Gilead faded in and out of consciousness. Streaks of fire raced through his veins, and at times it felt as though there was a serpent coiling around his chest cavity and attempting to crush the life from him. He dreamt long and fevered, strange visions dancing before his eyes. Most frequently the visions were of Dindrane, but he dreamt of other places as well: he dreamt of Camelot, and of the grand vaults of heaven. He dreamt that he wandered through the Arabian desert until he died of thirst. He dreamt of the sea, of ghosts crawling across the water’s surface.

  The brief gaps of awakening in between his dreams gave some context. Ben Gibson had gotten him into a one-room shack lit by flickering firelight. Twice, Gilead was woken by Ben plunging a needle into his arm and injecting something that brought agony with it. When he was at his strongest, Ben would bring a bowl of yellowish liquid to his lips and urge him to drink. It tasted faintly of salt.

  Then, at long last, the pain abated, and Gilead felt he could breathe freely once more. In an instant, an immense wave of exhaustion struck, and he fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

  When he awoke from that sleep, Gilead felt immensely rejuvenated, albeit commensurately hungry and thirsty. Ben Gibson was nowhere to be seen. Gilead sat upright, and while fighting off lightheadedness and the parched dryness of his mouth, called for his rescuer. A few moments later, the man showed himself.

  “Ah, good to see, good to see. How do you feel, boy?”

  “Passing fair, thanks to you. I have twice over debt of my life to you. But have you any drink or meat?”

  Ben nodded. “Food,” he said, which to Gilead sounded like a complete nonsense word.

  “Food? What is that?”

  “It’s anything you eat. We use words differently now; meat means the stuff that comes from the butcher.”

  Gilead became acutely aware of how different was the world into which he had been tossed upon his resurrection. It had been long enough for language to change, for new kinds of weapon to be introduced, and for fashion to become unrecognizable. How long had he spent dead?

  The cabin in which Gilead had been resting appeared not too different from any woodkeeper’s hut, at least, with the exception of the thing (Gibson’s shotgun) suspended on one wall. The only furniture around was the bed, a dining table, and the fireplace with a pot bubbling away on it. Gilead started to go for the pot, lusting after the food within, until he remembered that he was quite naked. His modesty had deserted him earlier due to a combination of exhaustion and adrenaline, but no longer. Ben explained that he had no clothes to offer him, so the only way that he could preserve modesty was to wrap a blanket around himself when he sat down for supper. There was a slab of bread and a tin cup full of yellowish liquid on his side of the table, while Ben Gibson had a bowl of stew for himself.

  “You’ve been out for a couple a’ days, so forgive me if I don’t trust your stomach. You get beef tea and bread until you’ve proven you won’t spew my tatties and onions and other things all over the floor.”

  “Beef… tea? Tea?”

  “Aye. The tea of the beef. It’s the only thing you’ve had the whole time of your recovery.”

  The yellowish liquid in the cup tasted faintly of salt, marking it as the same stuff he’d been given during his convalescence. He drank it all, and devoured the slab of white bread. Then Ben squinted at him, waiting for him to vomit it back up.

  Gilead took this time to sate his curiosity. “You’re a Christian, yes? Do you still count the years since the birth of our Lord?”

  Ben Gibson continued to squint. “You’re asking what year it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that depends on who you ask, I’m afraid. Different people will give you different answers here in Scrapyard, and nobody wants to admit they’re in the wrong. But here? Where you’re standing, we say the year is 1893.”

  “Eighteen ninety-three?” said Gilead. He didn’t understand. In more ways than one he didn’t understand. “One thousand, eight hundred and ninety-three years since the birth of Christ?”

  “What year was it, last thing you remember?”

  “Four hundred and ninety-seven. Gilead stared down at the table, his voice sounding distant to his own ears. “One thousand, four hundred years. Oh.”

  Ben Gibson nodded compassionately, then stood up. He went to the shelf and fetched a wooden bowl, then went to the cauldron bubbling away on his fireplace. “If it gives you any valor, you’re far from the first. I’ve been helping medievalites like you come up from the catacombs for fifteen years, ever since we arrived in Scrapyard, and the others all seemed to turn out alright.”

