Execution

by Shaun O. McCoy

  I’m overwhelmed with the need to be free. With the need to run on my beyond-sore muscles. I’m filled with a flight urge so strong it’s all I can do to prevent myself from charging headlong toward the bars.

  Instead I sit down.

  After being imprisoned by Igraine, holing up in the safe house, and finally being imprisoned here, I’m starting to feel like I’ll be trapped forever.

  My deeper worry, that fear that I might actually be in the wrong, springs up again. As a normal man, I was free to think I was in the right simply because I was me. As an infidel, shit gets a bit more complicated.

  I’m going to have to let that go. Time enough to be an infidel later. Right now, I need to survive. Right now, I need to believe in myself. Believe that I’m doing the right thing. Believe that I and my son are worth saving.

  This morning there are a great many men coming down our stairs. I wish they’d never make it to the bottom step and that this moment would be frozen in time. Then I might not ever have to face my fate, or watch my son face his.

  Dendra’s wicker-helmed soldiers come marching in, two by two.

  Amirani is there, but so is Fabian. They are side by side, the twin pillars of Dendra’s military community. I realize now just how divisive this trial might be, as it will pit the two most influential warriors of this city against each other. Amirani, I know, will be content to wage this war using only the laws of Dendra. Fabian, on the other hand—who knew what that fucker would do.

  I don’t know what it says about a man when he can’t get it up in the face of consent.

  The pillars of the community of Dendra are such different figures, the slender infidel dressed in black dwarfed by the menacing green-cloaked and red-bearded hulk towering beside him.

  Amirani’s visage is the model of infidel stoicism, giving nothing away.

  Fabian, however, is pissed off, and his white-knuckled fists clench when he sees Cid. She seems a shit ton better, at least. Other than around her eye, the swelling has almost completely died away, though purple bruises and dried blood still mark her face. Infidels heal fast.

  “Ready your weapons,” Fabian orders.

  His treemen raise their bows and arrows.

  He grins through his red beard. “Now open the cages.”

  The two white-cloaked men he’d brought with him during his attempted rape move to the chains. Bells jingle as the mobile bars of each cage rise. I stretch and begin to crawl through. It’s a struggle for Neb and I, but Cid and Q slip out like the infidel bastards they are.

  Of course, it’s no trouble at all for my son. He’s always been a squirrely little fucker, and undeath hasn’t changed that.

  Josh won’t meet my eyes. That’s not a good sign.

  “Two guards per prisoner,” Fabian intones. “I’ll help with the bitch.”

  He walks over and grabs Cid’s arm with enough force to nearly knock her off her feet.

  “I like your grip,” Cid gushes.

  Fabian readies a backhand.

  “Stop.” Amirani’s cool voice cuts through the air. “She’s not been found guilty yet, Fabian. You’d not want to beat an innocent woman.”

  A few of the treemen snicker, though I don’t see a damn thing funny about this.

  “Lead them up,” Fabian orders.

  Josh takes me by one arm, and some guard I don’t recognize seizes me by the other.

  Together, we travel up the dark, spiral staircase.

  Our heavy footsteps echo, meshing together oddly with the staccato beat of our captors’ as we go. We emerge onto the main landing of the Wicker Tree.

  Josh points through a gap in the vines to the vast expanse of Dendra. “That, that’s the Tree Lord’s tree. The Prima Tree. Court is held on a platform near the bottom. You can’t see it from here, but when we get out on the bridges, you will.”

  “And what’s that?” I point through another gap, out across the breadth of the chamber to where a bridge, not one of these shit bridges, but an actual wooden planked bridge, runs in nearly a straight line from tree to tree.”

  He grimaces. “The longbridge. Leads to the Safe Tree.”

  I nod. “Where your family will be if I need to rescue them.”

  The other guard’s grip becomes tighter, but Josh’s loosens.

  “Yes,” he says.

  I breathe in the air, and I can practically feel the sappy scent in the back of my throat.

