My name is Wendal Finn …
My brain told me I was falling, but my body said I was motionless. A searing pain stole my breath, as if a white-hot knife was tracing the spells on my skin, burning them away, breaking the bonds that kept an unknowable entity trapped inside its host. Free from the land of the living, Sycamore slid through my pores, cast me aside, discarded me as easily as shrugging off a jacket, and he threw me into blind confusion.
Alone, empty, spiritless, I was gripped by a bitter, powerful magic that pulled me in different directions, diluted me, smeared my existence over a thick, abject darkness, trying to pull me apart. I experienced no more pain or discomfort, but this place on the other side of the gateway did not want me, hated me, fought to reject my presence. Was this death? Had I been condemned to Nothing?
Just when I thought I would stretch across the emptiness for ever, there came a sharp, dizzying sense of sudden retraction as though the bitter magic had released its grip, and the Song of Always allowed me to snap back into my true shape. The impact came suddenly out of the dark, giving me no time to prepare, and I hit solid ground so hard that I thought I’d shatter into a million pieces. But no; I collapsed like a boneless rag doll instead and lay staring into a lightless void, only the sound of my breathing telling me that I was still alive.
Moments passed, and in the dark I had time to think about how small a part I had played in this game, how insignificant I had been from the very beginning. It had felt so good to kill Mrs Blackstone. Old Castle’s troubles were far behind me now.
So this was where Sycamore came from, his realm, that mythical place between the land of the living and the other side. Perhaps I should have felt amazed, panicked, awed, but I could only conjure up deep disappointment and loneliness.
The darkness lifted. A supernatural light shone from somewhere below, an eerie green radiance like the glow of a quagmire on the wasteland, illuminating the space above me. Not a void as I’d thought, but a vast shaft drilled through rock rising jaggedly up and back into darkness, maybe without end. Had the gateway dropped me into a monumental hole that sank straight down to Urdezha’s core? Was that where Sycamore’s realm existed?
A rustle of movement echoed from below. I rolled over onto my front. I had landed on a deep and sturdy ledge in the shaft. Crawling forwards, I peered over its edge. My eyes squinted, adjusting to the light, so much brighter in the shaft’s depths. Someone was moving down there; a woman, I thought, some fifty feet below me, wearing the hooded gown of a Magician. She was jumping and climbing from one descending ledge to another, making careful progress further down the shaft to where the light was brightest, like the glaring green pupil of a giant eye. The woman stopped and looked up, just for a second, but that was enough time for me to recognise the face within the hood.
‘Eden!’
The shout came from instinct, but she didn’t react to it and continued her descent. I tried again, begging her to stop, to wait for me, just … ‘Come back!’ But she couldn’t hear me. My words were returned to me as though borne on some force that whisked them up into the shaft’s heights, away from Eden’s ears. I roared in frustration, jumped to my feet in determination.
The closest ledge to my position was at least thirty feet below me. A fall like that would kill most men, but I wasn’t most men and this wasn’t the land of the living. Reckoning that I could make it with a good jump, I set my sights and prepared for the leap. But then a new source of light distracted me. It came from behind me, shining from the rock above where the shaft’s wall met the ledge. The rose-tinted silver glare of ether.
When the glare receded, its source was revealed as a luminous humanoid shape and hope lurched in my chest. A tank-suit, set into the wall. I didn’t stop to consider why it was there; rushing to it, grabbing the glass helmet, wrenching it out of the rock, I was thinking only of reaching Eden.
I put the helmet on and the touch of ether invaded my mind.
I’d forgotten what it felt like; so familiar and strong. With a mental command, I ordered the tank to come to me. The suit shook, strained and with a loud crack broke free of the wall and stamped over to my position, trailing debris. Its shape and size were normal, but there was no shoulder cannon and the armoured plates weren’t made from reinforced Dust. They were clear amber, inscribed with silver words of ancient Salabese. The tank was more like the suits of armour worn by the Order of Glass and Words. No time to wonder why; that it obeyed my commands was enough.
The tank’s plates unfurled, opening to hang in the air. I stepped backwards into them, revelling in its strength as they closed around me. This suit needed no ether crystal on its backplate; its energy came from the magical words decorating its amber parts, and the power of Glass and Words spoke to me like a friend. Cocooned in old knowledge, I sprang forwards, jumping from the ledge into the air, soaring down to land gracefully below.
I saw Eden, descending fast into the glare of supernatural light. I cleared the distances between ledges effortlessly, with single bounds, no harder than walking down stairs. The way became obscured by thick fog that abruptly rose around me, highlighted by eerie green, and the glass helmet adjusted to cut through it. Below, Eden was swallowed by the fog as the ledges became a smooth, spiralling walkway and she increased her speed to a sprint, passing beyond the helmet’s vision. The tank’s sonar picked up her signal immediately and I chased after her.
