The Tree of Story

by Thomas Wharton

  “Not very well, Shade. I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you.”

  “You are not. It is this place, as you warned me.”

  To her shock she saw that he was shivering, as if cold or feverish. It was the sickness in him. It was worse than she had thought.

  “Shade, you don’t have to stay here,” Rowen said, her heart breaking as she understood how much the wolf was suffering. “You could go back. To someplace with sunlight and trees. We have Morrigan and the shrowde with us now. You don’t have to protect us any longer. I’m sure Will would say the same.”

  “It is too late for that. I have come too far already.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you how the Stewards found me dying in the forest and gave me life and speech. They made of me something that no wild creature had ever been. I think now that they should not have done this.”

  “You can’t believe that, Shade. What would have happened to Will if he hadn’t met you? He would never have made it home. Probably none of us would have.”

  “I am glad that Will Lightfoot found his home again. And I have lived much longer and travelled farther than any of my kind. That is good. But those years are all here. They’ve gathered in my bones and I feel them now. The wolf in me is dying, Rowen of Blue Hill. When he is gone, what remains will be only what belongs here, in this place.”

  “If you went back to Fable,” Rowen said, struggling to hold back her tears, “maybe you could sleep again, like you did before Will found you. Then you could restore yourself.”

  The wolf lowered his great head.

  “What I wish,” he said, “is to be only wolf again. To run and hunt with the pack. To live the swift seasons of my kind and then die as a wolf dies, returning my flesh to the earth. But the First Ones are gone. They cannot take back the gift they gave me.”

  For the first time since she had known Shade, Rowen heard pain and even despair in the wolf’s voice.

  “We’ll find my grandfather soon, I’m sure of it,” she said desperately. “Then we can get back home and he can help you. He’ll know how to heal you. He must know. Then maybe someday you can go back to where you came from and—”

  “I will not be going back. You know this. You warned me of it. And now I know it, too.”

  “I saw what would happen if you stayed with us, Shade. That doesn’t mean it will happen. It doesn’t have to. You can get away from here. You can change what I saw. No path has to be the only one.”

  “Look at me, Rowen of Blue Hill. Speak the truth. Will the one you know as Shade ever leave here?”

  Rowen gazed into the wolf’s eyes and he into hers. Tears slid down her cheeks.

  “No, Shade,” she whispered. “You won’t.”

  “I see what you see,” the wolf said. “The other wolf, the one that belongs here, is running toward me faster than I can flee him. Even if I turned back now, he would be here before I could reach the border of this realm. Soon I will give in and he will walk in this flesh. To kill him you must kill me. And I would let you.”

  “Shade, no,” Rowen gasped, “we could never—”

  “I understand that I cannot force such a choice on you or Will Lightfoot. So I will leave. Soon, before that other one arrives. But I will not try to return to where I came from. Instead I will find some way to die here. Then I can be sure you will be safe from me. I only ask you, Rowen of Blue Hill, not to speak of this to Will Lightfoot.”

  “I won’t—I promise. But, Shade, there is another way. The thread my grandmother gave me. It’s stronger than anything. Morrigan has seen it and she agrees. I can use it to bind you and even you couldn’t break it. If you’re bound, then you—then he—won’t be able to hurt anyone. Only …”

  She hesitated.

  “Only, I will be helpless,” Shade said.

  “Yes. The things that live here, they’ll find you and …”

  She couldn’t finish.

  “If it comes to that, it will not be me they find,” Shade said. “Yes, you are right, Rowen of Blue Hill. This is a better way and I will submit to it. Rest now. I am still here, the Shade you know, for the time being. We will speak again of the thread.”

  Later Morrigan roused them. It was time to move on. Rowen watched Will go over to Shade and place his hand on the wolf’s matted fur. She knew he could see what she had seen earlier, how much Shade was suffering, but she was certain he hadn’t overheard their conversation.

  Will looked up at her then and gave her a smile. He wouldn’t have dared come this far if it wasn’t for the wolf, she thought, and then she was shocked at herself once more. She turned away.

