London Burns Read online

  At the center of the rectangular room lay a triangular table. On each flat side rested a smooth wooden chair, each high-backed and carved with the surname of the Shire clan that held seat at the table of Low Marish.

  The gentrified, stooped form of Opal Thornbrooke sat in the chair that bore her family’s name. A thin mesh shirt hung on her frail shoulders, covering her pale flesh minimally. On her face she wore a scowl. Her knotted, arthritic fingers thrummed on the table as she assessed her clan peers.

  A full decade younger and to her left sat Elder Cobb, Acton’s grandfather and sitting master of the village’s emaciated commerce. His bulbous red nose and patchwork flush gave away his love for ale and mead but his narrowed, shrewd eyes were focused. He too disapproved of being roused so early, but he arrived, as was his duty.

  The final elder reached his seat with the help of two younger family members. The wizened body of Father Burke leaned against the armrest of the wooden seat as it were giving him the strength to breathe. His bony arms wobbled as he rested his long back against the suitably tall chair. His white robes cascaded around him like a loose bathrobe, covering only the most crucial of private areas. His pasty chest was exposed, as was the flaccid flesh of his long legs. Flanking him only a few feet away was his grandson, the next resident apostle in line when Father Burke passed on.

  The residents of Low Marish hushed as the final elder cleared his throat.

  “Glad to see your spirit is still inside your skin, Father,” Opal said with a wry, wrinkled grin.

  “Well Opal, it’s fighting to get out each and every day. I yearn for the day I can cast aside this silly body and float around haunting you and your family like a proper friend ought. One day you’ll get your wish, as will I. No need to rush what doesn’t need rushing,” Father Burke said back to her.

  “Stop flirting,” Elder Cobb chastised. “We’ve business to attend to. My boy brings news from the wall.” Elder Cobb looked over his shoulder with great effort, and waved, summoning his son.

  Acton approached, stepping up on the raised dais the triangular table sat atop.

  “What say you, captain of the guard?” Opal asked of the tall, bearded warrior.

  “We have identified a wandering man outside the wall. Young Lily and Ray Thornbrooke spotted him no longer than two hours past. I identified him as Grant Barber,” Acton said.

  “Son of Celine and Hadwell?” Opal asked, her memory sharp.

  “True.”

  “Is he dead? Shall we send Priest Burke to banish him back to the earth? Such a shame for a soul to be lost,” Elder Cobb said.

  “No, he’s not dead at all,” the captain said. “Nor is he quite alive in the normal sense. I ordered him kept at the wall while we gathered. He appears… off.” He looked down to his feet and the leather boots he wore.

  “Say again? Am I so old as to have heard you say he’s still alive, but wandering like the dead we’ve had of late?” Opal asked, holding her hand to her ear and making a cone shape.

  “He is not dead, though he acts it. His eyes are faded and glossy, streaked dark with… something. He staggers and stumbles, but he is not enraged as the dead are. He seeks no death, but he seeks something. Similar to the other man who was encountered and killed by the Glenshire tradesman on the road the other day. I think he might’ve succumbed to something else.”

  “Sick with discordant balance? Bone rot?” Father Burke suggested.

  “No,” Acton said. “I suspect it might be something older, something we have dealt with long before. I think the Barbers built too close to the ravager tree, and somehow roused it.”

  The three elders coughed and laughed at the incredulous statement. There was no way…

  “The Barber’s family farm is but a mile from where the old maps showed the tree. Grant Barber is just wed, and I know he broke ground to start a home for his own family. I believe he did so a mile from his mother and father’s, which would put him perilous close to the tree. If he were to have accidentally roused a pod of spores…”

  Opal stopped laughing first. Father Burke and Elder Cobb saw her face as she twisted through the halls of her memory and realized that she’d remembered something. Something important.

  “Elder Opal? Do you have something to say? Something to tell me?” Acton asked, resting his hand on the pommel of his long sword.

  “My mother told me the ravager tree only spawns during hot, long summers.”

  “I thought I had remembered it so,” Acton said. “What else?”

