by Ben Chandler
Yami picked one up. ‘Perhaps you should ask Lord Tenjin.’
‘What do you think they are?’
Yami handed the piece back to him. ‘Playing tokens of some kind?’
They all returned to their work. Lenis put the rune pieces back in their pouch and slipped them into his pocket.
He glanced towards the north and saw a dark blotch on the edge of the Wastelands, shaped like an old, stooped man with a tall walking stick. Even from this distance he could feel that it was the Demon that had been following them. Neti. Lenis called out and pointed, but as the others turned to look the Demon Lord vanished. Lenis could no longer feel his presence.
‘Is everything all right, Lenis?’ Yami asked him.
‘I saw Neti, but he’s gone now.’
The captain stared for a long time at the tree line. ‘We should keep a lookout in case he returns. I will take first watch. The rest of you should rest.’
Once the camp was ready Lenis settled gratefully into his blankets on an almost dry patch of ground. The captain sat nearby, his eyes locked on the Wastelands’ edge. Lenis drew the Bestia close about him and fell asleep.
Missy watched Lenis enter the temple. Behind her she felt the tether Lord Raikô had tied around her spirit-self trailing back towards the south. She wanted nothing more than to make her presence known to her brother, but she could not break free of Raikô’s hold. If she had had her physical body she would have screamed and tried to tear herself free of his grip, but in her current state there was nothing she could do. Raikô’s power showed no signs of weakening, even though his mind was almost gone.
She kept her hidden vigil for hours, ignoring Raikô’s insistent tugging on the tether. She didn’t relax until Lenis emerged from the temple with the Bestia in tow. She trailed along behind them, willing her brother to notice her.
He didn’t.
The group had left the Wastelands and were setting up their camp when Missy reluctantly decided to return to Raikô’s temple, all the way back across the seas. As she turned to go she noticed a bent old man supporting himself with the aid of a long walking stick. He was standing on the edges of the wood, his face lined and kindly beneath his bushy brows. Missy wondered what the old man was doing all the way out here, and then he raised his head and looked directly at Missy’s incorporeal form with a single red eye. She instinctively reached out to him and recognised the unmistakable feel of its power. It rivalled Raikô’s, and like the Thunder Bird this one was riddled with the Wasteland sickness, but unlike Raikô there was nothing left to fight it off. This was a fullfledged Demon Lord. Hollow. This was what Raikô would become. No wonder he was scared.
Missy knew that she had to get away from the Thunder Bird before the transformation was complete. If there was a cure for his sickness, she was never going to find it, not like this. Every moment she wasted searching or tagging along after her brother the disease took a little bit more of the Totem she was bound to. She had to find a way to escape, whatever it took, and she had to do it soon.
The Demon suddenly laughed and Missy recoiled. There was something wrong about the laugh, not because it was strange or evil, but because it sounded so normal, almost human, and it wasn’t coming from the Demon. It was coming from something inside it.
‘So close.’ The Demon’s lips didn’t move. The voice came from whatever was hiding in its empty shell. ‘Poor Misericordia. If only your brother knew how close you are.’ Whatever it was, Totem or Jinn or some entity even more powerful than either, it began to laugh again, and the laughter terrified Missy to the very core of her soul. She fled, and when she felt an answering panic from Lord Raikô, she allowed him to wrench her back to him and away from the laughing creature in the Demon suit. The one that knew her name.
After Namei released him from a rough and awkward embrace and ran off below decks, Lenis sank down onto the stairs leading up to the bridge. The walk back across the sodden plains had been an ordeal, despite his newfound energy. Although his wounds were healed and his mind clear, his body was still exhausted from everything he’d put it through over the past couple of weeks. Spending most of a day wandering around the Wastelands followed by a night sleeping on the cold ground hadn’t helped either. What he really needed was a few days in his bunk.
