by Micah Yongo
Neythan knew in another month or so the tree would be gone altogether, no more than dust and ash, feeding the soil that had once fed it. He’d seen it before. They’d all seen it before.
“The lamp will give no more than an hour of light,” Caleb said as they stood looking at the dry, brittle wood. “We cannot tarry long.”
They moved deeper into the forest, past Josef’s familiar tall straight oak, and then Daneel’s bloodtree too, which seemed different somehow, the boughs slightly wider and the leaves, where the moonlight touched, a deeper shade of red, almost crimson, bloody even, or was it just the darkness?
“So many dead,” Arianna whispered.
Neythan glanced at her beside him and then around the gaping grassy slope. She was right. As many as seven or eight other trees, flourishing and strong when they were last here, now as decrepit as Yannick’s, collapsing in on themselves. Dead Brothers. But by whose hand? Perhaps tonight they’d finally learn the truth. Or perhaps they’d learn nothing at all. Perhaps they’d all die here on this mountain as betrayers and heretics, their own bloodtrees crumbling into ashy hollows, just like Yannick’s.
They eventually came upon Arianna’s bloodtree, the tiny leaves, small as petals, hanging still against the dark and the strange ever-changing blossoms now, as they drew near with the lamp, coloured black and white, bowing from feathery branches like drooping out-held hands. Neythan had never seen the blossoms that way, alternately pale and bruised. Judging from the way Arianna continued to stare at them as they passed, neither had she.
After another quarter hour they came upon Neythan’s, though it took a moment to realize it was his. The tree had doubled in height, now twice the size of a man. The size it had been in his dream. The bark was paler. The branches spread in every direction so that the tree’s bloom was almost spherical, like the feathered head of a hawksbeard flower. Neythan had to duck beneath the slim, silver boughs to touch the trunk, staring at the blossoms that littered every branch as he did so. They were white mostly, but pink toward the stems, like orchids, as though only having recently grown into the colour they now were. Each tree has its own season, Master Johann had said. Until now Neythan had never really believed the words. He wished he could ask Master Johann what it meant, why now, why blossoms, why that colour.
“Come, Neythan,” Caleb said. “We haven’t all night.”
They carried on for another quarter of an hour before reaching the long, broad crest of the mountain top. The grassy slope levelled off into a wide plateau. The thick canopy of trees that had shrouded out the moonlight thinned, giving way to a large clearing not unlike a garden, filled with bushes and shrubs mostly, and pocked with the odd boulder and rock here and there. And then they saw it, waiting at the garden’s centre, the dark, dominating presence of the Tree of Qoh’leth. The first bloodtree.
“The temple sits somewhere within the canopy,” Neythan said.
They crouched, resting their legs from the long hike and staring at the tree, more than seven times the height of the others they’d passed. Although it was not truly a willow it was obvious why it had often been called one. Its many limbs bent under their own considerable weight, arcing out and down from its fantastic height and forking into innumerable branches and sprigs that came to rest against the ground, creating a huge dome-like canopy, just like a willow, but as wide as a cropfield. It was a wonder the thing couldn’t be seen from the village below.
Caleb put out the lamp and checked the oil. “We must move quickly.”
They rose from the rushes and began walking across the clearing toward the tree. The clearing was cold, naked to the sky, uncovered by the wood they’d climbed through. They reached the edge of the vast canopy. The thick wall of knotty, tangled sprigs was as dense as briars. There was no way to push through.
“Must be an opening along it somewhere,” Caleb said.
“Or we could perhaps cut a way through,” Arianna said.
“No. We’ll make too much noise, and we don’t know what’s on the other side. Best to find an opening, somewhere we can look in first.”
Arianna glanced both ways along the breadth of it. “Could be a long walk. It’s not as if we’ll be able to see anything in there anyway until you light the lamp again. Neythan, what do you think?”
Neythan grunted. “We’ll walk awhile, look for an opening…” He reached into his satchel to fetch out a moondial, glad for the cloudless night, and looked at the faint angled shadow by its blade. “We’ll search for no more than half an hour. If we find none after that we cut a way through. Whatever we discover or not, I’d rather we were able to leave before dawn than be here when the village wakes.”
They walked toward the east around the dome’s compass, away from the tree’s vast shadow and toward the moon, feeling along the tangled wall of branches for an opening as they went. They found no doorway, but came upon a short and narrow hollow they could crawl and burrow through. They went in on their bellies, one by one, squirming and wriggling forward with their elbows until they’d crawled clear of the canopy into the space that waited within. Inside was pitch darkness. They waited, squatting, listening for any sounds. Eventually Caleb reached into his cloak for the lamp and nudged Neythan beside him.
“Light?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“Hold this.”
Caleb brought out his flints and snapped the small stones together over the wick spout until it kindled. The light, as small as it was, was probably as good for being seen as it was seeing, but they had little choice. They turned and viewed the opening they’d come through and the grassless damp earth beneath. Beyond that they could see little else, the space extending well beyond the brink of the little flame into a wide chasm of blackness.
