Chapter 56 — Roots of Defiance

The light of the Core had not left him so much as fallen below Yusuf's gaze, a stubborn clump of coal that refused to be snuffed out. He stumbled from the room and into the corridor of living wood as if the air itself tried to hold him back: to smother, to enfold, to bend him back into the room that contained the world's hurts.

The faceless child followed but did not lead. It lagged one step behind, its toes cushioned bare on the curled planks. For the first time in all its existence, as far as Yusuf could recall, the child looked small in the shadow of the creature which had become its home. The smooth face trembled with a very slight movement, as though something beneath it breathed.

They walked on and the walls watched. Roots planted on the ceiling above and strung down through the floor like veins. Sap dripped in slow stalactites; it glowed now and then like lanterns hidden beneath the bark. Each beat of the Tree was a distant drum. The corridor which went and came without sense contracted and expanded. Tiny refuges of the world hung from the roots: an adobe street, a harbor light, a knocker made of brass on a carved door that led to nothing. Yusuf's fingers stroked one shard and it dissipated to ash in his palm. The taste in his mouth was copper and paper.

The Codex against his waist pulsed. He'd demanded for years that the book was the world's — that it remembered and noted. But inside the Tree, the book was like a borrowed rib, both him and not him. Ink moved under its pages of its own accord; letters unraveled then re-wove into lines he half-remembered. At the very margin his own signature, scrawled repeatedly, looked up at him like tally marks on a prison wall.

He had struggled not to glance back for so long; sorrow had the manners of an unwanted visitor. Now, the quiet of the corridor compelled him to listen to the ancient weight of it.

"Do you sense it?" the child said at last, so low. The statement was more for him than a question. "The Root recalls when you are close to the Core."

"I feel it." The voice of Yusuf rasped like frayed vellum. His hands, in defiance of all, gripped the Codex strap. "It feels.alive."

The child's vacant face leaned. For an instant a thin specter of an eye descended the mask. Yusuf's breath caught; even the child's trembling had him with an irrational hope and an equally intense dread.

The roots felt him. A tiny shiver rippled along the corridor and then, like a pulse to another pulse, the floor heaved. A slender tendril split off from the wall and cracked across Yusuf's path like a whip. He jumped out of the way, boots thudding on a layer of moss that had not existed a heartbeat before. The tendril had the scent of leaves and books, old leaves and old books. Where it sliced the air he was in, the area it hit turned gray as though color had been leached out of it.

The first real strike came with equal surprise. A trunk-root curved down and exploded the ground in front of him, flinging a spray of sap and bark into the pale light. Yusuf almost but curved his body to the way of it; the root brushed his sleeve and, for an airy flutter of a heartbeat, the memory of the last street where he'd dwelled melted away: the turn of the staircase; the exact pitch of the neighbor's noon shout; the warmth of a particular oven on a winter morning. He stretched out into the air for the smell that had been there a second ago and discovered nothing.

He fell to his knees. The world tried to flow over a lack he was not yet prepared with words to define.

"Marking," the child said, and the syllable held no inflection—merely fact. "It marks those who have seen the Core."

Yusuf hauled himself up, his hands shaking, his chest heaving. He covered his mouth with a hand to stifle a cough and tasted bitter sap. The Codex was warmer against his ribs, minute flashes of light tingling against his sternum. He attempted to breathe into his lungs and tasted the memory of a librarian's touch on a ledger — and it slipped away, like a page being torn loose and thrown into blackness.

Another tendril whipped. It wrapped and coiled, a lash that cracked the earth where his right foot had been and severed a rectangle of space vacant. The sensation was strange: not pain but one of emptiness, as if waking up with something on the edge of your tongue that vanishes when you attempt to seize it. Yusuf forgot momentarily what a right foot was for. The memory of walking, itself a clot of little things learned, scattered like seeds.

He cried out, more from fear than injury, and the Codex leaped that moment, its pages burning as if in sympathy, and a thin thread of ink pierced out. He gripped it, involuntarily, and the thread wrapped about his wrist, warm and tacky as a honey thread.

