did. Time became the lie that only the living ancients can discern, and for the briefest instant his own year existed alongside all the rest that had gone before. Arnem knew at last and for the first what it was to feel the promise of a sunset, confident that the sun would rise on him again tomorrow. His days no longer seemed the only days to live and no longer as if he ranked among the last of humanity’s ignorant follies, before all things were to pass and disappear. The life of the world suffused every part of him even as that life continued to fade and without the excuse of humankind could be called dead already. All the boy had known was ruin and the echoes of life, now the sense of having had and lost some immutable truth. And in its knowledge he learned Haldok’s name. He learned how to call Haldok for true and Hjaltimar and all the things that grow. Arnem learned their name and was sorry that he did. For their name was sorrow.

  ◆◆◆

  Haldok had not been wrong. The winds and the roots whispered right. Something was afoot in the Midden that announced itself with plumes of smoke and screams torn away on the currents of a greater destruction. Arnem saw the city-beneath-the-city as the Jedezi must have seen it, as the birds that by chance found themselves trapped beneath the bars of its cage of glyphic wards. It stretched like a mottled stain from the interior wall, at the top of which was the Tradesmen’s Tier, until disappearing into the blackened weald of the Witherwood. The air above the sprawling tangle was thick with the haze of a dozen fires burning near Marskol Square. A throng of people moved through the streets there, greater than any he had seen in the Midden; but, for what purpose, he was too far away to see.

  Scenarios sped through his mind like a fire spreads through dry fields under stiff winds. A part of him was proud that, after his time with Haldok, Druids were not the first possibility to come to mind. He quickly dismissed them when they did: Fire was not a mainstay of their adherents. Neither would a war between the gangs grow to encompass the Midden’s most populated district and compromise their most trafficked source of income. Unrest was the only thing that made sense to him, given the absence of the other two. Misery was never in short supply in the Midden—given succor by the specters of starvation and disease—and the palpable rage to which it gave birth made idio
ts of men. But it did not make them blind. These were the worst months to burn oneself out of shelter. The incessant floods would have much of their work done for them.

  Suddenly Arnem felt himself detach from every consideration he’d made and each one that was on his lips to make. He became weightless in a way that could never be mistaken for sailing through the air in the arms of a Jedezi. His mind reeled to keep something else from breaking.

  “Right there,” he shouted up to the Jedezi which held him, pointed down at the parapets of a high tower in the neighborhood of the Square. “Put me down right there.”

  A single word was echoing down the corridors of his mind, over and over until it wore out the stones of his thoughts: Cistern.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Today, There Would Be Violence

  Oren bathed in the screams and the tears. He was tethered to every voice, every broken door, every child torn away from its parents, every family shackled together and led away. These chains bound him invisibly, such that even he did not see them. The men and women who authored these things did so in his stead, and yet he felt as divorced from them as the moons from the earth. First blood had been spilt hours ago, at the door of an old soldier lately returned from Daer, and the morning was not yet half done. Oren’s hands shook. He told himself they were not his. His hands were stone. They pulled men from cellars and beat them onto the lifts and sent them down to where the papers said they must go. Now his feet were as fixed as the earth under them and if these watchmen did not already have their orders his mouth would not give them.

  A pair of men hired for the day’s work were wrestling at the doorstep of a tall, thin home newly built last year between two squat monsters of the Tier's older dwellings. They were trying to hold the father back without using the clubs dangling by lanyards from their wrists, while separating out the mother and their three children, but without much luck. The time was upon them when it was more expedient to beat him senseless and move on to the next home than stay and reason with him over something that was without reason. The law does not receive arguments, and the rule of law was the soul of the City Intransigent.

  The children, two boys and a girl, bawled and looked between their parents for anything at all. Any shred of acknowledgment or understanding or comfort. They did not understand, would not understand, and Oren wondered how long before he saw more of Arnem in their faces than their parents. He could not help then but know what he was seeing and know what was to come. The boys were not much older than Arnem, the girl not much younger. All of them born close together and bearing the ruddy complexion and dark hair of their parents, common to any Urakeen family. But they could be Daerians, their faces buried under the grey paint of spirals and writhing symbols, and it would not matter. Children have no nation.

  “Watchmen,” he called over to the pair and finally found the will to animate his legs. “What’s the delay? Why are you separating them?”

  The man who busied himself with keeping the woman and children at bay gave his companion a look and then pulled a crumpled mess of parchment out from his coat. The other kept a hand to the father’s chest, to make sure of him while he gave Oren his due consideration.

  “It’s our share of the papers, sir,” the first watchman said. “They’re reading right.”

  “Maybe you’re not reading them right.” The Provost drew up to him and stood looking over his shoulder at the densely packed names and addresses and ages and relations.

  “Qulpacz Street, twelfth house in from Strig,” the man went on. His fingertip trembled against the paper, painting it with artful smudges of blood and sweat and rain. “The woman and three kids. Nothing about a husband.”

  “You can see a husband, can’t you?”

  “The papers.”

  “Nevermind the papers. When did we do a count last? You were barely old enough to read, much less pull men from houses.”