“One of us will need to stay here,” Neythan said. “We’ve found no other way in or out. Whatever we discover, it’s likely we’ll need to leave in a hurry. We’ll not want to be searching for a door when that happens.”
The words hung in the silence. Arianna looked at Caleb. He looked back at her. He then looked at Neythan and saw he was staring at him too.
Caleb smiled thinly, and sighed, shaking his head. “I see.”
“You’re the reasonable choice,” Arianna said.
“Am I? And why’s that?”
“Well, because you can’t–”
“You are smaller than us,” Neythan interrupted. “You can wait here in the hole and remain unseen, the better to keep watch. We will go with the lamp. The temple is somewhere out there. When you see this light disappear you will know we have found it and entered. When it reappears you will see we’ve made our way out again. Call to us then, and we will find you, and this door, and make our escape.”
“And in the meantime I just sit here?”
“There are five hours until sunrise. If you begin to see the light of day through these branches, consider us dead. Leave. Go back down the mount to the mule and cart and make your way without us.”
Caleb looked them over. He made a grumbling sound in his throat and handed over the lamp. Neythan took it. Arianna held out her palm.
“The flints,” she said.
Caleb reached in his pocket and gave them to her. He pointed at Neythan. “And do not speak of dying in there,” he said. “You are not to die. You still have a bargain to keep. Remember?”
Neythan smiled and nodded.
Caleb’s gaze lingered on him, then he shooed them away. “Go on then. Find the temple, and return with our answers.”
Neythan rose and drew his shortsword. Arianna did the same, and the pair of them stalked into the blackness.
They went slowly. The ground hardened until they eventually came upon buried flagstones that turned into a path. They followed it through the dark to a clump of giant sinewy tree roots: huge webbed cords of wood snaking over and under one another and turning the path lumpy. The roots thickened as they continued further, and then reared up over stone walls. Neythan lifted the lamp. They were at the bas
e of the huge tree’s trunk, its impressive girth spreading wide in both directions and mingled with slabs of stone walling that seemed to be a part of it, as though the tree had grown out of and over a large building, now sunken, swallowed by the tree’s incredible size and labyrinthine roots.
Neythan shook his head and gazed. “Of course… The tree is the temple.”
They followed the path as it curved left along the trunk’s vast breadth and came to a stop at a long and narrow opening. What looked to have once been a door was now swallowed by the pale clustered ligaments and nubs of more roots. The jambs were entirely covered. Arianna took the lamp and examined the opening, leaning in with the light to see the corridor that opened and stretched beyond it before turning to look back at Neythan.
“Well,” she said. “I suppose we’d better go in.”
Forty-Five
T E M P L E
The narrow walls of the short, dirty passage flickered in the lamp’s dingy glow before widening into a small enclosure upheld by several pillars, each one marked with glyphs and scribbles like the ones in Neythan’s scroll. He whispered this to Arianna, who glanced briefly at the writings and, finding nothing intelligible, quickly dismissed them, turning her attention to the rest of the low-ceilinged chamber.
The room was lit by a small lamp in each corner, a wickless flame on a shallow sink of sooty oil. Another two passages, narrow and unlit, lay on either side from where they’d entered.
Arianna sniffed the sweet incense-laden air and asked the obvious question. “Which way?”
Footsteps echoed from one of the tunnels before Neythan could answer. He doused the lamp. They each rushed to a pillar, standing sideways behind it with their daggers cocked. The slow, scuffed steps grew nearer. Two hooded figures robed in linen emerged from one of the passages and passed into the next, moving one behind the other, heads bowed like tired ghosts. Neythan and Arianna hid behind their pillars for several moments after they’d gone before daring to move again.
“We should follow,” Arianna whispered.
“Follow? We sit in a hive seeking one hornet. I’d rather we didn’t disturb the whole nest.”
“We’ll have no choice over that, Neythan. We’re here now, and who knows where the blind elder might be? She could’ve been one of the two who just passed by. We should split up.”
“What?”
“Yes. I follow the pair who just passed. You search out the other passage. We’ll return here to swap stories.”
“I don’t like it.”
“There will be no liking of anything here, Neythan. We knew that before we came. But this place could be a mile wide for all we know. You saw how big the tree is. If we remain together we could be searching until dawn and there’ll be more than a pair of vigil-keepers to contend with if we’re still here by then.”
“If we part now we’ve no way to find each other again.”
“I’ll follow them,” Arianna said. “You search the other passage. If I discover anything I’ll come and find you. If you do, you come find me.”
“Ari…”
But she was already moving, skipping away into the other passage where the figures had disappeared.
Neythan said nothing, bit down, clenched jaw, running his tongue over his gums. Long sigh through his nostrils. Should’ve brought Caleb.
He let Arianna go and went to the tunnel opposite. He listened to make sure no others were coming before he stooped to enter. The passage was blackness. Neythan felt his way, palms gliding out ahead over the narrow walls. The tunnel’s mild bend eventually became faintly visible. Light was coming in from somewhere up ahead. He continued on and came to another room far larger than the first, tall and cavernous and bathed in light by tens of tiny flame-lit wells like the ones in the first room, this time lying in long tidy rows along steps that led down from where Neythan stood to a dusty circular floor beneath. The steps compassed the entire chamber, ringing it like an arena. Each wall was graven with a giant image of a man standing and pointing with a drawn sword to the adjacent corner – to other doors, Neythan realized, each one just like the one where he stood atop the ring of steps.
