A bitter smell laced the air. A cake of jenkem smouldered in a burner beneath the closed window. A thin line of smoke ghosted up and dispersed in dreamy puffs as it hit the ceiling. I breathed in a lungful and felt its intoxicating effects tingle upon the periphery of my perception.
A pair of boots had been placed on the only chair in my lodgings. On the small table next to it, a city watch uniform had been neatly folded – a sergeant’s uniform.
Lana Khem lay in my bed, a single sheet clinging to her naked body. Her usually neat and tied-up hair hung in loose curls. Her brown eyes were glazed, looking in my general direction but struggling to find me. Her face searched for an expression. She smiled lazily and whispered a single word through the jenkem smoke.
‘Wendal.’
I wondered what else Lana could see besides me. Jenkem first relaxed the body and calmed the mind before anaesthetising all cares and inhibitions and inducing rich, vivid dreams. Just for a while. I remained by the door, breathing in more smoke in the hope of hurrying its effect.
‘How was your day?’
I shrugged.
‘Have you eaten?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘What do you feel like doing tonight?’
It was like listening to bad acting in an amateur stage production of a relationship. I hated hearing it.
‘You must be tired.’ Lana stretched beneath the sheet, content and drowsy.
I should have told her to return the key to my lodgings, to leave and never come back. I should’ve told her that weeks ago.
Slipping off my jacket and hanging it on the back of the door, I said, ‘How are you, Lana?’ Saying anything felt better than staying mute.
‘Some old, same old,’ she said, sighing. ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you, too.’ Hollow, perfunctory words, spoken limply.
‘Come to bed.’
Lana watched me undress. She took in my naked body, seemed pleased by what she saw. She never mentioned how thin I looked, never mentioned the words of magic on my stomach and back, the red stains of the spells which kept a spirit of vengeance trapped inside me. Nor was she put off by the old scars beneath them, the remnants of burn wounds suffered during my last days of fighting in the war. Lana pulled back the sheet, as though to reveal a secret. She had scars of her own.
When I lay down beside her, she wrapped the sheet around us and I fell into her embrace. Her muscles were toned and her skin was rough. Her dusty hair smelled of Old Castle’s streets.
It was hard enough dealing with my own afflictions, let alone Lana Khem’s. Perhaps she was addicted to me, or was it obsession born from a quirked sense of guilt?
Lana had been the city watch officer who had dealt with Eden’s suicide, who had found her dead body in this very room. My wife had pressed a hand-held ether-cannon to her chest, over her heart. At point-blank range, the blast had torn a hole right through her. Lana hadn’t wanted to tell me that, but I had made her.
Not long after I became the Salem’s pet, Lana began visiting me. At first, it was to return the last of Eden’s effects. I’d already reclaimed our wedding rings – I sometimes think it was the shock and emotion of seeing them that finally weakened my defences enough for Sycamore to take control of me and set us off on our murderous spree. Lana had brought the last remnants of Eden’s life, including the notice announcing my status as missing in action – apparently my wife had carried it around with her. But afterwards, Lana kept on visiting me. To see how I was coping, she said, to give me any help I needed, and somehow we ended up like this.
Lana pressed her mouth to mine, eyes closed as if she was thinking of someone else. Her fingers trailed over my scars.
I should have told her to stop. But I never did.
Back then, I’d thought it was only a matter of time before Lana arrested me; that she had to find out about my deal with Dyonne and what I was doing for the Salem. In retrospect, I think she had been, and still was, looking for forgiveness. She considered Eden’s suicide as her failing somehow. In a way that I didn’t understand, Lana blamed herself and felt the need to make up for her misplaced guilt, and she did so by filling a void in my life, replacing some of what I’d lost. So she could help me feel normal? Not so abandoned?
Lana straddled me and I groaned – as much from intoxication as from how good she felt. She bit my earlobe, whispering, ‘I love you,’ but it was the jenkem talking.
We never met in mundane circumstances. There were never any meals, no theatre trips – nothing approaching a normal relationship. I could count the proper conversations we’d had on one hand. We enjoyed each other while intoxicated. Because jenkem eradicated the need for reason. It was the unspoken agreement between us, the barrier that spared us from ever getting to know each other at all.
Lana ground against me and I held her tight, close. Her lips parted mine and our tongues met. Reality started to blur, and when I closed my eyes it was Eden’s face I saw, her body pressed against mine, slick now with sweat.
I’d never told Lana that I didn’t blame her. I’d never said that it wasn’t her fault. Perhaps I thought that if she knew, she wouldn’t come back, and these strange moments where she played surrogate wife to a widower would end. She helped me to remember how Eden had felt, tasted.
