The Warden, page 21
“I am sorry to have spoken only in a tongue unknown to you,” he said. “It was rude. But…” He seemed to pause and search for words. His voice was sonorous, rich, if hesitant. “It would have taken long, to explain to you. Good luck, Ay-lish Becalmer, against the Demon Tree.”
“Thanks,” Aelis said, too slow to digest his words to ask all the questions that came to mind before the orcs bounded off. “Becalmer? Demon Tree? What the fuck is a Demon Tree? Why do I need luck against it? Tun?”
She turned to her guide, who was silent as he watched the orcs bound off the way they came.
“What did they ask of you and why do you have to do it? I have my own task, and I cannot—”
“One question at a time, please, Warden. Please.” Tun’s voice was even softer than it usually was. Slowly, as if bearing a great weight, he turned to her. “Umarik—that was their leader’s name—he did ask a favor of me. I have agreed to do it.”
“I have my own task—”
“I know. And I was hired to help you do it, and I would keep my word. What do you do when obligations collide with one another, Warden?”
“Compromise, I suppose.”
“Well. I have my obligation to aid you in your task. I have an obligation—yes, an obligation—to do what Umarik has just asked of me. I cannot do both at once; I must complete one first. What he asked is of more immediate import.”
“And he asked you to do, what? Find a Demon Tree? Find something a Demon Tree guards?” Aelis felt her patience growing short and her temper flaring up.
“Finding it will be no issue. He asked me to kill it.”
“Oh, well.” Aelis threw up her hands and only just resisted the urge to hurl her walking stick as far as she could. “Is that all? Just kill some fucking demon-possessed tree? Is that all? I’d say we could just set fire to it from afar, but if it truly is possessed by some external spirit, like as not it’ll jump into you or me at its first opportunity.”
“It is not possessed. It is not a demon, not as you understand. It is … an orcish creation. From the war.”
“Explain. And tell me why we ought to hare off from our pursuit of Elmo.”
“Because it is more dangerous than your crazed scout. Because it is, in some way, my duty to kill it. Because … there is a good chance it will have something I need. Badly.”
“What?”
“Reagents. I can explain as we walk.”
“Is this the favor?”
Tun was already turning around; he paused with his foot upraised to look back at her. “Ah. You mean, am I asking you this favor as payment for guiding you? I was hoping to ask something else.”
“This seems like a rather large favor.”
“Look at it this way. If I go to fight this thing myself, there is a good chance I will die. Then you will be alone in the wilderness with no guide. I do not doubt, Warden, that you would find a way to survive. I do doubt that you could track your man.”
By now, Tun had set his foot down and turned to face her. “If you aid me, I live, I help you find your scout. You return to Lone Pine with him. Justice triumphs. All is well.”
“Or I go with you to fight this Demon Tree, and we both die.”
“That is also possible. But if it happens, then nothing that follows is our concern.”
Aelis frowned and gestured in the direction Tun had been about to set off. “Fine. Tell me about this Demon Tree.”
Tun smiled and began walking, swinging his stick almost gaily. “A Demon Tree is … well, it is neither a demon nor a tree, to start. It is an animation of the spirits inside the things of the forest.”
“So, some wizard did, what, a combination of Conjuring and Illusion and made something a little too real?”
“I am no wizard. I do not understand what you mean. I know it as a weapon devised by orcs. It animates the spirits and it sets them in motion. To defend a place.”
“Can’t we just avoid that place?”
“Certain innovations in the weapon made it start to, how do I put this?” Tun paused and lifted one finger to his bottom lip. “Self-perpetuate?”
Aelis felt her spine grow cold for the second time in the hour, and this time the feeling did not dissipate. “Explain.”
“It begins to call to other spirits. To animals. To build others like itself.”
“Onoma’s embrace, man! That is one hell of a weapon to just drop somewhere.”
“According to those hunters, this one wasn’t properly dismantled. It has reconstituted itself over time. And it has begun the process I just mentioned.”
