Month 1, Day 8 to Day 9
The furrows in the bark ran straight up, and they went deep. I could set my boot into one sideways and stand on the lower lip of it, both fists jammed into the next line above my head. That was the whole method: boot and fists finding the next line up, blind in the dark, with nothing to catch us if we slipped. Somewhere overhead, the lines ran higher than any of us could know.
The elf woman had found it, feeling over the trunk in the black while the rest of us stood and breathed. I still didn't know her name. Days fighting next to her, and it had never once come up, and now it felt too late to ask. She went up first. Antoine went second. "I'll set the pace," he said. No one had asked him to. After him went Rafi, then the dwarf, then Mirae, then me, with Jonas above Nikita at the back. Whatever Jonas dropped, gear or himself, Nikita would be right there under it.
Nikita had wrapped the bad knee before we started, with a strip torn off the tail of his own shirt. Jonas watched the trunk the whole time and not the knee.
"Nobody say how high it is," he said. "I mean it. Not a number. Nothing."
"It's walking," Rafi told him. "Walking you do with your hands."
"That's climbing. You just described climbing."
"One at a time is all it is."
Nikita tied the wrap off. "Fall and I catch you. Climb."
The first stretch went in full black, up the biggest of the roots to where it met the trunk, and we did it by hands alone. Bark dust came off in the furrows and stuck to what little sweat I had left. Under the dust the wood ran hard and dry, and it held a little warmth the stone never had. I climbed with my face so close to it that I could smell it, and under everything dead in it sat a thin green smell, the first live one in days.
Past the root's shoulder the cave opened out, and the seam showed again, far over us, thin and pale. It gave us a direction and nothing else. My eyes had two days of dark in them, and even that thread of grey put edges back on things: the line of the next furrow, the shape of Mirae's head against the wood.
The stubs began somewhere above the root. Old branches, broken off short ages ago, each one flat-topped and broad enough for three of us to stand on. From the first stub on it was furrow, fists, boot, the next stub, breathe.
I counted grips because it was easier to climb to a number than to nothing. Somewhere past the third stub I caught the pattern. The stubs came in rings around the trunk, and from one ring up to the next I counted forty grips, sometimes forty-two, never more. Rest came at fixed heights, all the way up, and now we knew when.
I told Rafi first, quiet, because handing a thing to the whole group still wasn't something my mouth did. "Forty grips, then a ring. It repeats."
He ran it down the line before I'd finished. "You hear that? Forty and you rest. One at a time. Count if it helps."
"Say them out loud," Jonas said from below me, thin. "The numbers. Please."
So I said them out loud, forty at a time, for the whole rest of that climb. Of all the things this world could've found a use for in me, it went with counting. I could live with that.
We rested on the rings in twos and threes, and nobody had spit left to talk with, so the talk stopped on its own. My lips had split at the corners, and I only noticed when I tasted blood.
On one of the rings Mirae stopped moving with the rest of us. Carving ran along the bark there, the same fine lines the city had been covered in, sunk deep where the furrow walls sheltered them. She sat with her palm flat inside one of the lines, and her lips were going, shaping words with no sound behind them, her eyes running line to line and starting again. Since the arena she hadn't looked at anything longer than a second. When the line moved she moved with it, one hand trailing on the carving until it ran out, and her lips kept going.
Twice the furrow under the elf woman pinched out to nothing, and we lost long stretches backing down and crossing over. After the second time I started reading the lines overhead instead of my own hands. The deep furrows threw shadow even in that thin grey. Shallow ones ran flat and pale and died over the swells. I called it low to Rafi, Rafi passed it up, and we stopped losing height.
The trunk swelled outward in places, and over a swell the furrows went down to fingertip depth, with all that dark under your heels. Jonas had climbed all day on his arms and one leg. On the worst swell yet he forgot, or ran out of arms, and pushed off the bad knee instead.
It folded. His boot tore out of the line, and the length of him dropped and swung, and his hands caught the lip two grips down with a crack I heard through the wood. Then he stopped moving at all, pressed flat, face against the bark.
Rafi's count came apart above me. "...five, six, seven, and, wait. Seven. Who's not... Jonas. JONAS."
"Here." It came out small. "I'm here. It's the knee, it's not... I can't push on it. I can't."
