Íde

My feet aren’t blistered quite yet, but they’re getting there.

Saints, it’s humid. It’s grey, it’s misty, the ground is smothered in a cloudbank that diffuses the heat into an oppressive cloying wetness. The light is muted, the sounds are not, and the sun floats, inundated, in the mist-drowned sky. I swing between wondering about my feet and wondering about what my family would make of all of this.

Iseult seems so cautious, always. Cautious and guarded and untrusting and the fact that she accepted Mister Kutrib’s suddenly changing request so readily seems unusual. But I’ve never done anything like this before. Maybe this is how things work, in business.

The road is a mat of thick black dirt, interspersed with grey gravel that seems sprinkled on as an afterthought. It snakes off into the fog some two hundred yards away. We haven’t seen any other travellers since we left the city, though in this weather we’d not be able to spot any approaching party until they were quite uncomfortably close. When I learned about the Wraithwild a decade ago, I was told that Brixa Thalaam sat adjacent to a frightful, roiling desert. Now we’re sweating in a foggy scrubland. Such is the nature of the shifting climates of the Wraithwild.

A watchful guard had almost stopped this whole trip, just on the cusp of Brixa Thalaam’s immense gates. As per Iseult’s instructions, I’d remained silent and nodded placidly as the steel-armoured man, along with several of his compatriots, had started a seemingly-friendly conversation with the Pathfinder. At some point during the flurry of hand gestures and shouts, Iseult had cut through the slowly boiling conversation by interrupting the increasingly animated guard with a firm, rhyming phrase. The clanking bag she’d tossed to him almost hit him squarely in the nose. He snatched it from the air, and felt its weight with one black-gloved hand.

Iseult walks ahead, with the Pathfinder, setting a swift pace that I find uncomfortable but will most certainly not complain about to the others. He had mentioned his name to me, twice, and both times I wasn’t able to understand any of his velvet Thalaami syllables. I always thought I was good at reading the Thalaami alphabet, though that skill apparently doesn’t translate at all to actually speaking the language. The two of them talk frequently, in low tones, and I stare at their backs and try to keep pace.

Our guide is small and condensed, and his white travelling clothes mirror Iseult’s dark robes. Unlike the rest of us, his dainty beige pack carries scarcely five or ten pounds worth of goods, and he moves with a light and loping grace. His skin is the same burnished tone as Iseult’s, though his hands and face are worn in a way hers are not. When he grins, which is often, he does so with his entire face.

She carries her belongings in a square leather rucksack, topped with a rolled-up Aergan tartan. Her left hand is empty, and occasionally gestures in some theatrical motion in time with their conversation. Her right hand is resting on the sling of a waxed case, which contains a truly enormous firearm. I’d seen the shrouded thing, of course, during our trip over in the Gundog Walking. She never carried it on deck, and opted to keep it secure it in that case, which had (or perhaps still has) been warded with some particularly vicious knotwork. I didn’t even try to inspect the sigils directly, and when I attempted to judge their potency with some tests of my own I felt the raw hint of their power shriek past me, wind from a carriage barrelling inches away. The case is half as tall as she is, and thick as a thigh, though if the weight taxes her it doesn’t show.

Sean walks at the rear position of our little troupe, obviously suffering, though he too refuses to say anything. He’s carrying the most weight, by far, and has decided to secure all the extra food, water, and cooking supplies within his own pack. When we’d set off from Brixa Thalaam, he’d filtered naturally to the back, mentioning something about ‘pacing’ and ‘marching order’. To be fair, this is his area of expertise, so I didn’t ask any questions. Whenever I turn to check on him, which is actually quite frequently, he never seems to be trailing too far behind. His face is pink with effort, and the sticky humidity is evident in the sweat that has already soaked through his overshirt. His left arm swings idly, catching the muffled, misty breeze. His right never strays far from the cross-guard of a sheathed Ildathach sword.

This environment is like nothing in Ildathach, or the countryside around the city. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of, save for in books and songs. There are woodcuts and drawings of Wraithwild flora in the library, of course, and our professors did occasionally use the unusual biology of this part of the continent to prove one point or another. But it is one thing to see a flower, perched on a steam that looks like a rooster’s leg, static and sanitised in a textbook. It is quite another to watch it flex and spasm in the wind, to see its great ruby petals swing to watch you as you walk by. We see ten such marvels emerge and disappear into the mist in the course of our first hour on the road. Wraithwild geography changes annually, sometimes monthly, so it’s no great surprise that its wildlife is equally tumultuous. I remember seeing maps, of complex patterns where the landscape would shift over a decade from swamp to desert to badland, seemingly at random. The trees in this country grow fast.

I’ve already sweated through my underclothes, and I can feel the damp even on the outside of my coat. There’s a similar band on Iseult’s clothes, from where her pack and her case rub against her body. Our Pathfinder, by contrast, is completely immune to this weather. His own rucksack is slung carelessly over one shoulder, and seems unusually small compared to ours. I notice with a start he’s not even wearing boots, just a pair of worn sandals.