I rolled on top of her, keeping my eyes closed to savour the image of a different face. The bed complained and Lana moaned as she built to orgasm. Passion rose, our teeth clashed, and Lana spat curses as she climaxed. I quickly followed, with her fingernails adding marks to my back.
After, we lay embraced, breathing heavily into each other’s ears. By the time I rolled away, Lana was already asleep, slipping peacefully into whatever visions jenkem had brought her.
On the cusp of slipping away myself, my tenuous link to reality was preserved by something stirring in the corner of the room. My gaze drifted to the words of magic seared into the wall next to the door. Above them, a ghoul bubbled like boiling pitch.
‘I’ve been dreaming again, Sycamore.’ A female voice, always sad. ‘Did you know the dead could dream?’
‘Go away, Itch.’ This ghoul, my Itch – even Sycamore could not sate her cravings. She was a thorn in my side, the one haunting that couldn’t be stopped. ‘Just … go away.’
‘I travel the wasteland.’ Itch shifted her form, but I couldn’t focus enough to see what shape she had taken. ‘I live wild with the clansfolk, seeing things that you wouldn’t dare to imagine, sparkling and pure.’
‘You’re full of shit,’ I mumbled. ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘But I don’t want to dream. I don’t want to go back.’ She wept with a sound that hurt my ears. ‘I want to be free.’
‘Fuck off, Itch.’ I started laughing.
‘Sycamore! Give me justice!’
And I was still laughing when the jenkem finally snatched me away. Behind my eyelids, Eden was waiting …
A lake filled the width of the valley floor, flanked by high, sheer walls of rusty rock. Its surface was smooth and glassy, glistening beneath the sun, clear all the way down to its bottom. The water looked pure enough to drink, inviting enough for a cool swim. But the lake was toxic, capable of melting flesh from bones in minutes; and hiding down below in underwater caves, monsters waited for their meals.
This was the wasteland.
‘Urdezha is covered in scabs,’ Eden said.
She stood on the lake’s shore, staring out at a bed that floated like a raft, carrying the sleeping form of Lana Khem. I stood next to Eden, smiling.
‘If the Scientists aren’t careful,’ she continued, ‘they’ll drill so deep into the wasteland that they’ll reach Urdezha’s skin. And that will be the day when they find so many festering wounds that they’ll have to admit how they ruined the world.’
I loved the sound of her voice, the confidence it carried. ‘Tell me how they ruined it, Eden.’
‘The wasteland is a brittle veneer of existence, Wendal, created by every single mistake the Scientists ever made. If it crumbled to dust and Urdezha was allowed to heal, the world’s natural state would be alien, hostile to humans. Over the millennia, the Scientists have ensured that we’re no longer the natives. Urdezha has had enough of us.’
‘Are you really so sure?’ I recalled us having this conversation before. ‘Seems to me we’re pretty good at surviving.’
‘Only by perverse will and ingenuity. Not by any right of natural selection.’ She snorted. ‘The Scientists are fucking barbarians.’
‘They’re not the only ones to blame. Magicians must fit into your argument somewhere.’
Eden turned to me and her admonishing chuckle made my heart skip. Red hair long and straight, eyes like green jewels, face without blemish, sculpted. Beautiful. ‘Oh, Wendal. I’m not arguing. I’ve thought my opinion through, as you damn well know.’
The lake in the valley had never been part of this debate; this location had come much later for me. The words belonged to the dusky hours before dawn in Old Castle, while Eden and I lay in bed in our lodgings. I would’ve had this conversation a thousand times over, in any location, if it meant Eden stayed with me. Sadly, these snippets of happiness were not meant to last.
From behind us came the boom of an explosion. Eden cocked her ear to the sound as it echoed down the valley. She faced the lake, looking beyond the water to the opposite end of the valley where, in the near distance, the giant corpse-trees of a graveforest rose above sheer walls of rock.
‘One day,’ she said, ‘someone’s going to find something on the wasteland, something old and forgotten, and it’ll be too powerful for the Scientists to handle. They’ll try, of course, but this artefact will bite back and bring every single city to its knees. That’s how the war will end.’
I remembered my line. ‘You’re avoiding my question.’
‘I’m trying to answer it, but it’s not as simple as you’d like, Wendal. Ask yourself – what would the Salahbeem think if they returned and discovered that we had survived?’
‘They already know we survived.’ I grinned. ‘They can see us from the Garden in the Sky.’
