Wrath-Bearing Tree

by James Enge

  “I don’t trust the demons; I master them.” Merlin shook the carillon of bells, and the furry team of dybbuks frantically redoubled their efforts to draw the sleigh forward. “They obey me because they fear me. I am the master of the arts of all makers and seers in all the worlds we know, Ambrosia. You should fear me, too.”

  “Old fool,” the girl muttered stubbornly.

  “You said you tested them,” Aloê observed, to distract the old man.

  “Yes, indeed,” Merlin said, ready to be distracted. “I have been trailing the Two Powers for a month or so. Or their avatars, anyway.”

  “What’s the difference between the god and the avatar?”

  “Sometimes not much,” Merlin said. “The god’s being has at least two anchors: one in the border of the talic and material planes, the other in the border between talic and spirit realms. Or so the old seers say. The avatar is the material echo of the god’s nearer anchor. Its appearance is a function of the god’s intentions as complicated by his identity.”

  “Or her identity.”

  “If you insist. I followed the avatars of Torlan and Zahkaar through the wreck of Old Azh. There was something they wanted to destroy there—”

  “The Apotheosis Wheel, I think.”

  “Possibly. There was once much in Old Azh to learn, but there is not now. The Two Powers went through the island like fire through a prairie.”

  “Did they kill the last Watcher?”

  “Eh? The mechanism, you mean? Kill is not the correct nomenclature, my dear. You can only kill something that is alive. But certainly the talic mechanism that once ran the island was inactive when I arrived, after the departure of the Powers (or their avatars). Most of those empty dog-people are dead; the rest will not survive long.”

  “Probably they did not pay attention to their daughters.”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Ambrosia; the grownups are talking.” Merlin looked sideways at Aloê. ‘‘A strange ship passed my galley while I was on the Sea of Stones. It moved very fast, and not with the wind, but it had no oars. It strode across the waves on a pair of long legs—”

  Aloê laughed. “That crazy bastard. Yes, yes. I can see it. The reduced friction would make very high speeds possible. But it might be a very fragile craft. I hope he didn’t run into a storm.”

  “If you are referring to my son—”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “I confess I suspected it even at the time, even though I thought Morlock was safely in the bag.” He looked darkly upon her. “Is that the attraction? You design ships together? Because otherwise I can’t see it.”

  “Have you ever met your son?”

  “Not since the day he was born. But we do have nonphysical communication from time to time. And I have seen pictures of him.”

  “Hm.” Aloê found this remark distressing, but tried not to show it. Even such tenuous contact with an exile might be held against Morlock as a violation of the First Decree. But there was always the possibility that Merlin was lying.

  “You don’t intend to enlighten me, I see,” Merlin remarked. “Possibly the explanation would involve unsavory details—”

  “Or savory ones.”

  “Gross!”

  “Ambrosia, enough.”

  Abruptly tumbling about their heads was a flock of chellnor birds, their gray wings flecked with white winter-feathers. The flock ran squawking westward.

  Merlin and Aloê laughed in surprise.

  “Where did they come from?” Aloê wondered.

  “They nest in snow sometimes,” Merlin observed. “I wonder if the team kicked up their nest. Life is returning to these dead lands, certainly. What you did was extremely inconvenient for me, my dear, but no doubt—”

  Ambrosia leapt up from the back of the sleigh and snatched Aloê’s glass staff. As Merlin and Aloê gaped, Ambrosia spun the staff, glittering in the sun, and smashed the skull of a harthrang who was climbing up the side of the sleigh. The skull shed its brains in the bitter white breeze, but the hands tried to hold on to the side of the sleigh. Ambrosia methodically pounded on the fingers until they could grip no longer, and the headless harthrang fell by the wayside as the sleigh ran on.

  “The bells!” shouted Ambrosia at the gaping Merlin.

  Aloê turned to see that the seven remaining harthrangs pulling the sleigh were looking backward, and three were fumbling at their harnesses. She seized the carillon from Merlin’s nerveless fingers and shook it fiercely.

