The Tree of Story

by Thomas Wharton

  Without having to discuss it, Shade took the lead. Rowen and Will followed him warily. The paving stones underfoot were even more cracked and uneven than the rest of the road they had walked, but they hurried along faster than ever, eager to reach the light at the far end.

  When they were halfway through the cutting, Shade pulled to a halt and lifted his head.

  “Something is coming along the road,” he said, “from the direction we came. I hear wheels, and hoofs.”

  8

  AS ANOTHER DAY DAWNED pale and cold over the Valley of Fire, Corr Madoc’s five remaining skyships set out for the city of Adamant.

  Finn stood with Corr and Doctor Alazar on the bridge at the stern of the flagship. On the long main deck below them, sixty armoured Stormriders stood hunched against the relentless wind. At least twice that number were crowded into the hold below. The other ships were filled with men, too, and with Nonn’s folk. This was the long-awaited day for the Ironwise, as well.

  Corr scowled into the blast of the wind. His scarred face was a ghastly, mottled colour, but he showed no signs of fatigue or pain. Thanks to the gaal, Finn thought, which was also coursing in his own blood. He could not use his right arm—it was still a dead weight in its sling—but he had been taught to wield a sword with either hand. He could still be helpful. As long as there was fever iron to sustain him.

  Finn glanced at Ord, the golem, who stood to one side of the bridge, the same impassive look on his grey features as always. If the ship fell to pieces and they all plummeted to their deaths, the expression on the clay man’s face would not change, Finn thought.

  I’ve become like him.

  The ships were sailing above the low cloud cover to conceal their approach from any watchers below. As the sun rose, it flared like a newly kindled fire at the edge of the earth. Looking west, Finn saw snow-capped peaks marching off into shadowed lands where night was not yet over. To the north, gleaming white snowfields rolled away, seemingly forever.

  “It reminds me of the deserts in my homeland,” Alazar said to Finn, shielding his eyes against the blinding white glare of the snow. “You could travel for weeks without seeing anything but sand.”

  Since they’d set out, Finn had avoided speaking with the doctor. He didn’t want to see the concern and pity in the older man’s eyes.

  “Balor told me that in the Sunlands you were the king’s physician,” Finn said.

  The doctor nodded. “I entered Prince’s service when he was a still a boy. The old king, his father, was terrified his son would contract the same disease that afflicted him: leprosy. And so the prince was never allowed out of the palace, and he yearned to know about the world outside its walls. For that he had to rely on what stories I could tell him of my own few travels. He spoke often of the great journeys he and I would make together when he was older and stronger, and I encouraged him, thinking that these were no more than a boy’s dreams.

  “Then came the day his father went hunting and was unhorsed and killed by a lion. Suddenly the boy was king. I saw very little of him after that. It was as though he’d been walled in by counsellors and petitioners. And then one day I was summoned to the young king’s chamber. He showed me a pale lesion he had found on his neck, and I knew that his father’s fear had come true. I told him that I would do all I could to cure him, that I would seek out the finest physicians in the Realm. But he shook his head. He said he was releasing me from my duties as royal physician. ‘I will never make those journeys we used to speak of,’ he said, ‘and so I ask you to make them for both of us. My only command is that one day you return and bring me back tales of all the wonders you’ve seen.’ And then he put on a golden mask shaped like the sun—the same mask his father had worn to hide his own disfigurement. And that was the last time I saw his face.”

  The doctor sighed and glanced away.

  “I think he wished to spare me pain,” he went on. “The pain of watching the disease take him a little at a time. I did not want to leave, but it was his command. So I left his service and went in search of the Realm’s wonders.”

  He gazed out over the rolling white fields.

  “Like snow,” he said.

  Finn was startled to feel tears sting his eyes. He had thought the fever iron had killed any feeling in him other than cold rage, but the sight of the snowfields had stirred something. He had believed the Valley of Fire lay at the uttermost edge of the world, but now he knew the Realm went on past this hellish place, on and on into lands he would never see or know. It might be that the Realm went on without end, and if it did, then maybe no one, not even the Night King, could ever conquer all of it.

