The Tree Read online

  Praise for The Root

  “Tilahun creates a fantasy world you’ll want to get lost in, and fills it with fascinating, diverse characters. This is a whole new exciting kind of portal fantasy.”

  —Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky

  “An intense, emotional ride that combines libraries, monsters, fallen angels, magical powers, and secret societies fighting an ancient war. This is catnip for my reading soul.”

  —Kate Elliott, author of Cold Magic and Black Wolves

  “The Root is a grandiose feat of imagination and cross-dimensional storytelling . . . a story that’s firmly rooted in human drama, exploring themes such as the nature of race, celebrity, the media and society’s perceptions of sexual orientation, gender and class division . . . Tilahun has laid the foundations for a very promising trilogy.”

  —Starburst

  “You’ll want to set aside some time in your calendar to do nothing but read this book . . . this first taste has left me ravenous for more and I very much look forward to seeing where the series leads.”

  —Nerds of a Feather, 9/10

  “An intriguing blend of urban and portal fantasy with a wonderfully diverse cast. . . . If you’re looking for inclusive urban fantasy, The Root would be a good bet.”

  —Illustrated Page

  “A fun, diverse fantasy . . . there is so much to recommend in this novel: great characters, new worlds, alliances and betrayals . . . The end was a cliffhanger so I hope that the next book comes out soon. I will be eager to read it.”

  —Pondering the Prose

  “A unique world that features diverse characters and fantastical otherworldly beings . . . grab book two when it is released.”

  —Monlatable Book Reviews

  “Starts out promisingly . . . with its two engaging characters . . . Tila-hun’s strengths lie in writing family dynamics.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Novels of the Wrath & Athenaeum

  The Root

  The Tree

  NA’AMEN GOBERT TILAHUN

  Night Shade Books

  New York | New Jersey

  Copyright © 2018 by Na’amen Gobert Tilahun

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

  Visit our website at www.nightshadebooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tilahun, Na’amen Gobert, author.

  Title: The tree: a novel of the wrath & athenaeum / Na’amen Gobert Tilahun.

  Description: New York: Night Shade Books, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017036138 | ISBN 9781597808903 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Urban Life. | FICTION / Fantasy /

  Contemporary. | FICTION / Fantasy / Paranormal. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3620.I496 T74 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036138

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-603-9

  Cover illustration by Charlie Bowater

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to all of those people who provided support and helped me survive a very difficult year, especially my mother, Marlene Gobert Last, and my friend Julian Shendelman.

  I love you all and could not have done this without you.

  MARIAN

  “Do you see anything?”

  “Give me a second, damn it.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Just nervous.”

  Marian sighed and glanced back to smile at Lester. It was his first mission as a full-fledged Agent. She couldn’t blame him.

  Marian closed her left eye so she could see more clearly through her right, which was currently in the building across from them. She grunted as the eye rolled along the dusty floor. It was painful. That feeling of one bit of dirt in your eye? Multiply it by fifty and spread it over the circumference of the whole eye and you might have some idea. She had been trained for this, though—the pain was simply another thing to be dealt with.

  She saw nothing of note as her eye rolled down a dark hallway. Then she spotted the small crack of light. She maneuvered her eye towards it and grunted as she squeezed it under the threshold.

  “Bastard piece of shit,” Marian spat.

  Lester chuckled but kept all other commentary to himself.

  Marian’s eye rolled into a bright room that looked like an assembly line of Clive Barker’s nightmares. People hung limp in chains along the wall, their mouths melted shut, twisted, scarred masses of flesh and blood. Huge hooks pierced their arms and calves, dripped red life onto the floor.

  She avoided the liquid as much as she could as she rolled forward. The room was cavernous; it looked as if a fourth of the building had been hollowed out to make it.

  She heard something. All of her senses were linked into this tiny representative part of her. The sound resolved into speech, a language she recognized the rhythm of even though she could not understand it: one of the Ante dialects with intonations beyond the hope of any human throat. The notes of almost song rose high enough to make Marian wish she could plug her non-existent ears. Someone came around a corner and she slammed against the pillar, hiding in the small pool of shadows. The two beings that turned the corner were impossible to mistake for human. The first was huge, topping seven feet. It had two legs that bent three times, back-and-forth and back again, and then ended in cloven hooves. The torso was thick and covered in dark-black matted fur, and it had three arms, one emerging from the middle of its back. The arms were covered in the fur as well. They ended in hands with two pairs of opposing digits. There was no head, but Marian saw hints of facial features under the torso fur.

  She knew of this Ante. It called itself Burning Metal because one of the first humans to touch its skin had burned off three of her fingers. Later she said it felt like burning metal. The Ante had taken that as its name and refused to answer to anything else. It was one of the leaders of Anoan and it was here in Manhattan without passing through a known gate or registering its presence with the Agency.