“Perpetuating itself? What form does that take, exactly?”
“It attempts to make itself ambulatory. Then it begins to spread its territory. Eventually it begins animating other spirits.”
“It animates other spirits?” Aelis felt her eyes go wide, her jaw drop. She snatched control of her expression back from her shock. “There are legions of Lyceum researchers who would kill each other to write a career-making paper about what you’re describing.”
“They would not survive meeting it.”
I wouldn’t sell wizards quite that short, Aelis thought. “At any rate, please go on explaining this horror to me.”
“It will not copy itself precisely. But it will find other spirits and awaken them.”
“And how,” Aelis finally said, running through options in her mind, “do you kill it?”
“With great fucking difficulty,” Tun said, and they lapsed into silence as he led them west.
16
THE DEMON TREE
They had walked in silence for perhaps an hour when Tun dropped to one knee and raised a fist. Aelis crouched behind him, wrapping her hand around the hilt of her sword.
Moving slowly, without raising a noise, Tun grasped his staff with both hands and cocked his arms backward. Then, as if it were a spear, he stabbed it forward. There was a small thud and a smaller crack.
Tun turned back to Aelis, a limp form dangling from his hand; a red fox. Briefly bewildered, Aelis was making ready to protest when he held it closer.
Then she saw the stitches of green—like woven grass—that covered the fox’s eyes. The same stuff was layered over its ears.
“This is how it guards its outer ranges. Spreads pieces of itself to the birds and the beasts, subverts them to its purpose.”
“That is gruesome,” Aelis breathed. As she looked closer at the fox, she saw the strands of green buried deep into its fur; possibly beneath, into its hide, its skull. She leaned forward, raising a hand to examine it, when Tun stopped her.
“Do not touch it. I do not know what effect it might have upon you.”
“Why can you touch it then?”
“I am something that a Demon Tree cannot touch in that way; it cannot have my senses.”
“How did you know where the poor thing was?”
Tun set the fox down carefully, almost reverently. Then he tapped his nose with one thick finger.
“You smelled it?”
“I did. The Demon Tree has a foul stench, if your nose can find it.”
“What now?”
“It is close. It will be surrounded by trees. There may be other animals under its control. Hopefully they will be small; no raptors, no wolves.”
“No bears,” Aelis breathed.
“That would be unlikely. None are nearby,” Tun said. Aelis offered him a skeptical look, and he shrugged. “I am a trapper. Is it not a trapper’s business to know where bears make their warrens, where they hunt and fish, where they are likely to be?”
“That is not an entirely comforting answer,” Aelis said.
“It does not need to be. Wolves alone would be problem enough, so discomfort yourself with them. Bears will not trouble us.”
“Fine. I ask again. What now?”
“We locate it. We are at the edge of its range; we will begin moving north, taking not one further step west, trying to encircle a likely point.”
“And when we see it? How will we know?”
“Oh,” Tun said, smiling again lightly, “we will know. And when we do, we attack, straight ahead, with as much force as we can muster, as fast as we can. The best chance against a Demon Tree is to overwhelm it with main force.”
“Direct force is not precisely my specialty,” Aelis said. “I am no Invoker.” She licked her lips nervously, narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure this thing isn’t animated with any kind of undead spirit? Because, gods, if it were?” She shrugged. “A light day’s work.”
“It is no abomination of the grave. Orcs give the bodies of their dead to the water, and presumably their spirits as well; they make no use of such in their magic as far as I know. I have told you as best I can what it is. If you cannot summon flames, what can you do?”
“I can protect the two of us as we engage it, redirect its force. If it has anything like a person’s mind, I can touch it, convince it of things, put it to sleep, make it friendly.”
“That’s all?”
Aelis sniffed. “I think you’ll be impressed the first time you see a ward in action.”
“As you say,” Tun replied. “Follow me and stay close.”