  “So one day you’ll be leaving the Errantry and returning home?” he asked the doctor, keeping his face turned away.

  “That was my king’s command,” Alazar said. “And I think now, after all of this, I can return with enough to tell.”

  A Stormrider who had been leaning over the prow of the ship looked to the bridge and shouted something Finn did not catch over the wind’s roar. Corr, still intent on the chart, straightened and barked orders. Men clambered into the rigging and the mordog at the helm eased off the huge treadle at his feet. There was a rumble and hiss from below, steam shot up in plumes from gratings in the deck, and all at once they were descending. The roiling cloudscape seemed to be rushing up to meet them.

  Corr turned to Finn and Alazar.

  “This is it,” he said, gripping his brother’s shoulder. “You and the doctor had best keep a hand on the rail. The ride down will be bumpy.”

  He had just finished speaking when the ships plunged back into the roaring wet and gloom of the clouds, into the reek of ash and sulphur.

  The flagship shuddered and bucked as it descended. The timbers rattled and groaned under Finn’s feet, and he wondered whether the ship would hold together long enough for them to reach Adamant.

  All at once the planks seemed to drop away beneath him. His stomach lurched and he feared they were falling out of the sky. But in the next instant his knees buckled under him as the ship rose again, reassuringly solid, if shaky, under his feet.

  “Heated air from vents in the ground below,” Corr shouted in his ear. “Shakes the hulls something fierce, but not to worry. It means the ride is nearly over, brother. We’re close to the city now.”

  Through a sudden gap in the clouds Finn caught a glimpse of the grey, barren valley still far below, and what looked like a path or road snaking through a field of boulders, but there was no sign of Adamant. Then a shadow crossed a thick bank of cloud beneath them and Finn looked up to see the hull of one of the other skyships appearing out of the mists.

  Like the flagship, this ship and all the others had the same odd iron latticework that projected from the hull at a point midway between the rail and the keel. These were the lightning collectors that the dwarf-smiths had fashioned. The latticework ran along the hull, tapering to a single dark band when it reached the prow with its figurehead of an eagle. Finn did not understand how Nonn’s folk had contrived such a thing, but the skyships harnessed the lightning, or the invisible, nameless power that sparked it, and held it in reserve until needed. When let loose by the gunner in the prow, a white-hot bolt of lightning would lance from the eagle’s eye sockets.

  The hull of a third ship appeared out of the mist just then and Finn knew the other two could not be far away. They were falling into formation now behind the flagship.

  The mist suddenly lifted away. The roar of the wind fell off at the same instant and the ship’s terrible shuddering ceased. They had dropped through the floor of the clouds, and the long trough of the Valley of Fire lay revealed beneath them.

  Corr turned and beamed at Finn.

  “There it is, brother.”

  Adamant had been built in the crater left by a great rock that fell from the sky ages ago, and that is what Finn saw at first: just another of the smoking holes in the earth that dotted the valley. But as they drew closer, he could make out more detail. A
ll along the rim of the crater an earthen ring-wall had been raised, thirty feet high or more and topped with a stone battlement that bristled with huge spikes. A tall iron door was the only sign of a way through the great wall. The city itself lay within this fortified circle, but they were still too far off to see over the rim of the wall.

  “The gate is shut and the wall seems intact,” Corr said. “No sentries that I can see.”

  As the other ships emerged from the clouds and came level with the flagship, the Stormrider in the crow’s nest high up on the mast gave a cry. They followed his outstretched arm and saw a pair of large winged shapes circling above the city. Finn found it difficult to tell how big these creatures were, but something in the slow, stately wheel of their flight told him they were very large. Corr shouted to the lightning gunner at the prow of the ship to stand ready, but almost before the words had left his lips, the winged creatures broke from their circling with slow, unhurried flaps of their wings. They beat their way northward through the smoky air, away from the city and the approaching ships, and swiftly vanished into the clouds. A cheer went up from the Stormriders.