Stand, the child instructed, and there was one note in its voice that sounded like instruction and not inquiry. It stretched out, thin and impossible-looking hands moving with painstaking deliberation to steady his elbow and lift him up. Its touch was neither familiar nor completely alien. It held him up.

The Tree pressed against him. The passage cinched up, roots coiling until the path was a throat. Air chilled to hardness; breathing became effort. Each breath was dust kept in an attic. Names were heavy as bread now; he could feel them working and turning in his chest.

"Too much, you're taking," the child said. "You push against the bark; you pull names out of the Tree as if you could keep them all locked up. The Core doesn't like thieves."

"I am not stealing," Yusuf growled, voice rasped. "I am remembering. Is that a crime here?"

Its mask did not speak, but its bark trembled and from the walls came low moaning that sank back into words, or at least word impression. The Tree answered rumbling in the wood like thunder in snow: Keeper, do not make of me a prison for your foolish love. The syllables were aimed less at him than counted, as if the Tree were counting him as it counted a book.

Roots lashed again—this time with urgency and coordinated ferocity. Not random, they swept like the net of a stalking animal, each stroke meant to unmake, not to wound: they lashed across his calves in a design that called up memory rather than flesh. With every punch, something little disappeared from him: the beat of rain on the museum roof; the strange little itch at the back of his left ear; the beat of the voice of his father when he tried to be good. Each took away a buzzing hurt.

Yusuf staggered, fingers feeling for something to grab. A loose railing of the hallway creaked and snapped off, and he fell, but it was arrested by the page of the Codex, which fluttered and left lines of ink on the wood that he would strike. The ink formed letters and then lines, and the lines did something that was not usual: they remained. They stitched the break back together like a thread.

The Codex, he realized in the daze of sap and terror, responded when he responded. If the Tree took, the Codex could bind, yet binding cost him. He lost space inside himself each time he bound one of his memories into a strand and employed it to seal one of the roots, the act of preserving one thing destroying another loose. No free magic existed in the novel. It was a ledger, and the ledger required commerce.

He gripped the Codex and propelled himself up. Ink uncoiled onto a virgin page and shaped itself under his thumb: a half-recalled, half-imagined ritual. His palm displaced the letters. He felt the thread of a name drawn out of his chest like a string of light. He tugged it free and whirled it into a knot; the cord snagged on a root and flared down it like a match in dry tinder. The tendril recoiled, shrieking in a voice that might have been a sound.

But with that binding, there was cost. He tried to recall the face of an old friend afterwards and found his memory flat, less reliable. The laugh of the friend was erased, its place an empty idea of sound. His hands trembled in grief and outrage at himself for the arithmetic: one life saved on the outside ledgers for one personal loss inside.

Roots seethed, outraged at the stitch. They pushed into his boots, seeking traction, and Yusuf's breath was blocked by thick, leafy perfume that was like bodies. The corridor pulled them into a narrower spiral; perspective cut and folded bizarre. He saw not one corridor but corridors stacked up like layers of vellum. For an instant he thought he was standing in the museum counter, catalog number before him; then the scene swung around under his feet into the river-market of a city he'd reconstructed earlier; then into a white room where his father was counting rows of names in a ledger. It was a dervishing mosaic and the Tree used it like a blade, slicing his mind into pieces on its numerous edges.

The faceless child walked beside him in the montage, a dark speck against the wreath of light. When the corridor was so tight it was hard to breathe, the child walked deliberately in front and touched the bark. For a moment, walls throbbed with knowledge and then recoiled, scorched-looking. The passage opened just a little.

You can't keep on answering everything," the boy had spoken bluntly. "You can't sustain one life at the cost of pieces of other people's." There was bitter directness in the sentences that stung more than the Tree's lashes. "You are human, Yusuf. The Codex is finite."

He answered in the only language remaining to him—action. He flung the Codex open and, with burning fingers, wrote. Not for the Tree—not yet—but for himself, cutting away words not to bind others but to anchor him. He tied a string of his childhood drowsiness—a memory of a tiny crumpled blue flower—and flung it down the passage like a flare. It flew and caught on a tendril and exploded into confetti of petal-sparks. For an instant he was triumphant. For an instant the Tree's power slowed.

And then something strange happened. The Tree didn't simply strike back. It answered with a retort that struck further into him: not stealing trivia, but the grammar of his own name.

