Kip & Shadow

by David Pietrandrea

The trunk was deformed, the gnarls and knots flowing together; a face made of bark, cracked wood forming a mouth with splintered lips. Two eyes were sunken into the tree, mercifully closed.

  Please don’t open, Kip thought, but knew they would. This world had things to reveal and nothing could stop that now.

  With a wooden creak the eyes came to life, two watery pools of green, like some frosted plant matter before a thaw.

  “Magic Boy…” the tree rasped, and the wooden face of Ragman came into focus. The bark and lichen moved with the words as the croaking voice came out. It was a voice in constant pain.

  “Alchemy Boy,” Shadow corrected helpfully.

  “Ahhhhhhh, yes. I’d almost forgotten. All your potions and fires and experiments. Things get forgotten down here. All I remember is a street corner somewhere, a vague point on a map. Perhaps I stood there once and talked to passers-by.

  “There’s a house too, a darkened house and trees. So many trees, swarming around me, hunting for me. Do you remember these things?”

  “I…I remember,” Kip said.

  “And a pulling and rending.”

  “I remember that too.”

  “Good,” the tree sighed, “I thought I’d gone mad. It’s easy to go mad. It requires the slightest push, a nudge even.”

  A warbled chorus filled the air from above. It had words in it, but only just.

  “Magic Boy! Magic Boy!”

  The cawing of a hundred caged birds, the words blending with the sound of beating wings. Kip backed away from the tree, overcome by the sound, wishing it would stop.

  Enos stood a few paces away, as calm as ever, unmoved by anything before him. The birds settled in time and returned to their muted squawking.

  “Do you like my chorus, boy?”

  “No, I don’t like it. I don’t like anything down here.”

  “Do you like gold? There’s gold down here, to be sure. I can feel it coursing in my roots, tiny filaments of it spreading to every limb and bud.

  “Do you want to be planted here, in this forest? We all return to the earth, boy. It consumes us in the end. The world that hides from us as we build over it, it returns in full force. Fungi and rot, insects, rust; all so hungry for every bit that we have to offer.

  “I’m part of it now, and a beggar no more. I don’t need your alms, your coins, your baubles. You can have them.”

  The Ragman tree gave a hacking cough and something dropped to the ground. tumbling past his wooden lips. It gleamed in the soft dirt, brilliant by contrast like some lost jewel in the night. It was Shadow’s medal, the medal he’d offered in place of money.

  He heard Shadow make a small sighing sound as if he were seeing this treasure for the first time. Is he forgetting, too? Kip thought.

  Shadow scurried forward to grab the shining bit of metal. He turned it over in his paws, letting it catch the light.

  “No need for earthly things here, true as true,” Ragman said. “You can have them all.”

  With that, the tree began to shake. First a flutter of movement in the upper branches. It alarmed the dark birds caged there. They squawked and screamed, chattering in their hidden language. Their eyes flared, filling the branches with a pale glow.

  Ragman’s face contorted, becoming even more tree-like, if that were possible. The wood that made up his cheeks and brow cracked, like dried driftwood.

  The trunk was swaying and shaking now. Shining veins surfaced from the ground, running up the length of the tree. It’s metal, Kip realized. He saw the mix of silver, copper, and gold as Ragman drew it from the soil.

  Shadow cocked his head to one side as he backed away, still clutching his recovered prize.

  Then came the sound. The deafening tolling of Vorax’s bell. Just as before, it sent a ripple over the earth, reality faltering for a moment. The sky opened up above them, a swirling galaxy rotating, and piercing starlight looking down like a million eyes.

  Kip heard a voice break through the din of the bell but he couldn’t decipher the words. It was high-pitched and breathless. He wanted to answer it but didn’t know what to say.

  The sound of the bell rolled into the familiar drumbeat.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  The drums faded, leaving a laughing Ragman behind. His choked voice was nearly unintelligible. It was the voice of a tree cracked by lightning.

  “You can’t buy more time, Magic Boy. Not with all the alms in the world. Not with every bit of charity there is.”