The graven men were simple and bald and little more than outlines. But they were not identical. Each was marked on their outstretched arm. The symbols were like the ones on the pillars of the first chamber, like the ones in Neythan’s scroll. How could that be? And then he saw it – what looked like his scroll, propped against the bottom step, wrapped in its familiar dark vellum. There was nothing else in the room.
He paused, just staring at it, and then looked at the other doors. Finally he entered, going slowly down the steps for a closer look. He reached the bottom and stepped down onto a solid timber floor. It wasn’t his scroll. It was slimmer, although it was clear it had been made by the same hand as the one he’d taken from the tomb. He walked across the canvas to read what name titled it. He crouched and craned his neck. Qoh’leth? Again? But how could that be? He looked at the emblem beneath the name and found the same elongated jaguar that marked the coat of the scroll he’d retrieved from the tomb, but this time the emblem was set around what appeared to be an image of a small flame.
“So it is true then.”
Neythan recognized the voice instantly. He turned to find Master Johann coming down the steps behind him from another doorway. He was wearing a thigh-length smock and the thin leather breastplate he’d always use when training them.
“The betrayer returns,” he said. “And counts his covenant of so little worth that he even enters here, transgressing the sanctity of this temple?”
“Master.”
“And yet he still calls me by that name.”
Neythan bowed. “I shall always call you by that name.”
Johann’s descent slowed; he frowned. “But with false lips. If I were your master, you would not be here now. You’d have not broken covenant, nor turned your hand against your own.”
“I did not. I can explain.”
“The time for explanations,” came another voice from behind, “is past.”
Neythan turned again and found the old blind elder walking slowly down the steps on the other side, clothed in the same hooded linen garb Neythan and Arianna had seen worn by the earlier figures. Some sort of ceremonial clothing. Neythan wondered what ritual he’d interrupted.
“There is but one penalty for those who betray the creeds entrusted to them,” the old woman said. “As you well know, Neythan. I was there when your own mouth spoke the words and swore the oath.”
Johann walked along the step’s long curve, around Neythan, to meet the elder. He stepped down in front of her to join him on the wooden floor in what was beginning to feel increasingly like an arena.
The woman remained on the steps behind Master Johann. The glazed whites of her eyes were as blank and unseeing as Neythan remembered, despite the deftness with which she moved.
“We were expecting you, Neythan,” she said. “Waiting for you actually, and Arianna too. Actually, she is already being seen to. She is very strong-willed, but even strong things must break.”
Neythan drew his blade.
Johann stepped forward and drew a shortsword from a sleeve on his back. “Arianna has sinned as you have, Neythan,” he said. “Did you think we would not know it, or that we would not foresee your coming here?”
“My quarrel is not with you, master.” He pointed to the elder behind. “It is with her.”
“Already you speak as a betrayer then, and cannot see it. How can your quarrel be with Elder Safit and not be with me? There was a time you understood these things. How did you fall so quickly from the way I set before you?”
“She is a betrayer, master. She has deceived you. She has deceived us all.”
Johann was moving before the last words left Neythan’s mouth. He lunged forward. Neythan braced. Their swords met in the middle.
The master feinted, thrust his blade at Neythan’s gut.
Neythan smothered the blow and st
epped in, grabbing a forearm, trying to hook the other man’s ankle out from beneath him.
Johann knew the move, of course, and twisted instead, let Neythan’s weight carry forward over his hip as he flicked a heel and slashed again with his blade, sending Neythan reeling into the lower steps on the other side.
The master sighed, turning his back as he prowled the arena. “And now you blaspheme an elder in this hallowed chamber?”
Neythan pressed a couple of fingers to his flank as he climbed to his feet. They came away bloody. “I do not blaspheme, master. You must listen to me. The decrees, our edicts, they were false. Yannick was commanded to kill Arianna. That was his decree. She slew him to defend herself.”
“You speak ill of sacred things, Neythan.”
“I speak the truth, master.”
Johann turned to face him. “Then what of Qerat? Or Nassím, and Sha’id? And all the others who are slain?”
“They were not by Arianna’s hand, nor by mine.”
“Coincidence, then? That seven of our kin should die in the same season Yannick fell, more than has ever been lost through an entire sharím?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who killed them.” Neythan pointed at the blind elder with his sword. “She is the one who knows.”
Johann smiled sadly then charged forward again.
Their blades clanged like smith’s tools. The older man hacked down two-handed as Neythan blocked and staggered back. Lamps splashed off the step as Neythan bumped the arena’s edge with his heels. Oil spilled and greased the floor.
He stepped in as Johann slipped. Grabbed an elbow and yanked.
The master shrugged it off, reversing the grip. Smacked a forearm across Neythan’s jaw and followed with a kick as he stumbled back.
“The sorrows of sin belong first to the liar, Neythan.”
