The Heretic Land Part 6

'What will it do?' Leki asked.

Juda seemed upset and distracted. 'We need to move. I'll know exactly when the slayers reach here, and whether they're still following our trail. And the more distance we put between them and us, the better.'

'How will you know?' Bon asked.

Juda puffed on the cigar and the scamp smoke hung heavy and spicy in the air. He stared at Bon through the smoke, and seemed very far away. 'You don't know much, do you, Bon Ugane? How will I know? I just will.'

Juda set the pace, taking them along the ridge and down into the next, much wider valley. He marched with purpose and determination, and it soon crossed Bon's mind that Juda seemed to be rushing towards something, not away from something else.

Venden Ugane came awake with something dead beneath him. He could feel it nestled under his stomach, an object whose presence was different from the bundled blankets and the spa.r.s.e mattress he'd made from moss and hat-hat hide. It was cold and hard. It did not belong.

For a while he did not move, staring across the clearing at the remnant and those objects he had spent so long gathering to it. It had now arced up into a perfect half-circle, and the dead tree stump at one end had tipped over to an extreme angle, a skin of dried bark fallen to the ground. It had shifted more while he had been sleeping.

He rolled onto his side and looked down to find what had died.

He had no name for the orange spiders. As large as his fist and the colour of bloodfruit, this one must have crawled down from the low cliff and dropped from the overhang into his bed just as he rolled in his sleep. They lived up on the cliff face, spinning funnel webs in holes in the rock, venturing out at sundown to harvest any prey caught in the web traps they set elsewhere across the cliff. He had observed them keeping to their own traps and not thieving from others, and he had wondered why. It hardly bode well for survival. Catching and examining a spider had crossed his mind, but there had always been something else to do, and he'd never had the chance. Now, the chance had come to him.

It had burst beneath him. Its insides were slick and sticky, stringing from his jacket as he sat up. The creature had seven legs and, search though he did, Venden could find no evidence of an eighth. Lost in a fight, perhaps. But it was just as likely that it had mutated this way. He prodded the sad body, and its ruptured sh.e.l.l was cool and surprisingly soft.

'Seven legs,' Venden said. Whenever his voice sounded across the clearing, it felt like an intrusion into the wild. 'Nature welcomes even numbers. Hard walking. Goes in circles. And the eyes.' He turned the dead creature a little, leaning close and trying to ignore the acrid smell. 'Simple surface eyes. All but blind.' There was a thick line of thread still hanging from the spider's abdomen, trailing across Venden's mattress and disappearing into the gra.s.s. He scanned left and right until he saw where the sun glinted from a hanging thread high above his head, drooping down from the overhang and waving in the slight breeze. Perhaps it had been lowering itself down when it fell. Venden touched his face and throat, because he had never known how these things hunted, or killed. He found no punctures.

Beneath the overhang was a rock with a hollow in its surface, and Venden took his morning scoop of water from here and drank deep. It never tasted fresh. Water dripped from the overhang above, and he wondered how long it had taken to filter down the surface of the cliff. Perhaps some of it was run-off from the previous night's dew. Or maybe it originated deeper, filtering down through the cliff and exiting eventually to drip into the hollow, and pa.s.s into him. This filtering water might have been many years on its journey through porous rock, and he wondered what this clearing had looked like when the rain fell.

Barely taking his eyes from the shifted remnant, Venden went through his usual waking ritual of toilet, a meal of dried fruit and a silent moment of reflection upon this land. He had been here for years, and he was more certain than ever that the war and its results had banished humanity from these sh.o.r.es. He was only a visitor here. That the unknown presence, the hollow inside, seemed to feel at home disturbed him, but he did not dwell on it.

He judged that it was approaching late afternoon. The sun dipped towards the low wooded slopes in the west, setting fire to the treetops and smudging the landscape with vibrant fire colours. He still had time.

The remnant loomed higher above him than it ever had. He circled it twice, examining the ground where it appeared rooted with the tree. Though it had moved, its end still disappeared into the ground, soil around it disturbed and upset, wet. Its other end also pierced the land, and there was no sign of any upset from the movement a no disturbing of the long gra.s.s, scoring of the turf or topsoil. In order to rise as far as it had, it must have grown.