  The harthrangs quailed at the shrill steely voices of the bells and turned away again, intent on the road ahead.

  “Thank you, my dear,” said Merlin frostily to Aloê, as if he were offering to cut her throat, and seized the carillon back. “And thank you, Ambrosia,” he said as his daughter silently handed the staff back to Aloê. “I can’t think of what drove the harthrang to it. It will have to abandon that body, and when I get around to activating its oath, it will begin a very unpleasant spiral to the final death.”

  “Maybe it was desperate,” Ambrosia suggested.

  “What does it have to fear more than me? I ask you.”

  “I’m telling and telling you. But you never listen.” The girl sat down again in the back of the sleigh.

  They rode on in silence, except for when Merlin gave the carillon an occasional imperious shake, to keep the harthrangs at their task.

  Finally they came to a small town. The sea was near enough that Aloê could smell it, and the air was milder there than any she had felt all day; the snow was melting in the town’s single street.

  The snow was unmarked by footprints. There was one chimney in the middle of town that was issuing a dim thread of smoke from its black mouth; the houses were reasonably well-kept. But there was no other sign that the town was still occupied.

  “Who lives here?” Aloê asked.

  “For the time being,” Merlin said, “we do. I will ask you ladies to unharness my team and draw the sleigh into yonder barn. Then I will stake the harthrangs to their posts as a perimeter guard, and we can rest from our travels.”

  Aloê and Ambrosia dismounted and approached the harthrangs gingerly. The harthrangs watched, enigmatic in their furred hoods, but did not otherwise move as the women unhooked them from the bar of the sleigh.

  “Ambrosia,” Aloê whispered.

  “Hm?”

  “I think this body is dead.”

  “This one, too. How recently is yours gone?”

  “Sometime today, I think.”

  “This one, too.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Tell you later.”

  “Is it good or bad?”

  “Really bad.”

  They finished releasing the harthrangs without incident. Merlin dismounted the sleigh and began speaking to the harthrangs in a language Aloê did not know. It sounded like a mudshark crunching bear-bones.

  The two women unpacked the sleigh and dragged it into the barn Merlin had pointed out. It was next door to the one building that seemed to be occupied.

  Inside the barn were several horses, about five cows, and a large number of chickens. The chickens were all dead, but the larger animals were alive.

  They wouldn’t be much longer without help, though. They had plenty of fodder, but their water troughs were bone dry.

  “What happened here?” Aloê asked Ambrosia. “Did the people just walk away?”

  “Hope so,” Ambrosia said. “Don’t think so, though,” she added, after a moment. She was reminding Aloê more of her brother all the time, and not in a good way.

  Once they had the sleigh in the middle of the barn and the great doors closed, Aloê dragged one of the water troughs out of a side door and started filling it with wet snow and slush.

  She dragged it back into the barn with rather more difficulty. By then Ambrosia had disappeared somewhere. Aloê found a pair of water buckets and used them to carry snow into the barn until all the water-troughs were full to the brim with slush.

  She d
id all this with a sense of mingled obligation and futility. “Don’t know who’s going to take care of you when we’re gone,” she told a horse who was taking tentative licks at a pool of melting snow. “But maybe we can let you loose to fend for yourselves.” The horse made no reply.

  She looked up to see Ambrosia standing nearby. The girl was looking more alarmed than ever.

  “What is it, honey?” Aloê asked.

  “Come see.”

  Ambrosia led her out of the back of the barn. Not too far away was the town graveyard. One of the crypts was standing open, mysteriously free of the melting snow. There was room inside for two or three bodies, but there were none within. Many a runic imprecation and trap had been freshly carven into the weathered stone.

  “This is for us, I think,” Ambrosia said. “Me, and Morlock, and maybe you, now, too. The spells would bar anyone from detecting what was inside, even something as acrid as the blood of Ambrose.”