  Fabian leads us with Cid on his arm. She’s clinging to him, switching her hips, walking along as if she’s his girlfriend, not his prisoner. I smile. That girl knows how to piss people off.

  It’s the little things in life.

  As a group, we head to the bridges. Neb is slowing us up. I was feeling pretty limber, all things considered, but the former Nazi is not having a good time of it. He’s hobbling more than walking, and his guards are pestering him to go faster.

  That’s okay, I have no particular wish to get to the hearing on time.

  We’ve got this. We just have to follow Amirani’s plan. Step one, kick out Keith. Step two, beat the charges . . . that is, assuming Callodax doesn’t attack us in the middle of the damn trial and slaughter us all.

  Fabian, Cid, and one of the white-cloaked guards step onto the bridge we’ll take. It’s not worth it, but I’m hoping Cid would toss that fucker into the mists.

  The vines still hang thick on the branches of the Wicker Tree, but there are hints of the enormity that is Dendra through their gaps. Some of those gaps, lined with blackened and charred plant matter, were clearly made by dyitzu fireballs.

  They take Q next, then Aiden.

  They’re a little rough with my son, but he ignores it well.

  “We’re up,” Josh tells me.

  We walk onto the bridge. Amirani is right behind us, staying close.

  We clear the vines and are exposed to the chamber’s tremendous hellscape. The mists are low, and I can see all of the oversized trees in their splendor and glory. The brown dressed Dendran citizens are out, lining the walkways, landings and branches which overlook our path. I guess we’re big news.

  Amirani whispers from behind me. “Remember when I told you about the scouting I did yesterday, and my friend?”

  I don’t look back at him, but both of my guards do.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “The witness of the Icanitzu meeting died last night. He fell.”

  Fuck.

  “They’ll believe you, though, won’t they?” I ask.

  Amirani doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. I’m the one who made him a liar.

  Well so much for step one.

  A leaf falls from the tree ahead, sailing this way and that in the air as it descends. I realize the leaf is dangerous. It is the size of a person, and while it might not take out a bridge, it could certainly shake one.

  Fortunately, this leaf only touches another branch as it makes its way down.

  Our witness died? Really? We couldn’t be that unlucky, but how could Callodax even know they needed to kill the scout? Keith must have found out somehow.

  A young girl, maybe six, is high on a platform by a root at a sap tapping station. She waves at us, perhaps too young to understand who we are and what we’ve done. Others peek at me from within wicker houses as we pass alongside the Storage Tree.

  I look longingly at one of the Storage Tree’s entrances. My pack is in there, and I feel naked without it.

  The landing they call the square is the most stable of any I’ve seen so far. Its burnished planks are nailed together, supported by a complex of latticework and two of the Prima Tree’s huge branches. I’d bet money Amirani supervised building this thing.

  The platform joins with its tree where a huge cut had been made into the trunk. The indention looks for all the world as if Paul Bunyan had made it with an axe swing. Inside the epically-sized indention, a chair sits at the back edge of the cut. As far as chairs go, the high back and arm rests make it look suspiciously throne-like.

 
There’s a flimsy wooden cage, maybe ten feet wide, on the right side of the platform. Its door is open, and I have a sinking feeling that we’re going to be put in it.

  The crowd of Dendrans is massive. They mill about in their dyitzu skin smocks and wicker headwear. A few young souls move impatiently amongst them, some climbing like monkeys along vines and branches. One parent is shouting as his child descends from some latticework. The groups of people we passed earlier in our journey are slowly filtering in behind us, bottlenecked at the bridges. They move in small groups, three at a time, from the surrounding trees.

  “You’re famous now,” one guard says. “The Tree Lord’s even got them setting up extra bridges for you.”

  The extra bridges he’s referring to are quite brilliantly designed. They attach trios of vines to both ends of a gap using what I’m guessing is processed spider silk. The thickest vine makes the floor of the bridge while the other two act as guard rails. It doesn’t seem to be the safest structure, but apparently it’ll do in a pinch.

