last Gnostic lesson. Everything had seemed half-hearted after Cil-Aujas, as if sand had been packed into the joints of all the old motions. He scarce had the stomach to teach, so he simply assumed that she scarce had the stomach to learn. But now he wondered whether there was more to her sudden disinterest.
Life's harder turns had a way of overwhelming naive passions. He found himself recalling his earlier advice to Soma. She had been given something, something she had yet to understand.
Time. She would need time to discover who she had become-or was becoming.
The Captain called them to a halt in what seemed a miraculous clearing. An oak had been felled in its hoary prime, leaving a blessed hole in the otherwise unbroken canopy. The company milled about, blinking at the clear blue sky, staring at the remains of the titanic oak. The tree had crashed into the arms of its equally enormous brothers and now hung propped and skeletal above the forest floor. Much of the bark had sloughed away so that it resembled an enormous bone braced by scaffolds of winding branches. Timbers had been set across several forks, creating three platforms at different heights.
'Welcome to Stump,' Pokwas said to Achamian with a curious grin.
'This place is known to you?'
'All scalpers know of this place.' With a gesture, the Sword-dancer led him up to the tree's base. A knoll rose about it, stepped and knotted with roots. The stump itself was as broad as a caste-menial's hovel but only as high as the Wizard's knees. The bulk of the severed trunk loomed just beyond, rising into the confusion of the surrounding forest.
'For the longest time,' Pokwas explained, 'the legend was that these trees were crypts, that each of them had inhaled the dead from the earth. So several years ago, when it seemed the Fringe would retreat into the Deeper Mop, Galian and I hacked this very tree to the ground. We worked in shifts for three days.'
The old Wizard scowled in camaraderie. 'I see.'
A jovial wink. 'Look what we found.'
Achamian saw it almost instantly, near the peak of the rough-hewn cone. At first he thought it had been carved-the product of some morbid scalper joke-but a second look told him otherwise. A skull. A human skull embedded in the coiled heartwood. Only a partial eye socket, a cheek, and several teeth-molars to canine-had been chiselled clear, but it was undeniably human.
A shudder passed through the old Wizard, and it seemed he heard a voice whisper, 'The heart of a great tree does not burn…'
Memories from a different age, a different trial.
'Some,' Pokwas was saying, 'will tell you the skinnies own the Mop.'
'What do you say?'
'That they're tenants, same as us.' He frowned and smiled, as if catching himself in the commission of some rank Three Seas folly. 'The dead own this land.'
The oblong of bare sky quickly darkened. After a sombre repast, the company spread across the three platforms built into the fallen giant, relishing what was likely a false sense of security even as they cursed the unforgiving edges that crooked their backs and poked their shoulders.
That night was a difficult one. The surrounding darkness was every bit as impenetrable as in Cil-Aujas, for one. And the threat of the Stone Hags had them 'on the sharp,' as Sarl might say. But the real problem, Achamian eventually decided, lay with the trees.
In the wild lore of witches-those scraps that Achamian had encountered, anyway-great trees were as much living souls as they were conduits of power. One hundred years to awake, the maxim went. One hundred years for the spark of sentience to catch and burn as a slow and often resentful flame. Trees begrudged the quick, the old witches believed. They hated as only the perpetually confused could hate. And when they rooted across blooded ground, their slow-creaking souls took on the shape of the souls lost. Even after a thousand years, after innumerable punitive burnings, the Thousand Temples had been unable to stamp out the ancient practice of tree- burial. Among the Ainoni, in particular, caste-noble mothers buried rather than burned their children, so they might plant a gold-leaf sycamore upon the grave-and so create a place where they could sit with the presence of their lost child…
Or as the Shrial Priests claimed, the diabolical simulacrum of that presence.
For his part, Achamian did not know what to believe. All he knew was that the Mop was no ordinary forest and that the encircling trees were no ordinary trees.
Crypts, Pokwas had called them.
A legion of sounds washed through the night. Sighs and sudden cracks. The endless creak and groan of innumerable limbs. The hum and whine of nocturnal insects. Eternal sounds. The longer Achamian lay sleepless, the more and more they came to resemble a language, the exchange of tidings both solemn and dire. Listen, they seemed to murmur, and be warned…
Men trod our roots… Men bearing honed iron.
According to Pokwas, nightmares were common in the Mop. 'You dream horrors,' the towering man said, his eyes waxy with unwelcome memories. 'Wild things that twist and throttle.'
The Plains of Mengedda occurred to the old Wizard, and the Dreams he had suffered marching across them with the Men of the Tusk. Could the Mop be a topos, a place where trauma had worn away the hard rind of the world? Could the trackless leagues before them be soaked in Hell? He had been forced to flee the First Holy War some twenty years previous, so crazed had been his nightmare slumber. What would he suffer here?
Aside from his one nightmarish dream of the finding the No-God, he had dreamed of naught but the same episode since climbing free of Cil-Aujas: the High-King Celmomas giving Seswatha the map detailing the location of Ishual-the birthplace of Anasurimbor Kellhus-telling him to secure it beneath the Library of Sauglish… In the Coffers, no less.
'Keep it, old friend. Make it your deepest secret…'
He lay on the crude platform, his back turned to Mimara. A warmth seeped through the exhausted weight of his body. Pondering rose out of pondering, thought out of thought. He drifted ever further from the mighty trees and their conspiracies, ever further from the ways of the wakeful. And as so often happened when he stood on the threshold of slumber, it seemed he could see, actually see, things that were no more than wisps, shreds of memory and imagination. The golden curve of the map-case. The twin Umeri inscriptions-token curses common to ancient Norsirai reliquaries-saying, 'Doom, should you find me broken.'
And he thought, Strange…
Finding knowledge in sleep.
He stood shackled, one among the gloom of many…
A line of captives, wrist chained to wrist, ankle to ankle, wretched for abuse…
Standing encased in horror and ignorance, a file running the length of a shadowy tunnel…
His eyes rolled in equine panic. What now? What-what now?
He saw walls, which for an instant seemed golden but formed of mangled thatch, scrub and undergrowth, surging and twining to weave a black corridor about their miserable passage. He could even discern the terminus, over shoulders slouched in woe and capitulation, an opening of some kind, a clearing…
Bright with things he did not want to see.
His teeth were missing… Beaten?
Yes… Beaten from his skull.
'N-no,' Achamian sputtered, awareness rising like a fog within him. The trees, he realized.
Trees! Crypts, the scalpers called them…
'Cease!' Achamian cried. But not one of the chained shadows raised their heads in acknowledgment. 'Cease!' he raged. 'Cease, or I shall burn you and your kin! I will make candles of your crowns! Cut trails of ash and black through your heart!'
And somehow he knew that he screamed with the wrong lips in the wrong world.
Gagging shrieks filtered down the hall, ringing as though across iron shields.
Something blared, a sound too engulfing, too guttural to be a mere horn. Without warning the chains yanked him and the shadowy procession forward, one stumbling step toward the light… the clearing.
And though all the world's terror loomed before him, the brutalized stranger thought, Please…
