There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  “Methinks we’ve finally had it,” Dura said, peering steadily out the narrow slit at the tower’s apex. “Us Middeners don’t need more of us than there are already. Only so much water to go around.”

  Muro heaved a sigh that stung with pain for the puncture in his stomach. “Them that’s coming don’t want to become one of us either. This will put a hole in business, will it not.”

  “We could use a hole in business,” Quarr called over from the litter where Kurr still convalesced in feverish spurts of half-lucidity, muttering her brother’s name all the while. He patted the damp and the heat away from her face with a wet cloth. “You’ve got a hole in your fucking gut, we don’t need any more business.”

  “Now here truly is a day of days,” Dura said. “Quarr and me, we agree. And besides, no transactions are getting made today lest you want to be paddling through that lake of shit and rain lapping at our walls.”

  “I don’t like it,” Verem said from above them. He balanced atop the highest orbital of the apparatus that dominated their hideaway, peering through a spyglass trained on a massive rent in the metal dome of the ceiling. “Why should we get flooded out?”

  “It’s riots, isn’t it?” Quarr called up to him. “Riots is like to get the troughs clogged. We’ve seen it afore.”

  “Where’s Szrima?” he asked and slid deftly from the orbital and onto another, swinging down from strut to sphere until he landed among the Stormcrows. “We appointed her to be here, did we not?”

  The orrery rocked around them. The shattering of glass phials, the dull thud of shelves and upended tables undercut the low rumble of the quaking earth. Verem kept his feet, rolling with the brief aftershock; but Quarr had fallen over onto Kurr and Muro collapsed against the wall, still hobbled with the puncture in his gut. Dura scaled up the stone beside him by way of the breaks and arrowslits in the masonry until coming to dangle from the machinery that once turned the orrery. The distant sounds of rage, the empty wind and light lapping of the floodwaters were all that consumed the ensuing silence as the Stormcrows looked between themselves.

  A crow alighted on the sill through which Muro and Dura had been spying the orrery’s surrounds. Its head lolled on what appeared a broken neck, but was otherwise erect and alert. The eyes stared blind. Beady pits of nothing.

  “A taster,” it said, but did not squawk. A man’s voice spoke and not through its mouth. The snide, withering tones issued through the distortion of a small metal orifice embedded in the puff of its breast, grimy with blood and pus. “Just a taster.”

  “Methinks you’ve taken this crow fetish a mite too far,” Verem said. “What have you shoved into that bird, Segved? A longcall repeater?”

  “I don’t see a hair of him,” Dura said. She had scaled back down the wall far enough to cling to the edges of an arrowslit and peer through its meager view of the world outside.

  “You’ll not see me until the world after,” the voice in the crow said, “if you don’t come clear of that tower.”

  Quarr got up from Kurr’s side and went around the orrery’s machinery to the storage crates that were cast in its shadow on the other side. “What’s that he hit us with?” he said as low as he could to Verem. “How do we answer back?”

  “The Sling,” his captain mouthed back at him before turning again to the crow. “And what’s the use, my lad? So you’ll have a clearer shot instead of playing blind with whatever you’ve got out there?”

  “Call it a fair fight.” Segved’s words carried through the metal cavity in the crow’s throat like the ghastly exhalation of an opened tomb. “Oh we’d have ourselves a time. But short-lived. Limited ammunition.” Someone wept in the undertones of his rasp. “Enough to lay waste to your gate, but: tiresome chore, storming holdouts. What say we finish what was started? Won’t be any Dwellers out here to interrupt our polite exchange.”

  “Polite exchange,” Muro said and spat on the bird. It received the gesture with as much notice as a corpse. “My insides are all twisted up cause of our last polite exchange, you fucking wart. I’ll cut out your lungs, how’s that for a polite exchange?”

  “Quiet,” Verem told him.

  Segved tutted through the repeater, a shake of the head implicit in the sound. “Such disdain.”

  “We’re three men less and little to show for it. Why the theatrics?” Verem waved his hand at Quarr, who fussed still with the assemblage of silver cord and glyph-inscribed bones that was the Sling. “Easy enough to bide your time and cut us down.”

