The Song of the Sycamore, page 19
‘What are you doing, Lana?’
Before she could answer, boots rang on the metal walkways above us as more city watch officers arrived at the forge.
‘Clear!’ one of them shouted. ‘Sergeant Khem?’
‘Clear!’ Lana replied. ‘Bring me cuffs.’ Nel struggled, but the sergeant’s grip was a vice. I had no idea what Lana was up to but didn’t argue when she looked at me and said, ‘Leave. Right now.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
I didn’t have to wait long before I discovered why Nel had been arrested.
That evening, in my lodgings, I had more on my mind than I could cope with. The meeting in the Garden – Ghan Hathor … Eden’s master had a name. Meredith said that she could find him, but it wasn’t only Dyonne and the Salem standing in her way. I kept seeing the lightning bolt that had struck the city. What if more got through? What if the storm drained the shield and destroyed Old Castle? I had to agree with Sycamore: the Song of Always wouldn’t save me from the explosion of an ether-growth. Everyone in the city would die.
I couldn’t think about it any more, so I lit a cake of jenkem, needing to escape for a while. I had already been through the daily routine of telling Itch to go back to sleep and was sitting on my windowsill, breathing in the smoky air, when Lana let herself into my lodgings. Casually, as though she were simply coming home after a hard day at work, she undid the belt from which her baton hung and threw it on the table before pulling the tie from her hair.
‘We need to talk about Janelle Memphis,’ she said, after a good lungful of the smoke which had already dulled the edges of my perception. ‘Did you know she’s been hanging around Reaper Town?’
I nodded.
‘The city watch have been keeping an eye on her, Wendal. She’s a new face and we think she’s working for someone big. What do you know about Memphis?’
‘She likes to be called Nel,’ I said, not really feeling the admonishment in my voice. ‘And I’m not sure what to say.’
‘Tell me honestly, is she affiliated with the Magicians?’
‘No.’
‘Then who’s she working for?’
I shrugged.
‘Come on, Wendal, I’m not a fucking idiot. Are you involved in this, too?’
‘No.’
‘Then why were you looking for Memphis at the reduction house today? Not exactly an obvious hang-out, is it?’
‘I …’ It was a good question and one I couldn’t answer. ‘I just got lucky. Lana, listen. All I can tell you is that Nel has bitten off more than she can chew. She’s not a criminal.’
‘You think she deserves protecting, fine. Let’s talk about why she was at the reduction house. Her home-made grenades were bad enough, but she was also carrying a whole load of chemicals.’
‘Chemicals?’
‘Not jenkem, not booze – something new called Liquid Ether.’
Mutley. What had Nel got herself into?
‘This chemical comes out of Reaper Town,’ Lana continued. ‘The Magicians are involved somehow, and your friend was at the reduction house making a sale for someone. No one would have noticed she was even there if it hadn’t been for the skarabs.’ She folded her arms and sank into herself. ‘Are you sure she’s not working for the Magicians, Wendal? It’s important that I know.’
Sycamore had always had his doubts about Nel, suspicious that she had turned up in my life at exactly the right moment, when I needed a friend most. He wondered if she was a Magician’s lackey and that Dyonne had ordered her to form a friendship with me, but I didn’t doubt Nel for a moment. She was no one’s lackey. I shook my head and saw that Lana wanted to believe me.
She and I always ended up in this room together, but this was one of the few proper conversations we’d ever shared. I wished the topic were happier, willed the jenkem to take me quicker. At least my brain had slowed enough to stop me worrying about the storm and repeating the name Ghan Hathor.
‘Where’s Nel now?’ I asked.
‘Tinman Watch Station, being questioned. The only reason she hasn’t been taken to gaol yet is because we can’t decide how big a player she is. Now, is there anything I need to know?’
‘Nel’s an idiot, but she’s not a player. You have to believe me, Lana.’
She sighed with the first effects of intoxication as she walked around to sit on the bed. She stared at me on the sill, her lips pursed with uncertainty.
