Eden and I had been friends long before we became lovers. We met at school, and it was our shared tragedy that drew us together. We had both lost our fathers to the wasteland. Eden’s parents married young, as we did, and her father hadn’t survived his City Service. He died in the war before she was born. My father had been a career soldier. To my memory, I only saw him a handful of times before he stopped coming home.
My mother had been older than my father, and she birthed a child late. She died of old age just before I left school. Eden’s mother was still around, somewhere in Old Castle, but she had never liked me. For some reason, she got it into her head that I was to blame for her daughter walking away from the life of a good citizen and following the Magicians’ way. She never forgave Eden for marrying me. The night before our wedding, she had tried one last time to talk ‘sense’ into Eden. It hadn’t gone well, and as far as I knew, that was the last time mother and daughter had seen each other.
But I had caught a glimpse of her, weeks ago now, sitting in the carriage of an under-rail train. Our eyes met through the window, but she hadn’t recognised me and looked away as the train pulled out of the station. I wondered how much regret had surfaced within her grief upon hearing of her daughter’s suicide.
Up until today, I had believed that no one on Urdezha knew Eden as well as I did. I used to tell myself that I was the only person who could’ve stopped her doing what she did. But now I wondered, if I had returned from the war undamaged, if Eden hadn’t killed herself, would I have known my wife at all? Would she have even wanted me to come home? The time period that Klyne was talking about … it must’ve meant that he had been Eden’s lover just after she found out I was missing in action. So soon? It wasn’t easy to admit, but I couldn’t shrug off a nagging feeling that on the day I went to war, Eden had let me go for good and begun a new life which had led her to a bad place.
The image of my wife and Abdon Klyne sharing intimate moments wouldn’t leave my head, and I didn’t talk after we sneaked out of Temple University. The meeting with the ghost had left me distracted with thoughts aflame and refusing to keep still. I walked with Nel, heading for Scholar Station, but halfway there, she stopped, concerned by my brooding introspection.
‘What’s going on, Wendal?’ She laid a hand on my arm. ‘What happened in there?’
‘I … I’m not sure.’ I rubbed my forehead. ‘You should go. I need to think.’
‘All right.’ Nel smiled. She knew when it was better to leave me alone. ‘Come and see me if you want to talk.’
I nodded, thanked her for her help and left her to catch the under-rail to Reaper Town.
I decided to walk the rest of the way home. The wind had picked up, carrying an icy chill, blowing dust into my eyes. There was a faint metallic taste to the air. From the north, dark clouds were moving in, slowly swallowing up the light of the ether crystals in the sky. They illuminated the distance with streaks of orange lightning. I didn’t want to think about whether this storm was coming from Alexria.
Reasoning that it would probably alter course before it reached Old Castle, anyway, I continued on, head down, oblivious to any citizens out as late as me. Klyne’s story ran over and over in my mind. The dead don’t lie … I wished that wasn’t true. My thoughts refused to slow down. What had Eden been looking for?
There were a lot of schools in Old Castle, and all citizens received a free education before their City Service came up. But only a select few of those who returned from the war were given a university education – funded by the Scientists, of course, who cherry-picked the most patriotic candidates from the survivors. I didn’t suppose they would have ever picked me, but Eden was everything they looked for – intelligent, curious, practical, academic – but she had chosen the Magicians’ way not the Scientists’: two philosophies that opposed each other fundamentally, especially on the application of magic.
For the Scientists, magic was a source of energy that fuelled wondrous inventions, machines and technologies. It powered the reduction houses, magical forges that reduced all waste matter to Dust. Dust was the miracle creation without which we couldn’t survive. It could become anything: food, medicine, building materials, cloth – whatever we needed. The Scientists ruled the cities of Urdezha with the power of magic and the promise of life.