  The tree’s wooden jaw unhinged and a flood of coins came out, spewing onto the ground, bouncing off each other and skidding across the earth. They pelted Kip’s feet as he looked on in horror. Every coin from a beggar’s lifetime, returned.

  Kip looked for Enos and saw him calmly walking away, continuing down the forest path as if he were taking a stroll on a sunny day.

  The Ragman tree heaved to one side as its roots punched through the ground, searching for Kip and Shadow. It broke the spell they were under and they turned and ran, bolting down the path that Enos had taken.

  With another rending crack, the earth began to split, snaking fissures all vomiting coins and bits of metal, stripping the earth of all its elements. Every bird was screaming now. Kip looked back to see some crushed in their cages. Shadowy feathers rained down.

  Ragman’s laughing voice trailed them.

  The fissures became chasms, each one spewing metal from deep underground. They ran down the path as uprooted trees followed. Shadow went pale as he ducked beneath grasping roots and over unsteady ground.

  A cliff face rose ahead, a towering wall that blocked their way. There was a doorway carved into the stone, its arched frame rising overhead. It led into the mountainside.

  Their one route of escape.

  Ashen roots tore from the ground and wove together to block the entrance. He could see the wood squeezing together like a vice, sheering bark away.

  Kip’s breath came in choked waves. He turned to see a roiling forest of roots and branches coming towards them. One tree towered over the others; the Ragman Tree. The river of coins and metals flooded every open space.

  Sublimation, Kip thought, the turning of a solid into a gas; the freeing of an element.

  He threw his bag to the ground and searched through the contents. His mind fogged once again, struggling to find what had once come so easily. His bag felt foreign, like looking through someone else’s luggage.

  Shadow compacted to a ring of black around Kip and spun in a dizzying circle, chipping away at the searching trees and flood of metal, but slowly losing the battle.

  “Kip must hurry!” his voice boomed.

  Kip’s hurrying, Kip thought, as fast as he can.

  A vial fell into his palm and he knew it was the right one, a forgotten thing suddenly remembered. He uncorked it and gave it a quick sniff to confirm. The acrid smell burned his lungs and watered his eyes.

  “To my side, Shadow!”

  His friend reformed and clung to his leg as the entire forest moved to fill the gap. Kip poured the contents of the vial around them in a perfect circle. The effect was immediate. The coins and metals were released from their form, hissing into vapor as they crossed the circle. A brilliant-colored smoke sprung into the air, intense violets and greens with flashes of blue. The tree limbs that touched the gas recoiled as their bark exploded into the same toxic cloud. The tree branches that blocked the doorway quivered and then retreated.

  The Sublimation Tonic began to fade, boring into the ground and then evaporating. The tree limbs roiled again, ready to close in. The ground heaved behind them as the lumbering form of the Ragman Tree approached, its upper branches swaying, the caged birds screeching as they were battered against their wooden bars.

  “Am I an Alchemist now, Magic Boy?” the tree roared, splinters of wood falling from his face. His deep green eyes were livid, two daggers that would have pierced Kip if they could.

  The cages contracted, like tightening fists, releasing a new peal of shriek
s from the birds. Kip looked away, squinting his eyes, but heard the sound of crushed bone and flesh. Black wispy feathers rained down on them, landing in Kip’s hair.

  He slipped his hand into his bag once again, his fingers scrambling over the contents, as Ragman’s ruined faced leaned in. A cold breath came from the hollow of the tree, rising through his mouth and over thorny teeth.

  Kip thrust his palm forward, coated in the Fixation powder. It burst into flame. Searing bolts gouged Ragman’s eyes. They burst like two ripe fruits and their hollows sucked up the flame. It entered the wooden shell of his body, igniting it from the inside.

  The blue flame shone through cracks in the trunk, streaks of light running up and down the tree and growing in intensity. The fire spread through the forest, finding the network of roots that connected the trees. Geysers of flame vented through the ground in sharp bursts, springing up in random patches like fireworks.

