Weeks passed and Ellis' numbness was replaced by a
mixture of boredom, resentment and despair.
He was living in a garret in the top floor of a crumbling tenement
building high on the hills overlooking the coastline of the district of
Searingsands, where they had been abandoned by Siren, Harker and the crew of
the Ebon Crest. He shared a room
with Gulliver, the Former Baron had another and Broken-Hope, who did not need
to sleep, waited in their only other room, a sort of kitchen/dining-room/living
area combination. Rockspark had
deserted them weeks ago, initially to seek some passage on a ship or through a
less-well-known route over land that might take them back north to the
Shalereef harbour district, but since he had not returned what he was actually
doing was anybody's guess.
The problem was that they had been abandoned in
Searingsands at a most inopportune moment.
The district, which to Ellis would easily constitute a vast city in its
own right, was currently embroiled in a war, of sorts, with the neighbouring
district of Shadedstream to the North.
The conflict had broken out only a few days before their arrival and
whilst there was very little in the way of open hostilities at the moment, most
forms of passage north were forbidden.
Thus Ellis was trapped in a strange city within
another strange city, on a world that was not his own, pining after a woman he
felt had abandoned him to that fate. He
spent much of his time sealed away in the garret, occasionally staring out at
the dusty cityscape below him, watching the few authorised vessels entering and
leaving the port and wishing he were sailing on one.
Ellis was not the only one to be in such a sorry
state, however. Gulliver too seemed
despondent after Siren had left them and he could be heard on numerous
occasions sounding off about what a slimy bastard his brother really was. In truth, Ellis found it hard to believe
that Gulliver and Harker could possibly be related, since they had nothing in
common save an interest in Siren, or so it seemed, and they barely looked
anything alike. Gulliver was lanky and
clumsy with soft, rounded features that only a mother could truly love and long
greasy hair, whereas Harker seemed to be a pirate adonis, although Ellis tried
not to let his mind linger too long on such thoughts, for he was inevitably
reminded that Siren had chosen that 'adonis' over him. And why shouldn't she? What did he have to offer?
Broken-Hope, too, was not faring well in
Searingsands, having never fully recovered from his transportation of their
party from the Catacombs of the Fallen to the Ebon Crest. Indeed, he seemed to be worsening by the day
and the Former Baron, who seemed to be the only one of them in fine spirits,
was making it his personal project to find out why. Without access to his laboratory and equipment it was hard going,
but the old man seemed to relish the challenge, in spite of the rather serious
nature of the Fallen's predicament and the complete lack of any obvious
improvement over the many weeks he had so far spent at the task.
By Ellis’ count they had now been in Searingsands
for nearly six weeks, which meant he had been stuck in Shadow for two
months. He found it hard to believe and
even harder to bear. There had been a
point, of course, when he hadn’t minded the prospect of staying in Shadow as
long as that was where Siren was too, but not that that seemed unlikely the
bizarre city-world was losing much of its eclectic appeal and being holed up in
one place was not helping at all.
Ellis realised this one sweltering amber-jade
evening as he was staring out at the harbour, pining as always and sick of
himself as much as his situation.
Gulliver was snoring in the bed on the other side of the room and he
could just hear the Former Baron muttering to himself, or talking to
Broken-Hope, next door. The old man
was, as was often the case these days, exasperated by his lack of resources and
his related lack of success. “I just
need a different perspective,” he kept saying, almost like a mantra, so that
Ellis had to hear it again and again, drumming into his subconscious.
I think I need some air, he thought at last,
tired of hearing the old man’s repetitive self-recriminations and feeling a
little guilty at his own stagnation. He
pushed away from the window with such force that Gulliver stirred on the other
side of the room, rolling over in his bed before resuming his snoring. Ellis paid him no heed and ventured out in
the main room of the tiny garret apartment, where the Former Baron was pacing
back and forth in front of Broken-Hope.