  Fourteen centuries was a long time. Long enough that, out of a stew with three ingredients being cooked over a fireplace, Gilead only recognized two of them. Everyone he’d ever known was not only dead, but long since forgotten. Who in this far distant future would care to think of King Arthur? Like a wax tablet erased by the hand of a student, so too had Gilead’s prior existence been wiped away.

  Ben Gibson set down the bowl, half-full of piping hot stew, right in front of him. “Eat up, lad. Night’s about to fall. And that means two things: I get to watch out for ghouls, and you get to learn where the hell you are.”

  Gilead ate. He had had stew like this countless times throughout his life, albeit never with potatoes, but this was one of the better ones. As he ate, he asked questions about everything that had confused him: the gun, the lantern, Gibson’s clothes, and so on and so forth. Crotchety though he may have been, Gibson answered each question patiently. When both men had finished eating, Gibson stood up and went outside, leaving the door open a crack.

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  As much as Gilead hated to be naked indoors, he hated to be naked outdoors even more, and the wool blanket he clutched around his body did little to alleviate the sensation of nudity. He stepped outside to find Ben Gibson, the great twin-barreled gun propped up against his leg as he sat in a chair facing outward into the great dark, a clay pipe puffing away between his lips. There was a second chair planted beside him, waiting for Gilead to sit in it. But Gilead wasn’t paying much attention to the chair, and this was for the same reason as why Ben Gibson had no need for a torch or lantern despite the arrival of nightfall.

  The sky glowed with divine writing. Strings of text formed vast, grand arcs that wrapped around the vault of the heavens the same way as threads in a ball of yarn, each character a subtle golden glow that lit up the dark brighter than any star. There were no stars, no moon, only those hundreds of runes. Was this the language of creation?

  “Have a seat, lad. It’s no good for your eyes to keep staring up at the sky like that.”

  “What is that?” Gilead said, all but breathless with awe.

  “Don’t know. Ain’t no stars in Scrapyard, nary a moon neither. We have a sun, and we have that.”

  Gilead sat down. “You said this place is called Scrapyard? How did I come to be here? I took my end near Salisbury.”

  Ben Gibson nodded. “Carlisle’s about a day’s walk thataway.” He pointed forward and to the side. Then he turned, and pointing back and to the right said, “Eighty or ninety miles thataway to go to Leeds, that’s the biggest town we have left. A lot more than eighty if you want to take a road instead of walking through ghoul country, of course.”

  “Carlisle? I have wist of Carlisle, and have been there. There is a very great church in Carlisle. Then, we are in Cumbria?”

  Ben shook his head. “We’re in Scrapyard. But Cumbria’s in Scrapyard, and we’re in Cumbria, so we’re in Scrapyard.”

  “Britain has been renamed to Scrapyard?”

  Ben Gibson shook his head, and puffed on his pipe, and spent a long while staring out into the woods. “Let me tell you a story, lad.”

  “It happened fifteen years ago, Friday, the 13th of June, 1879. That was the day that Leedsrealm got taken. Now it had already been a strange year before that all happened; there were deaths all over, diseases and murders and worse things. The mad German had proved to the world that animal electricity was of value, an’ Parliament was tearing itself apart asking what was to be done about that. But you couldn’t tell it was going to happen the day it did. Morning of the 13th was normal. Then, a little after noon…”

  Ben Gibson paused, bowing his head. Gilead didn’t interrupt him; he knew the look of a man lost to his own memories when he saw it.

  “The whole sky turned red. Everything went dark, the sun had gone out, you stumbled around in the middle of the red silhouettes and wondered if this was the end of the world. I don’t know how long it lasted; felt like hours, but I don’t think it could’ve been. Then everything went back to normal, except that the rest of the world wasn’t there. Only Scrapyard.

