Root of the Curse II

Synopsis

It began on the walkway. The large twig-thing sat in the dead tree’s branches across a fifteen-foot drop, and while the party worked out how to reach it the base of the trunk split open and the blights came out: cat-sized, dozens and then several dozen, streaming for the stairs. Koa put down the greatsword for a cutlass and a shield and held the stair-head, keeping the swarm at a distance. Mikhail threw oil across the steps to slow them, and Aldo, who could not get a torch lit while it mattered, set the second flask alight with a thrown one. Dry vine and dry stick take fire beautifully.

They fought the next two waves the same way, giving ground through doorways on purpose and burning each rush as it funneled, until Koa forced the door shut on what was left. The tree would not catch, so they went looking for the Elder’s map room instead, by way of half an hour of hammer, chisel and torch on the root that jammed the barred doors, which is how they learned the roots do not burn either. The map room held the Elder, pinned to the wall by the death tree’s roots, and his first words were a warning: night was falling, this tree blossoms in the dark, and they needed to be elsewhere.

Mikhail put it together on the way out. The thriving tree outside and the rotted tree inside are not two problems but one: opposites, each tied to a plane, each blooming in its own window. Razorleaf erupts at dawn; the blights come at night, shunning honest light and chasing illusory light.

They camped on the stone platform fifty feet from the door, hauling the dead assassin vines out for fuel and borrowing Dwayne’s axes to cut more. He had been carrying three of them all along. He laid the fires himself, one great blaze in the middle and smaller ones at the cardinal points to hold the light-shy blights off every approach at once, and took the all-night to stand the whole watch. Scratching started from every direction at once as the blights clawed up out of the ground, and whenever a fire burned down something came through the gap. They fought in pairs, threw the bodies back on the flames as fuel, and were wrung out by morning.

Near dawn Mikhail worked out the last piece: the great emergence comes at the start of the night and the start of the day, leaving one thin window between them. They ran the fifty feet in it, the outer tree waking behind them and putting out thirty feet of razorleaf in seconds. Jacobo lagged, and Dwayne rode back and brought the mule out gashed and barely standing.

Inside, with the death tree dormant for the day, they chiseled the Elder loose. He came away stronger than they had ever seen him, and told them why: he is one spirit schismed across the keeps, and each one opened returns a little more of what he was. He still cannot recall his own name. The relief map on his wall he could now read: sacred geometry, sites set equidistant around the keep where the boundary between planes runs thin, marked with three symbols. Two are life and death. For the third Mikhail could offer only what the Arcane Congress supposes: a void at the center of the inner planes, the antithesis of matter itself. He also dredged up the Muharib, the old empire’s portal-guards, set against what came through when the Mól broke a boundary. This may have been their house.

What will hurt the trees is not fire. A conduit of positive energy (a radiance crystal, or water out of the Rio Vite) would strip the death tree’s protection, and ash from burnt blights could bring down the living one. Then, and only then, an axe. Aldo said plainly that this is folly and no three people can do it. The Elder answered that leading it counts as doing it: break what can be broken, leave someone behind to finish, fly to the next on Al-Sāmiyah, and keep time through the bottles that let a man see him. He named the crown a noble’s, possibly a Muharib’s, and the circlet a thing worn by the sensitive sort of Mól artisan, the kind who cut living things into gems. Then he took them down to the root-heart beneath the keep, where the boundary is thin to nothing, walked them to the gate, tore a path through the razorleaf with the keep’s own force, and dissipated from the effort of it.