The Burning of the Ughill Gosava
You want to know the worst job I ever took? Not the most dangerous. I've had more dangerous. The worst. The one that still sits behind my eyes when the murk comes down thick and I've had too many pints and I'm feeling sorry for myself.
It was the tree. The one they burned out above Ughill. That was me. I don't tell people that, as a rule, because the way it ended isn't the sort of thing you bring up when someone's buying a round. But you've been decent to me tonight, and the ale's good here, and the landlord's stopped listening, so...
You have to understand what that corner of the Wisewood was like back then. This is before the district council put the fence up, before the warnings, before any of it. There was a stretch of trees on the Ughill side, up past where the Loxley goes quiet and the ground starts to climb, and things went in there and didn't come out. Not jellies, at first. Barkers. A onetoe that wandered off its tether. A whole flock of somebody's wooltards, gone in a murkneet. And then a lad. A jellyhead lad, out where he shouldn't have been, and after that it stopped being a story people told and started being a thing people wanted dealt with.
The man who came to me, I won't name him, he's dead now, that's a different murkneet's drinking. The man who came to me said it was a gosava. I didn't know the word. He said it like I should. A tree that eats. He said it the way you'd say a barker that bites, matter-of-fact, like it was a nuisance and not an abomination, and he put a purse of ¢hits on the table that was heavier than it had any business being, and he said all I had to do was kill it.
Just a tree, I thought. I know how that sounds now. I thought it then, too, and I took the money, and that's the whole of my defence.
Here's the thing about killing a tree. You can't do it quietly. That's the whole of it, that's the trap, that's the thing nobody tells you when they're putting a purse on the table. A creature you can shard in the dark. A creature you can lure, or poison, or wait out. A tree that's rooted to the spot, a tree can't run, can't fight back the way you'd think, sounds like the easiest kill in The Dark Peak. But it's rooted. You can't take it somewhere quiet. You have to do the loud thing, on its ground, and the loud thing is fire, and fire in the Wisewood after murkfall is a bell you ring for everything that hunts by night.
And the thing that hunts by night above Ughill is the barking pack. The gabbleratchets. I knew that going in. I want to be clear I knew that going in and I did it anyway, because the purse was heavy and I was young enough to think the trees would keep my secret.
So. Murkfall. I went up the edge path with two cans of lamp oil on my back and a firestarter in my coat and my heart doing something I didn't like. The path up there runs narrow, the Wisewood on one side dropping away into the murk, the crag on the other, and a ledge between them about as wide as a coffin, which was a comparison I made at the time.
And there was a thing on the path.
I nearly walked into it. It was standing where the ledge pinches tightest, between a leaning stone and the drop, and I took it for a walker at first, another fool out in the murk, and I opened my mouth to say something and then I saw the way it was standing. Which was not the way a person stands. A gritstrike does not stand the way a person stands. I didn't have the word for it then either, I've had a lot of words since, but I knew what it was the way you know a stinger before you've been stung. Something wearing stone on its legs, tall, its head set wrong, wide-set eyes that took in the whole edge at once without moving. And it was walking. Slow. The same pace, I'd later learn, it had walked for longer than the path had been a path. Grooves worn into the rock under its feet that fit its stride like a key fits a lock.
The gritstrike doesn't hunt. I know that now. It occupies. It walks its round and it does not deviate and it does not rest and if you are standing where it walks, it walks through where you are standing, and the drop is real, and that's the end of you. Not malice. Just geometry. You are in the way.
I stepped off the path. Onto the Wisewood side, into the trees, off the ledge, and I stood with my back against a trunk and my breath held while it came past. It came past close enough that I could hear the scree shift under it in that horrible even rhythm, tick, tick, tick, a clock with legs, and it did not so much as turn its head, because I had stopped being on the path and so I had stopped existing. It went by. It kept going. Somewhere up on that edge it's probably still going.
That was the easy part. I want you to sit with that. Getting past the thing on the path was the easy part of my murkneet.
Because then I was in the trees, and I found the gosava.
You'd know it if you saw it. You'd know it and you'd wish you hadn't. Everything else in that stretch of wood was dead or dying, the gosava had seen to that, its branches had gone up over everything and blacked out what little the murk let through, so nothing grew under it, nothing green, just bare poles and a floor of muck. The organic network doesn't reach in there. Even the fungai leaves that corner alone, and the fungai leaves nothing alone. In the middle of it, this. A trunk the width of a doorway, and above it a canopy that wasn't a canopy so much as a net, a great low tangle of dark wet branches, and they dripped. That's what I remember. In the quiet you could hear it dripping, a slow patient tick of its own, and I thought, mad, in the moment, that it had learned the sound from the thing on the path, or the thing on the path from it.