  “Once a hundred years, give or take the moon’s cycle or two,” Opal said. “It’s been about that time since the last season, if memory serves.”

  “Impossible,” Elder Cobb said. “The ravager tree is a legend. A story told to gardeners and farmers to keep them out of the furrows of their fields and in their beds at night. We’re imagining ghosts where there are none.”

  “Father, it is worth my time to leave the village and investigate, is it not? If I am wrong then all we’ve given away is a walk in the woods. If Opal and I are right… then we could save everyone in Low Marish from a terrible death. Or what amounts to life with the ravager tree awake.”

  Elder Cobb scoffed at his son.

  “Acton if what you believe is true, we could lose the whole village,” Father Burke said. “If the mother tree can infect enough animals and people outside the walls, it’ll surround us, and plant more of its kind until we cannot leave our own walls. Eventually it will plant us all in the ground to feed on. It’s only a matter of time. Either we act swiftly, or we die slowly.”

  An angry young mother stood in the crowd. She clutched at two fat, happy babies on her hips.

  “What are you talking about? Ravager tree? Spores? Speak truths to the people. To your families. Some of us have children we’d like to give futures to,” the mother scolded.

  “Sit, child. I watched you born and you’ll watch your grandchildren born the same I did. Don’t let the old apostle’s doom saying spoil your milk,” Opal said gently. “Though like all words cobbled together, there’s a message in what is said.”

  “If it lies in the woods where the maps say it is, how do I kill it?” Acton asked as the woman with the two children sat.

  “You don’t kill it. Ravager trees can’t be killed in the way people can,” Opal said. “But you can put it back to rest for another century. Maybe we can figure out how to kill it with that time.”

  “Then tell me how to do that, and I’ll see the task done,” Action said.

  Opal remembered that too.

  “It is as Opal said,” Acton mused. “Grant is infected by the ravager tree.” Acton, Lily, Ray and Powell Burke, the third in command of the city guard stood over the netted form of Grant Barber. As he’d suggested in the early morning several hours prior they had thrown a fishing net over him, and he’d tangled his feet up and fallen. Acton crouched over the oddly calm form of Grant and looked closely into his eyes.

  The whites were losing ground to faint green and black streaks that fed in from the sides. Roots of the ravager tree spores spread from inside the man’s skull.

  “What is that?” Lily asked.

  “When a spore pod bursts, and the released cloud inhaled, the ravager tree infects a man. The cloud is a million tiny seeds that take root in your mouth, throat and brain. Somehow the tree can control those infected to do its bidding. Instead of waiting for rain the tree sends out its infected to gather sustenance for it.”

  “Sustenance?” Ray asked, voice shaking.

  “People, animals. When the spores grow to a point where the brain and body cannot contain them any longer they return to the tree and die, giving their life blood to the roots of the tree,” Acton said, then stood.

  “The tree eats people?” Ray asked.

  “It’s a big tree. Infused with The Way I would venture. Something dark from our world’s past. Something from before The Fall three centuries ago.”

  “I say we burn it,” Powell said as he leaned
on his spear, clinking the rings on his leather armor against the ash haft. Powell carried a massive pack on his back that clearly weighed a great amount. Even with his substantial size the bag seemed to bother him.

  “Opal said the tree might not catch. Its bark is too tough. But there is something we can do. Fire has a home in this fight. We brought the flasks of lamp oil, right?”

  Lily and Ray lifted satchels up from their hip. Faint clinking could be heard from the bag’s interiors, like clay wind chimes on a distant neighbor’s porch.

  “Good then,” the tall Powell said. “I say we move now, burn everything and come home for a late lunch to celebrate. This bag makes my back ache.”

  “Leave it to a Burke to plan the celebration before we attain victory,” Lily said.

  “Leave it to a Thornbrooke to not keep their mouth shut,” Powell said, taking up his spear and pointing it at the younger girl. The pair grinned.

  “Thomas, Mattias,” Acton yelled as he looked up to the top of the city’s wall where several guards stood by, watching. “Summon Priest Burke for a blessing of soul’s rest, and give Grant Barber peace. This man has told us his story. We head south.”