  “Dragons?” Finn asked.

  “It looked that way,” Corr said, “but no, they were scavenger birds.”

  “They must have been huge,” Alazar said in wonder.

  “Yes. They’ll eat nearly anything, but most often they show up after a battle to feast on the dead. Anything else that might have been looking for a meal gets out of their way fast.”

  “They’ve arrived for dinner a little early, then,” the doctor said grimly.

  Corr laughed. “I would call their presence a good omen, Doctor. For us. Nightbane eat those creatures when they can bring them down. The birds won’t usually fly anywhere near Adamant or our fortress for that reason. It’s a sign the city has probably been deserted. That’s why the men cheered.”

  The ships dropped ever lower, and as sails were furled, the forward movement of the ships began to slow, as well. Just as the flagship passed over the ring-wall, Stormriders threw grappling hooks on long ropes that caught on the iron spikes. The ropes went taut, and with a lurch and a shudder through its frame the flagship came to rest. One after the other all the skyships followed suit and were soon anchored above the wall, venting steam and groaning deep in their timbers.

  Finn gazed over the side, awestruck in spite of himself. Just within the enclosing wall a broad walkway ran around the entire rim of the city. Within its circle a great crater yawned wide and deep, descending in ring after concentric ring of ledges, balconies, staircases and battlements far into the earth, until its lower circles were lost in smoke and darkness. There was no movement or sign of life in the depths that Finn could see, though he could make out small dark shapes that might have been bodies lying on some of the walkways. Directly beneath the flagship, an anvil-shaped projection of black stone jutted out into the central well, tapering to a pier. On the far side, a second pier reached out across the city’s crater, but the two did not meet. A broad gap lay between them, though their jagged tips suggested that they were two halves of what had once been a slender bridge spanning the deep. The black stone, Finn guessed, must be the fabled adamant, the rare ore from which the city took its name.

  “That’s where we’ll set down,” Corr said, pointing to the nearer of the two anvil-shaped piers. “It’s closest to the main gates. If anything unforeseen happens, we’ll have the best chance of withdrawing from there with men and ships intact.”

  Below the upper parapet the depths of the city were lost in shadow and smoke. Flakes of ash whirled in the air, and the same acrid stench of sulphur and burning tar filled Finn’s nostrils and stung his eyes, though a fainter but even more unwholesome reek accompanied it now: the smell of dead and rotting things.

  “Where I come from we have a legend about a city like this,” Alazar said to Finn. “It’s where the spirits of the wicked go after death, to be tormented for all eternity.”

  Corr overheard him and turned with a cold gleam of amusement in his eye. “The spirits of the dead are down there indeed, Doctor,” he said. “Don’t you see them?”

  Finn looked again and realized that some of what he had taken for drifting shreds of smoke and ash were in fact fetches: pale, wavering shapes of men, slowly moving about the parapets and platforms of the city.

  “Will they attack us?” the doctor asked.

  Corr didn’t answer. He shouted another order to the helm and the ship began slowly to descend. When it dropped below the rim of the ring-wall, the sun’s pale light was suddenly cut off.

  In a few moments all five ships hovered little more than a man’s height from the upper parapet and then came to rest on their flat keels. The sails sagged and the flagship’s timbers knocked and groaned as they settled upon themselves.

  Gangplanks were quickly lowered down the sides and the Stormriders hurried onto the pier. Corr ordered Finn and the doctor to wait on the ship’s deck until he gave the word, and then he went over the side, followed by the golem and then the Stormriders. The other ships disgorged their crews, as well, and soon there were hundreds of Stormriders milling about the dull black surface of the pier. Finally Corr signalled to Finn and he climbed down with the doctor, who brought his heavy satchel with him.

  “Welcome to Adamant,” Corr said.