  “I know your shit little cousin is a Provost’s catamite. I’ll not have him knowing I was the one who deaded you. He might suspect it otherwise, like to cause problems. This way, well, you’re a casualty of the times, aren’t you?”

  “It still bears asking,” Verem said, but waved madly for Dura to climb higher, and she did. Once there she took hold of one of the hatches set into the wall at the height of the ceiling. “Leave it quits. Take our holdout, have at our water caches and tributes, claim our tollways. We’ve peace with the other gangs. Even Black Iosef cut a berth around our territory until you squawked long enough for him to listen.” Metal screeched on metal as Dura pulled open the hatch with the inertial weight of a swing. The weak daylight, smothered by the overcast and smog-strewn skies, spilled into the tower. “What say we cut the same deal? What say we have peace?”

  “I’ve as much need for your peace as for your water rights or your failure of a toll network. What’s peace but a pause? And a pause for what ends? Wars are waged for ends.” Paddles slapped against water beneath the crow’s transmutation of Segved’s voice. The subdued whimper heard earlier was barely present now. “I want you Verem. I want your cousin, and I want your Stormcrows. I’ll know peace when I hear out loud the pitiful noises you make in my head.”

  Verem flung a palsied hand at Quarr, and the big man got down haltingly onto his knees. He worked a roughhewn crystal that burnt with a faint pinkish light into its receptacle upon the face of a disc of bone that sat at the center of the Sling’s assemblage. Once firmly secured, he set the point of a chisel onto it and poised a hammer above his head.

  “I’ve got him,” the Hawkfaced said from beside the window, the sharp angles of his visage at odds with the limp brokenness of the crow. “Far, far out. Three, on a barge. No. Four. Three standing, the other on their knees. Something set up at the center of the raft.”

  Sweat beaded on Quarr’s brow and ran down into his eyes. He wiped at them with the back of a dirty hand. “How far out, you cunt?”

  Muro looked back at him, aghast. “Does it matter?”

  Verem closed his fist. Quarr brought the hammer down at once onto the head of the chisel, shattering the gemstone beneath. The bones came alive in a flurry of light, as if a pale moon burned at the orrery’s heart. Slowly the bones rose from the ground. Faces whirled about them on spectral zephyrs, indistinct and baleful. The silver cords which bridged the gaps between the bones grew taut and gave them shape, glistening with the complex geometries of the ancient Magi.

  A wholly alien weapon came into being and a Sling perhaps only in the dimmest approximation buoyed before Quarr. The grim countenances of its bound dead raged within their nimbus of light. Its launching mechanisms—twisted malformations of a catapult or ballista—quivered with their dreadful desire for release. His throat convulsed with a deep swallow and, with a sharp shake of his head, he laid his fingertips delicately against the sigils graven onto the disc of bone. By light touches he manipulated the weapon so that it faced the aperture Dura had opened, accounted for its height and Muro’s less than descriptive guess at Segved’s distance.

  “I was hoping,” Verem said to the bird, “that you would agree.”

  He drew and tossed a knife from his belt in a single deft movement that passed through the bird’s breast and through the ovular node of the longcall repeater. It disappeared from the windowslit in a spray of blood and feathers, killing the poor thing for true.

  A nod passed from
Muro to Dura to Quarr, and the latter performed a sequence of gestures against the face of the disc that incensed the Sling’s light tenfold. The visages trapped in its ghostly haze wailed from inside their prison and strained against the bounds that held them from the living world. Then, with a final movement of Quarr’s fat fingers along the bright characters and sigils of the Sling, the luminous force that had built in its net was hurled through the hatchway with such force that a star could not be said to have fallen faster.

  ◆◆◆

  “A final chance,” Segved said into the crow's headless corpse, its torn shambles of a neck bristling with metal piping and vascular chambers that flickered with the dying light of glyphs. He was not answered. “We’ve been refused. Ready the cannon.”