  Ragman screamed, and Kip matched his scream as the fire started to burn his flesh. In that moment he wanted to burn the world, to make this a place of ash and dust. He wanted his fire to cover the land, to find his well and burst into London, flow down streets, squeeze through alleyways. Hurt for hurt, he thought. Only that would set things right.

  He gasped from the thought and from the pain that came with it, then drew his hand away and turned to the blocked tunnel.

  Deeper we go.

  “Deeper we go,” Shadow said. They nodded at each other and Kip extended his hand again, the fire blinding them both. The web of branches finally abandoned their guard, and pulled away from the tunnel, snaking up the rock face.

  The inferno that was Ragman lunged towards them, ready to smash them with his last act, like a burning ship run aground. Kip and Shadow leapt through the tunnel entrance and ran down the passage way, not daring to look back. Kip let the fire in his hand go out, his flesh pink and stripped.

  The tree collided with the tunnel; a great calamity of sound and vision. Ragman’s last scream blended with the roaring fire. It melted the rock behind them, sloughing off the tunnel entrance, glowing red like a lava flow.

  Kip didn’t dare look back, even as the heat seared his back and cut his shadow into the floor of the stone tunnel.

  There was a final rending sound and the smell of charred wood, its odor wafting up the tunnel.

  Autumn. Burning wood, a stoked hearth. To be safe again, to be comfortable and content.

  The fire died behind them as they ran, burnt to nothing and leaving only darkness.

  13

  They ran blindly in a pitch black world. Kip had his hands out in front of him, feeling for some surface to grab onto. The side of the tunnel scraped against his knuckles and he called out in pain as he felt the warmth of blood on his skin. But there was no time to process it.

  The floor of the tunnel fell away.

  Kip was airborne. There was a moment of vertigo as he thought he’d taken flight. Maybe he would sail straight through the darkness and find light on the other side. Instead he tumbled forward and hit unyielding rock, slick with water. The tunnel flew by at a dizzying speed.

  Wet roots grabbed at them, pulling skin and clothing. His hand, still burning, was a dim light in the dark. Shadow moved in a spiral next to him, sometimes sliding, sometimes running along the wall, his blue eyes nearly vibrating.

  A final, explosive howl from behind bounced down the tunnel until it was all around them, an echo doomed to repeat forever. A flare of orange light became visible for a moment until their descent left it behind.

  Streams of water ran over the stone, speeding their fall.

  Kip was sure they’d be dashed to pieces by some immovable surface below, his bones shattering in a heap.

  What if I fell forever? Down and down, past all the foundations of this world, past whatever was beyond that.

  And then it was over.

  The tunnel leveled out and they slid to stop.

  Water had collected in shallow pools along the floor, no bigger than puddles. They looked like tidal pools left by a retreating ocean. Each pool had pinpricks of green light that winked in and out of sight, small universes rotating in black water.

  Shadow was face down in one of them. He raised his head then shook it violently, beads of water catching the blue from his eyes.

  Kip heard his own breathing, trapped in the tightness of the tunnel. His heart raced as he thought of the tons of rock above him, miles of it for all he knew. He had to put a hand to his chest to calm himself.

  “Are you okay, Shadow?” His voice was an echo.

  “Shadow thinks we’ve done this before.”

  He was right. It was a dim echo of what had happened before they’d come to the Pale World.

  Ragman had attacked them and they’d escaped through a hearth.

  Through a tunnel.

  And fallen into darkness.

  Into a well.

  And landed in an unknown world.

  “Maybe Vorax isn’t too creative. Or maybe it’s some sort of purgatory.”

  “What’s purr-gate-story?”

  “It’s an in-between place where someone has to live out their sins over and over again.”

  “Is it a real place?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good.”

  Kip got to his feet slowly, testing the height of the tunnel. It was just high enough for him to stand.

  “Should we go forward?” he asked his friend.

  Shadow purred softly and padded ahead.

  They walked in silence as Kip listened for any sound. The quiet was suffocating. It was a kind of peacefulness that could drive you mad. There was no noise for distraction or to find your bearings, just an unending hush.

