Ahead was the clay-lined, spring-fed pool, which was where I had already guessed we were going. Beside it was a black wereleopard, and a man who was more cat than human, crouched, drinking from the cold water. I could feel them through the ground as we drew near, my boots loud in the empty silence. The two drinking werecats—leopard and mostly human shaped—stopped drinking, pivoted their heads to me, and slipped soundlessly into the night.
In the new path, my light caught a glimpse of white—a broken set of earbuds, tangled and torn. A gobag appeared a bit farther on, a woman’s skirt and comb on the ground, the fabric slashed by claws and stained by blood. I moved the light backand forth and saw Occam’s gobag in bracken. And Rick’s cell phone, the screen smashed. A few steps beyond were Rick’s clothes, in the bottom of the clay-lined pool. Soaked. The water was pinkish from blood.
We had come this less direct way, I guessed, so I could see the state of the clothing. It looked like things had gotten out of hand—violently so.
I stepped into the small clearing, lifting both legs high over a root that curled above a rock before it found the earth. My flash fell on the sapling.
The small tree had regrown its limbs, slender and more delicate, but longer than before. And more of them. Four limbs. The roots were different now too. Instead of the two roots coiling together, a dozen or so twined and twisted together to form the trunk. The circular place where it was rooted was a bloody mess, empty of natural life. No vines, no leaves, just a bare and bloody-greasy patch of soil. The tree was taller, ten feet or more. Its girth was greater.
Standing back from the sapling, I placed the flash on a boulder and used rocks to position it so its light fell on the tree. In the angle of its glare, I opened John’s rucksack and unloaded it.
I plugged in the portable battery backup tablet and set Rick’s music playing as loudly as the tablet could. The sounds of wood flute and violin filled the wood grove, and I could feel the interest of the trees. High in the branches, a breeze danced, making a low-pitched sound that seemed to breathe with the music. I angled the tablet into the trees in the direction I felt the werecats and placed all the tools where I could see them in the glare of the flash.
My hands moving with muscle memory, I tested the land with the psy-meter 2.0. All around the sapling, the trees read as they should. But the sapling itself and the ground beneath it read ambient on level one through three, with a little elevation of psysitope four. Exactly like me. And very unlike the sites where black goo toadstools were growing, and unlike the people at the hospital. Whatever was happening in town was different from what was happening at Soulwood, despite Rick’s bloody, bloody words. A weight dropped off my shoulders. I turned off the psy-meter.
Less tentatively, I crouched and placed my palm on theground away from the red mess. Nothing tried to grab me. Nothing tried to pull me under. The land arched up into me, healing and satiating. Beneath the surface, Soulwood itself was healthy except for the area around the sapling and the area where Brother Ephraim had carved out a place for himself. I followed the pulsing line of shadowed energies from the sapling to Ephraim and then out and down to the tree on the church compound. The trail of energies was no more energetic, no more active than it had been earlier.
The problem in Knoxville was spreading.
But the problem here was contained.
I stood and dusted off my hands.
I had forgotten safety glasses, but I wasn’t going back to the house. I took up the chain saw and pressed the button. The awful screaming whine sliced the night like a knife on stone. Occam leaped away, into the trees, and disappeared. Musta really hurt the poor cat’s ears. Moving carefully into the small clearing, I stepped onto the bloody earth, carefully making sure it would take my weight. Turning my back to the flash, I stood so the tree caught the light. It trembled, as if in fear. Our shadows fell onto a Soulwood poplar, massive and strong.
Chain saw blaring, I positioned the spinning blade and cut into the small tree. The tree reacted.
Newly grown branches lashed at me. Roots rippled and tried to rise through the soil to grab my feet. I cut up and ripped through the branches, then down and cut into the roots. Something splattered over me, but I didn’t care. I cut through the trunk, severing the stump from the roots and the roots from the earth.
Over the whine of the chainsaw, I could hear the tree screaming, the sound coming up through the ground and into my bones. From far away, a twin scream echoed, from the direction of the church compound where I grew up. Still, I didn’t stop. I cut it to pieces.
When I was done, I switched off the chain saw and stepped back. The tree was sticks and sawdust. Something trickled down my face. I wiped it and my hand came away red and oily in the flash. The liquid looked like blood, but it was cold and greasy, tacky, like drying glue when I tapped my fingers together.
