There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well Read online

  There Is Life In the Tree and Death In the Well

  Shane Burkholder

  There Is Life In the Tree and Death In the Well by Shane Burkholder.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [email protected]

  www.stburkholder.com

  © 2019 Shane Burkholder

  Cover by Miss Nat Mack.

  "We live in the flicker..."

  - joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  Chapter One

  Losing Everything Slowly

  A parade of seabound monsters languished in the sky, shot through with the kaleidoscope of sunset. The man had searched through the prismatic light and fat, twisted cloud until he found their like. He knew their shapes, they his. His own was changed, but not so different from the times before. Broken perhaps and healed again and again, warped into stranger geometries each time, but not so different. Theirs was eternal: They would follow him until there was no more earth to beshadow.

  The winds blew wild in their kingdom and down into the valley. A storm, the likes of which had terrified him as a boy, burgeoned in their whirl and play. One thing, at least, had not changed. His fire whipped and guttered in the gusts of the windswept hill on which he was encamped. He looked out to the horizon, into the dying rays of the setting sun, and sipped at his tea. The steam from the kettle and from his cup curled in the rosen fingers of light retreating from the skies. Just as they had in the long ago, when sunset meant a good deal more than it did in these times. The falling of the veil of night still remained the domain of things less than human. Only now the man was not so human himself.

  Cries like strangled yells rolled across the hills. A flock of stormcrows soared like long-tailed wraiths across the blank faces of the lower drifts of cloud. They were come down from their mountain roosts in the north and took wing for their breeding grounds along the sea-cliffs of the eastern coast. There were no surer heralds than they for the changing of the seasons, and nothing reminded him so much of his boyhood as their springtime migration. Nothing sank him deeper into melancholy.

  The man was older now, much older than he was then. Years had passed between his youth and age, and the echoes of memory grew quieter the more that they did. But he still traveled the paths that others would not walk. Still searched where others dared not look. These were the wages of his life. It was many days since he had last rested beside a hearth, much less inside a home. The man made no home, and the word remembered no secrets for him. The man was poor at it. Remembering. He did not often make it his business to remember. But then that was the use of a long road. And his road was to be long indeed–as long as only death can lay– and the building of it called him back to the tent that lingered behind him.

  The smell, pungent with losing everything slowly, wafted out of the tent flap before he even tugged the canvas aside. Inside, the darkness overwhelmed the glow of the lone candle. Tiny and pathetic, its melting column of tallow lilted atop a little camp table. There its flame threw into relief the ghoulish contours of a face now so removed from how the man still thought of its wearer. And indeed, that was just what he made of the countenance: a mask, the temporary embarrassment of age, a simple indignity from which the old man who wore it would soon recover.

  "I feel a storm in my bones," the bedridden elder said, swaddled from toes to chin with as many blankets as were left, voice reedy and wet with the fluid in his lungs. The empty hollow at the side of his head, where eye and ear had been, glared angrily. “Is there a storm on the horizon?”

  "Your bones are good weathervanes of late." The younger man swallowed up the distance between them as if afraid he would let it widen forever rather than face the thing at the end of it. He sat on the stool beside the litter and took the rag from the basin set on the table, wrung out the excess water. "How does the rest of you feel today?"

  The older man scoffed, then had to clear his throat. He looked away at the pockmarks in the walls of the tent, worn to tatters like the rest of everything else that was theirs. "Leave me be, boy. Let me die with some measure of dignity."

  "Quiet," the younger man told him, whom he still could not see as the shriveled creature soaking with sweat on the bed before him. He patted his forehead with the cold cloth, as the old man once did for him, and reached for the concoction that sat beside the candle on the table. "Sit up."

  "I won't have any more of that. It makes me choke."

  "You'll choke anyway if we don't keep the fluid down. I can hear it when you breathe."

  "Then let me choke. I have lived too long."

  "No one can live too long."

  "Go away from me, boy."

  "It's been years since I was a boy. More still since you could order me around." The younger man handled the vial as delicately as the last flower in the last field. "Now shut up and drink it."

  "I said to go away!" The voice that filled the small dark of the tent held such fury that some other must have been speaking for the old man. It could not have been him. "Get out!" His hand swept out wildly and threw the flask from the younger man's hand and into liquid shards across the ground.

  The younger man looked at the glass splinters, the viscous red droplets clinging to their jagged ends. His mouth drew into a thin line, his face a calm repose of cold fury. “That cost us a job's pay.”

  "A job's pay that should have been spent on the next job." The old man withdrew into himself, smaller somehow and lacking. "Not spent keeping alive some useless shell. I taught you better." He pulled the covers tighter to his chin. The younger man shook with the effort of keeping his tears in his eyes at the sight and then departed.

  The silence at his back was palpable, filled and vacated by the opening and closing of the tent flap as he went out into the twilight. He ran his hands over his face, then screamed into his gloves. When he brought them away, a tear fell from one eye and then from the other. The dying sun played in the glistening tracks they made through the dirt on his cheeks.

