Wrath-Bearing Tree Read online

  Published 2013 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  Wrath-Bearing Tree. Copyright © 2013 by James Enge. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover illustration © Steve Stone

  Map by Rhys Davies

  Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed version as follows:

  Enge, James, 1960-

  Wrath-bearing tree : a Tournament of Shadows, book two / by James Enge.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61614-781-5 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-61614-782-2 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3605.N43W73 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2013012125

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Diana

  “Set me as a seal upon thine heart,

  as a seal upon thine arm:

  for love is as strong as death.”

  I’m not sure what the canons say about thanking your editor in public, but thanks are surely due Lou Anders for giving me a chance to tell the story that’s been trying to gnaw its way out of my head for a generation or so.

  I also want to mention three people who will never read these words or this book. My father, Lawrence Pfundstein, died of cancer in October 2012. He was the polar opposite in temperament of the Merlin in this book (and elsewhere in the Morlock novels)—there was never a better father or a better man. Chris Ales was one of my closest friends growing up, though we had drifted apart over the decades. He also died in 2012, of an illness as destructive as cancer. And Andre Levi died of cancer in September 2012. She was my high school sweetheart and taught me a lot of what I needed to know to be a writer and also to be something approximating a human being. Certainly this would be a very different book if we had never met.

  The patience and helpfulness of my wife, Diana DePasquale, also deserves some mention. When the plot required me to address matters anatomical and social that were completely out of my range of experience, she was always there to listen and comment as I proposed increasingly bizarre, “What do you think would happen if . . .?” scenarios. This book is hers, and much else besides.

  PART ONE: DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Chapter One: The Balancer, Balked

  Chapter Two: The Necromancer Leaves Home

  Chapter Three: Vesper’s Prey

  Chapter Four: Fire, Water, and Thorns

  Chapter Five: Maintaining the Guard

  PART TWO: GUARDED AND UNGUARDED LANDS

  Chapter Six: A Thousand Towers

  Chapter Seven: The Graith

  Chapter Eight: Under Weigh

  Chapter Nine: Encounter off Tenagöros

  Chapter Ten: The Wreck of the Flayer

  PART THREE: THE GODS OF KAEN

  Chapter Eleven: The Purple Patriarchy

  Chapter Twelve: Many Mouths

  Chapter Thirteen: The Sheep and the Goat

  Chapter Fourteen: God in Exile

  Chapter Fifteen: The Golden Road

  PART FOUR: THE SHADOWS OF OLD AZH

  Chapter Sixteen: The Way Forward

  Chapter Seventeen: Making

  Chapter Eighteen: Old Azh Above

  Chapter Nineteen: Old Azh Below

  PART FIVE: A MASQUE OF POWERS

  Chapter Twenty: The Sisters

  Chapter Twenty-One: Voyage of the Boneglider

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Waste Lands

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Temptation of St. Danadhar

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Sleigh Ride

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Binding of Andhrakar

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Between Two Thrones

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Supple Confusions

  APPENDICES

  A. The Lands of Laent during the Ontilian Interregnum

  B. The Gods of Laent

  C. Calendar and Astronomy

  D. The Wardlands and the Graith of Guardians

  E. Note on Ambrosian Legends

  History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

  And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

  Guides us by vanities. Think now

  She gives when our attention is distracted

  And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

  That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

  What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

  In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

  Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with

  Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

  Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

  Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

  Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

  These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion”

  Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloom’d with woe

  You all but sicken at the shifting scenes.

  And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show

  In some fifth Act what this wild Drama means.

  —Tennyson, “The Play”

  With hands that were not hands the man that was not a man made a machine that was not a machine. All the while he muttered words that were not words with his mouth that was no mouth: “Keep me clean. Keep me clean. Keep me clean.”

  But he knew it was too late. He was stained with memories, with hopes, with life. He would never be clean again. He said “me” and meant it. He was infected with the idea of self.

  There was a way out of this hell that was not hell. If he could cleanse this world of life and make the way clear for the ever-strangers who waited beyond the Soul Bridge, beyond the end of the world, if he could do that he could also be cleansed of life and return to the selfless being he was meant to be, that he should have remained forever.

  He made his machine that was not a machine and laughed. He would sweep them all away, everything that lived. He would make them pay for making him care about them, about himself, about everything.

  Merlin Ambrosius was in his basement workshop when he heard the god breaking into his attic. The event was far away, and the house well-proofed against sounds, but Merlin had no doubt what he was hearing. There is something about the footfall of a god that, once heard, is not easily forgotten.

  “I knew I should have gotten around to insulating that attic!” he berated himself. “Now I’m in for it.”

