The Song of the Sycamore, page 5
‘A grenade, Nel? In this space?’
‘Hold on to your balls.’
Johnny, tortured but silent in the cocoon of his own spirit, was beginning to break apart, expand, explode. Nel rolled the sphere across the basement floor and it stopped at his feet. She pushed me up the stairs, chasing after me, and then we fell entangled on the steps when the grenade detonated.
The concussion was dull, releasing a spiteful buzz in the basement, causing a pressure that made my ears pop painfully. A vacuum stole the air from my lungs. The blast shook dust down from the ceiling and the stairs rattled precariously. For a moment, I couldn’t catch my breath and felt sure the building would collapse on us. But Nel’s home-made device was more controlled than that.
Jon Johnny and his spirit were entwined in barbed lengths of red magic that squeezed and crushed as they buzzed, liquefying him to harmless bloody jelly that dripped to the floor with big, heavy splashes. By the time Nel’s grenade had exhausted itself, Johnny and his spirit were no more than a steaming gelatinous mound that filled the basement with a gag-inducing stench.
Nel pushed me off her and got to her feet. She brushed away dust and cobwebs from her coat and hair, while giving me a bitter look. ‘Now can we go?’
Chapter Nine
Hope – that was what drove me; that was all I had left. Hope for a stagnant existence on a broken world. I never envisioned my life turning out this way.
‘Here’s to good business,’ Mutley said, ‘and a job well done.’
I hadn’t intended to hang around at the Sharpened Card, but Mutley insisted that we join her for a drink when we emerged from the basement – to celebrate Jon Johnny’s demise, she said, which Nel thought an excellent idea, claiming that she deserved a drink after what I’d just put her through.
‘Good business,’ Nel toasted, clinking her glass against our host’s.
We sat in an alcove at one end of the public gambling room, in the light of ceiling lanterns and a table candle. A few of Mutley’s cronies stood at the bar, talking quietly; a few others had already begun the process of cleaning up Jon Johnny’s remains. Otherwise, the place was empty. There was something eerie about the sea of dust-laden games tables, devoid of gamblers. The Sharpened Card felt unnervingly still.
‘Bottoms up,’ Nel said and drained her glass in one go.
Mutley refilled it from the bottle on the table. I sipped mine, politely declining a top-up. I’d never liked the sour taste of wine. Mutley didn’t seem to care; she wasn’t exactly trying to hide that she preferred Nel’s company to mine.
Mutley was a tall woman, broad, strong-looking – pushing thirty, at a guess. Her hair was short, as dark and smartly cut as the suit and shirt she wore. There was a hardness to her face, cynicism in her eyes, no nonsense in her body language – tough yet calculating – and it was easy to see that she had the charm and guile to be a criminal of Reaper Town. And the shine she had taken to Nel was reciprocated, apparently. During the brief time we had all been sitting together, my friend had gradually edged closer to our host.
‘Finally, I can open for business,’ Mutley said, sipping her wine. ‘Thanks to you.’
She said it to Nel alone, which was fair even though she hadn’t been told it was Nel’s grenade that saved everyone’s skin.
‘As reward,’ Mutley continued, ‘I’d like to give you membership to the private tables upstairs. If you’d like that.’
‘Deal,’ Nel said brightly. ‘I bloody love the dice tables.’
Not that she had money to gamble with.
‘What about you, Wendal?’ Mutley didn’t take her eyes off Nel. ‘Are you a gambling man?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t have the luck for it.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’ Mutley considered me, looked unimpressed. ‘A good fixer never places much faith in luck, am I right? That is what you do for the Magicians, yes? Fix problems?’
‘Oh, don’t bother asking,’ Nel said, leaning into Mutley. ‘He won’t talk about what he does for the Magicians. Not even to me.’
‘Well, that seems a little uncharitable.’ Mutley pulled a pack of cheroots from her inside pocket, took one out and lit it. ‘But then Magicians do enjoy their secrets.’ Her eyes didn’t leave mine as she blew smoke into my face. ‘Are you going to finish your wine, Wendal?’