  The Ante moving by Burning Metal’s side looked to be made of metal. It shone a bright silver that reflected the light. It was more appendages than body, with long, thin, jointed legs that resembled a crab’s, which exploded out of its core at every angle. Marian could see none of its main body, if it even had one. She thought it might actually be technology of some sort, but as the two beings moved past the pillar, she saw that the silver skin was rippling with scales. It passed close enough for her eye to break what she was seeing down to heat and light and aura and color and she sensed the life in the being. She had noticed that the Ante’s arms were moving but as it got close she could see that all of its limbs were busy taking notes. They were each paired off, one holding a small reflective surface that another limb tapped on.

  This was not good. None of their queries of Anoan in recent weeks had elicited a response and here was a prominent member of its Ruling Courts walking through this house of horrors.

  “Shit.” She whispered it, but only because her throat was suddenly too tight. Her mouth had lost all moisture and she could not make a louder sound.

  “Lester, listen. You need to be ready to move,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  Marian opened her left eye and swayed at the double vision she was suffering. She took a deep breath and fo
ught down the nausea.

  Lester looked very young and nervous. She wanted to comfort him. This was supposed to be a milk-run to ease him into the job. New or not, though, they were both representatives of the Agency right now, and they would not fail. She would not let them.

  “Just listen. Something really bad is happening. I need you to fly back to Headquarters, as quickly as possible, and report to Agent Andre.”

  “But I’m not supposed to fly, especially at night.”

  “Listen to me. That doesn’t matter right now. This is more important.”

  Marian was distracted because her eye was still carefully following the pair of Antes and most of her attention was on not getting caught. The downside of her position in the building was that there were tables and shelves all about and she knew something was happening on them from the way the two Antes bent over them to observe but she had no way to see them from the floor.

  “When I say, you will go to Agent Andre and you will tell her we have a Red Button Issue. Do you understand?”

  Lester’s hands were shaking, but he swallowed, straightened his back, and nodded.

  “I understand. Focus on your other part. I will guard you and wait for your order.”

  If his voice wavered a bit, Marian still smiled at his show of spine. She closed her left eye again and focused wholly on the building.

  She passed into the next room, well behind the two Antes, but close enough to keep them in sight. There were piles all around her, some of metal bars and screws and odd silvered frames, but others looked disturbingly like hands and legs and other human parts. She was not close enough to discern whether they were actual meat or imitation but from a distance they looked all too real.

  Too late she noticed the silence; the footsteps behind her had stopped. She rolled her vision around, only to see darkness and feel slick scales grabbing her up.

  “Well, what do we have here?”

  The English was liquid in a way that made her realize how ugly her own voice was.

  “I believe it’s a little spy.” She was lifted toward the wall of hair; the heat of the closeness was unbearable, and she cried out in surprise and pain.

  “Hmm . . . a little eye to spy.”

  Marian screamed as she was squeezed until she burst apart. All awareness of the inside of the building was now gone. She was back on the roof, her hand pressed over her empty socket, which had begun to steadily leak blood and fluid.

  “Lester. Go. Now,” she gritted out.

  To his credit, Lester hesitated only a second before lighting up. The flames that crawled across him had a sickly yellow tint that denoted his fear and nervousness. Once his body was completed engulfed, his flesh disappeared, and he was nothing but a roiling mass of fire floating in the air. The stars behind him were dimmed by his brightness.

  She saw the outlines of the beings coming for her against his light.

  “Now. Hurry!”

  He shot straight into the air and she saw some dark, flying shapes turn to follow, but she knew they would never be able to catch him once he really got going. The other figures continued straight at her as she forced herself to her feet. Her sight was not the only thing Odin had blessed her with, but right now she would have killed for the mastery of sorcery that her mother had possessed, or the battle fever that had killed her cousin. What she did have, though, was her connection with death.

  She dove at the first shape, hand still covering her bleeding socket. As she moved, though, the bleeding slowed as the blood froze. Her body released steam into the air, the coldness of death now running through her veins. The first Antes screeched at her touch. The sound was so loud she staggered back in surprise.

  Her movements were fast but not fluid. Her body jerked and cracked as she channeled the realm of Hel through her body. The world faded to the bright red of heat and the dark gray of cold. Whole rainbows of color bloomed where the two met. Her fists pounded into flesh that snapped like wood. She was grabbed by tentacles that slicked her upper arms with fire. She roared. Marian did not expect survival. She only wanted to give Lester enough time to get away.

  “I will take care of her.” Suddenly bands of burning heat clapped onto her wrists. She did not scream but wanted to. Instead she bit her tongue until her mouth filled with blood. The world swam in her vision and she was facing the torso from inside the building. “This must be the rest of our little spy.”