  He reached his hand out to steady himself against the wall of the tunnel, and to remind himself that it was still there; that they were still anchored to a reality, no matter how strange. The stone that ran under his fingers was chilled and slightly damp. The only light was the dim projection of Shadow’s eyes as they bobbed in the darkness and cast two weak pools of blue on the floor.

  Kip thought of using his Fixation solution, but his hand was too sore now. He heard the echo of his footsteps along the stone floor and the excited staccato of Shadow’s feet next to his.

  When his mind had any breathing room, Enos would find him. The thought of him always showed up uninvited. He wondered if his shade was here in the darkness, silently guiding them, or if he had gone ahead.

  The sound of a muffled explosion pulled him from his daydream. There was some great and destructive work taking place down the tunnel. They heard its echo like rolling thunder coming from ahead. It sounded like the beating of drums. Shadow stopped and put his head to the floor, a blue halo of light spreading onto the stone.

  “What do you hear?”

  “Trouble maybe…maybe not.”

  The booming quieted and they moved on, creeping in the blackness.

  Kip thought his eyes were playing tricks as a soft pink light filled the tunnel. It flooded over the stone, drawing out strange angles and the glint of minerals. It grew stronger as they walked until it was joined by new colors, purple and blue playing in the pink.

  The ground opened up beneath them, falling away into a bottomless cavern, an untapped mine filled with rich veins of color. The rock below glowed with shifting hues. Strands of white traced upwards like small lightning strikes moving up from the depths.

  The earth looked wounded, like the foundation of the Pale World had been laid bare for them. Kip felt a shifting vertigo as he looked down. He imagined jumping into the pit below, free-falling into the heart of it.

  Down and down into the endless.

  “What is this place, Shadow?”

  “Kip’s not the only one with a well. Everything has its origin.”

  A flash of purple glinted in Shadow’s eyes, but if it was a reflection from below or something else, Kip couldn’t be sure. Shadow fixed the medal to his chest. How it stayed there, Kip didn’
t know, but it was a part of him now. Even if it was just an artifact pulled from a drawer in Alchemy House.

  There were other artifacts from Alchemy House, Kip thought, and his mind suddenly raced.

  He dropped to his knees, sliding his bag from his shoulders again and opening it. As if magnetized, his hand went to one of the inner pockets of the bag and found a thin circle of metal there.

  He pulled out Enos’s bracelet.

  Maybe this world was the catalyst that would make things possible. All his failed attempts to call Enos in the real world might be amplified here, in the world that was being created around them.

  Holding the bracelet in his mouth, he searched for the proper tools, removing a small copper plate and two vials; one with liquid, one with powder, their glass catching the light of Shadow’s eyes.

  Kip lay the plate on the floor and poured two drams of the liquid onto its surface, He pulled the cork from the second bottle with a snap and sprinkled the powder over the liquid. It smoked immediately, a dancing wick of light crawling upwards.

  Kip cradled the bracelet in his hands, like a secret he wasn’t ready to reveal. The process would mean losing this artifact forever. But it was a trade that would be worth it; an artifact for the real thing.

  A sacrifice to move forward.

  He placed it over the plate and let it drop into the active mixture there.

  A blaze of metallic light seared his eyes, dazzling him with white circles and lines. Designs clashed in the flames, destroying themselves only to be reborn.

  The experiment activated the cavern below. Illuminated veins of minerals in the rocks made a network of color. They formed patterns that seemed too precise to be random. It was like the ancient art of cave paintings, as if some primitive people had designed all of this eons ago.

  A steady breeze pumped up from the depths, tangling in Kip’s hair. It had a voice, a droning mutter. Kip thought he could hear echoes of Vorax in it.

  What does it feel like to be alive?

  The bracelet burned down to nothing, smoking and cracking, as a small sigh issued from it. The metal liquefied and ran into the fire. It met with a wave of sparks. The mine below turned from pink to blue, bathing them in its light.