The Heretic Land Part 4

The void inside him had screamed.

He'd turned and run blindly, collapsing miles away in a sweating, frightened mess. And later that night, as he stared at the stars unable to sleep, he'd acknowledged what he might have witnessed a a shred of old magic.

It was said by some that dregs of magic still persisted in the darkest, deepest parts of the world, left over from the war. A forbidden thing now, even more so six centuries before, there were still those who sought it. Venden was not one of them. In his illicit studies he had found plenty of evidence to suggest that magic was a dark, insidious power. Some suggested it had possessed a strange sentience. One Skythian parchment, ancient and ambiguous, had even given magic a name.

Crex Wry, Venden had muttered, and dawn's cool light had brought a desire to hunt the magical dreg. Fear had changed to excitement. But upon his return to the ruined vale, he could already tell that whatever had been there had flitted or melted away.

Now, he stood by the river with his cart and the thing it contained, and stared at that fallen building. It remained motionless and dead. The plants growing upon it were a mixture of wild, mutated creeper that sprouted vicious-looking spiked seed pods, and the pale echoes of roses. These flowers were like images faded in the sun, bare memories of the beauty they should project. Their stems were weak and thin. Thorns were blunted by the sickness in the land.

Yet still they grew. For Venden this was the greatest shame, and the worst crime of the Skythian War. Alderia's use of forbidden magic had not killed Skythe, but had destined it to a future of weakness, mutation, and steady, slow decline. It had been six hundred years, and it might be six hundred more until this land was truly dead.

He pulled his cart through the ruined vale and the object rocked on the cart's bed, its protruding parts tapping like fingertips on a wooden table. Past the vale he entered the narrowing valley, beyond which he pa.s.sed through the fallen shoulder between mountains. That was the hardest part of the journey, when much of the time he was lifting and manhandling the cart rather than pulling it. The solid wooden wheels, though braced, bore some considerable damage on the fallen scree of boulders and sharp rocks, and Venden worked all through the day to make his way east.

As darkness fell, he found a relatively flat area in which to camp. In the flickering campfire light he saw pairs of eyes watching him.

He sighed, hand stealing to the knife in his belt. Venden a a genius, a silent boy, a searcher a was a stranger in a strange land, and there was never any telling how these meetings might end.

Some of them crawled, though their limbs looked little different from their brethren's. Some loped, stooping low. A couple still walked tall. Those who were not naked wore old, torn clothing. They were dirty, scarred, their muscles knotty and worn. The women's b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung empty and sad like drained water sacs, and the men's genitals were withered and thin. Venden had once encountered a group of these mutant Skythians rutting beside a lake, and aside from the violence of the group act, it was the apparent lack of success that had shocked him most.

In the forbidden books he had viewed before leaving Alderia at the age of thirteen, images of Skythians showed them as tall, proud and cultured. Their clothing had been beautifully woven, their hair worn in long, intricate braids. They'd been a head taller than most Alderians, and their art-and science-based culture was much more advanced, and less troubled.

We did this to them, Venden thought, though the damage had been done six centuries before his birth. There were others he had encountered who had seemed to haul themselves forward somewhat, establishing camps and even attempting to farm the land. But they were the minority. Skythians today were a wild breed, and Venden found their fall so depressing.

Resting one hand on his knife handle, he raised the other, palm out. The Skythians paused, one woman scurrying forward to within a few steps. She raised her head and sniffed at the air.

'I'm Venden Ugane, no threat to you,' Venden said. 'You know me. You've seen me before.' He tapped his cart, trying to jog the Skythe woman's memory.

She sniffed some more, edging a step closer. 'Venden,' she rasped. She looked at the thing in the bed of the cart, her eyes going wide. They were bloodshot and weeping. She scampered back and cried something else, her voice a high whistle that seemed to contain little sense, and the few Skythians with her drew back as well, a sigh pa.s.sing amongst them. It was not quite fear, and Venden had seen it before.

'It's nothing to be afraid of,' he said, still holding out one hand. He watched the way they moved, hunkered down on splayed limbs like dogs waiting to leap. Fear seemed to lower them. Evolution was a debatable theory, and for the most devout of the Ald a Alderia's ruling sect and unelected government a it was a blasphemy, because it denied the creation of things by the seven Alderian G.o.ds of the Fade. But most intelligent people, whatever their depth of belief in the Fade, accepted evolution as part of what made things the way they were. In these Skythians, Venden could see distinct evidence of devolution. And that made him sad, because it was man-made.

