Jenkem couldn’t tempt me. Sleep wouldn’t come. I paced my lodgings, alone and in bad company. I couldn’t stop thinking about a timeline that ended at the big, ugly void into which Eden had fallen.
There were forts dotted around the wasteland, between the cities; small army facilities, each heavily fortified and capable of housing around two hundred soldiers. They were important supply depots and medical resources in the war, and no one stayed at them long – unless they were too injured to fight, which had been me, around four months ago. With two months of my City Service remaining, I had been interned into the infirmary at Fort Icus, severely wounded from what I had experienced on the wasteland during the days prior.
I couldn’t recall much about my stay or how I got there, but I remembered the nurses and doctors being afraid of me. Sycamore was already inside me, but I was still fighting him as he slowly devoured my spirit, and he hadn’t yet possessed full control of my body. Both myself and not, I blacked out regularly, sometimes for a day or more, and would wake up strapped to a hospital bed, beset by ghouls that no one else could see. But my awareness had been such that I knew I’d been admitted to the facility at the end of Noveb last year, and that I spent roughly a month there before a train of ether-wagons bound for Old Castle took me home at the very end of Deccem. Janus and a new year had arrived on the day I met Dyonne.
When I was first admitted to Icus, Eden was still writing her journals, filling them with her usual philosophical musings and magical experiments. The trouble was, she always wrote in Salabese. I knew enough for conversation, but deciphering her handwriting had been hard. As far as I could tell, she had recorded little about where she had been or who she had been there with, but that was nothing unusual and life had seemed normal for her. However, she had written nothing of her concerns for me, either, or her hopes that I would return from the war. And she had also stopped replying to the letters I had written her from the wasteland. I remembered intending to write to her from Icus, but obviously I never did. If I had, she would have known that I was still alive.
Eden’s last journal entry was dated early Deccem last year, maybe a week after I had been admitted to the fort’s infirmary. Sometime between then and the days prior to my return to Old Castle, my wife had become embroiled in something that led her to take an aging archaeologist for a lover and then to hold an ether-cannon to her heart and pull the trigger. And there lay the darkness of my void.
I had discovered not one shred of information concerning the last weeks of Eden’s life. It was as though her very existence had been swept under the carpet. Even if Dyonne wasn’t keeping me on a short leash, I didn’t know anyone I could ask about that time. Eden’s circle of friends were never mine – not that I’d ever really had many – and outside our marriage we had practically led separate lives. We always came home to each other at the end of the day, just … rarely talked about the day itself. But now I had met Abdon Klyne. Now the game had changed.
Magicians liked to keep their secrets, and I was convinced that Eden had stopped writing her journals because she had been accepted, and her master had ordered her not to catalogue any of the secrets she would be exposed to in her new life as a Magician’s apprentice. Meredith was right. Dyonne was wrong.
How did I search for Eden’s master when Dyonne and the Salem had cut off all my roads? Don’t give up on me, Meredith had said. However much she had hoodwinked the Magicians, I didn’t believe she was a liar. She wanted to help me, her reasons a mystery, but help all the same. She remained my best hope, though with Dyonne on her trail, she had more chance of killing a Grand Adept and joining the Salem herself than surviving the next day or two. By the fucking Gardeners, I felt helpless!
With a growl of frustration, I kicked my jenkem burner, sending it clattering across the floor. Itch stirred at the noise, bubbling in the corner of the room.
‘Go back to sleep,’ I shouted. ‘Right fucking now!’
The ghoul obeyed, and I flopped onto the bed, burying my face in the pillow.
What did I really know about any of this, anyway? I drifted on the periphery of the city’s machinations, barely a citizen, occasionally being dragged into the feudal games played by the Salem and the Quantum. I understood nothing while clinging to … what? A romanticised fiction? Something that would never happen? Did Eden even want me to find her?
Mind alive with thoughts of my wife, I sank into a restless half-sleep, seeing her face, how she pursed her lips while she wrote, how she looked at me when she thought I was being stupid; I remembered the colour of her hair, her eyes, the smell of her skin. Over and over, memories and hopes, all crashing to debris at the feet of Dyonne Obor.
Finally, with the drone of the city shield rumbling in my head and flashes of lightning illuminating my window, I could be alone with my thoughts no longer. Dawn must have arrived by then, blocked by the storm’s darkness, so I went upstairs and knocked on Nel’s door, hoping she was back from seeing Mutley. No answer. I went to the baths beneath my lodging house, thinking to relax for a while in hot water. Thankfully, the baths were empty, but although the water was clean, it was cool without the power of ether to heat it. Just being there reminded me of the last time Sycamore had killed, so I didn’t linger.
Back in my lodgings, my heart skipped when I saw a note had been slid under my door. It was from Dyonne: Meet me at the Garden near Public Square. Now.
An unusual meeting place for Dyonne to choose, and one that made my heart sink. It could only mean one thing: Ing Meredith was dead and the charade of my life was about to continue.