  Pairs of Dendrans toss the silk-ended vines across the gaps. As I watch, one man gets his hand caught in the sticky silk. I chuckle a little when he can’t get the substance off. I figure he’s shit out of luck, but another treeman douses his hand with a ready water bucket, and that loosens the adhesive enough to where he can free himself.

  The Dendran citizens begin crossing those bridges in groups of three, but we’re forced along one of the permanent bridges.

  The guards clear a path for us, and we make our way across the fifty-yard expanse of planks, nails and vines of the Prima Tree’s platform.

  Fabian stops and whispers into a young woman’s ear. She’s a stocky brunette whose hair is braided up like someone from a renaissance fair. She kisses him. Nasty. What kind of woman would be with a thing like Fabian?

  I think about it more deeply.

  That poor girl.

  As I expected, we are ushered into the cage. Its bars are made of sticks and rope. It wouldn’t make a good long term prison, but they have enough guards to make up for it. Hey, at least we’ll have a good view.

  There is a raised stage, maybe twenty feet from the king, which has four guards around it. That’s got to be the witness stand.

  The buzz around us dies down after we’re locked in the cage. There’s barely enough space for all of us in here. I’m guessing they usually try one person at a time.

  The hum of conversation makes a comeback, though, increasing steadily as more people file in.

  When it’s loud enough, I dare to pass on Amirani’s information. “Amirani just told me his witness died. We’re not going to be able to get rid of Keith.”

  Cid and Q don’t react at all. Is it possible they’d known already? Neb, however, is troubled.

  I put my hand on Aiden’s shoulder. His black eyes remain fixed on the crowd, his face calm and determined.

  “We’re going to be okay, son,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head. “Don’t lie to me.”

  The lovely redhead who’d fed me before moves in and out of the leaf shadows which dapple the trunk on the left side of the Tree Lord’s throne. She might be coming this way. Then I catch sight of Keith. He’s regained his composure, but I bet that’s a façade. Instinctively I want to poke at him, to piss him off, to see just how thin that layer of sanity is.

  Many of the onlookers are staring at us, a few at me. They don’t meet my eyes. People love to watch train wrecks, and I’m sure they’d be happy to watch us take the fall.

  I lean against the side of my wooden cage. The ropes creak under my weight. I smell something sweet, a sappy scent I remember. Out of the corner of my eye I see her red hair. She looks different in the light, but she’s still absolutely gorgeous. There’s an edge to her I’d not noticed in the darkness. A cruelness, perhaps.

  “Hi,” I say softly.

  She does not respond with words but inclines her head, which makes sense. Who in their right mind would want to be seen talking to me?

  The hum of conversation nearly stops, but a single oblivious onlooker keeps on, his voice made more annoying by a New Jersey accent. Some people hush him, and though he tries to speak again, the continued insistence of the crowd silences him.

  A thin man, clad in a green, gold-trimmed robe, steps out of an opening in the Prima Tree’s Paul Bunyan axe wound.

  “That’s him, the Tree Lord,” the redhead whispers. “He lives in the chambers above. There are charges of infidel fire which Amirani set in the roots. If devils ever attack his tree, he can retreat into his safe rooms above and set off the explosions, sending the Prima Tree falling into the mists.”

  “That sounds appealing,” I quip.

  “That way he can stay safe in the caverns above while the rest of us are slaughtered,” she says.

  It seems I’ve made a friend.

  “It’s a safe setup,” I say.

  “He never has to worry about falling into the mists,” she says. “He never has to walk the bridges or fight the devils. You see that counterweight system over there?”

  Her nod is slight, so it takes me a minute to spot what she’s talking about. But in the branches beyond the crowd, I see huge, cubic stone weights—perhaps ten feet wide—held up by a system of chains and pulleys.

  “I see them.”

  She sneers. “Amirani had to finish them before the Tree Lord would let him bolster our defenses. Do you know what they do?”

  “I don’t.”

  “They bring up bloodwater barrels. That bastard is more concerned with getting drunk than our survival.”