He sat down close to the fire to eat. They would not join him, but he knew that they would hang back in the darkness to watch. He would leave them some food when he left in the morning.

Dawn brought a light sheen of rain that painted rainbows on the eastern skies. Venden remembered a story the Fade priests told children about Sh.o.r.e, the Fade G.o.ddess of the air, who cavorted with the sun and moon and sighed rainbows of delight when Venthia, the G.o.d of water, cast his seed through her. It had been an innocent tale of G.o.ds and dancing for the children, but its connotations had become more apparent the older Venden became. Rainbows were the ecstatic emissions of the G.o.ds. As he stood beside the dying fire, he looked at the colours and smiled. They were beautiful, but they were factors of light and water, little more. Venden did not understand the science of rainbows, but that did not mean he had to ascribe them G.o.dliness.

There was no sign of the Skythians, but he knew they were still watching. They watched him on every journey. He broke camp and went to pick up the cart's reins, and then noticed a strange thing. The light rain did not seem to touch the pale object. It lay upon dampened boards, but its surface seemed dry. He placed his palm on the smooth body, ran a finger along one of the short, thin limbs, and it was untouched.

He frowned. Perhaps the water soaked in so quickly that the thing could not feel wet. But as with the rainbows, his lack of understanding did not drive him to the G.o.ds. Its mystery was not divine.

When he moved on, the Skythians emerged from their hiding places and took the food he had left for them. They followed him for a while, as he knew they would. They mumbled and muttered amongst themselves, and in their language he could hear nothing of the wondrous Skythe tongue he had studied in those books and parchments. So much had been lost.

The rain persisted, but the soaking did not dampen his spirits. The Skythians soon disappeared, and he was alone once more, pulling the cart with the reins over each shoulder. By midday he was close to where he had made his camp, in the fertile land at the junction of two mountain ridges where the river found its source. The flow here was more a series of trickling streams, the land between them boggy, and Venden followed a route he had taken many times before. It involved a steep climb, but then a level, mostly dry path across the mountainside to the sheltered area he called home. Here was the rocky overhang beneath which he lived. Here, too, was the remnant.

He glanced across the clearing to his camp, and for a moment the change did not register. He frowned, trying to perceive the difference, and because it was something taken away instead of added, he had to search further.

It's dropped, he thought. He released the reins in reaction to this, leaning back against the cart, because even from here he could see what the remnant had become.

The first time he'd seen it, he'd thought it was a fallen tree. Eight times as long as he was tall, it arced out of the ground from the foot of another dead tree's stump and pointed north, lifting and dropping again so that he could just pa.s.s underneath it without stooping. Graceful and horrible, its surface was speckled and pocked, and close to one end it changed from pale brown to black. He'd shivered and leaned back against a living tree's trunk, eager to touch something not so dead.

He had decided to stay there for a while, camped beneath the overhang, before even looking at the thing again. Such a delicate remnant, he'd thought, naming the object without realising it right then.

Now it had relaxed. The action of the remnant's highest point lowering towards the ground had pushed out both extremes, tilting the dead tree at one end, and gouging an uneven furrow at the other. The five objects he had already brought here from across Skythe, and placed close to the remnant in positions that had somehow felt right, remained in place.

'Someone has been here,' Venden muttered, but he immediately knew there was more to it than that. Though there were those on Skythe who would think nothing of invading his s.p.a.ce and stealing anything of use a the south coast was home to several settlements where those banished here had chosen to make their homes, and they were wild and lawless places a they rarely ventured this far north. Those who travelled usually did so for reasons more complicated than simple theft or vandalism.

There were no footprints in the long gra.s.s, no signs that anyone had been here. He had been away for eleven days searching for the latest object, true, and much could have happened which the weather might have covered in the meantime. But the clearing had the sense of having remained uninterrupted. Untouched. There was a wildness here that he had sensed in many places across Skythe, as if the land had shrugged off all memory of human interaction and returned to its primal state. Even though he had lived here for almost three years, the cave and surrounding area managed to retain that feeling.