He moved back to the tipped tree trunk again and knelt to examine it. There were thousands of ants crawling around the exposed roots, gathering countless spotted white eggs and transferring them down beneath the soil again.

'Only just exposed,' he whispered. A breath of air pa.s.sed across the clearing, rustling plants growing on the cliff face and waving the gra.s.s in complex patterns.

The object he had brought back that morning was still where he had dropped it close to the cart. He remembered the remnant's strange movement, and dropping the spined object as he dashed for his place beneath the overhang. After that there was nothing, and sleep must have come quickly. This journey had been a long one, and tiring, and he still felt weary.

He touched the object, and the sense of raw power struck him hard. There was no movement this time, but a staggering potential that made everything clear and defined, smoothing blurred edges of doubt. And he knew what he had to do.

The object was light and comfortable in his arms. He pressed it to the remnant many times a its end, its underside, the edge with the longer projecting spines. When he shifted it in his grasp and presented the shorter spines to the remnant's underside, standing there with the shape arching above him and slicing the darkening sky in two, there was an immediate attraction that tugged the thing from his hands.

The world turned over. Venden fell, fingers digging into the soil, terrified that he was about to fall off. His heart thudded against his chest, and he squeezed his eyes closed, thinking, This is what I was always meant to do. After a pause he rolled onto his back and looked up, and the remnant was more complete.

The object had melded to the arched underside, spines now bent and connected to the remnant as though they had never been apart. Venden stood and stretched up to see, but there was no sign of any connection, no join. The two had become one, and when he reached up and touched the object it felt no different from the remnant.

It was as if they had never been separate, yet, until Venden, they had been forty miles apart.

'And there are more,' he said, looking at the five other objects around the clearing. Each had a story of his finding them a guided by the presence that resided within him, shown and told where to go. Scattered across Skythe, they had been brought together again by his hands.

One of them resembled a network of petrified veins, almost the size of his torso. It looked delicate, yet when he had recovered it from a deep pool beneath a waterfall he had felt the strength inherent in its structure. It was something that belonged inside. He had not applied pressure, but knew that, if he had done so, the object would have resisted, perhaps even pushed back. It had lain in the gra.s.s beside the remnant for three moons, and now he picked it up to see where it might belong.

This time he was still clasping the thing when it hauled itself against the foot of the remnant close to the upended tree, and though the mountains seemed to shrug, he retained his balance. Part of the remnant for a moment, he felt none of the upset. It was as if it was keeping him safe.

When Venden picked up the boxy, bony shape he had discovered in the ruin of a Skythian lakeside town, he thought that his actions resembled something like building. But as this shape also moulded itself around the remnant's underside, he let go and fell back, acknowledging what he had somehow known all along: that he was not building something new.

This was reconstruction.

Chapter 5.

seed Milian Mu senses the sun and moon shifting around her, as if she is central to their existence, and the pa.s.sage of time is an ambiguous thing. Her breathing fills the cave in rhythm with the tide, and then faster, and faster still as the smell of the sea comes in and the sense of movement fills her torso. Her blood flows, her nerves jangle.

She shifts to a kneeling position, one hand splayed against the cave floor, sh.e.l.led things falling from her body as she flexes and twists them away. Some of them she picks up and puts to her mouth, sucking out the slick insides and swallowing without chewing. The taste is neutral, but she can feel their goodness spreading through her insides.

Some time later, Milian Mu manages to walk around the cave. Motionless for a long time, her body has lost touch with the world, and being a moving part of it once again is like being reintroduced to a former lover.

She tries to speak. Her voice is a croak, and the shard she carries of her old G.o.d Aeon gives comfort. It does not speak, but exudes an understanding that all will be well.

Later, when the tide is low, she enters the water at one edge of the cave and starts making her way outside.

The sea welcomes her in with cold arms. She breathes in the water and panics for a moment, but the shard rises and calms her, urging her on. Those memories of a long, long journey across the bottom of the sea come again a pa.s.sing through murky depths, and hiding from dark things down there a but they feel more distant now, moved further back in time by her return to life. So she pulls herself past the low stone ceiling, lowering her head beneath the surface when the powerful waters scourge the last remaining molluscs from her skin.