The underlying hint was heavy and unmistakable, though Nel didn’t seem to notice. My business at the Sharpened Card was concluded. Which was fine by me. I didn’t know what I was still doing there, anyway. Sickened in the aftermath of another miserable incident – another death, another dead end – I just wanted to walk away as usual, go home and get shit-faced to forget. And I had a lot to forget. If Jon Johnny wasn’t enough, the murder of Agtha Martal was fresh on my mind from yesterday. There was nothing worth celebrating here.
‘I should be going,’ I said, pushing the glass away. ‘Are you coming, Nel?’
‘No, I’d like to stay for another drink.’ She smiled at her host. ‘Or maybe two.’
‘Then that’s settled.’ Mutley’s glare left no uncertainty as to whether or not I should leave the table now. ‘Thank you for your time, Wendal. My people will show you out.’
Nel winked and gave me a little wave before I walked away.
Chapter Ten
They came, hundreds of them, charging down the valley beneath an ash-filled sky that glowed blood-red with the light of a hidden sun. A swarm of wastelanders, bearing weapons and armour cobbled together from aeons of detritus crushed into the hostile landscape. Their cries rose as a united ululation, the fearsome call of clansfolk that was heard so often across the spaces between the cities – battle cries and curses and promises of death, bellowed in the language of the Gardeners.
And they were coming for me.
An advance cavalry of berserkers rode upon the backs of bears – huge, shaggy beasts, savage and powerful enough to bite and rip foes limb from limb. But the bears wouldn’t get the chance to sink their teeth into me because, like their riders, they were sacrifices; the berserkers were already screaming the incantations that would summon their own spirits, preparing to erupt with burning spirit-matter. The valley rumbled with the thunder of a thousand pounding feet. The ground’s crust broke and churned into a storm of debris.
This was how my dreams remembered the wasteland. Remembered the war.
More warriors lined the tops of the valley walls, jeering, lofting their weapons. Naked and unarmed, I had been trapped between the charging army and the valley’s end, where a gigantic, dense graveforest began. Behemoth corpse-trees, as wide as houses, growing so tall that their highest branches disappeared into clouds of ash, cast a shadow over me with the cold promise of death should I enter the forest. The clansfolk promised me the same if I remained where I was. I trembled, terrified.
But Eden wasn’t afraid. She stood staring into the graveforest’s darkness. Her clothes were the simple gown of a Magician; her hair was long and straight, red as the unseen sun. I asked her to help me. Her shoulders shook, whether from crying or laughing I couldn’t tell, but she wouldn’t turn to me. Sometimes, in my intoxicated dreams, my wife refused to show me her face.
‘Eden, please—’ Something moved stealthily among the shadows of the graveforest. An instant later, the glint of a blade announced an attacker springing into the light. ‘No!’ I shouted, but Eden did nothing to prevent the spear piercing her chest and emerging covered in blood as it ripped through the back of her gown.
I watched, too terrified to move. It happened so fast that I saw little of the attacker’s identity. A flash of armour beneath a hooded robe – armour made from amber glass and decorated with magical script – was all my eyes detected before my wife was hoisted onto broad shoulders and carried into the darkness of gigantic corpse-trees.
Left to the mercy of the clansfolk, I looked up at the smeared light of the sky and begged the Gardeners for salvation—
‘Sycamore, someone’s crying.’
But it wasn’t me.
‘Can’t you hear it?’
The voice did not belong to the dream, though it made the visions crumble and fade away before the clansfolk could reach me. My consciousness poked its head above the effects of the jenkem.
‘I can’t stand it, Sycamore.’
Heart racing, tangled in sweat-stained sheets, I focused on the pasty cracked ceiling of my lodgings. In a flurry of motion, I leaned over the side of the bed and retched bile onto bare floorboards. Slowly, my breathing calmed and my mind gained a stronger grip on reality.
‘Make him stop.’
