The dead called me Sycamore. They and I didn’t care for sentiment.
Mutley – the lowest of humans in life, a sickening brute in death – led me to the location of her murderer. Through the streets of the Tinman District we drifted, unseen but sensed as one senses the brooding presence of the storm above. Citizens, whose unconscious we tapped at, were reminded of their time in the war, remembering how they had learned to feel the threat of danger on the wasteland; and I imagined that their memories stayed with them long after the ghoul and I had passed.
‘I want my revenge,’ Mutley hissed.
Whether she deserved it or not was an academic point, though I wondered if she was at all aware of the irony inherent to a situation that she wouldn’t be in if she hadn’t been so devious and incorrect concerning my true nature.
It came as no surprise when Mutley led me to Wendal Finn’s lodging house, or when we ventured up flights of stairs to the floor and room directly above his. Nel was at home by this time. Her lodgings were as sparse as Wendal’s, and she was in a dire condition. I assumed she was already dead at first. That Mutley might have to go without Sycamore’s justice was somewhat pleasing. But then Nel stirred. Weakly. And addressed the human inside me with a whisper.
‘Wendal …’
I could feel him weeping.
‘I knew you’d come,’ Nel said.
She had been beaten so severely that her face was swollen with bruises and blood matted her hair. She lay on her back, hands clawed and trembling, speaking through broken teeth and mashed lips. By the way her legs were twisted and resting at uncomfortable angles, it was obvious that she felt nothing from the waist down.
‘I killed Mutley,’ Nel said, her voice clearer now. ‘But I couldn’t get away from her people, and …’
They had beaten her to a pulp, leaving her for dead in her own home. Perhaps as a way to let Wendal know that his contract with Mutley was now terminated. This was my assumption, of course, but also the logical aftermath of the visions that had accompanied Mutya Bryn’s Song.
At the gambling house, not long after Wendal left, Nel and Mutley had fought in Mutley’s private office. It was over quickly, with barely enough time for blows to be exchanged, because, during the brief struggle, Nel managed to pickpocket Mutley’s ether-weapon. One shot of magic had blasted the criminal’s life from her body.
‘I-I know you told me to sit tight, Wendal, but Mutley backed me into a corner.’ She huffed tears. ‘She wasn’t going to let us live, no matter what she told you.’
Behind me, Mutley’s ghoul had smeared itself across the wall like a blanket of oil, covering the door, quivering with anticipation.
‘You did what you had to,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of you now.’
Nel could open only one of her eyes, and it looked at me curiously. ‘I’ve never heard you speak Salabese before.’
My human host fought weakly against me. He tried his best to rage inside me, desperate, begging me to … what, Wendal? Save your friend? Rush her to the nearest hospital, perhaps? He knew me better than that. Besides, we could both see that even with medical attention, Nel was not going to survive the night.
Oh, Wendal, blind for so long and now he was beginning to see. For months of human time I longed to be free of him, but I had always been good at waiting. The storm and the way he felt it was watching him … well, something had to come for me eventually and patience was a virtue.
‘I can’t feel the pain any more,’ Nel said. She coughed, swallowed blood. ‘Strange, huh?’
No, not strange; just the end drawing close. Over millennia, humans had fled the inevitability of death. They refused to look it in the eye, though they knew it came for each of them. Because they feared not knowing what was on the other side. And even when death finally arrived for them, they remained in denial, never quite believing that their life would come to an end. I could see it now in Nel’s one eye. She had hope because she thought she was with a friend.
‘Help me, Wendal,’ she whispered.
And Mutley gurgled, ‘I want peace, Sycamore. I want it now.’
These people were so far removed from the humans who had once inhabited Urdezha. In the aftermath of the Ether Wars, the weapons and plagues they unleashed on each other, they merged their biologies with scavengers and predators and insects – any creature that could survive inhospitable conditions. They cut their life expectancies by half because a half-life on a ruined world was better than no life at all. There were no real humans left on Urdezha.
‘Do something, Wendal.’
Snapping the neck would put a quick and painless end to Nel’s suffering. But Wendal, the subhuman, the tortured soul, had finally set aside his denial and accepted the truth. His voice, so small and insignificant inside me, urged for a more humane way. I was not opposed to his request.
Mutley had slithered up the wall and across the ceiling, now hanging above us like the storm above Old Castle. Her face appeared in the dark mass, shadowed and anguished, lustful for vengeance. ‘Give her what she deserves.’
I spied the very thing. Under the bed, Nel’s cloth satchel lay rumpled. I claimed it and, as I expected to, found inside ampoules of the chemical Liquid Ether – the catalyst for this predicament.
‘Let’s make you comfortable first,’ I said, snapping the top off an ampoule. ‘Open wide.’
Nel probed her bloodied lips with her tongue. ‘Just a couple of drops,’ she warned.
Because too much would stop her heart. She had told Wendal that. I dripped three drops onto Nel’s waiting tongue. She swirled them around her mouth, winced as she swallowed.
‘Burns. Tastes like shit,’ she said, trying to chuckle but coughing instead. ‘You don’t sound right, Wendal. You look different. Your eyes are funny.’
‘One more for luck,’ I said, and two more drops fell into Nel’s mouth.
‘Give her all of it,’ Mutley demanded.
‘That hit the spot,’ Nel said, and her swollen face visibly relaxed. ‘It’s not true, is it, Wendal? You don’t kill people for the Magicians, do you? Mutley said Sycamore is an assassin, but—’
‘Shh.’
Nel didn’t seem to notice when she swallowed the next three drops of Liquid Ether.
‘You won’t leave me, will you? I mean, after you find Eden – promise that you won’t leave me alone.’
‘We’ll be together until the end.’
‘Yeah.’ Her one open eyelid drooped. ‘I was thinking. We should leave this lodging house, get a new place together. We already watch each other’s backs – there’s no reason not to do it. You know everything about me, except … except …’
‘Except what, Nel?’
‘It was me, Wendal. I did it. I killed my friends in the war. It wasn’t the monster.’
Ah, Nel’s recurring nightmare. I had heard many confessions at the moment of death.
‘I’ve always known it,’ Nel wept. ‘I-I—’
I soothed her with two more drops. ‘Sleep now.’
She closed her eye and sighed. ‘Wendal, what happened to you on the wasteland … ?’ Her voice slurred down into unconsciousness, and I emptied the last of the ampoule into her mouth.
In her chemical dreams, Nel swallowed the contents of a second and third ampoule, and I stayed with her until she released a final breath and her heart stopped beating. Though loath to admit it, I stayed out of respect for Wendal, who had fallen silent, frozen within me, reluctant to rise. Mutley’s ghoul, avenged and at peace, had disappeared without me noticing. I hoped her spirit would fall foul of the Scientists’ experiments before it reached a harmonious afterlife. Had I learned sentiment, after all?
‘The dead call me Sycamore,’ I whispered, stroking Nel’s beaten face. ‘I am their Shepherd.’
Poor sweet Janelle Memphis. How I misjudged you, thinking you were just another of Dyonne’s drones, spies, pets. But you were innocent after all – or as innocent as any of your kind could be. You wanted to know what happened to your friend on the wasteland. Well, he met a survivalist named August Jakob.