The Magicians, however, celebrated magic purely for its existence. It was Urdezha’s blood, a gift, and it wasn’t meant to be broken and enslaved to fuel perverted creations. Natural, free and wild – magic was a force to be accepted, thanked, and only the most adept could beg its favour. The irony of this belief was that Magicians held to it while dwelling under the protection of the Scientists. Without the cities, they would stand as little chance as anyone else on the wasteland, where monsters roamed and the clansfolk reviled cities as evil hives spawning demons who rose against them time and time again. But these ironies and differences had been born aeons ago, diluted over millennia, becoming vague traditions for today.
The stigma of the Salahbeem had laid the seeds of discontent between them. While the Magicians worshipped this mythical race as gods, the Scientists considered them a power-hungry enemy who had underestimated the human race. The Gardeners had arrived under the pretence of teaching and guiding and befriending us, but their real reason for coming to Urdezha so long ago was far different: subjugation, to make us their slaves, to rule our world – that was their true goal.
The Scientists hypothesised that the Salahbeem had probably invaded many realms and worlds under the guise of kindness and wisdom throughout their history. As for their reasons, conjectures ranged from stealing resources to the continued growth of an ever-expanding empire. No one knew the truth because it was lost to the distant past. But the Scientists claimed that, in coming to Urdezha, the Salahbeem had finally bitten off more than they could chew. We rose against them, drove them away, sent them fleeing before a superior might. The barricade of ether in the sky would seem to invalidate claims of this might, as would the fables and myths that were so important to the Magicians.
Friend or foe, Gardener gods or highly evolved mortals, the reality of the Salahbeem had been watered down and smeared across ten thousand years of history. Their remnants and legacies had shaped opinions of life and interpretations of death. Whether the Salahbeem remained on the periphery of our reality, controlling the other side and selecting only the worthy for their paradise, or whether they had gone for good, trapping us on Urdezha, while the other side remained as mysterious as the Scientists would have it; the most powerful legacy that the Salahbeem’s enigma had created would always be magic. In their wake, the Scientists and the Magicians had gone to war over it.
Ether was the source of all magic, all energy. In an ancient time, the Scientists had won the Ether Wars, but in defeat their enemy couldn’t be crushed entirely. As long as there was ether, there would always be Magicians, no matter how many the Scientists might’ve liked to expel from the city. I wouldn’t go as far as to say there was peace between them – perhaps more a begrudging acceptance of an equilibrium, a tradition born millennia ago. If either side retained a specific agenda against opposing philosophies, I didn’t know, but it was commonly accepted that the Quantum and the Salem manoeuvred against each other in the dark. And not just in Old Castle.
Had these secret manoeuvres led my wife to Abdon Klyne?
I stopped to roll a cigarette. Not many people were out tonight. Lightning speared the distance and the wind picked up. My hands were shaking, but not from the night’s chill. Why wouldn’t Klyne’s information sit right in my head?
Eden used to talk about her aspirations for moving up the ranks of the Magicians. Dyonne had once called her a novice, a dabbler, and that was true – but only to a point. Eden had been serious, training herself, trying to prove her worthiness to the Magicians so that they might accept her as one of them. Klyne was trying to convince me that she had achieved the first step of her aspirations.
The Scientists had made a new discovery, some secret dug up from the wasteland. Somehow it was trapping the spirits of the dead in Old Castle. If Eden had been trying to find this thing, as Klyne believed, then in all likelihood she had been doing so for the Magicians. It would mean she had been accepted, become an apprentice. It would mean that Eden had a Magician master.
I struck a match and shielded the flame from the wind as I set it to the cigarette, resuming my walk through the cold city under ether-light. But I was no longer heading straight home. Klyne’s story whirred in my mind.
I needed to talk to Dyonne; she held a high rank and could find out who Eden’s master had been, or if she even had one. But the trouble with Dyonne was that she summoned me, not the other way around. There was no point trying to find her at the nameless tavern until she was ready to see me again. So, I returned to the Garden near Public Square instead. The old woman called Ing Meredith had said she was going to investigate further, and I hoped to find her in the Garden with fresh information. But all that greeted me was hollow wind in the empty night-time. Somewhat desperate to find out more, I went home to pursue the last and most tenuous source currently available to me.