‘No one knows Nel like I do,’ I implored. ‘She’s a good person in trouble. You don’t need her to find out what’s going on in Reaper Town.’
Lana made a growling sound. She knew that I knew more than I could say. ‘This city has enough to handle without shit like this, Wendal.’
‘Can you help me to help Nel?’
‘Maybe.’ Perhaps Lana held a little respect for our strange relationship; she knew that anything I gave her on Nel could be used as leverage, and a close friend of mine might become a known informant among some very dangerous people. Or perhaps it was just the jenkem that made her relent with a sagging of her shoulders. ‘If she’s willing to help herself.’
‘Tell me how.’
‘Providing she can keep her mouth shut tonight, I’ll order her release in the morning and say it’s so I can follow her around and see who she leads me to.’ Lana shrugged. ‘So, Memphis needs to be smart, Wendal.’
‘She won’t go back to Reaper Town,’ I promised.
‘Then eventually I’ll stop watching her. Don’t make me regret this.’ A light smirk curved Lana’s lips. ‘And I hope she appreciates how lucky she is that her friend has her back. You can pick her up from the station in the morning. She’ll have a fine to pay.’
‘Thank you.’ I snorted a laugh that sounded relieved; really, it was the smoke rising from the burner carrying my cares away.
But Lana wasn’t quite ready to let go of her cares yet. She took several deep breaths and closed her eyes. ‘I never saw skarabs in the war. I didn’t really know what they were like. I mean, I’d heard stories about them, but … A lot of people died today.’
A single tear ran down her cheek. ‘The shield is focused on the storm, and it’s taking nearly all our ether energy to keep it up there. We’ve barely enough left to power the city cannons. The wall is being manned day and night, but … but Old Castle is prone to attack from the wasteland, Wendal.’ She rubbed her face like she had more to worry about than I did. ‘Come to bed,’ she whispered, removing her jacket. ‘I need to forget everything about this fucking day.’
But by then, it was Eden’s voice I was hearing …
The smell of real meat roasting over a fire was both appetising and nauseating. Spitting fat and greasy smoke into the air, it created a stench that clung to your clothes and skin, stayed in your hair and nostrils for days. It was an alien reek not easily forgotten by city soldiers, because meat for us was a concept, an idea served on our plates as flavoured Dust infused with nutrients and vitamins. But for the clansfolk, meat was a product of their environment, abundant on the wasteland, real, bountiful for hunting.
‘Is this really how you remember the clansfolk?’ Eden said. ‘As cannibals?’
She and I sat in a cramped cage of rusty metal too low to stand in. Outside, the clansfolk had camped in a valley. The light from an ether-filled sky sparkled upon the icy ground. It was cold. Winter on the wasteland. Warriors drank and laughed, breath frosting in the air. A hundred or more of them, dressed in furs and armour of bone and metal, shaking weapons in celebration as they sang in guttural Salabese. The battle had been hard won for them, and they deserved their victory banquet. Throughout the camp, real meat turned on spits over golden flames.
‘I don’t think they’re cannibals,’ I told Eden.
‘Oh, I get it. You don’t regard wastelanders as human, therefore they’re not eating their own kind.’
It was the corpses of fallen city soldiers that turned on spits. Naked and trussed, crisping and smoking over fires, real meat almost ready to serve.
‘Your prejudices run so deep you’re practically a good citizen, Wendal.’ Eden made an angry noise. ‘This isn’t how they are.’
My dream wasn’t regurgitating a memory of Eden this time; this was how I imagined she would react to the man I was now, the solider who had returned from the wasteland damaged. It happened sometimes. And no; that man did not believe the clansfolk were human.
Most were taller, broader than the average citizen, bodies honed to muscle by a harsh life, long hair and beards braided and matted into knotty locks. Their skin was a poisonous green colour. Heads like boulders, their wide mouths were full of blocky, oversized teeth with tusks jutting up from their lower jaws. Millennia ago, the clansfolk had evolved from biological mutations resulting from the effects of magical weapons deployed during the Ether Wars. They were the ones left behind by the cities, and they should have died out. Instead, they had survived, changed and adapted to live in a hostile environment. They might have originated from human stock, but they weren’t like us any more.