Eden made a disgruntled noise. ‘I meant hypothetically. Look at it with a Scientists’ eye. Would the Salahbeem be amazed that we’d managed to survive? Disgusted by how we did it? Respect our ingenuity or wonder why they didn’t just destroy us before leaving Urdezha?’
I shook my head. She was talking about ancient history, after the Salahbeem disappeared and the human race brought itself to its knees in the Ether Wars. ‘Who knows what really happened ten thousand years ago?’
‘The Salahbeem expected the worst of us to die out, that’s what.’ Eden’s eyes drifted up to the sun, so large and red in the sky. ‘Yes, Magicians have to take a share of the blame for the wars that turned Urdezha into this. But here’s the difference – without the cities and their technologies, the Scientists would be lost and pointless. The Magicians, however, would accept the natural order. Let the world itself control its ether and decide who gets to live. Because we, the Magicians, respect that one way or another, all life has to meet its end, otherwise what worth does it have?’
‘Yet the Salem get to use the Song of Always and live longer than anyone? And here’s another contradiction for your argument, Eden. You call the Scientists barbarians, but what about the Magicians’ Lore of Ascension?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Wendal.’
‘I know enough! The only way one of the people you’re defending can ascend to the rank of Grand Adept is to kill a current member of the Salem. Tell me that’s not barbaric. The Scientists don’t fuck each other over for the sake of rank. They work together.’
‘As I said, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, no one has ascended to the position of Grand Adept for centuries.’
‘You can only say that’s true for Old Castle. There are a lot of cities—’
Another explosion was followed by the whumping of ether-cannons. From somewhere unseen, the battle cries of the clansfolk rose as a united howl.
‘Longevity for the pursuit of elevated knowledge,’ Eden said, but not in her own tones. I sighed; the private moment had ended and she now spoke in Salabese using my voice. ‘That is why the Grand Adepts use the Song of Always.’ Eden looked at me. The green of her pupils had changed to the shape of sycamore seeds. ‘And no Magician has ascended to their rank in centuries because the current Salem members are far too clever at hiding their moments of death. They are all but immortal.’
The debate forgotten, memories of a cosy, pre-dawn moment receding into more recent matters, Sycamore stared at me.
In the conscious world, he and I couldn’t communicate; the Salem had made sure of that. But somehow, in the depths of jenkem dreams, the restraints loosened and we met in the subconscious. He always spoke in Salabese and I in Babel, the language of the cities. I’d never told Dyonne that this occurred; I liked that it was the one secret I could keep from her, though I just wished that Sycamore wouldn’t use Eden’s image when he came to me.
‘You spend too much time feeling sorry for yourself, Wendal. Here and now, you cling to this romantic notion that you will be reunited with your wife, while never considering who else you could be searching for. Typical of you humans. You see only hope when the truth would spare you a futile existence.’
‘Love will do that to a human, not that you could ever understand it.’
‘I have been trapped long enough to gain a broader insight into your concepts and emotional limitations. I feel them as you do.’ Sycamore looked out over the lake. ‘You need to clear your mind, Wendal, straighten your perspective. For example, do you remember Clay Hysan?’
How could I forget him? He was the reason I was stuck with Sycamore. Or was it the other way around?
‘Don’t you ever wonder where Dyonne Obor hid Hysan’s ghoul?’ Eden’s image narrowed its sycamore-seed eyes. ‘He cannot be her only victim. Magicians might be good at covering their tracks, but they are a cut-throat bunch and not one of them achieves a high rank without facing obstacles that require … removing. Dyonne must keep a secret closet somewhere, in which she hides the ghouls of her victims. If you could find but one of them, Wendal, I would exact revenge for what Obor has done to us.’
We must have had this conversation a hundred times before and I didn’t have the energy to go through it again. In the beginning, it was a more heated argument, but had dwindled to a somewhat passionless ritual over the weeks and months. He wasn’t trying to exact revenge for anything. The Song of Always meant he couldn’t kill me and that really pissed him off. What he wanted was for me to go poking my nose where Dyonne didn’t want it so I’d become the liability that forced her to release my moment of death and give my possessor freedom.
‘Forget it,’ I said tiredly. ‘It’s not going to happen.’
Sycamore smiled. ‘Give it time.’
I flinched. The cries of the clansfolk were growing louder in the valley.
‘Do you trust the old woman in the Garden?’ Eden said with my voice.
‘No,’ I stated.
‘Hmm.’ Sycamore watched the bed drifting on the still water. ‘You’re wondering why Eden would befriend someone who worked for the Scientists. Doesn’t sound like her, does it?’
‘I … I’m not sure any more.’