The initial exhilarations of being in the Wraithwild, of soaking in the wild magic of this stranger land, dissolve after a few miles of road pass under my feet. Now that initial, heady rush of curiosity has ablated to a dry patience. I pause to drink another swig of water - at this rate, my canteen will be dry before the sun sets. There’s a satisfying thunk when I drop it, and let the strap bounce it against my thigh. Sean had helped me unpack and repack my travelling wear this morning, showing me how to distribute the weight across my back and my body. This might be how they do it in the Ildathach army, but to me the immense jangling weight of is incredibly uncomfortable.

Life bursts around us, unnatural in thickness and variety. Even the dirt seems to hum with an enthusiastic zest, sprouting trees, fungi, and more unsettling forms with an impossible density. I’ve seen fragments of the deep wilderness of Yvreathe, in zoos and daguerreotypes and woodcuts. They pale in comparison to this menagerie. It is only thanks to the deadening mist and the bleak grey sun that my focus isn’t trapped by a hundred small wonders. The Bloom that Ābreen asked us to visit is a day’s walk, possibly two, from Brixa Thalaam. We’re not even close enough to see its distorting affect upon the land, I am already overwhelmed by the Wraithwild.

The flora and fauna are already strange enough. I wonder what the people are like. We passed a caravan within the first few miles of leaving Brixa Thalaam, but the merchants were hooded and quiet, and we exchanged no words at all. They’d waved to the Pathfinder and Iseult, tactfully ignored Sean and me, and clanked by on quiet wheels.

Every road that spirals into Ildathach is flooded with men and women. It’s inevitable. Her spiralling roads are clogged with immense imports of grain, meat, and merchants. In return, the city churns out textiles and industry. When you walk out of the increasingly fuzzy boundaries of the city, you’re greeted with a horizon-spanning line of humans and animals, all straining to the monstrous appetite of the city.

By contrast, the caravans around Brixa Thalaam dwindled immediately, then thinned to nothing as we left sight of the city. You hear stories about Bani Yathrib mathematician-raiders and strutting Wraithwild processions, but out here it’s as empty a place as I’ve ever been to. I shudder, and grip the straps of my rucksack tightly.

At one point, the road is bisected by a brown, malty river that flows under what for appears to be a thirty-foot long tree, grown in a great arcing bridge over the gummous water. Its pale sides are thick with a gorgeous emerald lichen, twitching gently under the wings of thousands of dirty-blue moths. Iseult and the Pathfinder have stopped at the base of this tree, and are staring intently at a patch of boulders that juts out of the water some distance downstream. Just as I march up to them to ask what they’re looking at, Iseult shushes me and points.

Newts should be about the size of a hand, maximum. They should not be twice the height of a man. They should be black, or dull brown. They should not be the colour of dirty quartz, and their slimy hides should not be interspersed with ghastly yellow feathers.

They should also not stare back at you.

Sean joins us without comment, and we have this strange little showdown, our party and the grotesque lizard couple. The animals, who are lounging on a rocky outcropping that camouflages them surprisingly well, regard us with cool, level glowers. Their heads are wide, twice the size of a horses’, and when one of them yawns it reveals row upon row of needle teeth. Thankfully, they surrender before we do- they look at each other, pause, and slip noiselessly into the river. Only when we see them surface, significantly further downstream and away from us, do we cross the tree-bridge. Even the Pathfinder holds a machete in his hand as he makes the crossing, staring intently down at the muddy water on both sides.

The miles blur under our feet. Everywhere, almost suffocating, the soft light of the Wraithwild stamps down upon us. Leather straps from my pack criss-cross my torso at several points, as does my canteen belt and the ridiculous sheathed machete that Sean insisted on securing to my thigh. Everywhere the straps rub against me has been worn raw. When we stop to form a rough camp under the boughs of an orchard of stone-clad palms, and the setting sun dyes the sky into a gorgeous swathe of pinks and crimsons, I feel an incredible, sticky relief as I peel my rucksack from my sweat-drenched back. Sean offers to hunt, though he’s stopped by a gentle word from the Pathfinder. Instead, we snack on a ration that our guide brought from the city- some sort of smoky, grey-brown paste flecked with scarlet seeds that he smears thickly onto flat, coal-blackened bread. It is one of the best things I have ever eaten.

“This,” Sean says a few minutes later, breaking the silence from the four of us eating, “is delicious. What’s it called again?”

Our guide says something in Thalaami, which I don’t catch. Sean mimics him; the Pathfinder flinches. Iseult tries instead. “No, Sean, it’s-“

She says the name of the food again. When Sean repeats it, the Pathfinder and Iseult look at each other, wincing.

“Alright, fine. Well, it’s great. Wish we could get this back in Ildathach.”

An owl hoots somewhere far, far away. In the slumberous damp of this fog, it could be ten feet away and I’d have no idea. Our two Wraithwilders lean together for a moment, the Pathfinder saying something rapid to Iseult. She nods.

“He wants to know more about Colt & Tumble. Ābreen didn’t tell him much before the job.”