  Qurzin shambled toward a naked woman cradling the bloody stump that had been her hand, his assent lost in the palsied stammering and inarticulate verbal spew. He nearly fell twice in as many steps. The touch of the death-rattle lingered with him still and more powerfully as the days ran on. His legs shook and took steps in ways that he did not will them across the gently heaving terrain of the raft. The lieutenant fulfilled his captain’s task and dragged the woman to her feet, weeping and dirty and shorn of dignity. He threw her down at the weapon’s makeshift anchors to the raft. It was a brutishly simple length of pale stone that was so overcome with the latent power of its glyphic enchantments that it seemed a disembodied thing, violent with light. Qurzin placed her hand into the loading end of the cannon. It was a cruel instrument, a toothed mouth that throbbed with a glow as if embers were stuffed deep inside and cooking with blood. She cried and fought with him, but it only delighted him more.

  “Quit twiddling with her like a fool and commence the bloodrite,” Segved said, eyes narrowed and studying the tower as if its secrets would be given up to him if he did so long enough. “We’ve more than this slaughter to attend to today. The Church is expecting further deliveries.” He swatted at the other Crowbill with them on the raft. “Help him.”

  “Please,” the woman said at Qurzin’s feet. “My name is Nysla. I will do anything, but not this. My hand.” Her tears stung as the salt of the droplets fell onto the stump of her wrist. “I want to see my children. My name is Nysla.”

  Segved went on searching the arrowslits of the tower from afar. “Do you think my knowing your name will make me feel any different about what I mean to do?” He did not even deign to pay her a glance.

  Qurzin seized her by the arm, the stiff motion slashing blood across the cannon and the raft. Her screams were music on the bleak wind as he slipped her arm into the mouth of the cannon once more.

  It had not swallowed more than the new beginnings of her wrist before the moonbright wraith of the Sling erupted from the apex of the tower. The death knell of a hundred thousand trapped souls rang out as it hurtled down from the nearest rainsoaked clouds. A moment followed that was long enough for terrible understanding to creep across Qurzin’s face, but no more.

  The grim missile landed to the side of the raft and tore into the floodwaters so powerfully that it nearly capsized. Qurzin fell and slid and caught himself on its edge, but the other Crowbill was not so fortunate. He was thrown screaming into the air and did not reach the surface of the water before the spectral cloud had erupted from beneath and seized him. The horrid gagging sounds of lungs purged of air, the crinkling of skin robbed of all fluid and desiccated of life, chased Qurzin back aboard the raft. Incoherent warbles fell from his mouth as the thing dropped his companion back into the water as only a blackened husk.

  “Qurzin,” Segved screamed. “Qurzin!” His lieutenant remained a babbling mess on the floor of the raft. “Useless.”

  He threw the girl at the foot of the cannon again and reoriented its sit so that it aimed at the doors to the Stormcrows’ tower. The spectral miasma surged toward the two of them. Her arm came willingly when he took it. She was limp and delirious with blood loss, her eyes lost in the mournful faces crowding in around them. Vague words rose to her lips and then were lost. She did not utter a conscious sound until Segved thrust what remained of her arm into the mouth of the cannon.

  A fierce, grinding mastication presaged the chorus of pain and terror that he so loved to hear. The gross sounds of appeasement were beneath the tearing of flesh, echoed out from deep within the cannon as if across far distances. Whether a spirit lay behind the arcane veil of the glyphs, satisfied of Segved’s offering, he did not know. The Magi’s weapons were obscure to him, but their power was plain.

  He let the girl slump to the raft when it was not much more than her shoulder that remained, his face a mask of gore in which his eyes burned like steady and remote stars. She spasmed her last at his feet until the cannon fired. The force of the blast launched the raft nearly upright and threw her into the encroaching embrace of the spirits.

  The shot that erupted from the cannon scintillated with immense heat and burbled as it went, leaving a spray of boiling blood in its wake to fall steaming into the waters. It smashed home against the gates of the tower with a wet crack. As if sanguine lightning danced against the steel, close on its heels a thunderclap imbued with the vitae of a thousand men. The doors fell broken and smoldering into the threshold. A cry rose up.