The others were all pleased to see them return safely, and even the stoic Arthur smiled, though he followed this up by asking Lenis how soon they would be able to launch the Hiryû. The captain reassured him they would be in the air once Lenis and the Bestia had had a chance to rest. Hiroshi seemed to take this as a cue and promised to force nourishing victuals on Lenis until he had regained his strength. Yami gave Lenis a look over the cook’s shoulder and actually winked. Lenis had to suppress a smile.
At last Lenis was able to return to his bunk, his stomach full and the Bestia resting fitfully in their hutch. The doctor had examined the Bestia and told Lenis they would be fine. He seemed far more interested in the sample of well water the captain had brought back for him. Long Liu gave Lenis a draught of a sweet-tasting tonic that had dulled the lingering aches in his body and quietened his mind, and then the doctor had disappeared into his cabin.
Despite his drug-induced sense of peace, Lenis’s dreams were harrowing. He was running through endless Wastelands towards an enormous tree on the horizon, being chased by a shrivelled old Demon. This time the knots and furrows of the tree’s bark formed themselves into tantalisingly obscure runes, but no matter how fast or how far Lenis ran, the Demon was always right on his heels, and the tree was always too far away to reach.
The feeling of frustration stayed with him after he woke. He lay in his bunk for a long time, debating whether or not to ask the doctor for another dose of tonic. He decided against it. Lenis hadn’t spent more than half his life as a Bestia Keeper without learning the dangers of drug misuse.
His burns were gone. The only pain he felt was from sore muscles, but that was the result of pushing a still-healing body too hard and could be managed. His nervy energy was a different problem.
Lenis bit back a useless cry, fearful of waking the Bestia, and threw off his blankets. He struggled into his trousers, ignoring the cramping in his muscles. He started pacing the confines of the engine room to stretch them out only to be further frustrated every couple of steps by the machinery that housed the heart of the Hiryû. The metal of the engines had cooled from being dormant so long. Lenis wasn’t used to his room being so cold.
The words of the mad Tien Tese doctor, the few coherent ones that Lenis could remember, taunted him. You are full of questions, Lenis Clemens. That is a good thing. You must go and speak to the World Tree. There you will get answers.
Lenis brought his hand down hard on the unyielding engine block, jarring his arm.
‘Damn it to the Wastelands!’ He shook his now-tingling limb and rounded on his Bestia. ‘How can I speak to something if I don’t even know where or what it is?’
Aeris looked up at him blearily and Lenis could feel waves of sympathy spreading out towards him. He turned away from her compassion and returned to his bunk, staring down at his rumpled blankets.
She doesn’t exist. Or she does, but she is everywhere and everyone and everything, which is the same as not existing at all, as being nothing ... Do you understand?
Yami had spoken those words to him after they had returned from their foray into the Wastelands outside of Gesshoku. Lenis had told the swordsman what Long Liu had said about the World Tree, and Yami had vowed to do whatever he could to help Lenis recover his sister’s soul. His idea of bartering with a Lilim had proven fruitless. Bakeneko had neither the power nor the inclination to stand against the corrupted Totem that had taken Missy’s soul.
That only left the World Tree, which was no hope at all.
Lenis sat down on his bunk. ‘If she exists she is everything and so she is nothing.’ He pulled his robes around his shoulders. ‘She is everywhere and nowhere.’
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br /> ‘Sounds like a riddle.’
Lenis started at the sound of Namei’s voice. ‘What does?’
Namei stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed over her chest. One hand played with the end of her scarf. ‘What you just said. If she exists she is everything and so she is nothing. She is everywhere and nowhere. It sounds like a riddle.’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘So?’
‘So, what?’
‘What is it then? What’s the answer?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lenis rested his chin in his hand. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. How can something be everything and nothing? Everywhere and nowhere? It’s impossible.’
‘Not something.’ Namei came and sat next to him. ‘Someone. You said it was a “she”.’
‘Well, it’s not really a she. It’s an it, I guess. A tree.’
‘A tree?’