I assume that’s not directed at me- my ignorance on the subject matter has already been established. But it does lead to a slippery sort of question. What is our Pathfinder’s relationship with Ābreen il Kutrib? Servant? Contractor?

Sean inhales deeply, folding his arms over his broad chest. He leans back, eyes unfocused, looking directly upward. “Fair enough. Colt & Tumble is currently run by Miss Wynne Colt and Mister Evin Tumble. She’s the daughter of Darragh Colt, the trader, and has a reputation for being somewhat reclusive. I’m sure you can fill him in on what you think about Tumble.”

Iseult smirks. I pick up a twig and start idly breaking it.

“In terms of Colt & Tumble, if he’s in the dark about what they’re up to, then he’s in the same boat as us. They came here some time ago, met his,” and here he points to the Pathfinder, “boss, did some deal in the Wraithwild, then headed back to Ildathach. Kept things under wraps, never even made enough of a splash to really start the rumour-mills back home. But either way, the company itself follows the drumbeat of its leaders. They don’t stop, they know what they want, and they’re smart enough to get things done. Anything else on my part is just speculation.”

When it’s obvious that Sean has stopped talking, Iseult scratches the back of her neck, then relays Sean’s story back to the Pathfinder in about a sentence. She doesn’t understand why both Sean and I find this funny, but the Pathfinder does, and thanks us by extracting a dessert from his tiny pack.

Afterwards, sated, Sean shows me how to organise my sleeping spot. I’d not really considered the logistics before, and the process takes longer than I’d imagine. First, he chooses a location, on a slight incline in case of rain. He pulls my pack apart, using the straps to create a web from which he hangs the blanket I’ve been hauling as a shelter. At one point, he marches over to a broad stretch of moss and simply cuts an enormous bundle directly off the ground, then throws it down under my makeshift tent, topping this mattress with the bear pelt and tartan that makes up the rest of my sleeping gear. I thank him, and fall asleep almost instantly despite the deafening chorus of a billion night-time insects.

*

When I wake up, my entire body hurts.

Why did I come here.

I shift under the rough blanket, moving tentatively. Even my ribcage hurts. Even my armpits hurt. I spend a few minutes remaining totally still, as if the soreness will evaporate if I spend these first waking moments moving as little as possible. I give up when I start coughing.

The sun is up, though again is drowned, so while the landscape around us is thick with grass and flowers, they appear sickly and muted. We are scarce feet from the black dirt of the road, on a hillock miraculously bereft of biting insects or crawling plants. I am, apparently, the last person awake. I try to crush my blanket into the tight roll that it was originally, but fail my first attempt. My second is no better, and at last Sean lumbers over and shows me, kindly, how to squash the fabric with my knees and wrestle it back into its original sausage shape. His hands feel like bark whenever they brush against mine.

There’s something about the air in the Wraithwild. It’s hard to describe. On the occasional damp breeze rides familiar scents- iron and pine. But there’s something else there too, a feeling of stickiness. I can’t breathe deeply enough to fill my lungs, ever. I try, and wince as the act of breathing brings with it a painful soreness along both sides of my ribcage. A whole land lacquered in a wet weight, and me, aching and complaining, in its centre.

Iseult is at the base of the hill, and is poking at half of her gun with a tiny brush the size of her finger. She doesn’t look up. Rings on her weapon catch the muted morning light, and for the first time I notice the depth of the inlaid glyphs, the alien knotwork that has been burned into the device. I feel an unexpected pang of jealousy.

This feels voyeuristic. I instead choose to entertain myself by watching the Pathfinder half-seriously chase a gang of squirrel-sized octopuses from around his own sleeping area. He’s yelling something to them in Thalaami. After the creatures have been corralled into a nearby tree, squawking darkly, he returns to the foot of his sack-like bedding, and pokes at the low embers upon which he has placed a battered, hook-beaked coffee pot.

A few minutes later, he approaches with a handful of tiny cups, and offers one to me. I take it with a reciprocal smile, and look down into the tiny measure of Thalaami-style coffee. It smells… warm. Sean, at least, is drinking his with a look on incredible contentment. I quite enjoyed the brew that we were served at Mister Kutrib’s house, so drink it eagerly.

It is bitter and disgusting. I finish it, politely, and feel the rivulets trickle into the mile-deep trough of my famished stomach.

We troop on for half a day, stopping twice to eat under the muddled sun. Soil underfoot, undergrowth on both sides. Occasionally the plants grow so tall overhead that they blot out the diffused smudge of sun, other times they retreat from the path and emerge only as paltry meadows or lawns. For one reason or another, the landscape occasionally becomes dominated by certain plants- flowers that look like goldenrods, lavenders. Cedars. The noise of animals and insects is constant, though I have seen nothing moving today save the weird, cartwheeling tree-octopuses in the morning. There are occasional pockets of inexplicable strangeness that I suspect are increasing in frequency as we are drawn into the warped land surrounding the Shorn Peak’s sporing. The first one, a perfectly cubic tree that wept a foul, lilac sap as we walked by, disgusted me. After a half dozen more of these uneasy, disquieting sights, I find myself growing more and more jaded to their presence, until they simply blend into the normal strangeness of the Wraithwild countryside. Fatigue returns in fits after the first few hours, beaten back by the drudgery of the road only to return later, seething. Were it not for the others, I would have stopped long ago.

