The Song of the Sycamore, page 1
Dedication
For Jack & Marney
I love you more than anything
THE SONG OF THE SYCAMORE
Edward Cox
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Contents
Dedication
I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
II
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
III
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
IV
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Acknowledgements
Also by Edward Cox from Gollancz
Copyright
I
The Song of Always
Chapter One
The city of Old Castle rose from the wasteland like an abscess swelling on the festering skin of a diseased world. Across its neighbourhoods and districts a siren called, lifting and falling with an ominous wail that sent citizens scurrying for their homes. Hiding like monsters in burrows, they prayed that this latest threat from the wastes would pass the city by, while fearing that this time, judgement had come to demand penance for their crimes. The people of Old Castle were rank with guilt. The city was populated by murderers.
And it was my home.
Through the chill of evening shadows, I made my way to the outskirts of Old Castle. No breeze disturbed the air, no sound accompanied the siren’s wail; light from a setting red sun did little to warm a tense ambience. Beyond the last of the buildings, I began crossing a stretch of open ground, heading towards the city wall. But it wasn’t me walking, not really, not any more. I could see through my eyes, hear through my ears, smell the stench of the city, but I had no control over my direction. My footsteps weren’t made of my own volition.
I neared the city wall, a sturdy construction, thick and high, unbreakable, but at that moment it seemed merely a thin veil constructed for the illusion of safety. The huge turrets rising atop it housed the mighty ether-cannons which protected the citizens from the horrors of the wastes. But not from me.
‘He’s close.’
These words gurgled from an oily mass slithering over cracked, stony ground ahead of me: a ghoul, wheezing wet breaths, hissing with anger. This thing had been a woman in life, a simple soul; but in death, an oozing puddle fuelled by injustice, out for revenge. Caring nothing for the danger approaching Old Castle, the ghoul sang her Song, a Song of obsession and need, and I couldn’t deny her plea for vengeance.
Whirring.
Rattling machinery.
Up on the wall, the turrets were turning, sweeping the aim of their long, fat cannons left and right. A low, familiar drone came next, baritone beneath the undulating siren, rumbling through the empty streets behind me. From the centre of Old Castle, a great beam of energy shot towards the cloudless pink sky like a waterspout. The city had activated its ether shield. High above the buildings, the energy gathered into a monumental ball of clear, wavering magic before dispersing, smearing, spreading across the length and breadth of Old Castle, forming a barrier between the city and the sky.
Above me, the edge of the shield curved downwards, creating an umbrella that descended liquidly to the ruined ground outside the wall. In a matter of moments, this hive of guilt-ridden souls was secured within a dome of ether power like a city in a snow globe. Sunlight refracted, the siren changed its pitch, the breeze dropped and the air became stifled. The bitter taste of ether dried the inside of my mouth. But it wasn’t really my mouth now.
‘Closer,’ the ghoul hissed.
Cannons tracked the movements of whatever monstrosity was coming from the wastes as I followed the ghoul along the line of the wall. With no choice in the matter, I was led to a set of stone stairs rising to a pot-bellied watch post nestled between two turrets. The ghoul slithered up the stairs and I climbed after her like the dutiful puppet I had become.
No sign of movement came from beyond the watch post’s darkened doorway, but I knew a man hid there, a murderer who had nowhere left to run. He had taken sanctuary in the watch post in a vain attempt to hide from death. His subconscious understood what was coming for him, and why. The dead deserved vengeance.
Reeking of sewage, the ghoul hissed in anticipation, gurgled with longing. Like a snake, her darkness oozed up around the doorway to form an oily frame. I stared into the gloom beyond.
‘Your sins have returned to you.’ My Mouth, using my voice, but it wasn’t me speaking. ‘Won’t you come out and atone with dignity?’
No reply.
The man in the watch post was by no means the first murderer I had tracked that day, and he wouldn’t be the last. I’d been leaving a trail of blood behind me for two days now, and there was an endless river’s worth waiting to be spilled yet.
Whatever will remained to me, I tried to force it into my legs, to make myself turn around and walk away, but I no longer had the strength or presence to make a difference to my actions. I stepped through the ghoul’s stench, entered the watch post, and the man attacked immediately.
