The Blessed Branches

The light grows on one tree only, and a tethered thing holds a branch of it in its mouth. Round the tree lies a ring of the dead — every hand that reached for it, still reaching.

The Enduring Lesser Lights laid their trap in the corridor the goblins had built to kill them. Draz and Heyou took the high ledges; Jamal and Sylvie, with Sarru and Savel and the snow leopard Yuki, waited below in plain sight, for bait. Through the kill-zone they spread the flammable ichor drawn from the dead brute, a long fuse for Draz’s fire-arrow. Then they waited — and while they waited, the mountain spoke to them.

Cloud rolled down over the Mountain Pass and took the light before its hour. In the false dark Sylvie and Jamal heard voices: the dead, carrying on conversations they had not finished, neither hostile nor aware that the living listened. Among them Sylvie heard her own grandmother, younger than she had ever known her, giving patient instruction for the baking of bread. She had thought she knew the shapes death took. Then stone came down on the lookout without warning — no goblin’s work, only the mountain — and Draz slipped aside while Heyou stood and took it, the scarf Sylvie had knitted him turning the worst of the blow.

Five goblins came into the corridor at last, four and a leader. Draz’s arrow found the ooze and the passage went up in a sheet of fire; one goblin died in it, and the rest broke. Below, the blast was the word they had waited for. Sylvie called lightning down her staff, and a goblin lost its head to its own flying debris; Jamal crossed the water and brought his hammer down and left nothing worth burying; Draz took the last from above. Then the corridor was theirs, and quiet.

They came to a fork and split. Draz and Heyou went high, Yuki trailing Draz; Jamal and Sylvie went low with Sarru and Savel. From the height Draz watched goblins at work below — not soldiers now but engineers, tool-belts and wrenches, building. A stone thing ten feet tall came out of the wall at Heyou and swung wide. Then the way opened into a drowned hall: shallow water, raised stone, and far off a golden glow from a tree. Draz loosed at a Stonewraith and the arrow came back off its hide; the thing answered with a rumble pitched below hearing that shook him from his perch. Heyou went through the goblin engineers with a rain of blades. Sylvie stepped into water that was deeper than it looked, and something beneath it closed on her ankle.

On a span of stone, Mellon came walking toward Jamal, and would not answer him, and Jamal’s hands closed on nothing. Sylvie pulled free of the water and went to the Stonewraith with open hands, and it heard her after its fashion, speaking in tremors felt more than heard. Heyou knew old work when he saw it; he set one hand to Sylvie’s pendant and one to the stone and spoke a word of command, and a spirit passed out of the wraith and into him. It wore his body like a strange coat — worked the joints, went through the pockets, set a bolt to its tongue — and gave a plain warning: keep away from the tree, for a Guardian keeps it. Thirty years it had wandered the golem-shells of that place, it said; it was not the spirit of the mountain, and would not be taken for it. Another roar came out of the dark, and it went back into the stone.

Sylvie threw a small light ahead, and the Guardian showed itself: a demon in the shape of a great purple cat, more eyes than a cat should have, tethered to the Glowing Tree with a Blessed Branch held in its mouth. Draz spoke to it in the tongue of beasts and got back only a cold and measuring hate; it drew off, and sat, and watched him. It was no animal. Then a goblin came under a flag of talk and asked which they were after, the tree or the beast. One branch, they said — only enough to keep the towns from the cold. Then kill the beast, the goblin answered, and the goblins would hold their hands and let them take it. These were builders, it said, who buried their own dead without much grief and traded tools with Heyou for the respect of the craft; the beast had come before them, killed all who crossed its ring of corpses and ate none of them, and kept the tree for reasons of its own.

They rested at the edge of the dead-ground. Heyou made what peace could be made with the goblins; Sylvie set the shimmer of armor back over them; the goblins put a satchel of black powder in Heyou’s hands and promised more, if the beast were killed. Mellon walked the far side of things now, past speaking. The branch hung in a demon’s mouth, and around it lay everyone who had ever reached for it. In the morning they meant to reach.