There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well by Shane Burkholder

Author:Shane Burkholder [Burkholder, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The Woe That Hope Brings

Tentacles slithered out from the dark and corpse-strewn waters he hovered above and took hold of his limbs, constricted them. He flailed against their grip even as they began to tear him apart. Others fought with him. Oren was among them, his cousin as well and all the Stormcrows. The verdant giant Hjaltimar was bound in the writhing nest, its immensities and greater strength met with the sort of impassable resistance that comes only in dreams. The harder that they pulled against their bonds, the closer the tendrils held them. But it was not to break free that they struggled. None of his friends sought to break free. It was for him that they reached, and the sight of their failure saw his limbs split away from his body in a shower of pain.

Arnem woke screaming. The crude mat of straw and sackcloth lay in disarray beneath him. Pieces of it prickled him all over, stuck to his skin from the sweat that made a cool night colder. He slapped them away as if they were the curious tips of the tendrils which held him in the dream, invading his every pore, and studied all the shadows to make sure nothing burgeoned within them.

The candles had burnt low throughout the cramped and musty garret. All was left to darkness but for the few uneven splotches of moon and domelight that stretched across the floor, lancing in through the broken windows. If whatever thing lurked in the depths of his sleep, haunting his dreams, sprang into the middling light then, the boy would have half expected it. The veil between the real and the incomplete chaos of the mind had been shaved thin for him. It grew thinner with the rise and set of every sun. But he was alone, save for Dob, as he was every night. And the knowing of it left him with such a hollow feeling he nearly wished otherwise, that something horrible truly was there with him.

There were only memories reposing in the watchtower below and the empty casern of which it was a part. The exiled Tradesmen who had repurposed its confines—billowing fires into infernos such as born Middeners had never seen, smelting the scrap of generations to smith it anew, forging a semblance of normalcy for themselves in the city-beneath-the-city—had gone and would not return. Their wives and husbands and children had died of sickness or starvation, washed away in the suddenness of a flood or fell awry of the endless gangs that haunted the alleys and alcoves. The hope died with them. They learned quickly the lot of a Middener and the woe that hope brings, that the only Fruitless Plain was that in which they now found themselves.

Gloom pooled in around them both like a smothering blanket, the boy and Dob, and the cool damp of the rainswept night hung close on the air. The moons were yet high when Arnem looked and hardly visible through the bright latticework of the dome.

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