It began with a gradual page closing noise. Codex pulsed weakly. Yusuf felt the tiny deletion in the shape of a syllable where his name should have been. He tried to say it aloud to anchor it—"Yu—"—and found the second syllable was empty. Panic climbed up like gall.

"Call it something," the child pressed. Its tone became suddenly urgent, almost tender. There was a very great resemblance to pleading in the way it moved forward.".

Yusuf arched into the farthest recess of mind he had not yet lost and bellowed the letters in a voice that trembled. "Y-U-S-U-F." Each letter thrust out into the air like a wooden peg forced into yielding bark. The Codex drank them up, the ink dripping from page to page to inscribe his name in a neat line. The sound seemed to close the gap; the second syllable gained weight.

As he looked up, the corridor's eyes had softened almost unnoticeably, as if the Tree had judged and still found him worth watching. The whipping tendrils pulled back far enough for him to stagger forward.

He hadn't killed the Tree. He'd only postponed its intent.

The long tunnel gave way to a breathing cavern. Light had built up at its center and sap veins had thick flows like liquid gold in the walls. Storm was present in the air. The throat of the Root was not as the Core was, a fold of memory; this one was where the Tree's heartbeat resonated like a drum that none of the old myths had ever spoken of, and every beat shifted the dust of stormy millennia.

In the midst of the cavern rose the fissure: a open mouth of darkness vein-striped with throbbing masses of light, roots sloping into it like fingers of a dreaming god. Softly blew the wind from within; its odor was of sea and old books; the light in the fissure twinkled and flashed for an instant countless faces, a universe of minute living beings. Some of the faces were whole, some were ripped, some glittered as in glass. Yusuf's knees gave way.

The boy stood at his elbow. For the first time in all those hours he'd experienced it, Yusuf caught a glimpse of sorrow on the mask. The faceless head bent forward, and for an impossible moment he saw reflection: a half-dozen white fingers skimming pages, a mouth shaping names. The vision breathed and was gone.

This is the path to the Heart," said the child. "You have rapped at the bark long enough. The Tree is awake. It will strike you openly now. The instant you enter the deep it will not only scar you; it will take what it will have. The core offers the chance to save or to shatter. But with each choice comes burden.".

Yusuf suddenly felt wonderfully small among the pulsating shafts of wood. He looked back, half-hoping to see a city or his father or Rae—anything—to be a connection to the surface. There was only the corridor, the Codex held in his hand, and the ephemeral impress of names in the air.

"Do you remember," he whispered, because it felt like a prayer, "what it means to be human?

The child's mask did not answer in words. Rather, it extended its hand and caressed his palm. It spread warmth through him, not a comfort but a permission. The touch itself reminded him of the first time he'd been offered a book of somebody else's life. It was like trust, delicate and untrained.

He could not turn around. The Core had spoken to him. The Tree had felt his palms in its bark and had understood. The crack yawned with its breath, as a mouth.

He tightened his fingers around the Codex until his knuckles turned white. He glared down once more at the small chip Rae had left in his care. It was a smoldering ember, its light nearly gone. He pressed it into the palm of his hand and felt the last of her warmth.

"Rae," he breathed, and the name was a vow.

He moved towards the crack. Roots of memory slid like fingers and reached out to take hold. He hauled the Codex up and added one more word, not to bind the Tree, not to save his father, but to declare the choice already made.

DEFY.

The letters seared onto the page; the ink puffed in a fierce, little fury. The crack flinched. For the first time since he had entered the Root, Yusuf's movement was not reaction alone. It was intent.

The emptiness yawned to swallow him up. The sound that filled the cave was not a roar but a gasp—such as the world drew in before a storm—and the faceless child followed him, silent companion at his heels.

Behind them the Root hummed, a last low note so close to blessing or mourning. Crossing over into the chasm, the Codex warm and heavy against his chest, Yusuf felt that he had already paid. He didn't yet know what the tab would expect of him, only that it had been served.

The darkness engulfed them, and the last thing he saw before the world collapsed was the thinned ember of Rae's shard, then nothing but the cold, crystalline thrum of the Tree's heart.