  Burning Metal was fearsome up close. She could see the cruel smile through the rough black fur. The air around him radiated with heat and something more sinister, a feeling that penetrated the cold of death. She screamed in his face. It was the call of a raven. A scream of defiance.

  There was a flare of even greater heat and Marian was blown off of her feet and Burning Metal was the one screaming. The calls of the other Antes joined in. Calls of pain. Marian rolled onto her back, tilting her head to take in what was happening.

  Lester had come back. He was burning white against the night, his fire almost incandescent. Even as she looked, her remaining eye watered and his image blurred.

  “No.” She whispered it. The foolish fucking boy! She rolled over and rose to her feet. There were other forms surrounding them. She had to turn her head to take them all in. Ten figures in a loose circle around her, Lester, and Burning Metal. They were all crouched and cowering, holding onto burned limbs that glowed red in her sight. Lester at least had taken out the others but she could see that he was failing against Burning Metal. The fire of his body was wavering. He was unable to maintain the super-heated temperature for long. She saw him struggle to lash out with his fire. He flared brighter, but only for a moment.

  Marian knew she had to go. This was bigger than him; bigger than all of them. One of the Antes in the circle had fallen to the ground and now lay still; Lester must have hit something vital. She rose to her feet slowly but none of the others noticed or moved in her direction. They were all staring at Lester and Burning Metal—a fight that became more and more one-sided as she watched.

  She dove for the non-moving Ante and it was only after she had tumbled over the edge of the roof that she heard one of the others cry out in warning.

  Now it was time for the hardest trick; she had only ever done it a handful of times, and it had cost her dearly the last time. The cost didn’t matter, though—only getting the message through mattered.

  Because of her other injuries, it was painful. She screamed as her body turned inside out, as her mind split down the middle again and again, smaller and smaller. One mouth crying out in pain became five, became fifteen, became thirty.

  Marian forgot a lot. She forgot her human body. She forgot that she was falling. She forgot her fear, but she did not forget that she had a mission. An unkindness of ravens rose into the sky in a squawking, crying crowd. They did not like flying in the darkness of night but they had to. As they rose into the sky they heard a dying scream behind them.

  The ravens did not know why the sound of it made them call out in unison. They only knew a pain tight in their chests, even as their heads were decidedly pointed away from the source.

  LIL

  Lil sent her awareness through her body, taking stock of her arms and legs. She felt the potential in her muscles, and the curve of strength. She also took stock of the missing pieces of her body: The stumps of lost toes. The stump of lost tongue. The divots in her face and body where pieces had been cut away. She felt the small bits and pieces of magic that grew inside her body; magic that she had picked up here and there. Most of her magic took not internal power, simply study and hard work—the right combination of intuition, skill, and concentration. Unfortunately, so many of these magics required exact equations or motions that she could not recall perfectly, and a simple mistake could cascade out of control too quickly.

  There were other magics, though. Narrower, and more focused ones that Mayer had not deigned important enough to teach. She had an affinity for some, though, and had taught herself from the books in Kandake
.

  A pain shot through her heart at the thought of her old home, now lost to her, but she shook it off and returned to her body.

  When she was finished . . . when she knew every piece of her body . . . she reached for one of the magics resting inside her. She visualized them as small lights and this one pulsed a red/black as it became larger in her mind.

  Blood magic. Many ‘dants used it daily in small ways—light healing, blessing homes, finding family. It was the last one that interested her the most right now. The light filled her vision and she flung it out of her in two separate threads, one for Min and one for Davi.

  She followed the threads. Her vision blurred as her spirit was pulled from her body. Moving along the threads, she passed over the ruins of The Out and over the territory of the Court of Predators and Instincts, where ‘dants lived among animals that would tear apart those who didn’t belong, and occasionally those who did. She flew over the territory of the Court of Mists, which was shrouded as always. She moved faster and faster. The blood of her sibs calling her closer until she slammed into a wall.

  Her power dissipated. The momentum was gone and she had just enough time to see she was above The Drowned before she was snapped back to her body, gasping. When she had her breath back she let out a cry of inarticulate rage and stood up. This was not the first attempt she had made to find her sibs in the last two six-days. It was not even the tenth, but she had had hopes that this attempt would be different. Her strength was returning to her, and blood magic excelled at family bonds. She had to face the fact that something or someone was blocking her from finding them.

  Lil paced back and forth, her stride wobbly from the loss of toes and her new sense of balance. The Nif in the corner, whose numbers seemed to grow larger everyday, chittered softly to each other and every once in awhile one leaned forward to coo in her direction. They had slowly become more vocal. She didn’t know what it meant, but she did know she found the pity in their voices annoying.