  His watch-beast remarked, “There is a god in the attic, apparently without permission.” A pause and the beast continued, “But have you considered the peace of emptiness that you might receive from union with the Illimitable Cloyn, Arbiter of the Infinite? If I had a soul—”

  Merlin reached out with his long clever fingers and snapped both the necks of the watch-beast. The dreamy light in its seven eyes faded. Merlin was disinclined to be evangelized by his own automata, particularly on behalf of a puny god like the Illimitable Cloyn, Arbiter of the Infinite. (It was always the little gods that grasped at those big-sounding names.)

  Still, he was in some danger. The puniest god might be deadly to the mightiest mortal, and Merl
in did not feel particularly mighty this morning.

  Against the lesser gods the best weapon was outright unbelief. Unfortunately, Merlin was old and wise; his cynicism had been battered by centuries of experience. The purer forms of unbelief were increasingly difficult for him.

  Fortunately, he had foreseen the risk and armed himself in advance.

  He broke open a glass jar near at hand and removed the dried but still living brain of a fervent atheist. He grabbed a pair of boots lying nearby with his left hand and, holding the dusty brain out in front of him like a dagger, he leapt up the basement stairs two at a time. Old he was. Feeble he was not.

  Cloyn was already descending from the upper floor, wrapped in a cloud of metaphysical comforts that slid like fog down the spiral staircase.

  “Back, you!” Merlin shouted, and brandished the dried brain wildly.

  Cloyn retreated semi-visibly. Merlin and his weapon had the god’s complete attention: nothing fascinates a god like an atheist. Cloyn raised up a shield of apologetics and a long pointed blade of theology. The god was readying for a battle.

  Merlin couldn’t risk a prolonged conflict. His atheist had been harvested while still young and uncontaminated by experience, but the brain was very dry and brittle by now. Already he could feel the god pressuring it with golden gifts of emptiness and surrender.

  He threw the atheist brain down at the god’s feet and it shattered. He could feel the waves of agony emanating from the dying atheist. The god became wholly absorbed in comforting and healing the atheist’s death.

  It was Merlin’s chance. He ran out of the house and sat down on the doorstep to pull on his boots. Although he heard the footfall of the god behind him, he took the precious seconds required to tie his bootlaces. He had tripped once wearing seven-league boots and had no desire to repeat the experience.

  Cloyn was almost on him when he leapt to his feet and took a single stride.

  The dense thickets of the Lost Wood sank below him, dark green in the morning light. He felt the ecstasy of flight and sternly repressed it: the feeling was akin to religion, and he wanted to leave no trail for the god pursuing him.

  He landed lightly on his right foot in a mountain meadow, seven thousand paces from his god-violated house. He swung out with his left foot and took to the air again.

  He had not many strides left before the boots became exhausted and reverted to their mundane selves. It took a fearful amount of impulse energy to charge them even for a single stride. But he would take a few more at least. The Illimitable Cloyn might not be the only god who was after him.

  Merlin Ambrosius meditated as his boots carried him across the long flat curve of the world. Who, among his many enemies, was powerful enough to command gods as hunting dogs? He could not tell, and it was vital for him to know.

  The enemy might strike at his children, too. Yes, that was quite likely. He wondered what he might do about that to turn it to his own advantage. His daughters, if he remembered correctly, were not too far distant, on one of their ridiculous rescue missions to the Vale of Vraid.

  You are what you eat, and Vesper had mostly been eating monsters. He had drained a werewolf, south of Wuruyaaria—a little hard to digest, but full of silver-edged shadows, very sustaining. The Kembley’s serpent he had consumed in the Ketchpur valley was also very tasty, bristling with venomous shadows. Best of all, among recent meals, was the mandrake he had devoured in the Blackthorn Mountains.

  Ah, the mandrake! The mandrake! Never had Vesper known, or even suspected, such joy.

  He had been slithering along the ground in the shadowy semblance of the Kembley’s serpent. (He had no shape of his own, so it was easiest to assume the form of the entity he had most recently devoured.) Suddenly he stumbled across the tail of a dead dragon. The vast corpse was going to pieces like a fallen tree in a forest, no shred of life left there, nothing for him. But nonetheless his shadow-pulses quickened with excitement.

  As Vesper knew, dragons don’t reproduce as most animals do; it was rare, at any rate, for a dragon to possess genitalia unwithered by venom and fire. But, once a dragon was dead, its teeth would hatch like eggs and little mandrakes would emerge, to plant themselves in a nearby stretch of favorable soil. Eventually, when they matured, they would uproot themselves and begin walking about, as manlike chrysalides from which dragons would eventually emerge.

  How this final transformation occurred, Vesper neither knew nor cared. But, if he was lucky, some of the mandrakes who had been born from this dead dragon might still be somewhere nearby. Vesper scuttled around to the front of the rotting dragon, pausing briefly in the shadow of the ruined, pockmarked jawbones, bereft of teeth.