  Chapter Two

  The End of an Era

  Spring was come to the Urakeen Shelflands, and the storms that daily chased the winds. The smell would tell a man so, if not the soaking damp. From the innermost parts of the city's lowest tier to the perverse bulk of the outermost wall, rainwater and sewage had flooded everything below a man's height. Men paddled makeshift rafts and barges down rivers that had been streets only a few short weeks ago. Candlelight and muted words filtered out of the windows of the hovels that looked down on the deluge. Their occupants had lashed them high enough to the stonework of the ruins in which they lived so that they were not forced yearly to rebuild when the season of storms finally passed.

  These were the Midden Quarters of Sulidhe, the City Intransigent. More than anywhere else in the nation of Del'Urak, here humanity had learned to live in concert with that which could not be killed and eaten. To be a Middener was a hard life, made harder by the living of it. Many-visaged Death laid on every hand. It beckoned tirelessly for companions in the lands beyond flooding and starvation. Even for men such as Kodes and Meveled–who were not bound to the Midden’s confines, only marooned safely above the surge upon one of its ancient walkways–the soft nimbuses bleeding from the windows of the hovels tempted their eyes in a way that thought for home did
not. They traded words beneath their murky glow and resisted an invitation that would not have reason to exist anywhere else.

  "Another one, you say?" Meveled asked, rain collecting on the brim of his hood and dripping into the pools at his feet.

  Kodes nodded in the stolid way that was common to him, moving only his head. "If you can believe it."

  "I tell you, Kodes, the Midden usually does us the decency of being indiscriminate. Now this happens."

  "It is the end of an era, Meveled."

  "Skinned, I am assuming? Or flayed, I believe is the learned description."

  "Butchered. To the bone. The meat—the muscle, that is—it looks was used to sate the appetite our killer had worked up doing the skinning."

  "Druids, most like. Or Daerians. Love their flaying, our heathen friends do. And all of this with a plague kicking up."

  "Do we call the Provost down on this?"

  "And what will he do? Send us his boy?"

  Kodes gave a strangled laugh that, to anyone but Meveled, was plainly token.

  "We could use him as bait at least. The very least." Meveled wrung his hands. "Filching little bastard."

  "He could use some correction."

  "If I could just get my hands around his scrawny little neck I'd–"

  "You'd what?" a man said from behind them.

  They straightened as if the storm winds themselves had spoken and turned to attention for the solid block of a man who materialized in the alleyway at their flank. He was not very tall, not so much shorter than any other man, but the wide set of his shoulders set them back on their heels when he approached. Cowled and garbed as they were, the only measure of distinction he wielded was the silvered emblem of office which fastened his cloak at the neck: a fist strangling a serpent. It was theirs too, but in his presence they did not feel it. He was Oren, the Provost of the Fourth Ward of the Tradesmen's Tier. He was their captain.

  "How I handle the charges you bring me is my business, Meveled," he said. "How you find them for me to handle is yours. That is what you are paid to do. Generously, I might add."

  "Sir," Kodes said and cleared his throat. "We did not see you there."

  "Just tell me what you have got to report."

  "We caught another deader," said Meveled. "Clogged up the drainage trough, had it backed up and flooded from Marskol Square down to Tulzkr Street. Skinned, again."

  "Butchered," Kodes broke in.

  “Butchered. Flooded.” The Provost spat into the river of sewage and rainwater flowing beside the walkway, which in any other season overlooked the street below, and pulled his pipe from inside his greatcoat. "Everything is flooded,” he said.

  "It is higher there," Kodes told him. "If it ever floods, then there is a problem."

  "Yes, but it's flooded now."

  "We have to fix it."

  "Have you fixed it?"

  "The body should still be there," Meveled tried to answer, but Oren kept on looking at Kodes. "Posted a few hired boys to guard it."

  "Who? Don't tell me. I don't care." He brought his pipe to his mouth. "They probably flushed the damn thing, anyway," he said from around the stem and tried to light the mouth in the driving rain. "Untouched?"

  Kodes shook his head. "I do not understand it, sir. The animals, they will not bother with these corpses. Not even the crows, which of late seem to eat anything."

  "They're smarter than we are." A puff of smoke issued out from the soft glow of the leaf burning in the pipemouth. Something about it put Kodes and Meveled at ease. It was a thing of springtime Sulidhe: the warmth of a glow. "Go back there and pull it if you can. I don't know what we can learn from it, but at least it'll be one less deader lying about."

  He left them then, and his stocky frame faded into the storm-choked distance along the walkway. They watched the smoke of his pipe come and go over his shoulder until he faded out of sight and wanted powerfully to be at home, beside their fires and Kodes beside his wife and children. The watchmen shook their heads at one another. They looked around themselves at the ramshackles festooned across the leaning and crumbling stonework of their far-off antecedents. The Midden was no place to spend the day, much less the night.

  Meveled was the first to speak. "Let's be about it, then.”

  "Agreed." Kodes breathed into his hands, trying to warm them. "Maybe we could stop on the way for mushroom tea? The rain is cold. And I know a place that isn't bad."