“I’m just going for a walk,” Ellis told them.
“Goodbye, Ellis,” Broken-Hope croaked in reply, but
the Former Baron just gave an absent-minded wave before returning to his
patient.
“I’ll see you both later then,” Ellis continued,
sounding more cheerful than he really felt, before stepping out into the
hallway of the tenement building and descending its crumbling, echoing
staircase, which always seemed to smell of body odour and spices.
He did his best to ignore the noises coming from
each of the apartments he passed on the way down. It seemed that the lives of the other inhabitants were always
spilling out into that stairwell and they were always more dramatic, or melodramatic,
than he would have believed if he hadn’t witnessed them with his own eyes. This journey was no exception, interrupted
as it was by a couple screaming at each other loudly on the third floor, before
embracing each other passionately and hurrying back into their apartment just
as Ellis was passing by, and a small child sitting on the third step up from
the ground floor, crying her eyes out for no apparent reason. Ellis had almost wanted to help her, but he
didn’t know what he could do and so he passed her by as quietly as he could and
then opened the main door to the bustling street outside.
If Ellis had thought that Shalereef and its harbour
had been busy - and, with the exception of the day of his arrival, when the
streets had been deserted because of a Lithoderm incursion, he always had -
then he would have to come up with another word to describe the chaos of
Searingsands. The district was like a
living, pulsating organism of commerce and crowds and the fact that it was
technically at war did not seem to make any difference. From dawn until late in the evening the
streets were filled with people. Market
stalls lined every street wide enough to hold them and still let customers
through. The air was filled with the
varied shouts of vendors and the hum of the populace. Strange, reedy instruments were played on street corners and hot
foot, cooked at the stalls, sent its fruity, spiced fragrances into the breeze.
At another time Ellis would probably have loved
it. He would have been fascinated by
all the different colours of clothing people wore, the thousand flavours of
spices he could taste and buy. He would
have tried to work out the cadences of the music and perhaps learnt some of the
dances he saw being played out near the musicians (although he would never have
danced any of them in public). He would
have wanted to know what surprises awaited him around every new street corner
and he would have been eager to see all the myriad palaces of the richer parts
of the district, with their palm trees and colonnades, sculptures and
pools. Whilst he had taken in all these
details and more over the past month and a half, they had not thrilled him, nor
had they penetrated much into his perpetual gloom and on this particular
evening he was keen to leave the crowds behind and find somewhere quieter,
somewhere he could sit and think without being disturbed.
This desire led him to seek out the backstreets and
alleys of Searingsands as he made his way downhill towards the harbour. He was vaguely reminded of a similar
journey, made in a similar temper, albeit with some slight inebriation, only
two months previously, as he had walked down the hill from DUSK. He was pondering that other journey, that
other night after his meeting with Sarah which led to his fateful discovery of
Doctor Barkham’s ring, and he found it hard to put into the context of where he
was now, what he was doing. It seemed
not just to be part of some other world, but of some other life.
It was true, he realised, what Sarah had told him that
night. Everything about who he had been
back in Larksborough had been a lie, a façade put on to impress his
friends. It had only taken five seconds
spent in Shadow to dispel that illusion and he had never gone back to it. Instead he had found someone else and a
different life, which, although chaotic and dangerous, had been more real to
him than his old life. Now, as he
walked through a silent alley between tiered, box-like tenement buildings, it
just seemed empty.
“Well,” came a gruff voice from behind, making Ellis
jump, “what ‘ave we ‘ere, then?” There
was something familiar about the voice, although Ellis couldn’t quite place it
and he had no idea why there would be anyone familiar in these parts. He began to turn around as the voice
continued, “I would ‘ave never expected to see you ‘ere, boy.”
Ellis completed his one-eighty and stared in horror
at the hairy, rotund man before him, no longer caring about the Former Baron’s
warning of two months previously as he stared right at the man’s mismatched
eyes.
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