  “How could we live in there?”

  “I don’t think we are meant to.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “I was looking for it. Come on; there’s something else.”

  Ambrosia led Aloê into a house next to the graveyard. Inside the sole room were the bodies of an old man, and old woman, and a young man.

  “So they didn’t walk away,” Aloê mused. “They were killed. No, wait!”

  She knelt down by the side of the old man. His chest was rising and falling; the whites of his eyes were still clear, not darkened by the brown shadow of death. “They’re still alive!” she said. “At least some of them.”

  “No,” Ambrosia said, with unusual somberness. “Some of the bodies may still live, but only their vegetative souls. The people aren’t here anymore. They have been killed, eaten.”

  “By the harthrangs.”

  “That’s what demons live on: the tal of living rational souls.”

  “I take it you’re telling me we should get out of here.”

  “Not yet,” Ambrosia said thoughtfully. “He’ll be expecting something like that, and will have prepared against it. But something is obviously going to happen that he doesn’t seem to expect. Maybe we can make a break then. Be sure to follow my lead,” said the imperious girl.

  “What if you are Hope at the time? Should I follow her lead?”

  Ambrosia thought in silence for a while. “Almost certainly not,” she said. “Hope’s first thought will be to help Merlin. There’s no way you can stop her from being a fool. Be sure to get away yourself; there won’t be anything you can do for us.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Uh. Was I—?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  They returned to the front of the barn, where Merlin was waiting for them.

  “All eight harthrangs have been anchored about the village,” he said, with a sly smile. “Their talic imprint should shield us from any unwanted attention from the Two Powers.”

  Ambrosia nodded indifferently. “Eight, eh? So you gave one of the townspeople’s bodies to one of the demons. One of the harthrangs is a double. Is that it?”

  “Yes,” said Merlin irritably. He had obviously wanted to explain this himself.

  “Which one is it?” Ambrosia asked.

  Merlin thought a while before answering, but finally admitted, “It is Andhrakar.”

  “He’s the strongest, then?”

  “Not necessarily. Perhaps he is merely the most reckless. Occupying two bodies at once puts him at a certain risk.”

  “Only from you. And you can’t afford to harm him.”

  “You’re talking nonsense, daughter. I will do what I must. Andhrakar knows that. So should you.”

  “But others will do what they must. And that’s something you don’t really understand, father, not the way I do. That’s why I will be the greatest ruler in the history of this world, and you are a man whose home was burgled by a rogue godlet.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Trying to goad me into a rage? It won’t work, you know.”

  “Only into thinking. That probably won’t work either.”

  “Either way, we’ll be more comfortable inside.” He gestured for them to precede him, and they did.

  The building was the smithy, and the smoke was coming from the big central furnace.

  “We should set up some beds in here, my dears,” the old man said. “It may be inconvenient, but we should sleep in the same room for the time being.” He gestured with the carillon.

  “In case his tame demons attack in the middle of the night, he means,” Ambrosia observed.

  “I heard him,” Aloê said curtly.

  They raided rooms in the rest of the house for beds, and then scavenged up food in the rest of the town to last them for a day or so.

  “And now,” Merlin said, like a kindly schoolmaster dismissing his students to play, “you may amuse yourselves, my dears. I strongly suggest that you do not leave town; the harthrangs have been instructed to stop you. For myself, I must give some thought on how to lure my son into this zone of protection, and then what my next steps will be.”

  Ambrosia muttered inaudibly and drew Aloê to the side. “He’s not telling you, so I’ll tell you. There are things you have to be aware of around demons, bound or not. Try not to pay too much attention to any voices you hear in your head. Certainly don’t accept any offers they make. If they won’t leave you alone, just scream for a while.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. It has a dispersing impact on ghosts and demons generally. That’s why the first thing a specter will do is paralyze your larynx. And don’t ascend into vision unless you absolutely have to. He probably doesn’t care if you get possessed by demons; it’d change your talic pattern, which is the only thing entangling you with the blood of Ambrose—i.e., him.”