  "Brannig's, methinks? Whatever your heart desires, so long as it gets me out of this fucking storm."

  Meveled raised his hand and shouted to one of the bargemen poling his way down the flooded street. When he did not show any sign of stopping, having a mind to instead continue hauling the meager extent of his life on down the river, the watchman raised his badge of office. Through mud, driving rain, terrible snows: The silver of that badge was more visible to a Middener than any sunset. The bargeman hung his head and poled over to cleave against the ruined walkway as if it were a quay and meant to be there. The watchmen climbed aboard and sat down as if they, too, were meant to be there.

  ◆◆◆

  The boy watched them go, having heard everything. Their forms dithered in the distance only as the slight movements of cloaked shoulders amid the miscellany of salvage piled around them and on which they rested. A few more heaves of the bargeman's pole and the rain intervened. They became just another brown smudge in the drowned landscape of ruins, debris, and hovels—the latter of which distinguished only by the soft glows of candles set into their windows. Like the watchmen, Arnem watched those too.

  "Provost's boy," he spat under his breath and retreated from the cracked balustrade to which he clung like the bars of a broken cage, deeper into the terrace overlooking the street below. A shaggy mound of fur waited for him there, almost bigger than him, and he gave it a good scratching. Its long grey tufts had fallen into its three eyes again, so he cleared them away and tucked them behind its horns. "I'm not anybody's boy. Am I, Dob?"

  The animal beside him huffed at once and scrabbled against the alabaster to stand onto its formidable legs, shook itself out as if in disagreement. But the question carried too much weight for the boy’s ears to ignore, and he wasn't so sure.

  "One thing that don't need asking," Arnem said and got to his own two feet. "We know what we're about and where we're to be. I know that canal they were talking about and they'll laze about getting to it, too. Not us, though. Lazing ain't in us, is it, Dob?" He ruffled the creature's head, patting it roughly so that its hair fell into its eyes again. The creature barked. "Well come on then!"

  And so the two were off. The boy bounded back down through the wrack of ancient triumphs, catapulting from the steadily collapsing balconies of what once perhaps was a theater and scaling down the fallen columns of a phantom temple. Arnem moved like he belonged among the decayed memories, a spider that haunted such places, but ultimately who strung his home wherever the world permitted him.

  Chapter Three

  Growing Up

  No storm in all the world or time could drive a Middener from his streets. This, Arn had accepted. Marskol Square was ever the beating heart of the dead city-beneath-the-city and alive with activity. Rain fell in curtains, as it would for some months, and still the disheveled press of humanity went about its business in the lately flooded markets. Merchants and self-styled craftsmen hawked their wares from their stalls and the entrances of shops around the perimeter, shouting over the deluge drumming against stitched-together awnings that were like rainbows of sackcloth. Perusers sloshed through the slowly draining floodwaters to inquire of them while pickpockets tussled with their marks in the crowds and the beggars looked on in sad amusement. A little drizzle could not dampen an already sodden life.

  The land was higher in the Square, climbing as that part of Sulidhe’s lowest tier did to the interior wall of the Midden Quarters, and not prone to flooding even in the worst of storms. The cadaver clogging the culvert must have went some time before being discov
ered. Arnem knew this, and knew a little of geography; but he had kept himself young enough to still pretend that it was neither of these things, that no explanation satisfied the why's and why not's of a waterlogged Marskol. He liked to think it was the blessing of the tree that towered at the heart of the Square, massive and imperious and utterly dead, so high that if one were to stand at the topmost branches they could spit into the tier above. Arnem knew this, too, for he had done it. It was the great tree of Sul, Oren once told him, for which Sulidhe was named and that in later ages became the Midden Quarters. He would not tell him who burned Sul and buried its realm beneath and between the shadows of the inner and outer walls.

  Behind the tree was the stair, and he liked to climb this least of all. Just as there was no other tree like that which stood in the Square—none that the boy had seen, anyway—there was no other stair like that which rose out of it. It climbed nearly halfway to the Tradesmen’s Tier, so that its shadow fell over the tallest ruins that hemmed in Marskol's eastern edge, and then ended imperfectly as if cut like butter with a Giant's sword. He asked Oren over and over if a Giant really had, in the long ago when there still were Giants, and always the Provost would tell him no Giant ever came so far south, not even in the midst of the Magi’s war on them. Afterward Arnem never asked again how the bridge came to be cut. The air there, at the highest step, was cold and always felt on the verge of speaking before Arnem ran back down again in leaps and fits.

  Arnem stepped to the awkward edge of a threshold that had been overtaken by the intermarriage of two trees, parasitically affixed to the leaning structures on either hand. The stair or walkway which once led up to it was gone now, a part of the rubble below. But the boy had no need of it. When the part of the Square immediately below grew scarce of life, he leapt. He scaled and slid down the verdure that descended in the stair's stead as if he was born to it, as indeed many children of the Midden were born to it. The creeping vines and stems and roots were the new mortar of its abominated ruins, the new stairs and streets. The only creature who knew them better was Dob, and even he could not outpace Arnem easily.