They came, hundreds of them, charging down the valley beneath an ash-filled sky that glowed blood-red with the light of a hidden sun. A swarm of wastelanders, bearing weapons and armour cobbled together from aeons of detritus crushed into the hostile landscape. Their cries rose as a united ululation, the fearsome call of clansfolk that was heard so often across the spaces between the cities – battle cries and curses and promises of death, bellowed in the language of the Gardeners.
And they were coming for me.
An advance cavalry of berserkers rode upon the backs of bears – huge, shaggy beasts, savage and powerful enough to bite and rip foes limb from limb. But the bears wouldn’t get the chance to sink their teeth into me because, like their riders, they were sacrifices; the berserkers were already screaming the incantations that would summon their own spirits, preparing to erupt with burning spirit-matter. The valley rumbled with the thunder of a thousand pounding feet. The ground’s crust broke and churned into a storm of debris.
This was how my dreams remembered the wasteland. Remembered the war.
More warriors lined the tops of the valley walls, jeering, lofting their weapons. Naked and unarmed, I had been trapped between the charging army and the valley’s end, where a gigantic, dense graveforest began. Behemoth corpse-trees, as wide as houses, growing so tall that their highest branches disappeared into clouds of ash, cast a shadow over me with the cold promise of death should I enter the forest. The clansfolk promised me the same if I remained where I was. I trembled, terrified.
But Eden wasn’t afraid. She stood staring into the graveforest’s darkness. Her clothes were the simple gown of a Magician; her hair was long and straight, red as the unseen sun. I asked her to help me. Her shoulders shook, whether from crying or laughing I couldn’t tell, but she wouldn’t turn to me. Sometimes, in my intoxicated dreams, my wife refused to show me her face.
‘Eden, please—’ Something moved stealthily among the shadows of the graveforest. An instant later, the glint of a blade announced an attacker springing into the light. ‘No!’ I shouted, but Eden did nothing to prevent the spear piercing her chest and emerging covered in blood as it ripped through the back of her gown.
I watched, too terrified to move. It happened so fast that I saw little of the attacker’s identity. A flash of armour beneath a hooded robe – armour made from amber glass and decorated with magical script – was all my eyes detected before my wife was hoisted onto broad shoulders and carried into the darkness of gigantic corpse-trees.
Left to the mercy of the clansfolk, I looked up at the smeared light of the sky and begged the Gardeners for salvation—
‘Sycamore, someone’s crying.’
But it wasn’t me.
‘Can’t you hear it?’
The voice did not belong to the dream, though it made the visions crumble and fade away before the clansfolk could reach me. My consciousness poked its head above the effects of the jenkem.
‘I can’t stand it, Sycamore.’
Heart racing, tangled in sweat-stained sheets, I focused on the pasty cracked ceiling of my lodgings. In a flurry of motion, I leaned over the side of the bed and retched bile onto bare floorboards. Slowly, my breathing calmed and my mind gained a stronger grip on reality.
‘Make him stop.’
The only evidence of the speaker to be seen was nestled in a high corner of the room, above the words of a spell which had been seared into the wall. A ghoul bubbled as a patch of oily darkness there.
‘Go back to sleep,’ I croaked.
The spells glowed briefly. The ghoul burst into vapour, leaving nothing behind.
Kicking away the sheets, rising through the stink of my unwashed body and my vomit, I moved to the basin in the corner of the room and turned on the tap. The water was tepid, tasting of old pipes as I splashed my face and rinsed out my mouth. The last fog of intoxication parted to reveal a headache, and I realised that someone was crying. An edge to the sound took it beyond the generally accepted definition of upset. Tears of desperation, wailed with an innate fear that cut to my bones with the blade of empathy. It came from outside.
Crossing the room, I opened the only window in my lodgings. For the first time in more than two days, fresh air blew in, cool and clean to chase away the guilt.
‘Get up,’ a woman ordered.
‘No!’ was the tearful reply.
Down in the filthy lane that ran between my lodging house and another, a man lay on his back, eyes pinched closed, rubbing his thigh. He wasn’t much younger than me but his crying sounded younger than us both, as primal as a child’s. He had obviously just been knocked to the ground; two city watch officers stood over him, an older man and woman. He wore a plain constable’s uniform and held cuffs. She wore the uniform of a sergeant and carried a baton, looking very ready to use it again.
‘Don’t make me go,’ begged the man on the ground.
‘You’ll defend the city as is your duty!’
‘I-I don’t want to die.’
A runner. His time to fight in the war had come and he was too terrified to accept it. I couldn’t blame him.
‘Coward!’ This came from further along the alley, on the opposite side, from a woman leaning out of her window. ‘I lost two sons to the wasteland, and they didn’t die so you could run and hide.’
‘That’s right,’ said a man, his furious face appearing from behind the woman. ‘Serve your fucking city, coward!’
The sergeant pointed a finger at them. ‘Go inside!’ she commanded, and they did, slamming the window behind them. She then gestured to her constable, who pulled the runner to his feet roughly.
The sergeant gazed up at my window. I ducked back quickly, but not before catching her eye. When I looked again, the runner had been placed in cuffs and was being led along the alley on unsteady legs, head bowed. The sergeant looked back at me a couple of times, and then was gone from sight.
‘Poor bastard.’
I looked up to see Nel leaning out of her window, smiling down at me. ‘Hello, Wendal. I was beginning to think you were dead.’
I blinked at her a few times, deciding that I felt as though she wasn’t too far wrong. ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I could tell by the interesting aroma coming up from your room.’ Nel gave me a knowing glare. ‘When was the last time you ate?’ I took too long thinking of an answer and she rolled her eyes. ‘I’m heading into work,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own today, if you fancy a free meal.’
The idea of food set hunger pains rumbling in my gut. ‘That’d be good. I’ll meet you there.’
‘Have a wash first, Wendal. I can smell you from here.’
After a visit to the latrine, I made my way down to the communal bath beneath my lodging house. The water was hot and clean, cloudy with floral soap. It made me feel a little more human, but I didn’t linger to relax in the warmth. A couple of my neighbours were already in the bath when I arrived. One was an overweight man with far too much body hair, submerged to his shoulders and apparently asleep. The other was a fragile-looking woman with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, who stared at me whenever I wasn’t looking directly at her. I didn’t know their names but I’d seen them both around the place before. I didn’t speak and got on with washing myself.
People came and went from my lodging house, and no one seemed to live there for long – besides Nel and me. My neighbours hardly noticed my presence, which was fine as far as I was concerned. They weren’t the sorts I wanted to know anyway, not after seeing the things some of them had left behind in the latrines on my floor. Sordid books and blood-stained clothes and devices for purposes I couldn’t even begin to guess. It made me shudder. This place had changed for the worse since I became the property of the Magicians, as if the building had died with Eden. No families lived here any more, no laughter to be heard, though sometimes I could swear there were children crying in the night. It was difficult to tell if the sound was real through the amount of jenkem I used.
When I’d finished washing the stink of a two-day torpor off my body, I wrapped myself in a towel and made my way back up to my lodgings, where I discovered a note had been slid under the door in my absence. It was from Dyonne – a summons. She wanted to see me at noon.