Tun shifted his staff and stood. Shuffling carefully, moving one foot, setting it down, then lifting the other, he began to edge to his right. Aelis shadowed him, reconciling herself to the idea that when Tun had said encircle, he’d meant it. And that it would take time.
Slowly, Aelis making more noise about it than Tun, they walked. After a half hour, they’d made no more than a hundred yards, and that was probably a generous estimate. Aelis’s legs burned with the squatting and shuffling.
Her guide showed no sign of strain.
After another quarter hour, Aelis’s legs were trembling, and she fell forward onto one knee. Thankfully, there were no leaves to rustle—the pine needles made barely enough noise for her to notice.
Still, Tun glanced back at her, frowning. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and a roar erupted from a stand of trees thirty or forty yards ahead of them. It was not the sound of a beast. To Aelis it sounded more like a great inrushing of air, so forceful that its passing shattered the silence of the wood.
From the noise, Aelis expected some giant to unfold itself above the tops of the pines. Instead, they merely rustled, and the thing—the Demon Tree—came gliding out.
Borne on legs that were pine tree trunks crosshatched with the same green that had sewn the fox’s eyes and ears shut, a monster strode forward. Its legs were where its resemblance to a man ended; above them roiled an amorphous mass of coruscating green and brown light. Inside it, eyes—blazing, lidless, now purple, now red, now blue—and all of them searching. Tendrils extended from it that could have been arms, if arms were boneless and looked solely like ropes of muscle that ended in sharp wooden hooks.
“Fuck, I’d call it a Demon Tree too,” Aelis breathed. But Tun was not there to hear her; he had already leapt to the charge.
She’d half expected some kind of battle cry, some wild yawp from the huge guide. But he was utterly silent, gliding forward with footsteps that barely touched the ground. Tun held his staff out in front of him like a spear, the thick wood never wavering.
Aelis stopped admiring, came to her senses, whipped out her sword, and followed after him. She couldn’t match his pace so she drifted to his left and tried to keep him and the monster both in view.
An Abjurer’s place in battle was to defend those who could land the decisive blow, not look for the decisive blow herself. So when one of the long, ropy tendrils with its hook end shot out at Tun, before he could even lift his staff to knock it away—a dubious prospect, she thought, no matter how strong he might be—she called a ward into shimmering existence just between him and the blow.
Tun seemed to instantly know what had happened, and ducked under the almost-invisible circle of force. Aelis realized quickly that she’d made it too large, but there was no time to adjust as the Demon Tree smashed against it with incredible force.
The blow it landed dissipated her ward, but the magic had done its job, and Tun was that many steps closer to the glowing, bilious light of the Demon Tree’s body. Two more of its tendrils were lashing out toward the half-orc. Aelis called two more wards, only this time she made them smaller; just big enough to intercept the hook-ends of the tendrils.
The first one stopped her cold, rocking her back on her heels with the force of its contact with her magic. The second shattered her ward, but she’d done enough, and Tun made his play.
When he was perhaps two lengths of his staff away from the beast, he planted the metal-shod tip in the soft ground of the forest floor and vaulted straight at the Demon Tree.
She didn’t know what he meant to do, and was brought up short by that direct an approach. Feet first, he flew straight into the coruscating ball of energy. She was so stunned she almost missed the limb the monster threw at her. Her instincts grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and hurled her to the ground, her sword raised almost apologetically to hold the thing off. It rebounded, hard, the impact sending shocks up the blade and into her arms.
It wasn’t like chopping wood. It was like trying to cut through the iron haft of a mace with the edge of her sword.
Is a little shock going to keep you on the ground, Warden? Aelis wasn’t sure if the voice she imagined was her own or Lavanalla’s or Bardun Jacques’s, but she was damned if it was going to have the better of her. She rolled to her feet, took the hilt of her sword with both hands.
She saw Tun sailing through to the other side of the Demon Tree, his passage impeded by the energy at its core. Faint tendrils of smoke rose from his coat where some of the fringe had burned off and from the ends of his long hair, as he sailed clear and hit the ground hard. He bounced, rolled, and came to his feet, snarling.