  “What shall we do, then, Provost?” asked the man at the door, still keeping a hand on the father and another on his club. “Let them all stay cozy?”

  Oren knew what he was asking, and he read the pain of what he had to do in the faces of the family at his mercy. He knew what they would say—that he did not need to do anything, that every man has a choice—and he knew his reply. He had given it many times. His bones knew this time would be no different. The Provost had done all of what he believed was in his power to do, far more than he had ever done before. The father would go with his wife and children. He would not be left bloodied and half-alive on his own doorstep, listening to the fading cries of his children without having been spared a second glance—much less a twisted form of mercy.

  “Take them all. And take the presumption out of your voice or I’ll see you stay down there with them.”

  A curse sprang up in the throat of the father and died in the kind of animal snarl Oren might have expected from Arnem’s beast. He rushed the watchman who held him and took him off his feet, both flying from the steps that ran up to the door of the home. They landed together hard on the cobbles of the street, but their tussle did not last long. The other watchman laid his club along the base of the father’s skull and sent him sprawling senseless and limp. The children cried out. The oldest son started to beat his tiny fists against the man who struck his father. Oren threw the same man to the ground when his club started to rise again.

  “Gather them up and take them to the fucking lift,” he said. Spittle flew from his lips and onto the watchmen, who helped each other up. “We’re servicing an edict, not an exercise in cruelty.”

  “Is there any difference?” the mother asked, and the Provost was thankful she was led away not long after. He could not endure her stare.

  “Oren.” The voice came from behind him, inarticulate and nondescript, as if from underwater. He turned when the hand fell on his shoulder and looked into Helyett’s familiar but unremembered face. Blood spattered her hard features, attractive to him in their severity. He reflected it was an odd thing to notice in the pool of violence around them. The distance was fast separating him again, threatened to drive him out of his own body. “The lift,” she said. “We’ve a problem.”

  ◆◆◆

  A riotous throng had built up around the doors to the singular lift that traveled between the Fourth Ward of the Tradesmen’s Tier and the Midden. Only his watchmen, many of them raw recruits hired to mitigate the day’s duress, kept them herded about the gate through the judicious application of their clubs. Oren could see their lines breaking already. There were too many fighting too hard to keep from being cast out of their lives and into what had become a sort of hell in the mind of any Tradesman. He saw one of the reservists, no more than a boy, take a savage blow hard on his head and fall to the ground under the force. The others standing beside him in the human cordon promptly beat the huge man who had done it—a thick Slaughterhauser or perhaps a Forgeman, shorn of all but long mustaches—half out of this world and threw him back into the crowd. But the boy had had his fill. He ran with the demon of desperation in his feet.

  “Have you had any word from the others?” the Provost asked Helyett. “Did Nilbod start when he was supposed to start, before the Slaughterhausers and Forgemen got hunkered down in the Works? And Kodes. Where is Kodes?”

  “Kodes is in the Midden where you put him. I don’t know how it goes with him; but there’s smoke coming up from below. And the others?” She shrugged. “We can only hope. But I don’t think they’re having much more luck than us.”

  Helyett indicated the circle of spectators that had started to form incongruously amid the throng, several ranks deep around a thicket of weapons and raised voices. Oren shoved his way through the first and only line of watchmen that enclosed those who were to be exiled and then through the exiles themselves. Acolytes of the Church-Oppugning matched the vows and jibes that the Lictors of the Exchange hurled at them. The seething of the crowd around them pushed the two groups dangerously close, well within striking range. A twisted heat
stirred in Oren’s gut, the bubbling acid of the day’s affairs working at him. Everything brimmed on the edge of thunder, such that he could smell the lightning.

  Huer stood foremost of the Lictors. Oren was glad for it, though the man’s drawn face was red with hate, and made for him straight away.

  “You have to clear out or sort yourselves here,” the Provost said, fought hard to be heard over the ambient chaos. “We don’t have enough men to control the unsanctioned that are here and more are coming.”

  “Oren,” was all the Lictor said, his face splitting with such a smile that the sun might have shone on a freezing man. “Glad you’re with us. Circumspex sent down the squidfuckers? We don’t need them. Get them gone.”

  Oren clapped him on the shoulder. “Keep your men in line.”

  He crossed to the other side of the despairingly close but still vacant space and looked over the Church-Oppugning’s fighting men. They were outfitted for a battlefield, not keeping the peace. The spiked heads of their longflails hung low and loose from their shoulders. Stiff leather plates covered every part of them, dyed to an obscure grey and stylized by means of gilded embossments with likenesses of Utquod and his abyssal realm beneath the waves. Oren’s own pendant hung heavier on his neck, weighed down by the shame of its simplicity.

  The Provost cleared his throat to better address those who he could not escape feeling were his superiors in matters of the true world. “Which of you should I be speaking to?”

  Their ranks split like the sea breaking on a rock to reveal a lofty woman, garbed all in white robes so that she shined like the naked sun in the grey day. She conferred with a member of her guard and, as she turned her countenance upon him–hairless in the fashion of the Church-Rejoicing, the severe plains of her face creased with a smile–Oren knew her at once. He fell to his knees.