  This clearly pisses her off, but at the moment, I feel like I wouldn’t mind a gig like the Tree Lord’s. It’s certainly not the worst way to ride out damnation.

  The Tree Lord looks up as he comes down a set of carved out wooden stairs. I shit you not, he seems exactly like a green robed Jesus. Not the first century Palestinian Jew of antiquity, but the blue eyed, light brown-haired, barely smiling Jesus whose face was a staple of renaissance art.

  “God damn,” I breathe.

  “What?” she asks.

  “I swear, every time Jesus sits in judgement of me, my life gets just a little bit worse.”

  She snickers.

  Even the Tree Lord’s mannerisms are suitably Christ-like. He touches people, smiling as he moves through the crowd, a look of pure love on his face.

  He ascends to his throne.

  The murmuring crowd forms a half moon around the throne and the stage. They remain hushed as they shuffle—perhaps awaiting a proclamation from the Tree Lord.

  I see Fabian there, at the edge of the crowd, his green cape slung over one shoulder. Amirani stays near us, perhaps making some show of solidarity.

  Amirani said we had a good shot to make it to day two, right? But that was before we lost our scout.

  I’m going to die.

  The thought of the next Hell fills me with horror. My hands are shaking.

  On Earth, when the afterlife was some half-believed dream, a man could make peace with death. You can’t make your peace with death here because it marks an irrevocable downward step into the abyss of damnation. Every level lower is worse, and you can never come back up. It’s like losing a limb in the old world. You’ll never get it back. You’ll always be less than you were.

  Without warning, the idea of the infinite abyss below fills me with vertigo. I’m highly aware of how thin the platform I’m standing on is. Underneath my feet, mists await. The ground feels unstable, as if the weight of all these people is causing it to shake.

  I turn to Cid. I want nothing more than to hold her hand, to feel her power, to rest my fate in the strength of her will.

  But I can’t show weakness before this crowd. And I can’t show the redhead that my heart belongs to another because I need her to love me.

  The Tree Lord sits. “For three days the devils attacked us, and for three days they were repelled. Why? Why did they attack? Did they sense weakness amongst us? O
r did strangers bring sin into Dendra?”

  The crowd jeers and the Tree Lord smiles his Jesus smile.

  I have the sudden urge to nail that fucker up on a cross.

  He holds up his hand and, after a moment, the jeering stops. “Please, bring the wight. Let us sit in judgement of the creature.”

  The door to our cage swivels open.

  Aiden turns to me, terror in his inhumanly pale face, his black eyes wide.

  “I love you, son,” I tell him.

  The arms of the guards reach in and grab my boy. They drag him away, and I feel my heart going with him.

  My hand instinctively reaches for Cid’s, but she’s as still as stone.

  I look to Q, who is similarly stoic. It’s Neb who meets my gaze, not because he’s the only one who can feel my sorrow, but because he’s the only one poorly trained enough to show emotion.

  And for that, I am so grateful. Necromancer and Nazi he may be, but he’s still human, and his support gives me something.

  I turn to the redhead. Her eyes are on some distant tree—the Safe Tree, I believe. From the conversation I overheard with Josh, I know that’s where they move children and non-combatants in times of assault. Maybe she’s got a loved one in there.

  The jeers come again as they drag my boy to the stand.

  The crowd recoils as Aiden walks up the steps. It’s as if Aiden’s elevation to the stage repulses them. My son seems so defiant, so vulnerable. His tattered dyitzu skin shirt hangs off his stick-like torso. His hair, so blond, so fair, is still darker than his marble white skin.

  I feel a love in my heart which is mixed with terror and pride.

  I made you.

  I’m sorry, son. I didn’t make you strong enough for this, but I made you as strong as I could.

  “Creature,” the Tree Lord addresses my son, “you entered our city on two occasions. Once, as a leper, and again as a wight. Tell me, what is it that wights want most in Hell?”

  The redhead shifts. “That’s the same question he asked Durgan when he was up here,” she whispers.

  Aiden raises his chin. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not what Durgan said,” she informs me. “He said he lived to watch us suffer.”