Venden had often thought it strange. Now it was stranger still.

He stepped from the trees' shade and crossed the gra.s.sy clearing, unafraid, cautious. He listened for any sounds out of place, sniffed the air, remained alert, but he was as alone as ever. When he reached the remnant and held out his hand to touch it, something moved.

Venden fell and struck the ground hard, one hand held out to break his fall, the shadow deep inside him rolling with apparent delight. The wet gra.s.s stroked across his face. Everything had moved but for the remnant. It was as if the land had shrugged, the sky shimmered, and the falling rain wavered at the audacity of Venden's touch. The only solidity was the remnant and those objects he had brought to it a the objects he had been guided to by the shadow he carried inside a and he was struck with a certainty that if he had been touching it, he would not have fallen.

The trees were still, and there were no sounds of panicked wildlife or falling rocks. The world had moved for him alone.

Water soaked through his clothing. He lay motionless, looking up at the falling raindrops. Those that struck him seemed suddenly warm.

From the cart came the sound of movement, and he rolled onto his side and lifted up on one elbow to look across the clearing. The object lay motionless where he had left it, yet he was certain he'd heard the sound of its many short limbs drumming against the wood. He gained his feet and walked back to the cart, nervous that the same sensation would strike him again, but he was steady and sure.

The object was almost weightless, motionless, in his hands, cool, and nothing like anything alive. It was only as he started across the clearing with the thing in his hands that the remnant began to move.

Chapter 4.

remnant Days after Milian Mu's awakening in the cave, she catches her first food. Tiredness no longer preys upon her. Yet she is still weak and almost withered away, and it will be a while until she can move again.

There is no day and night, only the ebb and flow of the tide to time her slow heartbeats a five beats ebb, five beats flow. She has been sleeping and ageing with the land. The shard of Aeon has been resting with her, and perhaps dreaming as well, because she can feel it still inside like a forgotten memory.

She has been listening to skittering back and forth on the cave floor. Hearing the animal locates it in the dark, and the warmth of its meagre supply of blood has raised the temperature on Milian's right side. She reaches out slowly and grabs the creature. There are waving, scabrous legs, a spiked carapace. She squeezes, and the sounds of breaking things echo. She puts it to her mouth as it still struggles, keen to feel its life against her lips. The dying animal moves against her mouth. There is no taste, only sensation, and she swallows because she knows she must to grow strong. Her future awaits. The shard swells within her, a cold thing reminding her of where she came from, in preparation for where she must go.

She chews some more. The memory of hunger is a bloom of heat from a spreading fire, rumbling in her stomach, vibrations spreading along limbs she has not been able to feel since waking. The more she chews and swallows a soft innards, spiky sh.e.l.l and legs a the more awake she feels.

After finishing eating she sits for a while in the complete darkness, listening to the water washing against the sh.o.r.e outside the cave. She can almost feel the sun on her skin, the wind blowing abrading sand against her face, and she can taste much more than the crushed dead thing.

She remembers arriving, and wonders how much things outside have changed.

Another animal oozes between the rocks; she can smell it, and hear its moist skin flexing and releasing secretions that allow it to slip along. It is somewhere to her right, easing closer. She prises the thing from a narrow crack and brings it to her mouth, cool and slick. Her arm sc.r.a.pes as she moves, heavy and weighed down.

How long have I been here?

The shard does not steer her or coerce, but it is aware. She can feel it watching, and has the idea that perhaps it has always watched, and kept her alive, and waited for ...

Something.

Because it is merely a shard, not the whole. The remnant of a G.o.d.

Bon was exhausted. After seven days at sea with poor food, sickness, dirty water and a constant belief that his next breath might be his last, he'd had to swim half a mile to sh.o.r.e through vicious waves, with sea things doing their best to take bites from him. His arms and legs no longer wished to function. His stomach was rumbling from the bread and meat, and he wondered whether Juda had succeeded in poisoning him, intentionally or not.

But the memory of the dreadful murder and mutilation he had seen on the beach drove him on. And after so long fearing the light and courting the dark, the realisation that he desperately wanted to live came as something of a revelation.