  Morrigan stood beside her, her face cloaked in the hood of the shrowde as always.

  “If you cannot do as he asks when the time is at hand,” the Shee woman said, “the shrowde and I will kill him, as he wishes. If we can.”

  They walked on and once more time didn’t seem to pass in this lifeless city. As he had the previous day, Shade scouted ahead often and returned to report what he had found. On one of his forays the wolf was gone for a long time, and Rowen began to think the worst. But at last Shade reappeared from around a corner, moving quickly, at a near run. Rowen froze in fear as the great beast bounded toward her. But Shade swept past her and Will and drew to a halt beside Morrigan.

  In a voice just loud enough for Rowen and Will to hear, Shade said, “There are creatures ahead. Of a kind I have never met before. I found a place where we can watch them without being seen.”

  “Take us there,” Morrigan said, and without another word the wolf loped back the way he had come.

  They followed. Around the corner the street ran out from between the looming towers into an open space bordered by long, low buildings and paved with flagstones. A kind of city square, Rowen thought, much like those in Fable.

  Shade did not stop but set out across the square and they hurried after him. Keeping up with the wolf was easier now because the pavement here was clear of the broken stonework, cables and glass that had made their passage difficult. Yet the square was littered with other things: scraps of paper, a worn leather shoe, a cane, a book splayed open, a child’s cloth doll with the stuffing falling out. Rowen had the unsettling feeling that a great crowd of people had filled this square only moments earlier, just before she and the others arrived here.

  Then it struck her: she could not see or hear them. The people who had left these belongings or were forced to abandon them should have been causing a clamour in her story-sight. But there was no more story in these objects. Or almost none. She pressed her hands to her temples, struggling to find a thread of who they were and what had become of them.

  Will noticed her distress.

  “What is it?” he whispered. They were in an open space, far from any buildings or places of concealment, so it seemed safe to talk.

  “I can’t hear them,” she whispered back.

  “Who?”

  “There were people here, Will. I should be able to hear and see them. See the paths that brought them here, and where they went. But there’s nothing.”

  “What happened here, Morrigan?” Will said. “What is this place?”

  “These streets were once part of a city in the Perilous Realm,” Morrigan said. “Not long ago, by the look of it. Then its people fell under the shadow, either willingly or by force. That is how Malabron’s empire of fear grows. My people have seen it happen too often already. Those who once called this place home have become fetches by now. They will have scattered aimlessly through the Shadow Realm, forgetting who they were.”

  They were nearing the far end of the square, where the enclosing buildings drew closer again. The street rose steeply beyond the square, climbing to a bridge or overpass supported by massive concrete pillars that arched over another paved roadway running beneath it. Or the bridge would have done so, but when they reached the middle of the great span, they discovered that the other half of the arch had collapsed into the road below. Iron reinforcing rods
jutted out into the gap like exposed roots.

  The bridge had a low parapet on either side and Shade led them to the one on the right. Part of it had crumbled away, and through one V-shaped gap they were able to look out over the expanse of the city, which stretched away into a dim grey haze. Beyond the bridge they could see what Rowen first thought to be great heaps and ridges and drifts of rubble, some rising like hills almost to the tops of the highest buildings. Then she caught the sour stench of damp and decay and she looked more closely. With a shock she realized that these heaps and ridges were not rubble but great mounds of cast-off objects like the belongings in the square.

  What lay before them was a sprawling wilderness of trash.

  And it was silent. No threads of story came or went from any of it.

  Several times as a girl she had gone to Fable’s trash midden with her friends. It was not a place they were supposed to go and so it was irresistible to them. But the first time she’d seen the pit where people threw out what they didn’t want anymore she had been speechless. She’d hated the stink of it, too, and the feeling that her own things—toys and books and everything else—would end up here sooner or later, discarded and forgotten. Now it came to her that the Shadow Realm was a trash heap itself, only a thousand times larger and more hopeless.

  “It must go on for miles,” Will said under his breath.