‘They don’t care what I think of them,’ I told my wife, staring at the fire closest to the cage. Lana Khem was being turned over crackling flames by a broad wastelander. Lana’s hair had burned away, her eyes had boiled to nothing and her skin was red and charred. The spit protruded from her mouth, keeping it open as if to preserve her final scream. ‘I hate them and everything they do, Eden. They live to kill us.’
‘What about the villages and settlements we destroyed?’ Eden said. ‘The children and families who died in the name of our war? They didn’t ride out to meet us in glorious battles, did they?’
‘We did as we had to.’
‘Don’t delude yourself, Wendal. The human race rose to the best it could be and then crashed headfirst into the worst, and that’s where we stayed. The Scientists would have us believe that history began ten thousand years ago, when the Salahbeem left. They don’t want us to remember what came before, when we were better than this. They want us to deny our mistakes, forget our origins. I mean, what if it’s true? What if we’re not native to this world and came to Urdezha from somewhere else?’
I’d heard that myth before. It was something the Magicians liked to believe, and the Scientists denied. ‘What does it matter?’
‘Which is exactly the Scientists’ philosophy. No point being interested in how we used to be if we can’t go back there.’
‘I don’t want to go back because I think the Magicians romanticised the Salahbeem. They were probably as bad as the clansfolk.’
‘Like I said, you’re becoming a good citizen, Wendal.’
‘I’ve had more insight than you.’
Joints of human meat were being carried to long stone tables and carved up for the plates of hungry clansfolk. A hush fell over the camp as eager mouths tore into carrion from the battlefield. Lana continued to turn and silently scream.
‘Remnants,’ Eden said. ‘Vestiges of past mistakes. You only need to look at the end of this valley to know that’s all we are.’
But I didn’t want to look. On the other side of the camp, the valley ended not far away, and there the giant corpse-trees of a graveforest grew, a huge and brooding silhouette encapsulating the darkness of my worst memories.
‘You’re one of the few soldiers who saw the inside of a graveforest and lived to tell the tale,’ Eden said. ‘You heard it, didn’t you? You heard the original Song of the Dead in there.’
I didn’t reply.
‘Why don’t your dreams ever confront what happened in that graveforest?’ Eden expressed puzzlement. ‘What are you most afraid of? Yourself? Or that survivalist you met – what was her name?’
‘August Jakob.’
‘See? You do remember. Now, what about your friends? Hanna, Danii, the rest of the soldiers you fought with – why don’t you dream of them?’
‘Eden, every waking minute of every day I have to carry the wasteland around with me. I don’t remember what happened in the graveforest because Sycamore won’t let me.’
My wife scoffed and her manner changed. ‘You might consider denial a necessary form of protection, Wendal, but in actuality the act of lying to yourself is nothing short of pointless.’ Eden turned sycamore-seed eyes to me. ‘And the clansfolk don’t eat city soldiers, no matter what you think of them.’
I sighed and my shoulders sagged. He had to turn up eventually.
In the camp, two clansfolk lifted Lana off the flames and carried her to a table for carving. Rowdy cheering and songs had started up again.
‘Your recent conversations have roused my curiosity,’ Sycamore said. ‘And you know how much I hate it when your race brings that out in me.’
He hated the very act of humans breathing, but I played along. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Don’t you think it’s interesting how Dyonne Obor was more perturbed about Ing Meredith than the menace hanging over her city?’
‘Not especially,’ I replied. ‘Nothing Dyonne does surprises me any more.’
‘I can’t help thinking that Meredith is an anomaly, a spanner in the works, as it were.’
I frowned at the image of my wife, surprised by such an obvious statement. ‘Dyonne already told us that much. Meredith is meddling in the Salem’s affairs and—’
‘No, no – you’re not following me. I’ve long suspected that Dyonne isn’t quite the dutiful servant she purports to be. What if she’s up to something of which the Salem are unaware and that is why she was perturbed by Meredith’s interference?’