There was a shape at the base of it. Roots come up out of the ground round the foot of it like fingers half-closed, and there was something held in them, and I made myself not look at what. It was about the size of a lad. I'll leave it there.
I did the job. I want that on the record. I did what I was paid for. I got in close, closer than I wanted, close enough that the dripping was going down the back of my neck and it wasn't water, and I emptied both cans of oil round the roots and up the trunk as far as I could reach, and my hands were not steady, and the whole time the branches above me were doing something I've never been able to describe to anyone's satisfaction. Not moving, exactly. Attending. The way a room goes when someone's woken up and hasn't let on yet.
And I lit it.
You cannot do it quietly. I keep coming back to that because it's the whole of the lesson. The oil went up with a sound like a great indrawn breath, a whump you felt in your chest, and the light, after a murkneet of nothing, after all that black, the light was obscene, it went up through the branches and turned the whole underside of that canopy orange and I could see, for the first time, exactly how big the thing was and exactly how much of it there was, and I understood I had made a very loud, very bright announcement to everything on that hillside that Pip Rippon was 'ere and Pip Rippon had fire.
The tree screamed. I'll not dress it up. Whatever's in a thing like that when it burns, it came out, and it was not a sound a tree should be able to make, and the branches that had been attending were thrashing now, actual movement, whipping and cracking in the heat, and the dripping had become something worse, and I was already backing away, back toward the edge path, back toward the ledge, when I heard the other thing.
The whelping.
You've maybe heard it, at a distance, on a bad murkneet, and thought it was hounds. It isn't hounds. It's layered, that's the word I've settled on, layered, a baying and under it a weeping and under that something like a child, all of it coming from more throats than you can count, and it arrives before they do, it comes over the hill ahead of them like weather. And the worst of it, the thing nobody believes until they've seen it, is the heads. When they came down through the smoke into the firelight I saw the heads and they were human. Human in the shape of them. Not in anything else. The eyes went the wrong way, held and then skipped, held and then skipped, like they were reading something written on the air that I couldn't see.
The fire had called them. Of course it had. Light and noise and me standing under it like a struck match. I did the one thing you must never do, which is I ran, and I want to tell you I ran because I panicked but the truth is I ran because there was nowhere to not run. The tree was behind me going up like a beacon and the pack was coming down the sky and the only thing in the world that wasn't on fire or full of teeth was the edge path, so I went for it.
I wasn't alone. I've not said that yet. There was a lad with me. The man who hired me had sent him, to carry the second can and to make sure the job got done, a watcher, and he'd kept his distance the whole murkneet, up by the ledge, out of the light. And when the whelping came he did the thing you must never do worse than I did it. He didn't run. He stopped. He stood in the open with the fire on one side of him and the pack coming down and he looked up.
You must never look up.
Hearing them is bad. Hearing them without seeing them seeds a thing in you, a quiet unlocking, and it doesn't come back. But seeing them, in the open, with your face turned to the sky, that's the soul gone. I saw it happen to him. He put his arms out. That's what they do, after. Arms out, staring, and the sound they'd been making, he started making it too, soft, under his breath, like he was learning it. The body was still there. The body kept standing. But the lad had gone up with the tree and there was nothing in the shape of him but the sound.
I didn't stop for him. I want to be honest with you about that, because it's the part that sits behind my eyes. There was nothing to stop for. That's what I tell myself. There was nothing left to carry out. I went past him, I went past what was left standing where he'd been, and I got onto the edge path, and I found I did not care in the slightest about the gritstrike anymore, I'd have walked straight through it, and as it happened it wasn't on that stretch, it was off doing its round on the far side, tick tick tick, indifferent to the whole burning business.
I came down off the edge with the light of the tree behind me the whole way, throwing my shadow down the path in front of me, long and stretched and reaching, and the whelping got fainter, and then it stopped, and the quiet after it was worse than the noise had been. The murk closed back over the top of everything, funfair-soft, humming to itself the way it does, like nothing had happened at all.
I went back to the man who'd hired me and I told him it was done. The tree was dead. I'd killed the gosava, burned it to the root, and I'd earned every ¢hit and I wanted the rest of my money. And he paid me. He counted it out and he didn't ask about the lad, and I understood then that he'd known. That he'd sent a spare. That the lad was always going to be the price and I was just the one who lived to be told the tree was down.
I drink here now, at the Wisewood, because you can't see that stretch of hill from this window. I checked, first murkneet I came in. You can see the tree line, you can see the murk sitting in the trees, but you can't see up to Ughill, and that suits me.
So. That's the worst job I ever took. Just a tree. It's always just a tree, or just a hole, or just a package in the water, right up until it's the thing you don't talk about when someone's buying a round.
Get me another and I'll tell you something with a better ending. I know a couple. Not many. But a couple.
-- Pip Rippon, field notes. The Wisewood Inn, Loxley, at the table where you can't see the hill.
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