Eventually, I emerge from the mindless half-death of our marching. I realise that I’m fixated on a tree, a proud and massive thing that for all the world looks like a Yvreathan willow. It lurks scarce yards from the black earth of the road. I must have been staring at it for several seconds before my thoughts, banished by the fatigue and the boredom of the road, reel themselves back into my head. The tree is split open, directly down the centre of its trunk, and the dark brown of its bark has been sundered to reveal a horrible mass of beige and carmine that resemble so many packed yards of knotted intestines. This great cleave extends through the ground, presumably into its roots, one of which has burst from the ground almost vertically, some distance from the main body of the tree The way it has been broken, its mass falling into two neat halves, gives the impression that it is offering a welcoming embrace. Black and twisted growths crown its branches, decaying forms that give the whole thing a ghastly, rotting air.

“Lightning strike, I think.” Sean stares at it with me, and I pray he’s right. Either way, it changes my perception of the tree. What was once a blasted, haunted thing is now simple and miserable. I look back once as we march on, and watch the stricken tree-corpse fade gently into the mist.

The stretch of road we finally pause at looks virtually identical to all the others we’ve crossed so far. It snakes away into the distance, eventually disappearing into the hungry tangles of the plant life around us. On one side of us is a grove of extremely thin trees. I take the opportunity to remove my pack, then rap on the trunk of nearest one. Tin?

A frantic bird bursts from the pipe-tree. I realise with a start that its head is simply a cat’s skull, complete with a shockingly white mane of hedgehog spines. The bird thing hisses a sort of burping snarl at me before alighting.

A burst of low, sad syllables sighs from the tree. I refuse to believe that it just spoke Thalaami.

“Here,” the Pathfinder points in the opposite direction, over a jumbled scree-slope speckled with tufts of yellow tobacco plants. It looks identical to the thick plant growth we’ve been hiking through for hours. I glance over at Sean, and am comforted by the indecision on his face. Our guide continues talking. Iseult watches the treeline, arms folded.

“The Bloom is here. Stay close. Use machetes.”

“Wait, wait,” Sean pipes up, “we’re going into that? How do you know that’s the Bloom? Aren’t we suppose to reach a city first?”

He’s right, I realise. They’d talked about it during the meeting with Ābreen. A town called Nabat.

Apparently this question doesn’t merit a response, and neither Sean nor I press the issue as we follow the pair of Wraithwilders through the meadow.

The first few yards look reasonable enough. Waist-high snapdragon fields with the occasional cluster of stony outcroppings. But the forest that looms ahead of us, a sudden, cliff-like wall of foliage, is more menacing. I can’t see anything living at all in those viridian depths, even though the air around us is clogged with cries and whistles. The Pathfinder shrugs his wiry shoulders, then points to an innocuous looking tree right at the fringe of the ominous woods.

“You see flowers? Black. And leaves? Not part of tree.” He’s right, I realise with a start. Saints and gall. The leaves follow the rhythmic, breezy swaying of the branches, but none of them are physically connected to the tree itself. Each floats half an inch above the bark. “Wraithwild trees are still trees, even when they are different. That is not normal tree. He comes from Shorn Peak. So, Bloom is here. Through,” he waves a desultory hand at the jungle, mimicking Sean’s voice “that.”

Iseult nods and unbuckles her pack. When she stands up to she’s holding a two-foot machete.

Sean’s holding two- a machete and the sword he’s brought from Ildathach. That seems quite wise, actually.

Our guide speaks again. “We look for bee. He looks like bee, but he is not. You will hear him before you see him. When we meet hive, we need honey. Only small weight.”

I stare at the Pathfinder expectantly, before realising he’s doing the same to me.

Right then.

A wild wind of courage has seized Iseult, and she blazes a trail through the remainder of the meadow before I can muster a response. Plants fold under her, and she raises her machete and begins slashing at the thicker growths at the edge of the forest. We follow, the Pathfinder catching up immediately. Sean and I move more slowly, and he turns to me as we reach the threshold between the field and the jungle, and gestures at the dismal underbrush.

“Do you smell that?” I don’t, and shake my head. “Fungus and rot. It may get worse inside. I’ve brought a few measures of laudanum, and I’m sure that those two know some local cures, but…” he pauses, gesturing with a machete at the verdant underbrush. “The newts and the trees and such aren’t the real threat. It’s always exposure and sickness, just like in Yvreathe. The longer we stay, the more likely both of those are likely to become problems.”

I understand. Time is important. Iseult has already reached into her pack to retrieve two charmed slates, and finishes the sigils with a single line of what must be consecrated chalk. They activate a few seconds after she’s placed them into simple, protective cages, and she holds one of these lanterns in one hand and passes the other to the Pathfinder. We march into the Bloom, four humans and a pair of lights in the creaking darkness.