‘You have suspicions about everybody, all the time.’
‘I have the influence of my host to thank for that.’
In this dream, even if I closed my eyes, I couldn’t stop seeing the clansfolk feasting upon roasted city soldiers. ‘All you care about is making me piss Dyonne off enough to summon my moment of death.’
‘Wendal, you are so self-absorbed that I’m not sure you have truly heard all you have been told. Answer me – do you harbour any doubts over whether or not Ing Meredith is telling the truth?’
‘No.’ And I meant it.
‘Then consider – there is a Magician out there somewhere named Ghan Hathor. A short time ago, the Salem found reason to order his execution, which must have been at the same time that Eden was serving as his apprentice. This I find interesting because, allegedly, Hathor’s executioner was Dyonne Obor.’
‘Dyonne …’ I suddenly saw the dark void into which Eden had fallen and found Ing Meredith staring back at me. What was it she had said about Dyonne being in almost as much trouble as her?
‘The Salem believes that Hathor is dead, but what did Eden do when the assassin came calling? Kill herself? Was her master’s execution connected to black stone?’
Sycamore crawled to the front of the cage, curling my wife’s fingers around the bars, staring out onto the clansfolk’s grisly banquet. ‘I often wonder how the Magicians knew I was in Old Castle, Wendal. The dead have loose lips, to be sure, but there’s more to it than that. The Salem see much of what occurs in this city, but not as much as the Quantum. There must be a reason why the Scientists have never approached you, or found a way to stop the Magicians using me against them.’
A big secret world was swirling around the city, Meredith had said, and I was only just beginning to see it.
‘The Quantum and the Salem have their plots and feuds,’ Sycamore continued, ‘but I’m beginning to wonder if Dyonne Obor lurks between them with plans of her own. What if Ing Meredith’s threat is more personal than she’s letting on?’
‘I don’t see it,’ I said. ‘What could Dyonne do that the Salem wouldn’t know about? She holds a trusted rank, the Grand Adepts keep her close, they …’ My thoughts halted as another question clicked into my head, based on something Dyonne had told me. ‘A Magician needs permission from the Salem to take on an apprentice. When they ordered Ghan Hathor’s execution, did they know who his apprentice was? Did Dyonne know?’
‘You cannot risk broaching this topic with Dyonne herself, and Hathor can only answer questions if Meredith finds him before death catches up with her. Quite a quandary. I’m not sure what to suggest to increase your proactivity here, Wendal.’
How did I find the strength to wait, pray, for Meredith to come good?
‘At least Nel has given you an alternative concern to worry over.’ Sycamore sat back as three clansfolk approached the cage. One slipped the chain from the gate, levelling a bone spear as the other two stepped in and grabbed him. Hair wild and faces dirty green, they grunted Salabese through blocky teeth and tusks as they dragged him towards the fire over which Lana Khem had cooked. The gate was closed and chained, its rusty bars separating me from the image of my wife.
Eden gazed at me calmly as the clansfolk laid Sycamore down on the ground and prepared him for gutting. ‘Meredith was right, Wendal. The end begins for you now. My freedom is coming. The storm will see to that.’
I looked away as a clanswoman stabbed down into Eden’s stomach with a wickedly sharp knife and turned my eyes to the sky. Clouds were closing in. Snow would come soon.
Chapter Thirty-Three
What should have been a simple morning – pick up Nel, read her the riot act and then return home where I could carry on obsessing over my dilemma – turned out to be far more complicated.
As always, Lana had gone by the time I woke up, and I rose from bed with a bastard of a jenkem hangover which left me sick to my stomach. Stumbling from my lodging house and out into the Tinman District was a painful exercise: the rumble of the city shield felt like a vice squeezing my temples; flashes of fiery orange in the sky like nails driven into my eyes.
Smoke was rising in the distance, from somewhere at the centre of Old Castle. I heard citizens talking about it on the street. From what I could gather, the storm had penetrated the shield with three more lightning strikes during the night, all of them focusing on the Fusion, damaging buildings and causing fires in the area.