The only evidence of the speaker to be seen was nestled in a high corner of the room, above the words of a spell which had been seared into the wall. A ghoul bubbled as a patch of oily darkness there.
‘Go back to sleep,’ I croaked.
The spells glowed briefly. The ghoul burst into vapour, leaving nothing behind.
Kicking away the sheets, rising through the stink of my unwashed body and my vomit, I moved to the basin in the corner of the room and turned on the tap. The water was tepid, tasting of old pipes as I splashed my face and rinsed out my mouth. The last fog of intoxication parted to reveal a headache, and I realised that someone was crying. An edge to the sound took it beyond the generally accepted definition of upset. Tears of desperation, wailed with an innate fear that cut to my bones with the blade of empathy. It came from outside.
Crossing the room, I opened the only window in my lodgings. For the first time in more than two days, fresh air blew in, cool and clean to chase away the guilt.
‘Get up,’ a woman ordered.
‘No!’ was the tearful reply.
Down in the filthy lane that ran between my lodging house and another, a man lay on his back, eyes pinched closed, rubbing his thigh. He wasn’t much younger than me but his crying sounded younger than us both, as primal as a child’s. He had obviously just been knocked to the ground; two city watch officers stood over him, an older man and woman. He wore a plain constable’s uniform and held cuffs. She wore the uniform of a sergeant and carried a baton, looking very ready to use it again.
‘Don’t make me go,’ begged the man on the ground.
‘You’ll defend the city as is your duty!’
‘I-I don’t want to die.’
A runner. His time to fight in the war had come and he was too terrified to accept it. I couldn’t blame him.
‘Coward!’ This came from further along the alley, on the opposite side, from a woman leaning out of her window. ‘I lost two sons to the wasteland, and they didn’t die so you could run and hide.’
‘That’s right,’ said a man, his furious face appearing from behind the woman. ‘Serve your fucking city, coward!’
The sergeant pointed a finger at them. ‘Go inside!’ she commanded, and they did, slamming the window behind them. She then gestured to her constable, who pulled the runner to his feet roughly.
The sergeant gazed up at my window. I ducked back quickly, but not before catching her eye. When I looked again, the runner had been placed in cuffs and was being led along the alley on unsteady legs, head bowed. The sergeant looked back at me a couple of times, and then was gone from sight.
‘Poor bastard.’
I looked up to see Nel leaning out of her window, smiling down at me. ‘Hello, Wendal. I was beginning to think you were dead.’
I blinked at her a few times, deciding that I felt as though she wasn’t too far wrong. ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I could tell by the interesting aroma coming up from your room.’ Nel gave me a knowing glare. ‘When was the last time you ate?’ I took too long thinking of an answer and she rolled her eyes. ‘I’m heading into work,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own today, if you fancy a free meal.’
The idea of food set hunger pains rumbling in my gut. ‘That’d be good. I’ll meet you there.’
‘Have a wash first, Wendal. I can smell you from here.’
After a visit to the latrine, I made my way down to the communal bath beneath my lodging house. The water was hot and clean, cloudy with floral soap. It made me feel a little more human, but I didn’t linger to relax in the warmth. A couple of my neighbours were already in the bath when I arrived. One was an overweight man with far too much body hair, submerged to his shoulders and apparently asleep. The other was a fragile-looking woman with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, who stared at me whenever I wasn’t looking directly at her. I didn’t know their names but I’d seen them both around the place before. I didn’t speak and got on with washing myself.
People came and went from my lodging house, and no one seemed to live there for long – besides Nel and me. My neighbours hardly noticed my presence, which was fine as far as I was concerned. They weren’t the sorts I wanted to know anyway, not after seeing the things some of them had left behind in the latrines on my floor. Sordid books and blood-stained clothes and devices for purposes I couldn’t even begin to guess. It made me shudder. This place had changed for the worse since I became the property of the Magicians, as if the building had died with Eden. No families lived here any more, no laughter to be heard, though sometimes I could swear there were children crying in the night. It was difficult to tell if the sound was real through the amount of jenkem I used.