Juda led them from the small cave and into a narrow crawls.p.a.ce that seemed to go on for ever. The oil lamp threw vague illumination, but it birthed shifting shadows that deepened creva.s.ses and exposed the sharp ridges of broken rock, and after a few minutes' crawling Bon had slashed his left thumb and right knee. Behind him Leki seemed to move soundlessly, a counterpoint to his gasps and struggles. She had grace. She enchanted and frightened him.

'How far?' he asked, but Juda did not answer, or did not hear.

'Just crawl,' Leki said from behind. 'I think we can trust him.'

'You think?' Bon's voice was m.u.f.fled in the enclosed s.p.a.ce. He wasn't sure where he was, or why, and this journey had become something he had never expected.

Juda had every opportunity to kill them, but so far had done his best to save them. So he says, Bon thought. But that image came again a slayer, the man, his guts and severed head.

The route from the cave was barely even a tunnel. A crack in the ground, narrowing and widening, sloping and falling, and at one point it became almost vertical. Juda climbed without pause or comment, and Bon followed, bracing his back against one side and his feet against the other. They climbed for some time, and the thought of what injuries he would sustain should he fall kept his back straight, his legs tense. Leki climbed below him, silent as ever. Whenever he glanced down he saw only her pale face looking up, and he was grateful for her encouraging smile.

Bon lost track of how long they were climbing and crawling. They paused to rest frequently, and it took five stops before he realised that Juda was lost. Their rescuer would sit back against the cave wall with his eyes closed and his hands reaching, grabbing shadows from the air and piling them either side of him. Bon glanced back at Leki, and she merely raised an eyebrow.

The air changed just as Bon noticed the light. The oil lamp had been burning low, but there was a background illumination that seemed to filter down from above. Dusky light was visible through narrow cracks above them, filtering down through spiky plant growth.

'This is it,' Juda whispered, and his obvious relief was also loaded with stress. 'We're out, we're away. But I have to see. See if the open brings danger.'

'How could the slayers know where we're coming out?' Leki asked, but Juda seemed to wave away her question, slapping it from the air with his ever-moving hands.

'I'll crawl out and see,' Juda said. 'They're not looking for me.'

'Wait. Don't move. Don't cough or fart. Don't ... breathe.' He nipped out the oil lamp between thumb and forefinger and crawled into the open.

Bon watched him go, and then Leki was beside him, warm and close. Though he had only known her for days, there was a familiarity that he found comforting.

'He has Outer blood,' Leki whispered.

'You're sure?' Brought to the continent of Alderia from the countless scattered islands way across the oceans a it was rumoured that some even came from the fabled southern place known at the Heartlands, ten thousand miles distant a Outers were regarded as inferior races, created by the Fade G.o.ds for Alderia's use. As such they were frequently imported into the south of Alderia as cheap labour, and the north as slaves.

'I don't think he's pure Outer. But there's something to him, yes. Have you seen the colour of his eyes?'

'Piercing green.'

'Regerran.'

'I knew a Regerran once,' Bon said. She had been a thin, striking woman who had worked in a tannery close to where he and his wife used to live. He had tried speaking to her several times in the street but, every time, she had turned away, almost panicked by the unaccustomed contact. It had shamed him then, and it shamed him still, because he had not tried harder. She had been killed in an accident soon before his son had vanished. No one had mourned her.

'A feeble race,' Leki said, surprising him. 'They're troubled, and never rest. They suffer nightmares that make them violent, dangerous to themselves and others. That's probably why he's smoking those cigars a there'll be a drug in there, settling and calming. Where I come from in Skeptin Lakes, they're employed to harvest nark eggs from the Chasm Cliffs. They sometimes spend days up on the cliffs, and they tie themselves on when it's time to sleep.'

'He said he'd been awake for some time,' Bon said. He could still smell the scent of the cigar smoke. 'Do you really see him as feeble?' The comment had troubled him. Leki's past was still a mystery, and he could not simply a.s.sume that she was here because she had spoken out against the Ald. For all he knew she was like the priest on the ship a a devout whose banishment was for something else entirely.

'I'm speaking through what I've witnessed of other Regerran,' she said. 'That's all.'

Bon fell silent, thinking about what she had said, and what Juda's heritage might mean. There were still many questions to ask him, but he had no desire to include Juda's race in any discussion. It was irrelevant. Alderia was behind them now, and with it the prejudices and indoctrinations of the Ald's way of life. If being banished had done anything for him, surely it would have granted him such freedoms?