  “The North Sea’s coast is gone, the land just fades away into the blood ocean now. Newcastle went under, flooded by the outlet that separates us from Furret. Leeds is up against Topeka County now, with Manchester and Sheffield gone in the red. Scrapyard’s not a right place, not a real place. It’s all fragments like us, chunks of places from somewhere else, worlds that shouldn’t be real, all huddling together to resist the blood ocean’s encroaching. And for some reason, every so often, Scrapyard brings back the dead, even if they died in places that got left behind. So that’s where you are, and that’s how you got here. Questions?”

  Gilead didn’t fully understand, but he realized that neither did Ben Gibson. It was all impossible madness. Pieces of worlds taken up, put somewhere else, somewhere with an ocean of blood. It sounded like verses from the Apocalypse of John, but without any order or meaning.

  Was this the end times? That was when the dead were supposed to come back. But if this was the end times, then were was the judgement, where was the Antichrist and the Beast? Was every prophet wrong? Or were there other things besides the divine that could bring about such horrors?

  Gilead rubbed fiercely at his brow. There were practical matters to consider.

  “What will I do next?”

  “Now that’s a good question, lad. Now that you can stay on your own, I’m going to go to Mrs. Blair in the village and try to get some clothes that’ll actually fit you. You’ll stay here for at least a couple more days to let you sweat the venom out.”

  “I assure you, I have no want of such extra care. I can wend away soon, if only you will…”

  “The government pays me to take care of you backarounders, and I’ll damned well be doing my job, thank you very much. If you feel useless, you can help me bury the boy and split firewood and repair my roof and things. But you’re not leaving here until I’m sure you can make the trip to Carlisle.”

  “You will accompany me along that journey, I presume,” said Gilead.

  Ben Gibson nodded. “Carlisle’s a big enough place that a man with a back like yours can’t help but find employment. And I’ll be out there spending every pound I have replacing that antivenom you made me use, and that lantern you smashed, not to mention all the food and the tailoring for your outfits. You’re bloody massive, you know that?”

  Gilead scoffed. He was all too aware of his size. He did feel somewhat guilty for Ben; by all accounts the man was quite poor, and now he was rendered even poorer by the necessity of aiding Gilead.

  “I can repay you, or try to,” said Gilead. He reached beneath the blanket, and was reassured to find that the two objects he’d awoken with were still secured in place. The belt was to remain his forever. But the other one…

  “This cross was given to me after burial,” he said, fishing the object in question from beneath the blanket. “Feel tells me that it’s gold, or at least partly gold, so it should sell for quite a few ‘pounds’. I would be passing pleased to be delivered of it, and therewithal we can split the profit evenly betwixt us.”

  Ben took a few seconds to puzzle out what Gilead meant. “Fair’s fair, lad. I’ll take you up on that offer.”

  They sat together, gazing out into the night a little longer. Ben asked Gilead to fetch some more stew for the both of them, the better to warm them against the cold night. He could not leave his post, in case there were ghouls around. Gilead watched with him, even if the lack of clothing left him chilly. After another long while, the darkness turned Gilead’s thoughts back to the underground, and from there, to Dindrane.

  “Earlier, when I was in the catacomb, I had a… a vision, you might call it. The vision said many things to me that I don’t understand. Could you illuminate me?”

  “O’ course, lad. Assuming it’s something I know about, at least.”

  “The vision made much ado about something called a Pretension. And an Old Man In A Tower that I should seek to destroy.”

  Immediately, Ben’s expression went sour. “You’re referring to Pretenders. Don’t faff about with them. Stay out of their business. It’s evil business.”

  “Evil business?”

  “Pretenders travel from place to place, always searching to do violence and wickedness. They have powers, great and evil and different for every one, but that power only drives them to seek out more power in turn. Evil business, that, greedy and ravenous and murderous. So stay away from Pretenders, and don’t listen to any damnable fairy tales about the Old Man in the Tower.”

  The night suddenly felt a good deal colder to poor Gilead. He wasn’t going to let Ben Gibson’s warning dissuade him from following Dindrane’s orders to the edge of the world and beyond, their bond was not so easily broken. But still; what had she gotten him into?