  The four left the wall, and headed south towards the horror that waited.

  Acton Cobb led a small party of Low Marish residents into the southern forest. Unlike his subordinate Powell Burke he’d listened to the advice of the Elder Opal and shorn his black leather armor for the trip. The crushing heat made the armor almost a danger to wear for that reason alone but Opal warned that the fight they faced wouldn’t be decided by the thickness of hide any of them wore.

  They would need speed and wits, not brute force and tough armor.

  The four walked in the light of the rising sun along the south-eastern trade road for almost two miles. They kicked rocks and dirt on the cart-worn road and watched the surrounding fields of burnt wheat and grass pass. They drank profuse amounts of water from jugs and skins and when they crossed the arched stone bridge halfway to their goal, each refilled from the cold running stream below.

  When the four passed over the crest of a small hill Acton stopped them. A farm lay nestled in the crux of a forest’s elbow, surrounded by wooden fences and flanked by a long, flat barn. The bodies of sheep lay in the field, beaten to death.

  “Look there, and there,” Acton said as he pointed into the field. “Sheep killed, then dragged into the woods to the east. See the scuff marks in the rows?”

  They all saw.

  “Protect your faces,” the captain said. He produced a dark wedge of cloth from his belt and poured out a handful of water into it. When sufficiently soaked he wrapped the fabric around his lower face, forming a mask to cover his nose and mouth. In the old books the ancestors of Low Marish said this would protect them from the spores.

  Lily, Ray, and a very sweaty Powell did the same. Acton checked over their masks and when he was satisfied, they walked down the road and jumped the fence that marked the border of the Barber family farm. Following the trail the dragged sheep bodies left after that was easy work.

  Ray’s hand shook, wobbling the bow he held as if a winter wind blew fierce against it. He prayed for a winter wind. It would distract him from his guilt for being scared and cut the heat in the dark of the forest. No wind would come, however. Not in this long, hot summer.

  From behind the tree he crouched at he looked to the left and right quickly, trying to forget what sat in front of him. To his right he saw the large Powell Burke as he slid the giant bag off of his back and undid the leather straps that held it shut. The man looked calm in the presence of danger, no different than a hunter stalking a deer. Cautious.

  To his left Ray saw a very frightened Lily holding her bow in equally shaky hands. His instinct to protect her grew suddenly, even though he knew she was the better shot, older, and more brave than he. He laughed at his folly and looked for Acton.

  The visage of the tree interrupted his search.

  The four explorers had found the ravager tree easily. Following the trail of scuff marks and blood smears had been a child’s task. The minions of the tree had made no effort to conceal their works.

  Each of the bodies dragged through the forest were brought to a circular clearing the ravager tree occupied the center of. Dominated the center of. The ancient tree looked as much like a monster as it did a plant. Five men holding hands would’ve struggled to encircle the base of its trunk and it reached to the sky a hundred feet above the large oaks, maples, and pines gathered fearfully around it. At its base were pomegranate sized red globes that tantalized like ripe, delicious fruit. They almost pulsated with visible danger from the spores that lay in wait inside them.

  Spaced equally around the gargantuan trunk were branches that left the center mass at a steep angle, aimed at the sky. The branches reached their sharp zenith then twisted at an elbow and stabbed sharply down as if the tips were heavy, and couldn’t finish the climb to the clouds. The branches ended in sharp spikes that slowly moved side to side, like a horrid wind blew even in the stillness of the cursed glade. Not a single leaf grew on the tree.

  Littered around it were hunched human figures, their knees in the dirt and their hands digging at the soil. Ray watched one by one as they methodically scratched out grave after grave for the pile of bloody, dead animals they had dragged there who knows how long before. The mother Barber stood up on shaky legs and turned with great care. She grabbed a goat carcass and pulled it into the hole. When she was satisfied of the lay of it, she stepped away and began to dig another hole a few feet away.