She knocked aside two more of the thing’s ropy arms with her sword, trying to measure the magical strength she had left and what to do with it.
Tun, deprived of his staff—it lay between her and the monster now—reached inside his coat and drew out two thick, wicked-looking metal bands that wrapped around his fists. She couldn’t tell if they were bladed or not—couldn’t spare the time to look—but the question was answered when the end of one of the thing’s ropelike arms was sliced off into two sections as Tun’s arms blurred around it.
“Inside it, Warden,” Tun bellowed, as suddenly the monster sprouted more arms and shot them toward him. “Get inside it, there is a stone, wrapped in grass and hair, that animates it. It must be plucked o—”
This last was cut off as one of the tendrils evaded his swinging bladed fists and wrapped itself around his throat. Tun chopped at it savagely, but the ropy blend of wood and muscle had fixed itself around his neck and cut off his air.
She could not rush to his aid and handle the Demon Tree at the same time. She saw that Tun had come through the ball of roiling energy little the worse for wear, but he’d done it fast. She would have to be thorough.
Aelis had only one choice: a Third Order Abjuration she knew in theory, and had briefly cast once, under laboratory conditions; Nieran’s Sheath.
At most, she could hold it for a few seconds, so she darted forward at the thing, dodging its tendrils when she could, rolling forward to maintain momentum. When she couldn’t, instead of summoning a full ward to absorb the blows, she summoned just the edges of wards to deflect them, to make them miss her. It was a risky strategy, and one that called for a precise control Aelis had never felt she had.
Fine fucking time to learn just how precise I can be, she thought as she rolled to her feet and called the Sheath to her mind.
She held it, ready to cast, but had to reserve her immediate energy for deflecting the attacks the Demon Tree made as she closed in. The paper-thin wards she called did just enough to make its limbs shed their force or redirect their impact.
Her hair was ruffled by the passage of one, and she made a mental note to thank Maurenia for having braided it for her.
At last she was close enough to lunge. Her hands tightened around the hilt of her sword. As she pushed her will through it, utilizing its focus, she felt every contour of the sharkskin and wire that wrapped about it. The steel core of the blade, forged around droplets of her own blood, sharpened her will and the words she was already intoning, bringing palpable effect in the visible world.
Aelis felt her senses respond to the ward that enveloped her, starting at her head and feet and meeting in the middle. Air ceased to move against her skin; sound narrowed to a distant roar and then vanished. The coruscating energy before her dimmed.
She only just remembered to take a deep gulp of air before it sealed her in. Her movements were suddenly faster, as if being cut off from the world by a ward shed some of its weight.
Aelis lunged, her sword extended to the length of her arm. She was no great distance-fencer, and her sword was not made for the lunge—it was a swinging weapon, made to maximize force, not reach—but the ward flowing around it allowed it to pierce straight through the magic that animated the spirit, or the weapon, or the Demon.
Soon after that followed her arm, and then her head and shoulders.
Aelis was disoriented. Inside the beast, space was distorted—there was more of it than there should have been. A latticework of grass and wooden pieces like tree roots formed a kind of crude skeleton. Nothing like any body she’d ever dissected. The Anatomist in her wanted to stop and study it, take its measurements, draw it.
The Anatomist in her also reminded her that she needed air to breathe and regulate her blood, so she shook off that impulse.
In the center of the beast, on its own power, spun a small, dully glinting sphere, surrounded by a lattice of the woven grass that seemed a hallmark of the thing. She swiped at it, almost casually.
It spun out of her reach. She swiped again, and again it dodged.
She flexed her knees and jumped up into the thing entirely, sweating inside her airtight ward.
It was, to date, the moment of purest concentration and deepest terror Aelis had ever lived, but she managed to wrap her entire warded body around the stone. The thing vibrated madly, and with her ward keeping her from covering it tightly, she couldn’t actually grab it.