‘The World Tree. I need to know where it ... what is it?’
Namei grabbed one of his hands in both of hers. ‘That’s what we’re talking about, the World Tree?’
Lenis stared back. ‘You know about the World Tree?’
‘The World Tree is the mother of all things. We were all born from the buds that sprouted on her branches. Her roots reach deep into the earth and connect every living thing. She resides in the heart of our greatest hopes, and gives birth to our deepest fears.’
Namei was holding his hand too tight, but he didn’t pull it away. He said, ‘That’s what Yami told me.’
‘Yami?’
‘The doctor said the only way I could save Missy was to ask the World Tree. I asked Yami what it meant.’
Namei rolled her eyes. ‘Why didn’t you ask me?’
‘I didn’t know you knew about it!’
‘Didn’t your Puritan parents teach you anything?’ Namei turned red and let go of his hand. Then she pushed up her left sleeve, revealing the tattoo Lenis had noticed earlier. ‘See? This symbol comprises three words: eternity, connection and mother. Those who follow the World Tree philosophy use it to identify one another. My mother gave me this tattoo. She used to teach people about their philosophy.’
‘I thought she was a warrior!’
‘She was.’
Perhaps Lenis wouldn’t have to search the entire world to find someone who could tell him about the World Tree after all! ‘Well, what about it?’
‘One day when I was still very small,’ Namei began, ‘I brought home a sapling and planted it in the garden. I told my mother it was the World Tree, our own private World Tree.’ Her eyes were unfocused, as though she was no longer seeing what was inside the engine room. ‘My mother tore it from the ground and made me burn it to ashes. “You must understand,” she told me, “the World Tree is nothing because she is everything.” When I cried she told me not to weep because the ashes of my tree were as much a part of the World Tree as the sapling had been, as I was. She was trying to teach me a lesson. I was too young to understand it back then.’
Lenis groaned and slumped in his bunk. ‘I think I’m too young to understand it now.’
‘The followers of the World Tree believe everything is connected. Like the Totem. People call them by different names, but they’re really worshipping the same beings.’
‘Like Apsilla and Seisui?’
‘Right. The World Tree represents their connection to one another, and so she is everywhere, but she is, herself, a non-entity. She doesn’t exist except as a symbol of that interconnectedness, so she isn’t really anywhere.’
‘She’s nowhere.’
Namei nodded and stood, then started to walk out of the room. At the door she stopped and said over her shoulder, ‘She is in everything and so she is nothing. She is everywhere, and so she is nowhere.’
Lenis threw an arm up to cover his eyes. ‘Nowhere in particular.’ As he followed the dancing of the false lights behind his eyelids he repeated, ‘Nowhere in particular.’ He lowered his arm. ‘If she’s nowhere in particular and everywhere, then I don’t have to find her ...’ He looked over at Aeris and found her still watching him. ‘She’s here.’
Lenis blinked and the engine room disappeared. In its place were the desiccated remains of a garden. Instead of his bunk, Lenis found himself standing on a bed of dead grass. If he had not seen the Wastelands with his own eyes, had not travelled through it, he would have sworn he was in it now. He was surrounded by an undulating plain covered in dying vegetation. There was no sun, nor were there any clouds. The sky was a dull white and gave off a uniform, somehow artificial light by which Lenis was able to see crisscrossing paths of flattened, yellowed grass spreading out around him. Between these pathways, which must once have been green and soft underfoot, were clusters of crooked, groping twigs, thick brambles, and bare earth. The soil was grey, and when Lenis bent down to push his fingers into it he found it hard, like stone.
He spun around and saw something on the horizon. It was a thin column, reaching up into the heavens. The longer he stared at it, the greater his dread became. No. It was familiar, terrible and familiar, and Lenis didn’t want to admit that it was not a column at all, but a trunk, wasted and thin and with empty, clawing branches. Please, no! This was not the World Tree of his dreams.