  Then, like a strike of lighting, one of the ravager tree’s dagger branches snapped down. It impaled the goat body into the hole and split its torso in half, spilling fresh entrails and rotten meat into the hole. The branch drew out of the corpse and into the air and then slammed down with a ground shaking impact, ruining the body further. Ray cried as he watched the animal’s form lose its familiar shape and become bones and gore held together by strips of skin and hide.

  Something moved underneath it in the hole. Black fingers, long ropy strands of cartilaginous fibers rose from the dirt and earth high enough to wrap themselves around the mess of the goat. The tree’s roots embraced another meal. Ray watched as the flesh of the animal was pulled deep into the earth for the ravager to suckle upon.

  On the far side of the carnage and the slow drones of the Barber family servicing the tree, Ray watched as Acton stalked elegantly. He moved low and alternated his foot speed to move from tree to bush, from boulder to draw. He evaded the root-filled eyes of the almost dead and the strange almost supernatural watch of the eyeless ravager tree.

  In one hand he held his long sword, in the other an unlit torch. Ray lost himself in the motions of the brave and very alone captain as the man took a knee and sat down the rag-wrapped torch. Acton poured out a bottle of lamp oil on a large dry bush covered in emaciated blueberries and produced his flint and steel. Two strikes later he had the torch lit and two ticks after that the bush went up like a funeral pyre in Low Marish’s central square.

  The effect the flame had was instantaneous.

  Hadwell and Celine Barber stood from their holes in the earth and began to stride angrily across the ground the ravager tree owned. Slower still was an unidentified woman who struggled to move at all. She twitched and stumbled, but moved towards Acton nonetheless. The spore-dominated servants of the tree came to their matron’s aid.

  That must be Grant’s wife, Ray thought, feeling better somehow that the spore-infested people were moving away from him at last.

  “Boy,” Powell said in a whisper. “Boy!”

  Ray turned to the massive guard. “Yes, sorry.”

  “I must sow the field with the twice blessed salt as Acton draws their attention. You two are to protect me with the bows. Do you understand?”

  “What do we shoot? The tree?” Ray asked, confused.

  “No, idiot. Shoot the people if they come for me. The tree is no danger if I stay fa
r enough away from its branches and red bags of spores at its roots,” Powell said, producing a handful of small burlap bags filled with salt from his backpack. He hefted them in one hand and grabbed the strap of the larger pack.

  “I’m ready,” Ray said. “Though I’ve never killed before.”

  “I am ready too,” Lily said from further down the line. She didn’t echo Ray’s second statement. Ray wasn’t sure what that meant.

  Powell moved without hesitation. He dragged his backpack ten yards into the clearing and dropped it, allowing the smaller mismatched bags inside to spill out for easier access. One by one he tore open the bags in his hands with his teeth and emptied their contents out into the dug holes filed with gore and blood. One bag became three, three bags became six and then he was out. He ran back to the backpack and its resupply of the poisonous salt.

  As he ran, the tree felt the burning sting of the salt, and it reacted.

  Over and over the massive hooked branches with their spear-like tips stabbed into the ground near to where he ran. The massive impacts of the blade-like branches grew closer and closer to his feet as he tried desperately to pick up speed. The tree felt his girth come down on the ground, one foot at a time, and Ray watched as one branch held high, twitched once as it measured the time of it, then descended down.

  The tree’s limb came down and skewered poor Powell through the back and belly, knocking him off his feet and to the ground, impaling him still on the unsalted earth he tried to escape over.

  “Gah,” Powell gasped, spitting up a lungful blood. He clawed at the earth, digging furrows into the grass and exposing the bones of others who had miss-guessed the reach of the ancient, evil tree. He looked from Ray’s face to the arm bone of a child, then closed his eyes and let his head hit the ground.

  “Powell!” Ray yelled.

  “Shut your mouth!” Lily said through gritted teeth. “The tree will find us. Fire your bow at the men and women going after Acton. I’ll spread the salt.” She got to her feet and began to take off her quiver and satchel filled with oil.

  “No,” Ray said, faking bravery. “I’ll do it. I’m faster and stronger.”