‘This is certainly a strange lead for Dyonne Obor to give you. Suspiciously helpful, at first glance.’ Sycamore pushed a hand under the collar of Eden’s gown, pulling out a chain and showing me the solitary ring hanging from it. ‘Whoever you do or do not trust, you are going to see if the old woman was right about this Abdon Klyne, aren’t you?’
I nodded. The clansfolk were getting closer. I could hear the sound of their charging feet, but I didn’t dare look to see if they were in sight yet. ‘What choice do I have?’
‘None that you’re willing to see. You gave away your choices three months ago.’ He directed my attention to Lana Khem. ‘You made your bed, Wendal, no matter how much you like to blame me.’
‘Yeah, you’re entirely blameless.’
‘I do wish you would exceed your limitations.’
The clansfolk’s charge shook the valley floor. Rumbles sent debris rattling down the walls and set ripples to spreading across the surface of the lake. But it was movement on the far shore that grabbed my attention now.
An anomaly had distorted the air. A straight thin line of silver light rose eight feet at least from the ground like a crack in reality. The line widened to become a ragged hole, filled with starless space. I’d seen this kind of distortion before, what felt like a thousand times in these jenkem dreams, but its presence was never my doing. The silver-lined hole in reality was a gateway, an ancient and powerful transport device the likes of which hadn’t been seen on Urdezha since the days of the Salahbeem, and it had been conjured by Sycamore, taunting me with one of his memories.
‘Your problem, Wendal, is that you refuse to accept that your existence was never continued for the purpose of finding Eden.’ Unconcerned by the army of wastelanders charging towards us, Sycamore pursed Eden’s lips. ‘Try considering something bigger than yourself for a change.’
The gateway’s darkness bulged outwards and an ethereal woman stepped from it. The gulf of the lake lay between us and she was too far away to see in great detail, but I knew what she looked like. As with the gateway, Sycamore had brought her to my jenkem dreams many times before.
She had no hair and her skin was such a pale blue that it was almost translucent. Her ears were small and pointed, pressed flat against her head; her nose was two slits on a smooth face and her mouth a small pursed circle; but her eyes were large, clear ovals, entirely devoid of colour. She wasn’t human. She was so much more than that. According to Sycamore.
Dressed in the splendour of shimmering amber armour decorated with ancient script, she was a Gardener, one of the Salahbeem. She had come to these dreams so many times that I’d long ago stopped feeling awed to be in the presence of such a legendary being, whose legacy had seeded all that the human race had become. If she was truly a Gardener at all; Sycamore’s word was hardly trustworthy.
‘What do you think, Wendal?’ Sycamore’s pity cut through the roars of bears and the screams of berserkers that had now risen above the war cries of the clansfolk. ‘Is she a god or a mortal?’
No matter how many times this Gardener appeared, Sycamore wouldn’t allow her to come close or speak. He never explained why she haunted his memories or revealed her name; he would only say that she had lived sometime during Urdezha’s distant past. The script riddling her amber armour sparkled with the rose tint of ether, and the suit denoted that she had held a special position among her kind. This mysterious Salahbeem woman had been a knight from the Order of Glass and Words.
Truth? Lies? What did it matter?
The Gardener held some kind of device in her cupped hands. It glinted glassily in the sunlight, hued the same as her armour. Unhurried and calm, she blew upon the device and it emitted a high-pitched whine barbed with bursts of static. With eerie grace, the knight cast it into the lake before turning to step back through the gateway. The ragged hole closed to a crack of silver and blinked out of existence behind her.
Sycamore said, ‘The true frustration of being trapped inside a human is that I view life as one of you while knowing of things that you could not comprehend. I am not supposed to be here, Wendal, but I suspect that you and all your kind will have to learn that the hard way.’
The device exploded with a dull boom beneath the toxic water. The lake’s surface became agitated, frothing and boiling, rocking the bed upon which Lana Khem remained asleep. The explosion roused something in the depths. A geyser shot into the air. A monster rose with it. It was difficult to see in all the confusion and froth, but in a brief moment of violence, of scales and claws and teeth, the monster smothered the bed, dragging it down into the lake, taking Lana with it.
The clansfolk were almost upon me, their united voice deafening. But I wouldn’t turn to face them and kept my eyes firmly fixed ahead. I started trembling. No matter how many times these fucking wastelanders came for me in these dreams, I couldn’t master the fear they brought.
Sycamore patted my shoulder. ‘Expand your awareness, Wendal. Good luck with Abdon Klyne.’
Eden stepped into the water and dived beneath the surface.
I closed my eyes.