  “Untold miles,” Morrigan confirmed. “When a part of the Realm falls to the shadow, all that lives becomes the shadow. Becomes part of Malabron’s nightmare. Everything else is left to rot.”

  “All the people,” Rowen breathed. “The stories. Just … gone. No threads. Nothing.”

  She saw Fable in her thoughts then. Just like this. The streets she knew. The Golden Goose. The toyshop. Nothing but rubble and trash. Lifeless. It would happen soon, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  Shade growled and hunkered down below the rim of the parapet.

  “There they are,” he said.

  They all looked out to see a dark, distant figure on one of the hills of trash. The figure was hunched over and moving slowly across the slope, stopping now and then to scrabble in the refuse as if searching for something. A moment later Rowen caught sight of a second hunched figure not far from the first and then a third, climbing another of the trash heaps. All three of these beings, whatever they were, seemed to be dressed in the same grey rags, but it was hard to make out any other features or to be sure of their size.

  Just then one of the three figures stood upright and gave a rasping shriek. For one terrifying instant Rowen thought they had been discovered, but the figure bent again and began digging furiously in the hillside. The other two straightened and began to make their way over the mounds toward the first.

  “What are they?” Will whispered.

  “Harrowers,” Morrigan said. “The scavengers of the Shadow Realm. They search for anything or anyone that might still have a little life, a little of the fathomless fire, and they feed on it.”

  Rowen stared at the digging harrower and then she looked away, not wanting to see what it had found.

  “It’s horrible,” she said, shaking her head. “They’re horrible.”

  “We have no choice but to go that way, into their midst,” Morrigan said. “The shrowde says it is the swiftest path to the heart of the Shadow Realm.”

  “What if the harrowers see us?” Will asked.

  “They fear the Angel, as most of Malabron’s slaves do,” Morrigan said. “He was once their overseer and treated them cruelly. The sight of the shrowde should be enough to keep them at a distance.”

  They turned from the parapet and descended the bridge, following Shade. Once at the bottom again they set out across a broad pavement toward the trash mounds. The stench was far worse here than it had been above. It assaulted them so powerfully that both Rowen and Will had to stop several times to retch before they could go on.

  There was a path of sorts through the mounds. It was a narrow, trampled trail, slick with some kind of foul-smelling oily leakage. They climbed in single file, going slowly to avoid slipping. The heaped garbage rose steeply on either side of them like the walls of a canyon.

  The path made the walking easier, but Rowen guessed that the trail had been made by the harrowers themselves in their comings and goings, and that meant it was all the more likely they would meet one of these creatures.

  Sure enough, they had not gone far when Shade stiffened and his ears flicked forward.

  “What is it?” Will whispered.

  Shade sniffed the air. “Something very close, coming this way,” he said. “Two creatures. Maybe more.”

  They turned to Morrigan.

  “We keep going,” she said.

  Around a corner the path fell away steeply. Below them lay a pool of dark, stagnant water with a long, warped wooden board thrown across it. At the top of the slope Morrigan halted and Rowen looked up to see two figures working their way down another mound of trash on the far side of the pool. They could not be seen clearly at this distance and in the gloom, but to Rowen they appeared to be much larger than even Morrigan in the shrowde cloak. Both were hunched over, like the three they had watched on the bridge.

  The nearest of the harrowers began scrabbling at the trash with its bony arms, and with a shiver of horror Will realized it was digging through the carcass of some large dead animal. As it dug, it was singing to itself in a cracked, tuneless voice.

  Run mouse run,

  your tale is done.

  Tale is done, and all is one.

  We his eyes, we his teeth.

  We his claws for catching meat.

  Catch you, claw you.

  Nibble you, gnaw you.

  Tale is done and all is one.

  All is one, and one is—

  The creature abruptly raised its head and sniffed the air. Will dimly made out glittering black eyes in a bone-white face. The creature hissed at its companion, who also raised its head and then hunkered down, making a low moaning sound.

  “They’ve seen us,” Rowen whispered, her voice tight with fear.