"We're not hanging here over a knee." Antoine said it from above us, level, already reaching for his next grip.
Nikita said nothing to that. He climbed down instead, past me, one line at a time, no hurry in it, and set himself beside the bad leg with a fist jammed deep in the furrow.
"Look at your hands. Not down, not up."
"They're all I'm looking at, believe me."
"Left boot on my fist. I take the weight. Then the good leg."
Jonas breathed twice, loud. "Okay. Okay, going." And he went, shaking the whole way, up over the swell on Nikita's fist and shoulder, one grip at a time. The elf woman had waited too, hanging easy off one arm just above us. Rafi and the dwarf and Mirae had waited. The only part of Antoine still in sight was his boots, far up, where the pace was.
After that Nikita stayed under him for good. At every swell he set Jonas's boot with his own hand, and the forty grips between rests became a hundred, most of them spent hanging still. My numbers came slower. That was the price, and everyone paid it without a word.
We slept once, if that's the word for it, wedged standing into the deepest lines at a ring, arms threaded into the furrows to the elbow. I went out between one breath and the next, and came back with no idea how much later. Two days with nothing in me, and the weakness had settled into both arms, heavy and constant. Every grip now took two tries or a breath first. Over us the seam had changed, the grey gone paler, close to white along its length. Morning, somewhere out over the world we'd come from.
The first tremor came before we'd moved off the ring. Dust lifted off the bark in front of my face, hung, and dropped. Through the wood under my arms a roll went by, long and slow, from far below to far above, and faded out over our heads.
"Wood doesn't do that," the dwarf said. He had both palms flat on the trunk. "Not wood this size. It doesn't."
Then it came again. The third one didn't fade.
Sound reached us next, from all the way down in the black under our boots. Screaming, and not from one throat. It rose and spread until it came from everywhere below us at once. Then light followed it.
Fire opened across the ground far below in a long straight line and stayed burning. A second line crossed the first. In that light I saw the city whole for the first time: the walled rings dropping away from the trunk tier below tier, the streets running out through them. Every roof and stair of it lay lit dull orange, far down. Until that light I hadn't let myself know how high we'd come.
The ground at the base of the tree was moving. My eyes worked at that until it came apart into what it was. The plaza and every street feeding it crawled with the things, packed body against body, pouring toward the roots from all sides. Where the fire crossed them, the pouring stopped. Down between the roots the dragon stood with both wings half open and its head low, laying flame in lane after lane around the base of its tree. This wasn't the half year it had promised. It was only the things from the arena, still pouring out after us, and the dragon doing just what it said it would, keeping its own ground clear. Not once did it look up at us.
"Eyes up," Rafi shouted, and his voice cracked in the middle of it. "Climb, we climb now, go, go!"
We climbed, and while we climbed, the tree grew.
It started under my hands. The furrow I held eased apart, slow, the wood sliding until my fist sat loose where it had been jammed tight, and I had to grab again. A hum ran in the trunk, a note too low for ears that I got in my teeth instead. Then the whole trunk moved upward under us, root to crown, one long pull, faster than any of us could have climbed it. Nobody reached for a new grip after that. We jammed ourselves into the furrows we already had, and held on while the tree did the climbing for us.
The seam over our heads split at both ends. Stone came away from it and fell, pieces big enough to hear coming, gone a long time before the crash came back up from below. One slab passed close enough that the wind of it dragged at my jacket. The elf woman took Mirae by the collar and folded her into a furrow until it had gone by. Nikita put himself over Jonas without being asked. We pressed in and held, and the tree pulled again, longer, and the burning city dropped further away between my boots.
This was the climb now, just holding on while the wood carried us higher.
Up through the wood and into my hands came the voice from the cave, one last time, low and quiet. The words came out of the deep of the trunk, for all of us and for no one.
"Half a year."
On our very first day in this world, a voice out of the sky had given us six months. My arms were past shaking by then. I let the two numbers go and held the bark.
The gap stopped being a seam. It tore wide at both ends, and daylight came down the trunk in a band that widened as it dropped, and then it went over us. The light hit my eyes and kept going, all the way to the back of my skull, and I pressed my face to the wood and held on blind. Under us the screaming climbed and then thinned out, further off each second, and no part of it followed us up. Wind came next, moving air with cold in it and wet in it and the smell of open ground. Rock slid down past us on every side, close and pale in the new light. Then the rock ran out, and there was sky.