*

Into the stinking, sunless depths. A hundred yards into the brush and we’re plunged into a dismal twilight, the pallid daylight lost and listless under the swaying ceiling of the forest canopy. The sun-hushing fog has grown thicker and more dreary, and stops us from seeing more than fifty or a hundred yards into the treeline. Muted pillars of sunlight wink into existence, then vanish as the trees shift in the wind and the gloom reasserts itself. I tighten my grip around the straps of my rucksack as a screeching rattle booms through the trees, screaming into the breeze before fading back to the ever-present background hum.

Now that we’re inside the woods, and the muddled grey darkness has swallowed us entire, a low lump of dread has congealed in my stomach. Rank ferns sprawl in these depths, choking out most other foliage between the titan trunks of massive trees. Moss sprouts from everywhere else. The plant life here seems subdued of colour or vibrancy, and alternates only between corpse-white and darkest green. The whole growth, dead-seeming despite the noise of the insects and animals around us, is locked in perpetual fetid autumn.

Our progress is stymied almost immediately by the thickness of the brush and the hills hidden underneath treacherous mounds of ferns and vines. A triplet of yellow mammal eyes stare at me from the shadows of a paper-barked tree. A moth the size of an owl beats its wings softly, ten yards overhead. At one point I am convinced a snake is wrapping itself around my boot, and give a strangled yelp, but it is just the slow-moving stem of a curious fern. This is somehow worse, and I stick close to Sean afterwards.

Undeterred, we work our way through the undergrowth. Actually using our machetes is much more time-consuming than I expected. We attempt to circumvent the more ominous looking knots and tangles, and the horrifically-spiked trees, and the strange amalgamations of lichen and vines, because using machetes to wade through such obstacles is immensely tiring. About an hour into our trek, we stop at a cluster of boulders that look like roughly carved granite faces. Gorgeous ivory fungus bursts from their head-sized eye sockets. My hand grips involuntarily around my machete as an almost certainly human howl bursts through the trees beside us, and the Pathfinder, for the first time, holds up a hand to force us to stop and listen. A stalk of eyeballs, growing from a tree about ten feet above me, shudders at the noise, then slowly reopens, turning to regard us with an idiot stare. Five seconds later, the foggy silence of the mist resettles around us like snowfall.

The road through the Wraithwild was unusual. This, the oppressive hazy dimness under the canopy, is madness. I find myself immediately missing the light of the path- at least there all we had to worry about was the blanket mugginess and the potential for unhospitable Wraithwilders. Here, in the Bloom, strangeness waits for us in every hollow. The air will be quiet for an hour, then burst with yelps and songs. We press on, and I pray to the Saints for a break in the treeline. Our path meanders drunkenly between gullies and impassably deep thickets. I hope that the compasses that Sean and Iseult are using still work, and that the residual magic of the Wraithwild isn’t pulling us to some new, sinister pole. We walk, and walk, for hours.

Light, ahead. Stark and sudden, and certainly not a bad sign- though at the Pathfinder’s cautious request we edge carefully towards this unexpected clearing. We’re standing on the cusp of a vast meadow of alabaster and ivory, thin spikes of the stuff growing densely, like glistening grass. Even the fog seems beaten back, lifted from this treeless expanse. Iseult shrugs, then passes through the treeline, taking a moment to prod at the white soil with a tentative boot-tip. We follow, warily, and the blades crunch pleasantly underfoot.

The shining grass only stretches a third of a mile before being interrupted by a clutch of mauve-tinged trees, each of which is crowned with disquieting, lung-like gas sacs. While the meadow beneath us tinkles in the breeze in a billion tiny chimes, those trees swell and deflate to their own rhythm. Watching their great, minute-long breaths is at first disquieting, and then actively unpleasant.

Naturally, Iseult and the Pathfinder decide to camp near the trunk of one of these grotesque tree-things. Closer to their immense bulk, I realise that each trunk is clad, root to lung, in massive, fleshy scales. We stop when we reach the base of the largest. An unexpected positive side effect of this is that I can no longer see their crowns, and now have to crane my head to notice the enormous gas sacs pulsing slowly above me.

The downside is now I can now clearly hear the trees take their immense sobbing breaths, about once a minute.

*

Iseult and the Pathfinder are playing some tiny board game in the dying light of the evening, something that involves black and white discs and raised voices and a tiny wooden board marked with pointed, regular fangs. Relishing the opportunity to decompress, I bring my notebook out of my rucksack and idly sketch a knotwork sculpture in a spare margin.

Sean has taken his role as watchman seriously, and has sequestered himself about ten yards up the scale-clad trunk of one of the lung-trees. “It’s pretty easy!” He had called down, sinking a tent peg into the thick flesh of the plant. “It’s more like skin than bark!” If that’s supposed to encourage us to join him, he’s sorely mistaken.

He’s carved a little bolt-hole at the top of one of the tree’s immense, horse-sized scales. After a disgusted shout from Iseult, he’d stopped dumping the excavated tree-flesh anywhere near us. From this perch, he spends a fair amount of his time staring at the horizon, though occasionally glances down at the three of us. When he sees me looking, he gives me a wave. I grin and wave back. The machete he’s sharpening flashes in the evening light, and he goes back to running the thick blade over a tiny sharpening stone in his lap, legs dangling over the side of trunk.