  “Do not speak, whatever happens,” Morrigan ordered. “You must act as if you have no will or hope left.”

  She led the way down the slope. At the bottom she stepped onto the board that lay over the pool and stood there, silently watching the approach of the two harrowers. Will moved close to Rowen. She saw him put his hand to where his sword would have hung. Morrigan had taken it, she remembered. They were supposed to be defenceless prisoners.

  The creatures descended the trash mound toward them, and now Rowen could see the harrowers more clearly. They were terrifying. The nearest, the one who had been singing, had the head of an old woman, with hanging hanks of clotted, filthy hair, but her body was grotesquely elongated, her arms bony and bent weirdly at the wrists, like those of a praying mantis, so that when she wasn’t using them to dig in the trash her huge clawed hands lay tucked inward. She wore a tattered grey robe; a pair of gnarled, clawed feet poked out from the draggling hem. Even hunched over she was well above six feet tall, her hideous head straining forward on a stalk-like neck, her small eyes squinting, searching.

  The other harrower was naked except for a filthy rag that served as a loincloth. A thickly braided rope was knotted around its neck. This harrower climbed down toward them more slowly, moving its head from side to side as it came, and then Rowen saw the reason for its caution. It had no eyes. On its broad, flat face there were only two tiny slits for nostrils and a round, many-fanged hole for a mouth, like a lamprey eel’s, that opened and closed with a wet sucking sound. The rope around its neck, Rowen realized, was a noose.

  The harrowers drew closer, and Rowen felt their malice and hunger like a blow. She knew that if not for Morrigan in the shrowde cloak, these creatures would rend her and Will in an instant. Absolute, blind terror seized hold of her then and shook her so that she could barely stand. She was about to run—she couldn’t help herself.

 
; Then she felt Will’s hand slip into hers and grip it, and she knew he felt the same. There was the smallest comfort in that. Just enough.

  The thing with an old woman’s face bowed low, her bony hands scraping across the trash. A stench came off her of excrement and rot.

  “Prince of Hunger,” the harrower croaked, lowering her head slightly but keeping her sunken eyes fixed on Morrigan.

  The harrower was frightened herself, Rowen now saw, but there was also a cold, measuring appraisal in her look, as if she were watching the one she believed to be Lotan for any sign of weakness.

  “Mighty Angel. What joy for us unworthy ones. We did not know if we would see you again.”

  Her darting eyes fell on Rowen, Will and then Shade. Morrigan did not reply to the harrower’s greeting, and Rowen could not help but glance up at her, suddenly afraid that she would reveal herself.

  When Morrigan did not speak right away, the harrower moved closer and raised her head slightly higher.

  “Lord?” she said. “How may we serve you?”

  At last a voice came from the shrowde, and it was not Morrigan’s.

  “Dirge. The Angel remembers you. Return to your task.”

  Or it was still Morrigan’s voice, Rowen thought, but it had changed almost beyond recognition, and sounded like a hiss of steam escaping from deep under the ground.

  “We are humbled and thankful for your gracious notice, Mighty One,” Dirge said, drawing closer but hunching over even more as she approached, so that she was nearly crawling by the time she reached the bottom of the trash heap. “And we rejoice, don’t we, Gibbet, to see the Prince has returned at last.”

  The harrower with the eel’s mouth let out a long bleat that sounded more like a cry of despair than one of joy. It raised its eyeless head and sniffed, its nostril-slits flaring.

  “Why would you rejoice, Dirge?” Morrigan said. “You could not have doubted you would see me again.”

  “Mighty Angel, forgive the ignorance of the worthless,” the creature called Dirge said, “but rumour reached us that you had been … ended in the Uneaten Lands. Now here you are, and we can scarce contain our happiness at finding that it is not true, that you are not ended, that it was only some hateful lie. Tell us how you escaped, for we always long to hear of your journeys, your victories. It is not our lot to venture into the Uneaten Lands, though we hear they are filled with spoils. With so many tasty things.”