He came out of the gloom, big and strong, a blur of motion in the dim light shining through the viewing slit in the back wall. With one arm, he pulled me into a tight embrace, spitting a curse into my ear as his free hand thrust a knife into my side. The blade couldn’t penetrate my ribs and sliced over bone before its tip ripped out of the skin beneath my chest. I was too far gone to feel the damage inflicted upon my body and pushed the man away with force enough to send him sprawling.
‘Kill him,’ the ghoul hissed from the doorway.
The murderer sat on the floor, staring up at me. He was no Magician; he couldn’t see the ghoul of his victim. His expression became stunned when I pulled the knife from my body and showed no distress at the hot blood soaking my shirt and trousers. Panic filled the man’s eyes when I used the blade to point at him.
‘The dead call me Sycamore. I am their Shepherd.’
With another curse, he jumped to his feet, fists clenched and ready to fight. I stepped close to him, dodged a clumsy punch and drove the knife into the side of his neck, down to the hilt. Such a simple and fluid act. I wished I could have turned away and covered my ears as the man dropped to his knees, choking, clawing at the knife’s handle with fingers slicked in arterial blood. Desperate, struggling to breathe, his eyes pleaded with me. He looked to be approaching twenty, the prime of life but not yet old enough to have seen the horrors of war.
When he toppled, falling face down and dead, the ghoul gave a peaceful sigh and slithered across the floor. The oily darkness mingled with the pool of blood spreading around the corpse of her murderer. As though in a show of gratitude, a single tendril reached out to touch my boot before the ghoul faded and disappeared. Finding peace through vengeance, she journeyed on to the other side.
The city siren continued to wail. I continued to drown inside myself.
Stepping over the corpse, I peered through the watch post’s viewing slit to gaze upon the desolation outside Old Castle. The sun was about to kiss th
It looked as though a dust storm was blowing in. A bank of debris rolled across the plain like fog on the sea, hued red by the sun’s backdrop. But this was no act of nature. The storm had been kicked into the air by the hundreds of feet galloping towards Old Castle. A herd of beasts. A stampede of monsters. They were too far away to see in great detail, but these creatures were as big as houses, thundering along on four legs, too many to bother counting. With stocky bodies covered in bony spikes and long horns protruding from great heads, the herd’s charge looked unstoppable. Was this an act of war? Had the herd been driven this way by Old Castle’s enemies? It didn’t matter. The creatures of the wasteland were never a match for the might of a city.
Along the city wall, ether-cannons took aim and fired with oddly subdued whumps. Ether knew ether, they said, and the shield allowed the lethal bursts of magic to pass through its energy and race across the wasteland trailing streamers of displaced air. The first wave of shots smashed into the herd’s front line, punching the life from the monsters. The cannons fired again – and again – and the charge faltered under their fury.
Through the sound of the siren, the drone of the shield and the whumps of ether, distant roars reached my ears. The cannons spat so many bursts of magic that the enemy was soon obscured by dust and debris. Whether or not the remaining monsters had turned tail and fled, leaving their fallen as carrion on the wastes, not one of them emerged from the storm. The abscess of Old Castle wouldn’t be lanced today, but … ‘Soon,’ said a voice inside me.
I placed a hand on the wall to steady a sudden flush of fatigue weakening my legs. The knife wound in my side wasn’t critical, but it was bleeding freely. I needed medical attention, food, sleep, but none of them would be given to me. As long as I could draw breath, my body would continue this rampage, while my spirit, my essence, me, slowly spiralled down into the oblivion of Nothing.
The moment of weakness passed, and a voice gurgled from behind me.
‘Sycamore.’
Another ghoul had materialised. It stood in the watch post’s doorway, formed into the rough approximation of a human shape. It held no discernible features and oily shadows dripped from its outstretched arms. The ghoul’s presence came as no surprise; it was simply the next victim of murder to find me. And in this city, on this world, there would always be a next victim.
Chapter Two
Every person carried with them into death the final moments of their life like memorials grieving for the last spark of corporeal existence. The Song of the Dead, it was called, a lament that was not designed to endure. It faded from memory until a spirit learned to let go and achieve true freedom. Most moved on to the unknown of the other side; others chose to remain as peaceful ghosts to haunt the places where they had lived. And then there were ghouls, those who refused to stop singing the Song of the Dead because they could not accept the manner in which they died.
‘Help me, Sycamore,’ said the ghoul in the doorway.