The thrum of the Bloom has not changed in the hours we’ve been resting in the clearing. Occasionally, the cries will be punctuated by a particularly savage keening, or the noise of something being messily devoured. For the most part, the only animals I can see are songbirds and flies. Now that the sun is setting, the din rises to even greater heights- noisome cicadas competing with screeching birds and other, more exotic creatures.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It’s gorgeous, even if it comes at the price of my blistered feet and exhausted back. A beautiful, soothing lull. I’m dragged, not entirely unwillingly, into drowsy repose.

Sean calls down from the trunk of the tree. I can’t quite make out what he’s saying.

A response from Iseult. The quiet of the evening stretches away.

There’s a very subtle noise. A tinkling, like chimes. Sean shouts something, more urgently.

My name.

The Pathfinder and Iseult are up, and sprinting towards me. I’m slumped against the base of a smaller tree, the one with the quietest and least asthmatic gas-bag. I startle, and stand up, and see a puddle of blood pivot roll slowly over the meadow, splashing towards me.

It’s slow. Red. Like smeared rose petals. It pinwheels, strangely, a mess of muddy crimson visible only in patches where the glass blades of the meadow begin to sink into it. The effect is hypnotic, and the tinkling is the sound the plants make as they are swallowed whole by this carmine sludge. It is not a single shape, but is instead a mass of brushstrokes, all gently gliding through each other. The swarm is wider than a house, and shorter than an ant.

The mass wheels towards me. I am sprinting to the base of the tree that Sean has taken his watch in, all semblance of fatigue evaporated. He’s roaring above me. “Up up up!”

Me first, with the Pathfinder’s assistance, all thoughts of soreness or pain gone. I struggle to pull myself up the rope that Sean has attached to the flesh-tree. The rope is painfully coarse, and I seize it with all my might and begin to climb.

No good. I can’t get the traction. I step awkwardly up the stalk, my body perpendicular to the tree, and barely make it a few yards off the ground before my back seizes and my hands lose their strength.

Iseult spits something, panicked. She rips her jezail out of its case, and starts fumbling with a pouch on her stomach. I scrabble at the rope, sweat soaking into the rough fibres, and feel my hands tear as I make a few scant feet of progress. Both Wraithwilders are underneath me, trying to push me up the stalk.

Barely twenty yards away, the red rot begins to circle the tree. It moves with a mesmerising lethargy. More and more of the glass disappears into it in a hungry bout of tiny chimes. It is getting closer. It is thirty yards across.

I try as hard as I can, whimpering, to climb.

I can’t.

The Pathfinder is next to me. How? He has fat knives in both hands, and is punching each into the trunk of the tree, hauling himself upwards. He stops for a moment and desperately tries to pull me upwards by the back of my shirt. With our combined strength, I muster a few more feet of altitude. Iseult is still standing in the meadow at the base of the lung-tree, hands flitting over the body of her weapon. I’m barely my own height above her.

The rot spatters closer, hungry.

I am ripped upwards, in one enormous movement, gaining at least a yard, then stopping momentarily, then rising again. I tear my sight away from the mesmeric swirl, and look up to see Sean, standing hunched against the flesh of the tree, pulling the rope up in great coils. His toes dangle into the air, even as his forearms flex as he hoists me. He must have ripped out a chunk of tree-flesh above his little enclave for him to stand slightly more upright in.

The rope underneath me starts to flutter. Iseult is climbing, catlike, the rope wrapped around her tattooed hands. She’s practically leaping up the tree, with one hand grasping the rope and the other her firearm. There’s a pattering clamour as her various pouches and satchels rattle in the ascent.

The Pathfinder seizes my collar from above and pulls me onto a tiny ledge he has sliced out of the flesh of the tree. Sean grunts audibly as my weight leaves the rope, and Iseult bypasses us entirely a few moments later. The Pathfinder and I stand, backs to the trunk, on a ledge scarcely a yard wide and half a foot deep.

Beneath us, five yards down, is a dreadful, hungry thing. I’m seized with a sudden vertigo, and dig my heels and fingers as hard as I can into the bark of the tree. I feel it sag under the pressure, and my fingernails tear into the disgusting, spongy mass. Beside me, the Pathfinder begins hacking away a larger space next to us, loosing great hunks of tree-flesh. I can scarcely move my head, so I do not know what Sean and Iseult are doing. If I lean forward too far, I will surely lose my balance and tumble into the ruin below. The great red pattern lurks, orbiting the trunk of the tree, vulture-like.

It’s very obviously waiting. The pattern shifts in an immense series of hundreds of interlocking blobs, each swelling and diminishing like raindrops on flagstones. Every time it moves, it consumes more of the meadow’s glass, leaving behind nothing but desiccated, orange-dyed dirt when the stains shift and spasm. Like the ground itself is diseased. A vile red streak arcs slowly towards the tree I was dozing under, and cuts a quiet path of stained soil in its wake. White glass blades drop into the slowly wheeling shape, and do not return. My pack teeters on the precipice of that vile shape, then falls into it, as if from a great height. It makes no difference that the ravenous, blurring redness has a shadow’s depth. The stain remains underneath where I was, even as a hundred other smudges flock and circle around it.