I opened the two boxes that had come from the pantry andupended the contents of the first one on the ground, in a three-foot diameter circle around the sapling. The ancients had salted land, rendering it incapable of supporting crops, thereby killing the farmers who depended on nature for food. Monarchs and generals and warriors had used starvation as weapons and punishment for centuries. Maybe for millennia. I scattered the rock salt with my boots. Beneath the layer of crystal, the bloody earth shriveled and curled and moaned in pain. In short order, the moisture would dry out and the land would be a brick. No plant would grow in the three-foot diameter circle for years. Which broke my heart, but not enough to stop. Tears misting into my vision, I smoothed the chunks of rock salt into an even layer.
Then I layered the box of borax on top and stomped it down, my boots making a sucking sound as the wound in the earth bled and the liquid was absorbed by salt and borax. Sam had said that salt hadn’t worked against the tree on the church grounds, but this tree was a sapling. Its roots were young, close to the surface. It should work here. The trees nearby would suffer from the rock salt poison too. Everything in the area would unless I sealed it off. So when I was done killing the tree, I scuffed my boots clean and walked to the nearest patch of healthy ground. I placed my hand on the earth and willed the land to seal off the wound, keeping it separate from the rest of the area. Willed it to seal away water and nutrients and to let the tree die. I didn’t know how Soulwood would manage that, but the land had done more amazing things even without my help.
Hand on the earth, I thought about the long strand that draped through the ground to the huddled form of Ephraim. I imagined snipping it in two with loppers. Nothing happened, but it made me feel better. And maybe the land would smother the line of energy now that the sapling was dying.
Finished, I gathered up the severed parts of the tree and tucked them under my arm. I left the blanket beside the tablet, which I left playing, and repacked my gear. I checked the area to make sure I had left no branches, no rootlets, nothing that might root or sprout. And I walked away. Ahead of me on the path, a giant cat dropped from the trees overhead and looked at me. The flash caught his golden eyes and the spots and striations in his pelt. Occam turned away and padded before me, as ifleading me once again. I understood that Occam had appointed himself my protector. It was sweet, if unnecessary. “You trying to make up for being catty rude at the pond today?” I asked him.
He glanced back, slant eyed, and I couldn’t have said why, but I got the impression that Occam was amused at the thought of a cat being called to task for rudeness.
Back at the house, I replaced the tools, checked to make certain that rootlets hadn’t sprouted on any of the chipped-up bits of sapling, and stopped at the marriage trees. One knee on the ground, I put a palm on the twined roots, intending to do a light surface scan. What I got was a lot more. The land around Brother Ephraim’s little bolt-hole was churning with anxiety. And Ephraim himself was roiling with fury, sparkling with black lights that had even blacker centers.
If I were using my eyes to see his reaction, I’d have seen nothing, but since I was just sensing his feelings with my brain, the black on black made sense, an indication of fury. As I studied him, I realized that his tenuous connection to the place where he died—the thin strand of energies—was gone. I had broken it without magic, with purely mundane and human things. Power tools and ice cream salt. I chuckled, and it wasn’t a nice chuckle. It was mean sounding. I didn’t care if Ephraim knew it or not.
Pride goeth before a fall and all that kinda thing.
The energy that was Ephraim heard me. Or felt me. Or saw me. And he lanced at me like a spear launched from an atlatl—a spear-thrower. I tore myself up from the ground and leaped away. I landed hard, and the dirt and roots where I had knelt roiled for a moment as if an earthquake rattled the earth. Then it fell still and I felt Ephraim as he raced back to his hidey-hole. “Last time I laugh at you,” I said.
From the back door, Occam snorted, the discharge of air an interrogative.
“Never you mind,” I said to him. “This is not a problem you need to deal with. It’s my problem. And yes, I’ll ask for help if I need it.”
***
When I got back to the house, I locked Occam outside, much to his amusement, and put the tree pieces in the still-hot stove to burn. They lit up instantly, a bright red flame. I showered thebloody tree stuff off me. It had grown sticky as it dried, like tree sap, which was interesting but not overly helpful.