  Aloê smiled at the odd, intense, hatchet-faced girl. “But you would care, honey?”

  “Sort of. Don’t get mushy on me. I have to go write a letter to my sister.”

  It was a meditative afternoon all around. Aloê, too, gave a lot of thought to what would happen next. Because she was pretty sure something would happen that the other two (or three) weren’t counting on.

  The long afternoon passed; they gathered to eat around sunset. Ambrosia had become Hope, by then. There was very little conversation through the meal, and afterward they settled down to sleep.

  Merlin’s bed was next to the forge, with Aloê’s and Hope’s beds on either side, closer to the doors.

  “Wait a moment,” Aloê said to Hope, after they said good night, “do you sleep?”

  Hope laughed. “I used to. In fact, I’ve lived more of our life than Ambrosia has. But once she figured that out, she started fighting back, and now when I sleep she usually takes over. Tonight I think I will not sleep.”

  “Happy waking, then,” Aloê said, and dragged herself to her bed. It wasn’t such a great bed, apart from the fact that it was a bed. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to sleep in one, but she caught the knack of it again pretty rapidly.

  In a dark hour full of whispering, Aloê heard a voice call out, “Aloê. Merlin. Wake up. Wake up. They’re here.”

  Aloê’s eyes gaped open. The great room was lit by the red light of the forge. All around the room, like sentinels, stood the harthrangs. They were not wearing their hooded jackets; symbols had been cut or clawed into many of their faces; and all their dead eyes stared at Merlin.

  “Get back to your posts,” croaked Merlin furiously. He reached over by the furnace to grab the carillon of bells and gave it a vigorous shake.

  Silence. In the dim light, Aloê saw the steel bells misshapen like wax, dripping molten metal that set Merlin’s bedding alight.

  The harthrangs stepped forward.

  Merlin’s throat issued more croaking sounds, but they didn’t rise to the level of words.

  The dead faces of the harthrangs smiled. Their teeth had been filed needle-sharp.

  Aloê jumped a
s someone touched her arm. It was Ambrosia. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “This is it.”

  “What about your father?”

  “What about him? He killed everyone in this town to feed that demon. Now it’s turning on him. He made his own bed; let him burn in it.”

  The two women turned away, but there were harthrangs behind them too, and they were seized and held. Aloê kicked and elbowed her captors as much as she could, but it was useless. She could smell their rotting flesh. They weren’t alive: if the bodies felt pain, it didn’t matter to the beings that controlled them.

  “Look, Andhrakar,” Ambrosia said. “You’re making a mistake. We aren’t parties to your filthy bargain and we have unlimited capacity to harm you. This is your last warning.”

  The harthrangs did not respond in any way. They continued to smile their needle-toothed smiles at Merlin and stepped toward him again as the others did the same.

  “How do you know which one it is?” Aloê asked.

  “They’re all the same now,” Ambrosia said impatiently. “One of the demons ate all the others. Listen, you remember what I told you to do in a certain context.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Do it with me. Loud. Now.”

  Ambrosia screamed and Aloê followed suit.

  The girl’s scream was high-pitched, ululating, angry rather than frightened—a war-cry. Aloê matched it and bettered its volume.

  It hit the harthrangs harder than a sledgehammer. They staggered and their hands slackened; the women dropped to the floor and ran.

  Aloê was headed for an outer door, but Ambrosia grabbed her and led her to an inner room of the house—a guesting room, by the looks of it, with ornamental chairs of polished dark wood that looked relatively unused.

  “This door looks solid enough to keep them out,” Ambrosia said. “And no windows or other doors. It’s perfect!”

  “What if that fire spreads—the one Merlin started?”

  “Even better! Demons hate fire, as a rule, and it’ll damage the corpses to uselessness. We can sit comfortably in the burning house until they’re all driven off. I wonder if he started the fire on purpose? He is pretty clever sometimes.”