I watch the languid churning of the rot. It flocks and rolls about us, and soon there is nothing left in the meadow around us save the stains, the trees, and the barren soil the thing leaves in its wake. From here, it looks familiar. We learned about this in school. Saints above, I’ve seen a picture of this before.

The Pathfinder taps me gently on the arm, interrupting my thoughts, and then wraps a soft hand around my shoulder when I startle. I look over to him, and he points to a hollow he has rapidly excavated in the bark. Deep, tall enough to sit in. The inside of the tree, this inner layer of wood, looks hideous- sprawling pink and brown whorls, the high tang of blood. He lets go of my shoulder and points at my palms.

Oh. Not the tree then.

Both of my hands have been ruined, and the gory sight of the blood and torn flesh is enough to return that horrible, woozy vertigo. I have left immense, slick bloodstains on the surface of the tree, where I seized the bark. Even now, blood runs down my forearms and spackles the tree and the ground below. His eyes are wide as he seizes me by the wrist and shuffles me into his little carved hollow. When I sit down, and start to stare at my ragged palms, the pain hits me all at once. I bite back a sobbing moan.

He leans out, looks up, and calls to the others in a language I don’t understand.

A few seconds later, a satchel drops into his outstretched hand. He rifles through it, and pulls out two bolts of beige cloth bandages. He mutters a prayer under his breath, and I recognise nothing but the syllables for Saint Teneral as he begins to fix my rope-ruined hands.

The work takes twenty minutes, and all I can do is try to bite back my tears and watch the blots orbit us.

*

“An emptiness configuration.” She calls down.

“Yes, I heard you. We call them death charms. And yes. But I don’t have tools!” I reply.

Iseult and I have been shouting up and down to each other for the last minute or so. She and Sean have dug their own cave into the tree, about three yards above the Pathfinder and me. The Pathfinder has spent his time digging fervently into the soft shell of the tree, stopping only when he reached a glittering, pearlescent heartwood about four feet in. This has given us a surprisingly comfortable, if disgusting, shelf to rest within. The quiet crimson ruin still circles us below, individual swatches blending into each other in a hundred different orbits.

Above us, in the slowly growing twilight, the sky is beautiful. The stars have just begun to shine through the light of the setting sun, and the moon (the real one) has started its stately journey overhead.

“You have my tools. They’re in the bag I threw down to you.”

She’s right. Her worn satchel is still standing upright where the Pathfinder left it before he tended to me. He’s staring straight down into the writhing mass beneath us, and turns his head slowly as I shuffle over to pick through Iseult’s things. I wince as my palm catches on a metal stylus, and try not to bend my fingers too much or get blood on her things.

She’s right. Slate, chalk. Enough for at least a minor sigil.

“Alright!” I call back up. “Are you sure you don’t want to do it?”

“There’s not too much sunlight left. I have to scrimshaw this bloody bullet, unless you want to give that a try.”

I do not. “Alright. What do you want me to do, exactly?”

There’s a pause. I can’t see what she’s up to. I wonder if she’s going to try to shoot the pinwheeling rot again.

Sean’s voice, now. “She’s doing some calculations.”

I wait.

“Íde! Do you know what an Irecura configuration is?” I do, courtesy of Saint Listless’ College: a basic modification to a death charm. I confirm this to her. “And the Anhrod?” Also yes. “Then yes. Do both, in a basic death charm, two-in-three, delayed for whatever amount fits the charm. At least thirty seconds though.”

The empty slate seems too small for her request. I try to visualise the patterns in my head.

“Okay,” I call back, and look down at the small slate in my hand. “Is there anything else to write with? All you have in here is chalk and a steel stylus.”

“No. Although it would be more effective if you wrote it in blood.”

I pause for a moment, and stare at my bandaged hands.

“That was a joke, Íde. Sort of. Next time try not to wreck your writing hand though.”

I sigh. “What can I say. As an absolute failure, I am a massive success.”

That elicits a laugh from Sean. I look at the Pathfinder, and he shrugs. Judging from the sky, I only have about an hour an hour of daylight left. I unwrap the bandages from my right hand, wincing, and gingerly take a pencil from Iseult’s pack. My fingers burn as I begin to write. I start the slow process of emptying myself into my work, something I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of times before. Slow and focused, and the pain bleeds away into the sunset.

First, do the arithmetic to calculate the geometries. Then bend the charm to your heart.

*

Inscribing the actual knotwork takes about ten minutes to complete, from start to finish. I could’ve drawn it in two, if my hands worked. The bulk of the work involved, as always, is mathematical- the weight and complexity of the knot itself is determined by optimised ratios of areas, angles, curvatures, and a dozen or so other variables. I’ve done similar work a dozen times before, but not with Iseult’s strange little square slates, or with injured hands. The Pathfinder is staring at me in wonderment.