  The flat, broad pier jutted out like a road, from the massive front gates of the city. The gates themselves were set deeply in the outer wall between two towering bastions that had carved stone heads of dragons set atop them. Finn thought it odd that these monstrous heads, their mouths gaping, should have been placed inside the city, facing inward, rather than glaring out at the valley to dismay enemies. But he was too busy surveying the rest of the city to think about it for long.

  On either side of the pier the parapet curved away, and now Finn could see there were other structures built upon it: round sentry towers overlooking the central well, and vaults, like hoods carved of stone, over entryways to descending ramps and staircases that Finn guessed would lead to the city’s lower levels.

  The fetches Finn had glimpsed earlier from above had all vanished, as if they had been frightened away. He remembered Master Pendrake explaining that these spectres had no will of their own and drifted aimlessly unless bound by spellcraft. But they were drawn by the gaal, Nonn had said. That was how his people had trapped and sealed so many of them in armour alloyed with the fever iron.

  Some of the Stormriders ran back along the pier to the gates and up staircases to the battlements, where they stood at watch while the rest of Corr’s forces left the ships, carrying gear and supplies. Other Stormriders began to fan out and explore the platform and the adjacent tunnels and walkways. Corr’s beastmaster, an enormous brute with a whip, came down from one of the other ships with seven of the wolves following him. They were agitated and wary, no doubt smelling the scent of blood and death in the air. And there were a few Nightbane corpses to be seen, lying on the stone or the stairs to the upper battlements. Some had had their limbs or heads hacked off.

  Once the ships were securely at rest, Finn and the doctor walked with Corr to the tapering end of the pier, followed by the golem and two Stormriders. As Finn had seen from the ship, the walkway ended at a broken and jagged edge, as did the end of the pier on the far side. It seemed as if a central span that had once connected the two walkways had been smashed through by something falling from above. Or perhaps exploding from below. Chunks of black rubble littered the other pier, and Finn wondered what kind of weapon or force had been powerful enough to shatter something that was supposed to be unbreakable.

  Together they gazed down into the chasm that was the city of Adamant, speechless for a while at the vastness that lay beneath them. Much of the building the Ironwise had done over the ages was damaged or had collapsed, but what remained to be seen—columned arcades, great arched doorways, sweeping staircases, slender bridges—struck Finn with amazement. This city had been beautiful once.

 
“The fetches will be drawn to the gaal in the ships sooner or later,” Corr said. “We’ll have to be vigilant. They may not be under the Night King’s power, but their touch can still freeze the blood.”

  As if to fulfill Corr’s words, Doctor Alazar gave a cry of warning. A pale figure had risen from the depths in front of them and hovered now just beyond the edge of the walkway. It was a fetch in the vague, wavering shape of a bearded man in long, flowing robes. Finn and the doctor stepped back in alarm, but Corr stood his ground.

  The fetch hung in the air only steps from the broken end of the walkway, his sunken eyes fixed on Corr but without any expression in them that Finn could read: not fear or malice or even curiosity.

  “Who were you in life, I wonder,” Corr said. “A leader of men, I think. Yes. A great lord or a king. That’s why you came forward first, before the others. You were always first, weren’t you?”

  The fetch slowly raised a hand toward Corr and drifted closer to him, growing more solid and distinct the nearer it got.

  Finn murmured, “Be careful, Corr.”

  “He won’t harm me,” Corr said over his shoulder, then he turned to the fetch again.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” he said. “The first Sky Lord. The one they named me for.”

  The fetch gave no sign of recognition.

  “Hear me,” Corr said. “I rule here now and the gaal is mine. There is nothing left for you or the others. Fade and depart as you should have done long ago.”

  The fetch gazed at Corr as if it had not heard, then at last it began to move away, dimming and growing thinner, its arm still outstretched, until finally it could not be told apart from the ash and smoke whirling up on the drafts from below.

  “Will they all obey you like this?” asked Alazar.

  “They bend to a stronger will, Doctor. Any stronger will. We’ve seen it before. One must face them down, and then there is nothing to fear.”