Lenis took a step forward and, after a blur of motion, was standing right in front of it. He drew in a shaky breath, not even able to hope that he was mistaken. Surely this near-dead thing could not be the legendary World Tree? Its girth was no wider than the span of his arms, and its bark was cracked and peeling. There were no runes, no secret meanings to discover. The World Tree was supposed to represent the interconnectedness of all life. If that was so, then something was terribly wrong with the world.
Lenis reached out a hesitant hand to touch the tree.
‘I wouldn’t.’
The voice came from behind the trunk. Peering around, Lenis saw it belonged to a tall man cloaked in a black robe. He had long, dark hair and though his eyes were human enough, their irises were red. They were his only distinctive feature.
‘It is a brave or ignorant man who touches what he does not understand. I so often find that those two things go well together.’
Lenis took a step towards the World Tree. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am a Warden. The first of them, in fact. This garden is my charge.’
Lenis hesitated, caught by the man’s crimson gaze. ‘What happened to it?’
The man swept his arm to indicate the whole of the waste around the tree’s upthrust roots. ‘Corruption, my gentlest creature. It is in everything, everyone.’ He stepped forward and touched the decaying pillar. It trembled under his touch.
A bolt of fear shot down Lenis’s spine. ‘Don’t touch her!’
‘So you know what this is?’
‘The World Tree.’
‘Ah, but what is the World Tree?’ He didn’t wait for Lenis to answer. ‘Scientifically speaking, each species on this planet had its origins in her. She is the progenitor of each and every living thing in this world. She is our mother, Lenis. We sprouted from her branches, every one of us. Her roots run through us all. They bind us together. Her boughs protect us, shield and cocoon us. And this,’ he placed his other hand on the trunk and the quivering intensified, ‘this is her heart.’
‘Leave her alone!’ Lenis grabbed the man’s arms and thrust them aside.
The man stepped quickly away and raised his hands in supplication. ‘Forgive me, gentle one, but I do her no harm. The life in her grows weak, it is true, but I do not threaten her.’
Lenis placed himself between the man and the tree. Long Liu had said he would find answers at the World Tree to help his sister. Was this man the one he had to ask? ‘Look, I don’t care about the World Tree just now. Do you know how I can save my sister?’
The man crossed his arms over his chest and fixed Lenis with his red gaze. ‘You cannot save your sister. Misericordia must save herself.’
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘Dying?’
The man stopped, pointing at the wasted trunk. ‘She is almost dead. During the Great War, the weapons humanity used to destroy one another were far too powerful. They drew on the strength of the Bestia and the Lilim and of other creatures since forgotten, and that power came first from the World Tree. The world’s energy is finite. They took too much. At the very end, someone even sought to harness the power of the gods themselves. Not the Totem, nor the Jinn, but an older and more powerful race even than them. His reckless act caused the Wastelands to appear, and now they are spreading.’
Lenis was horrified by the man’s words but not willing to trust them. ‘How do you know this?’
‘I know because I am one of the gods.’ The man pinned Lenis with his vermilion stare again. ‘One of the Firstborn. One of the True Dragons. What your people would call a Caelestia if they still knew how to name such things. I will reveal to you my true name, Lenis, spoken only amongst my fellow gods. I am Ishullanu, Warden of the World Tree and King of the Demons.’
‘King of the Demons?’
‘Yes, gentle one, the Demon King, and you and your sister are my hope.’
Lenis backed away from the man until he was almost touching the World Tree. ‘What are you saying?’
‘You and your sister were once a single bud on this tree, gentle one, the first to appear after the birth of humanity, and that was a very long time ago now.’
‘We aren’t human?’
The man took a step closer to Lenis, frowning. ‘You are human but you weren’t meant to be. I plucked you from this tree. Such a beautiful shoot you were and with such promise, but the Tree did not have the strength left to see you safely grown. Your body, whatever it was to become, was a wasted thing, but your soul, your mind, these I could save. I placed each in the body of a human child.’