I remember professor Driscoll from my first year at Saint Listless’, her infinite patience during our attempts to attune basic sigilwork. “Take your time. Every smudged mark will return, magnified. Draw once, but perfectly.”

Forty five minutes after I started, the charm is done. I’m exhausted, and the sigil has hollowed me far more than normal. No mistakes in the linework, with triple-checked mathematics. Consciousness sweeps back, like a tide. So does the pain in my hands. Knotwork was never this tiring in Saint Listless’. My breathing is as slow and laboured as the tree’s.

It’s compact. Iseult suggested a combination of an Irecura and an Anhrod configuration, which means this particular charm is asymmetrical. Most of the slate is dominated by a simple circle, outlined in tight, symmetrical braids. The square at its centre is crammed with tiny knots, as are the clutch of interwoven knots that spin like pearls from the main body of the charm. My head rings with the growling strength that I’ve fixated into the magic. Now that I’ve finished, I struggle to remain focused as the hollowing starts, driving static-flavoured nails into my thoughts. Colours slowly wash out of view.

I call up to Iseult that it’s done. She had finished her own scrimshawing a few minutes earlier. Sean, against all reason, is napping. I pass the slate to the Pathfinder, who regards it thoughtfully before tying a length of rope around it and lowering it slowly down the length of the trunk. He shouts something up the tree, and a few seconds later Iseult calls down, in Irdcheol: “He says your knotwork looks good.”

A negligible pause. “Not that he’s a sigilist,” she adds. No other comment.

He unreels the slate about six inches short of the red swirls that are still silently circling. There’s very little noise other than the thundering of my pulse in my ears. Yesterday, the dusk was heralded by a discordance of birds and bugs and peculiar things that I don’t have names for. Today, it’s quiet enough that I can hear the noise of Iseult loading and preparing her gun.

With achingly delicate movements, the Pathfinder begins to swing the slate. Not too much, or too fast, just enough to get it far enough from the tree for Iseult to actually hit it. Tiny movements of his hands translate into great, sweeping pendulum arcs. A little dark square against a seething carmine pool.

When Iseult fires, several things happen.

The first is the incredible slamming sensation of noise. It shatters the silence of the evening like a crack of captive thunder. The bullet whips by our ledge with a ferocity I can feel, and slams directly into the ground beside the slate, several inches wide. It fizzes and crackles in the dirt, and the crimson stains appear to buckle and flee around it.

The Pathfinder didn’t flinch at the bullet, and calls out something in a dry, flat tone. I hear Iseult mutter her retort. “Yeah, yeah. That’s why I made two.”

Her second shot strikes the edge of the charmed slate just at the apex of its slow swing. The sigil should collapse faster than I should be able to notice. But time feels treacle-thick, and I swear I can actually see the charm unravel.

First, the scrimshawed knotwork engraved upon her bullet devastates my sigil. The death charm, keyed to bleed its energy slowly through the configurations Iseult directed, collapses in on itself and instead releases all of its power in a fraction of a second. A rough cylinder of empty space approximately three yards across and one yard tall appears around the sundered knotwork, and for less than a heartbeat I can see the stains and the ground and the bark of the tree swim into greater detail.

Then the air collapses, and the crack of the bullet striking the slate is echoed a hundredfold by a stentorian roar as the sigil’s power manifests. A wave of sound and crashing wind strikes us, and I have to screw my eyes shut in the agony of that onslaught. My hands are clamped over my ears, and my mouth is slack, just as Iseult told me. But we never did anything this idiotic in Saint Listless’, never even considered writing a piece of knotwork and shooting it.

Where did she learn this? How did she know it would work?

When I open my eyes again, the stains are writhing. They have fled the area around the trunk, and are piling on top of each other, skirting and writhing in a pattern that is immediately distinct from its earlier movements. Each piece of rot spasms and squirms, even the pieces that are not moving, and the effect is disorienting and grotesque. After a few moments, one piece in particular begins swelling- before, only the largest of the swatches were the length of a person. Now, one stain, its edges bubbling with some sort of freakish reaction, has swollen to the width of a house.

It still isn’t making a noise, even as the stain seems to roll through itself, even when the wriggling edges and pieces of the thing cohere to form silhouettes of impossibly dense organ meats, of a throat and a sheer, ghastly beak-

Even when I see it, clearly, a dead, doll-like eye, all in black, a jewel that gazes blindly upon us before rolling into itself.

The shape is flat, and passed, and the stain turns sideways into the world and flows into nothing.

There is nothing to say, and after a while the ringing in my ears stops. I unclasp my hands from my ears and close my mouth. The Pathfinder is staring at the crumbling orange dirt where the stains had demolished our meadow. With slow, deliberate motions, he pulls up the rope that was holding the slate. Its split ends are singed and smoking, and the slate has disappeared entirely.

My pulse hammers in my head, almost drowning out the patient shuddering breaths of the great trees around us.

I stare at the dead sand below. I imagine it will take me hours to fall asleep, despite the hollowing that gnaws at my brain.