  As it turned out, he was almost too late. Of all the rows of mandrakes who had been there (with his shadowy eyes, Vesper followed a long triple-trail of empty holes), only one was left. And even as Vesper approached, the last mandrake was struggling to uproot itself from the ground. It was fully grown, with toothlike protrusions already prominent on its upper arms, its head and its lashing lizard-like tail.

  Vesper moved quickly. Luckily for him, it was evening, and there were many long useful shadows in the mountain valley. (As a shadow-being, he could not safely bear complete darkness or direct sunlight.) When he was near enough, he extended shadow-tendrils toward the mandrake and made contact.

  At first the mandrake had no idea what was happening. (They never do, Vesper thought.) When it realized it was being attacked, it started lashing about with its powerful scaly arms, but it was already too late. Vesper had implanted his shadowy tendrils and began to feed. He drained its ability to move its own limbs, and it stood, quiescent, while he continued to feed.

  Beings which live and move and take action have two natures: bright essence and dark matter. The light of their unfettered essence would destroy Vesper, and the dark heaviness of their matter was too crude to be useful for Vesper’s light airy body. But the essence and matter of material beings mingled in a shadowy substance on which Vesper could feed. It contained memories, and hopes, and fears, and many other things; and once it was gone, the animal was dead—that is, its bright essence was permanently severed from its dark matter. But Vesper was sustained, and that was what counted.

  This is how it was with the mandrake. Vesper planted his tendrils and drained it dry of shadows, leaving the monstrous fang-armored body dead, half-buried in the ground.

  But the shadows themselves . . . The essence of dragons, it seemed, was dark as well as bright. And the gross matter was luminous with fire, as well as dark with flesh. The torrent of red-hearted shadows was scalding, illuminating, terrifying, satisfying. Vesper was sad when there was no more.

  But that was the nature of things. Nothing lasted forever . . . except Vesper himself, of course.

  Vesper now assumed the form of the mandrake, and moved swiftly through the shadows of evening. He would go north, he thought: to the Skarsl Woods north of the Blackthorn Range. Complete darkness would slay him even more surely than direct sunlight, but, night and day, there were always shadows in the Skarsl Woods and no lack of interesting prey.

  At sunset, Ambrosia Viviana sealed her focus with the rune of the Open Fist. She was planning a long walk through the Skarsl Woods, north of the Blackthorn Range. Only a fool would walk there during the day, because of the daymares and solstroms and other sunlit dangers of that evil wood. Ambrosia was brave enough to get by in a dangerous world, but she wasn’t a fool: she would travel by night.

  But the night had its own dangers, and Ambrosia thought a focus full of sunlight might come in handy during her journey. She had set the focus on a pinnacle of unshadowed rock to absorb sunlight throughout the day. Now, with the sun red on the horizon behind her, she wrapped the spherelike focus in vekka-cloth and stashed it in her wallet by her mirror and writing tablet.

  Ambrosia Viviana: with the crooked shoulders and aquiline nose she inherited from her father, Merlin Ambrosius. Her dark red hair and gray eyes were more like her mother.
Her build was that of a girl on the verge of womanhood, but her expression was harsh with a wisdom many grew old and died without ever achieving. She had many skills, sorcerous and mundane, that made her dangerous. With these was one weakness; she spoke of it to no one, but she was always aware of it, as it could overcome her at any time, despite all her abilities.

  Ambrosia waited until the sun had wholly left the sky, and then imbued her bright gray eyes with the Bitter Glance. This spell would cause her eyes to emit beams of light for the next half-day. The light was dim enough, even in the gray evening air. But it would be handy in the dark places of the wood.

  All three moons were up, and if someone else had been there to see, they might have said that the moonlight was playing strange tricks: as if the one woman had two shadows. There was no one there but Ambrosia, though, and she ignored the double shadow from long habit. Plunging into the woods, she began her long walk eastward.

  She had not been walking long before she began to feel sleepy. This was very bad. It was the worst of all possible events, as far as Ambrosia was concerned. She had slept all day, preparing for tonight, so she knew it was not the weariness of her body speaking. It was the onset of her weakness, the flaw she could not defend.

  She swore briefly and sat down to scribble a note on the writing tablet from her wallet. She had hardly finished when unconsciousness swept over her in a dark tide and her awareness drowned in it.

  Vesper crept north into the Skarsl Woods, flitting (in the veil of the mandrake’s form) from shadow to moonlit shadow. There was much animal life around him, but nothing he thought fit to take as his prey. Vesper was becoming rather choosy about what sort of life he would consume. He thought of himself as a dim garland of monsters, and not everything that walked the night was fit to join that shadowy company. Even now he regretted some of the choices he had made earlier in his career, lives he had eaten merely to stay alive.

  As he lingered thoughtfully at the margin of a moonlit clearing, he saw something rather strange. It was a pair of dim lights, just bluer than moonlight, passing to the north of him, going from west to east. Intrigued, he pursued it.