This was it, I told myself; she was real this time. Mrs Blackstone had confirmed that the gateway had been eating the spirits of the dead; Sycamore had told me that Eden’s spirit had never been on Urdezha. This was his realm, the way station, the place through which the dead travelled on their way to the other side. Of course my wife would be here – the real Eden, not some phantom from a fucked-up dream. I had found her.
The spiralling path became so even and smooth that I was able to push the tank as fast as my legs could run, but the journey was lasting an age. And although the sonar remained locked on to Eden’s signal, she didn’t come into view again. Just as I grew suspicious that surely I should’ve caught up with her by now, a pungent smell invaded my nostrils, a sharp chemical reek which reminded me of the wasteland. A shout of defiance came from below. A blaze of magic swirled the fog and burned it away. Then I saw her, my wife, further down the walkway, beset by monsters.
This shaft into Sycamore’s realm descended into a nest of skarabs.
I rushed down until I was opposite Eden’s position. The skarabs came from rocky burrows above and below her, from her left and right. Half-human, half-insect, carapaces like the armoured plates of a tank-suit, they charged with sharp horns, reaching with blade-like fingers. My ether-cannon slid from its housing on my arm and I took aim. But I didn’t fire. Not yet. I didn’t need to.
Eden moved with the skill of an adept. She released the ferocity of her magic, pushing hands out to either side and reducing two skarabs to dust. She destroyed a third and a fourth, before melting a fifth and a sixth to puddles of oily matter. But their deaths were merely the beginning of her spell. Her face grave, lips whispering incantations, Eden commanded the puddles to rise, spring up with fat, livid tentacles like the living roots of corpse-trees, and they became her guardians.
Tentacles smacked skarabs from the path, sending them shrieking and thrashing into the shaft’s lowest depths. The monsters tried to flee, but Eden’s magic plucked them from their burrows, curling around their bodies, smashing them against the rock, squeezing until their carapaces crunched and cracked sickeningly. Where the corpses fell and melted, new tentacles rose, two dozen at least, growing like a forest of guardians to protect their summoner. The skarabs battled frantically to escape my wife’s might, and they died.
But Eden didn’t know that more skarabs lurked beneath her, clinging to the underside of the walkway, searching for a way up and through her defences. My arm cannon bucked, the force of Glass and Words powering shot after shot into them. Whumps of ether magic displaced the air as the shrieks of dying skarabs fell away into the glowing depths, and only then did she see me. Only then did Eden halt her attack and allow the surviving monsters to escape back into their burrows.
As the shrieks of the dying faded, Eden stared across the gulf between us, frowning uncertainly. I took off the helmet and smiled at her, but she expressed panic, as though more frightened of me than any monster. Her tentacles died, slapping to the rock in wet puddles. To my horror, Eden stepped from the ledge and plummeted into the shaft.
‘No!’ I shouted and jumped after her.
The tank’s magic field compensated for the fall, preventing me from tipping over and hurtling down in an uncontrolled spin. Wind whipped around me, the shaft’s jagged walls flashing by until they were bleached out by the supernatural light. The brightness intensified as I speared into its core and then out through the other side into a moment of darkness before landing with a bone-jarring thud.
The tank’s boots vibrated, creaking as cracks in the amber plates snaked up my legs, across my body and down my arms. With a flare of ether, the suit of Glass and Words shattered from me and I staggered back. The amber pieces sank into the darkness below my feet, a pure blackness that absorbed the light of the shaft as it shone down like a poisoned sun.
In this strange place, Eden stood a few paces away, her back turned. I approached her, but the flare in my heart cooled and I stopped, suddenly perturbed. My wife’s hands were clenched, shaking with rage, and she was muttering threats and obscenities to herself, growling something about being a prisoner twice over.
‘Eden,’ I said softly. ‘It’s me, Wendal.’
‘I know who you are,’ she snapped, ‘and you don’t belong here.’
‘What?’
‘I’m tired of singing my Song, but he won’t let me escape. Not while you’re clinging on.’ Eden pulled down her hood and faced me. ‘You just couldn’t let me go, could you?’
I had no reply, shaking my head at what I saw. Eden’s bright green eyes were dulled, the red of her hair faded, her face and clothes leached of colour to a drab monochrome. She looked like a ghoul. What sick twist was this?
Eden cursed me in Salabese. ‘You have no place in the realm of the dead.’ Her words were full of spite, as if spoken to an enemy, and she turned and walked away. ‘But it seems you’re my only escape route out of this fucking nightmare.’