When I’d finished washing the stink of a two-day torpor off my body, I wrapped myself in a towel and made my way back up to my lodgings, where I discovered a note had been slid under the door in my absence. It was from Dyonne – a summons. She wanted to see me at noon.
Chapter Eleven
Nel worked in a dingy tavern called Piper’s situated close to where we lived in the Tinman District. It was a clear day as I made my way to it, but while I walked down Pharaoh Street, a chilly shadow suddenly fell over Old Castle and made me shiver. At first, I didn’t think much of it; it wasn’t unusual for the sun to disappear behind the thick smoke belted into the air by the various reduction houses around the city. But the forge chimneys weren’t belting out smoke today. Instead, there was an immense formation of black clouds in the sky. The citizens around me looked unfazed by its presence, but it disturbed me.
The clouds were many leagues off, not only high in the sky but also stretching down low, perhaps all the way to the wasteland. Even from such a great distance away, I could still see that they were roiling, billowing. Yet they appeared fixed, shot through with streaks of orange like fire, but otherwise entirely too dark, sooty. Storms had a habit of coming fast and angry out of the wastes, but this was no ordinary storm. It reminded me of the explosions I’d seen in the war but on a monumental scale. Like a wall of storm.
Since the citizens were going about their daily routines, hurrying along the street, bustling in and out of stores and conveniences, entirely unconcerned by the strange sight and the shadow it had cast, I reasoned that its presence was old news to the city, and I asked Nel about it when I reached Piper’s.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t spend so much time indulging your habit, you’d know what it is.’
Nel was the only server on duty. I sat at the bar, while a few other customers ate and drank at tables and Piper’s enjoyed a lull between breakfast and lunch. The rich smell of cooking came from the kitchen out back.
‘That storm was started by an explosion,’ Nel continued. ‘It’s hanging over Alexria.’
‘Alexria?’ The next city you’d come to if you travelled north-west from Old Castle. It was over a hundred leagues away, yet the storm was big enough to see from here? ‘What happened?’
‘The Scientists aren’t saying much, but I hear all kinds of shit in this place. The most popular rumour is that Alexria’s defences failed during an attack. Clansfolk or monsters – I don’t know, maybe both – but something from the wasteland got inside, and you’ve seen the results for yourself.’
‘Fuck … that can’t be true, can it?’ Because as far as anyone could trace back, the clansfolk had never been strong enough to take down a city. ‘The explosion came from inside Alexria?’
‘That’s what the Scientists are saying,’ Nel said. ‘I don’t think anyone really knows what caused it.’
‘What about the citizens? Are they all right?’
Nel shrugged.
I swore again. ‘Why is nobody panicking?’
‘You slept through the show. There was plenty of panic a couple of days ago. You should have been there. The roar of the explosion woke me up. The city sirens went off. I nearly shit myself. Came down to see you but you wouldn’t open your bloody door.’
‘I was busy.’
Nel rolled her eyes. ‘The Scientists were quick to transmit a statement telling us that we were safe. What happened to Alexria wouldn’t happen to Old Castle, they said – which, of course, means they know more than they’re saying.’
The Scientists always did.
‘Anyway, it’s old news now, Wendal.’
I pondered Alexria’s fate while Nel went off to get me a bowl of stew, some bread and a jug of water. She laid them out on the bar, and then stared at me until my silence confirmed that she wasn’t getting a thank you.
‘You’re welcome,’ she muttered before attending to her chores.
I tucked into the stew. It was good, hot and salty; the bread freshly baked, steaming when I ripped it open.
‘I keep thinking about that poor runner,’ Nel said with her back to me, stacking clean glasses and tankards behind the bar. ‘I considered running on the day I went to war. I suppose everybody does.’
I mumbled something non-committal through a mouthful of food. My thoughts remained on Alexria.
‘Still, at least you got to see your girlfriend in action.’