We came up out of the ground on the side of a tree.
Broken earth turned over on every side of the gap. Roots the size of the streets we'd walked heaved out of the fields and settled, and the rim of the hole sank away below our boots as the trunk kept lifting.
"Off." Nikita already had Jonas by the arm. "Now. Go for the dirt."
The elf woman stepped off onto the torn grass at the rim. One after another we went after her, boots onto ground that rocked and cracked and held. We ran, or did the thing our legs still had that was nearest to running, away from the edge, while the ground behind us split wider around the climbing trunk.
I made it to grass that wasn't torn, and my legs quit there, and I sat down hard and turned around to see.
The tree didn't stop.
It went up out of the broken ground in pull after pull, and the crown opened as it rose. Branches swung out and up, whole rows of them, and filled with leaves while I looked, green breaking out of the wood by the thousands. Then it slowed, and after one more long pull it stood still.
Morning light lay along the crown. Where we sat the land was still in shadow, and far over us the top of the tree held the sun already, lit green down one side. Low cloud went past beneath its highest branches. The two kilometers we'd spent a night and a day climbing stood over the world now, one green column, and every hill in sight ended far below it.
Smoke rose thin and black out of the torn ring of ground at its base, from the city burning somewhere under us. Before I looked away I found the gap once more, and far down in its dark one point of dull red held steady, exactly where we'd left it.
For a while the eight of us stayed in the grass without a word. Jonas had both hands over his face and his shoulders going. Mirae sat with her knees pulled up, watching the crown, and her lips had finally stopped. Beside me the dwarf lay flat, the hammer still locked in one fist.
Antoine stood up first. He shook the bark dust out of his hair, rolled his sleeves down, and never took his eyes off the tree while he did it. "Everyone will have seen this," he said, flat. The dwarf spat into the grass and said nothing back.
Jonas heard it before any of us, still flat on his back. "Water." He sat up so fast he hurt the knee doing it, and didn't care. "That's water. Moving water. Somebody tell me you hear it."
Down the slope a river ran over stones, wide and shallow and loud now that we knew what the sound was. Getting up hurt more than anything on the climb had. We went down that slope at the closest thing to a run our legs had left, all eight of us, and not one of us arrived on their feet.
I put my face in it and drank until my throat seized, came up coughing, and put my face straight back in. The cold got into the split corners of my mouth and burned there, and I kept drinking through it. Rafi lay in the shallows laughing at nothing, wet to the collar. Beside him Jonas drank and coughed and drank, flat on his belly in the current. Nikita stood in it to his knees, watching the slope and the treeline. Only when the last of us came up for the third breath did he kneel and put his own face down, and he drank longer than anybody.
Afterward we lay on the bank in the long grass and breathed.
Rafi counted us from where he lay, one hand moving down the line of us, his voice low. "Seven, and me. Eight." He said it once, quiet, and for once didn't run it twice. His hand went back under his head, and he looked at the sky and left it alone.
Twelve of us had gone down those stairs behind Basha, five days back. I did that arithmetic once, lying there, and put it away. The grass on the bank stood long and had gone to seed at the tips. Ben would've had a blade of it in the corner of his mouth before he'd finished sitting down. I pulled one loose without quite deciding to, held it a while, and dropped it in the current and watched it go.
Nikita got us up while the sun was still low, and camp lay somewhere past the far ridge, most of a day of walking if the legs held.
"They'll have seen it," Jonas said. He walked backward a few steps at a time so he could keep the tree in front of him. "From camp. You can't not see it. They're standing there right now, looking at it."
"Five days," Rafi said, and left the rest of the sentence alone, and started walking.
As far as camp knew, we'd walked into the ground and never come back out. Out of old habit I started lining up a first sentence for whoever we'd meet at the gate, and hated every version of it before it was half built. The tree threw its shadow out past us across the whole valley, long enough that we'd be walking inside it for the first hour.
We went after Rafi, strung out along the riverbank, all eight of us. An hour on, when I looked back, the tree was no smaller.