  Dozens of skiffs slid out from the web of alleys and streets that stemmed from the courtyard of the tower, signaled by the canon’s roar and the crash of the gates. There were the beaked masks and warpicks of the Crowbills; the painted marauders of Black Iosef; and even the plumages of dried snakeskins trailing from the leathern caps of Scaletails, who just last summer were instead coordinating raids with the Stormcrows. The blood that came with every rainy season stank with opportunity. Another gang knocked aside, another share of the loot to be claimed and sold and deployed. The skiffs swarming around the tower were no more than parasites, and there was precious little room left in the host.

  The Bogscag led the van. It threw the first of the grappling hooks against the walls, bound to catch on one of the many imperfections in the crumbling masonry. It beached its craft onto the lone scrap of earth left to the tower’s ingress by the flood. Its crew stormed onto the landing and into the open mouth of the tower threshold. Another discharge of hungry souls burst from the heights of the tower and fell amongst a group of skiffs approaching from the west. Those who did not abandon their crafts forfeited their lives to its grip.

  A hand gripped Segved’s ankle, accompanied by frenzied but inarticulate shouts, until Qurzin’s lips and tongue finally obeyed him. “Segved!” he cried.

  The captain of the Crowbills looked and saw that his hand had already been engulfed. Ghostly jaws nipped at his ears, spoke secrets long dead and forgotten. His mind reeled. The miasma took the half of him that it could with the last of its fading strength. An animal howl escaped him, the body filling the space that the mind had relented. He felt his flesh twist. Sweet rot seeped into his nostrils on the backs of gases released from his rapid decay. Something like fire tore apart his nerves until he distantly screamed for the pain to take him and for it to be over. Then his eyes, by chance in their wild flitting, fell on the cannon. If there was to be pain, it would be his own doing.

  Segved hardly felt the bloodrite. Its touch was the touch of the wind when set against the agony that gripped him already. The heat that rose from the cannon, its deep roar, escorted him into blackness. The force of the discharge took him from the souls’ wavering embrace and tossed him into the waters. He did not see where the cannon aimed, much less where the sorcerous bolt would fall. If he had, a smile might have briefly danced across his face before he was blinded to the world.

  ◆◆◆

  The knife slid along Verem’s jaw so that he felt the blade cut into the bone. It clattered into the busy gloom behind him, thrown just awry of its mark. His own knife was busy in the gullet of the last man to try the threshold of the stairwell. Gagging, coughing sounds fought to assert that he was still alive while the better part of his life ran down the breast
of Verem’s jerkin. He withdrew the knife and kicked him back down the stairs, forcing those behind to scatter or find themselves tumbling with him.

  Verem’s hands were thick with the man’s life, with the life of the dozen men and women who came before him. They were black in the shadows with spilled blood, so slick that with every thrust and stab and parry his weapons threatened to fly from his grip. His thews grew tired of the killing. The tower traps had taken their toll, but did little to stem the tide. So many had died already in the dance of blades with him. So many more shambled over the dead to reach the dance again.

  The bodies clogging the stairwell were a monument to him, but each had laid their wound. His leg stiffened with the gash left by a spearhead, withdrawn after a failed thrust right into the meat of his thigh. A dagger had slipped beneath the mail of his jerkin and left a puncture not much deeper than his thumb; but the pain was a distraction all the same. Enough distractions and it would be a sword that found its way home against raw flesh. It would be his own life running from him. And, even when he chanced to think there might be an end to the Crowbills and Blackbodies and Scaletails, he thought of the Bogscag and how easily the thing handled him at their last meeting.

  The ghostly thunder of the Sling resounded throughout the orrery behind him. Pale light fluttered in his periphery as the missile crossed through the heights of the chamber and through the opening Dura had uncovered. She slung from one to the next of the hatches as Quarr adjusted the aim of the weapon and threw them open to hurl ancient death down on those below. Muro called out her targets from whichever embrasure offered the best view of their current trajectory. It was a mad scene made madder by the steel tide that continued to surge up from the stairwell, spitting blood as it came.