Sycamore, Shepherd of the Dead, spirit of vengeance. I struggled to remember who I was within his possession. Wendal Finn, I told myself. I am Wendal Finn. My mantra, my last rock of salvation, surrounded by the endless depths of an unforgiving sea.
‘Little ghoul,’ Sycamore said, and he made me step over the corpse on the watch post floor. ‘Can you tell me your name?’
He asked this because if a ghoul couldn’t remember its name then its murderer was unobtainable, perhaps already dead. In such cases, there was nothing to be done and Sycamore would banish the ghoul from his sight. But, to my dismay, this one remembered.
‘Clay Hysan.’ The name was spoken with an urgent hiss, and with its uttering changed an it into a he.
‘Sing me your Song, Clay Hysan. Show me how you died.’
I knew what happened next. Without words or melody, Hysan’s Song came as a drab monochrome vision, a preternatural glimpse into the recent past which broke down the walls of the watch post and superimposed itself over the environment. The vision muted the voice of the city and delivered me to a sparse room somewhere in any one of Old Castle’s many hidden corners; a room without windows and steeped in the flickering shadows of candlelight. Wax dripped onto bare floorboards. Dirty smoke drifted.
Hysan appeared in his Song as he would have in life. A wretch of a human, his grey beard and hair long and greasy. His naked body, brittle and grubby, had been strapped on its back to a wooden table into which words of magic had been carved. It was easy to assume that Hysan had been stolen off the streets where he lived, chosen to be a subject in the rites of the woman standing over him.
Of indeterminate age, the woman was dressed in a dusky gown that covered her from neck to foot. Sweat beaded on a head shaved smooth. With the look of a predator, face masked by concentration, she used a medical scalpel with the thinnest of blades to slice a symbol into the skin of Hysan’s stomach. This woman was a Magician. Her touch was so delicate that she drew no blood. An adept, then, casting a spell. She was saying something, either talking to her captive or reciting an incantation – it was impossible to tell for her lips moved without sound. It was always the same in these visions: the Song of the Dead came in near-total silence.
Clay Hysan was looking at me, and his voice I could hear, speaking to Sycamore.
‘I never learned her name.’ A dry and close rustle, whispered in a vacuum, narrating his moment of death, his Song. Hysan expressed dispassion, detached from the cruelties being inflicted upon him. ‘She never explained why she did this to me.’
And why would she? The Magicians of Old Castle were like fleas riding on the backs of the vermin who ruled the cities of Urdezha. Some would call them the bane of the Scientists; others, a necessary counterpart. They were secretive, hidden, keeping their purpose and reasons close to their chests. Magicians answered to their own kind only, but this woman would be answering to Sycamore.
‘She promised a hot meal and a contract of employment,’ Hysan explained as the woman completed the spell on his stomach and stepped back to admire her handiwork. ‘Said the Magicians had need of someone like me.’
‘Indeed,’ said Sycamore.
The homeless made excellent spies. They understood how to manoeuvre through the city’s every shadow and unseen space, and the Magicians paid them well for their services, especially when they needed to spy on the Scientists. Of course Clay Hysan would have jumped at this Magician’s offer. Unfortunately for him, her intent had clearly not lived up to her promise.
‘I never got my meal,’ Hysan said as though reading my thoughts. ‘And no, the contract wasn’t what I thought it’d be.’
The woman’s breath misted as she spoke into her hand and then released the words onto Hysan’s stomach with a flourish. They settled on him like wisps of smoke. Blood rose from the thin cuts, just enough to detail the spell in lines and swirls of red. A barren tree, I thought the symbol resembled. The Magician blew upon the blood and it congealed, hardened, turned to scabs.
‘The spell’s purpose?’ Sycamore thought to me. I didn’t know. Perhaps an experiment to further magical prowess, or maybe part of a clandestine plan – it didn’t matter. Whatever the purpose, its casting had resulted in murder.
Hysan said, ‘It didn’t hurt. I just felt more and more tired, and then I wasn’t alive any more.’
With further words of magic and a deft hand, the Magician sliced a circle around the scabs before gently cutting under them. With care and infinite patience, she worked the scalpel until the complete spell separated from Hysan’s body and floated up several inches, carried on a gossamer leaf of skin. Crimson steam began to rise from it. The magical script carved into the tabletop beneath Hysan glowed with a dim radiance. The Magician dropped the scalpel and raised her arms, chanting the crescendo of her incantation silently to my ears.