They remained close, but not quite touching, until Juda returned. He scrambled down from the narrow entrance, blocking the fading light and panting as if he had been running. He paused close to them, little more than a shadow, and handed them both dry, rumpled clothing.

'We're ... okay,' he said. 'No sign of slayers nearby. Close to Vandemon, but we'll have to skirt around and head north. We can't enter the town.'

'Into the wilds, then?' Leki asked.

'Yes. The slayers might expect that, but it's not likely they'll follow right away.'

'Why not?' Bon asked.

'Two others they wanted from your ship evaded them.' His meaning was implicit. While the slayers hunted down the others who had escaped, the three of them could flee.

'You've done this before,' Leki said. 'So do you always run with the people you rescue?'

Juda was silent, awkward. His shadows shifted as his hands waved, grasping at the air.

'Juda?' Bon asked.

'We need to go,' Juda said. He turned and started climbing, and Bon reached out, grabbing his foot.

'What happened?'

'Nothing good. Which is why every breath counts.' Juda sighed, and when he spoke again his voice was shaking. 'I knew the time would come. The slayers have marked me also. I made contact with a friend in Vandemon, and she told me the slayers have my name and scent. I'm now as much on their list as you.' He shrugged. 'I'm f.u.c.ked.'

Juda went and they followed. Outside, Bon's first sight of Vandemon was the flames.

Juda was tired, and he could feel his darker, troubled side starting to fill him out, stretching itself through torso and limbs and taking his shape. Aggravating his part-Regerran blood, this darker echo was dangerous. Though dusk had fallen, he could not let himself succ.u.mb to nightmares. They had to escape.

He had slipped into Vandemon only briefly, but in that time he had learned everything he needed to know. Built amongst the ruins of an old Skythian sea port, rough wooden buildings stood between the tumbled walls and rubble piles of homes where no one had lived for six centuries. Even ruined, it was obvious from some of the carved stones and barely visible floor layouts that these old structures had been much grander than those now forming the coastal community of banishees. In the hundred years that Alderia had been shipping its worst criminals to Skythe a from murderers to political exiles a there had been barely any attempts to improve these dwellings. They were built, they fell or became dilapidated, and they were repaired or rebuilt. Patched up and thrown together, they reflected much about the people who lived within them.

The new arrivals who had made it to sh.o.r.e and not been marked for execution by the slayers were already being integrated into Vandemon. There were those who sought to welcome new prisoners, and who did their best to reach them before some of the town's less benevolent characters a the pimps who went for the women, and slave drivers who lured with promises of buried treasures in the wilds to the north. If the prisoners could be warned then they might avoid both.

Juda had gone to visit his friend Bindy at Bindy's Tavern, and from the moment he'd entered he had known that something was wrong. Usually pleased to see him, she had been uneasy and twitchy, glancing more at the door than at him as if waiting for someone else to arrive. And moments into their conversation he had asked the question, and her silence provided his answer. Slayers?

Juda was now known and marked, and his time in Vandemon was over.

He had always known that this moment would come, and for some time he had been awaiting it. After each prison ship arrival and the resulting executions, the slayers would retreat to their holes along the coast where the cliffs were tumbled and worn from erosion and, perhaps, some ancient cataclysm. They made their dens there, and no one ventured close. But Juda had known that he was destined to be hunted by these inhuman killers one day. Seeking the spa.r.s.e dregs of magic still in the land a and attempting to rescue those who might be able to guide him to them, knowingly or not a was inevitably going to make him a marked man in the end. Gathering information, such as the names of banishees and the reasons why certain ones were marked for death, was always dangerous. Bon Ugane's name and crime had come to Juda at a cost.

Sometimes Juda recognised the desperation in his actions, and the unlikeliness of success. But he had nothing else left to live for. And there was always a chance.

He was not sad to leave Vandemon, because Bon Ugane and Leki might be the people he had been seeking for so long. Bon's crime had been studying Skythe and the war's ambiguous history, after all. But he could not yet let them know. He did not wish to frighten them away. His needs and aims, he knew, could be perceived as arcane to some, and mad to most.

'What are all the fires?' Bon asked behind him.