Eventually she feels something different above her, and she surfaces slowly to the silvery glare of the moon. Outside now, she gasps in the fresh night air. The water buoys her, and the shard sinks back down, not cowed, but secretive. She thinks perhaps it has betrayed itself, just for a moment.

Milian Mu walks through the surf and onto the beach. When she had arrived here long ago, the beach had been scorched to gla.s.s by the cataclysm way across the sea on Skythe. Now it is a rough surface of sand and sharp-edged black rocks, scattered with evidence of life a empty sh.e.l.ls, dead crabs, seaweed, and night things that root amongst the tidal deposits to take their fill. Some of them scurry from her. Some sink down and play dead. She ignores them and looks down at herself, and feels a momentary surprise at her nakedness. She is, she realises, beautiful.

And cold.

She looks around, and along the beach there is something out of place. The building seems empty, an awkward, blocky shape against the dunes. There are nets hanging from racks beside it, and timber and wire pots piled on the beach in front. A fisherman's shack.

As she walks towards the shack, the sand slicks between her toes. The soft sea breeze brings visions of the open ocean and a chill across her newly exposed skin. She drags her feet through the sand, feeling the swish of knotted hair across her shoulders. Her breath is heavy and phlegmy in her throat. How can I be walking? she wonders. How can I be breathing after so long? But the shard rises again to allay her doubts and drive her forward.

There are many questions, but for Milian they are all answered by the presence of the shard. She is in Aeon's service now, and whatever the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Alderians and their Engines did to her G.o.d so long ago, at least she carries a trace of Aeon inside. A memory, she thinks, but that is too vague. No, not just a memory.

A seed.

The shack seems abandoned. The door hangs off, one side wall is split and rotting, but when she ventures inside she finds someone's belongings, heavy with windblown sand. Perhaps a fisherman went out one morning but never returned, and the only evidence of him ever existing remains here.

There are clothes, sandals, a time-blunted knife, some tobacco and a small shoulder bag. As she dresses, Milian feels a growing warmth heating her insides and exuding outwards. She is alive, again. She has risen.

Though terrible memories of what she once did still haunt the edges of her perception, she no longer feels like a relic of the past, and the future is suddenly an exciting place.

Juda viewed the slayers from the dreg of magic he had left behind, and they were terrifying.

Since finding the wisp of magic he had been training it, kneading it to his mind's desires, employing untested techniques which were largely theoretical in an effort to make the weak haze his own. This was his final dreg, a precious thing, and every step of the way a Leki and Bon Ugane following on behind, their silence loaded and nervous a he was anxiously probing back with his mind, eager to discover whether anything had worked. If it did work, then much of what he had dedicated a large part of his adult life to might have had a purpose. If it did not, then there would be so much more left to do. He would not give up on magic. He could not. If he did, he might as well wander into the wilds and die.

He and the others were four miles away from where they had camped when he sensed the slayers. He rested against a tree that had half fallen to grow out across the water, and as Leki's shadow reached out a concerned hand, he clasped at the air and dragged it aside, and saw back the way they had come.

The images were erratic, but clear. There were two slayers descending the steep slope towards the camp. They leaped and loped, no caution in their movements, no effort at concealment or surprise. Their heavy feet slapped down and coughed up clouds of bursting fungi, and dark clothes flowed behind them, dragged along like resistant shadows.

'You're seeing them,' Bon said, but Juda waved away his words, closing his eyes. He plucked a cigar from his pocket and lit it, drawing in the spiced smoke and welcoming its calming influence. It made the visions clearer.

One slayer was female, one male. The female was heavy-boned and her large bare hands were scarred where she clasped her pike, yet she had made a grotesque effort at make-up, smearing blusher across her pale, inhuman face. Juda found the effect more disturbing than the various weapons tucked into her belt and shoulder harnesses, and as she went to all fours and sniffed across the camp he diverted his attention to the male. This was a larger slayer, his muscled arms and legs bare, body clad in thick leathers bathed so many times with blood that they had taken on a port-wine hue. His misshapen head jerked this way and that like a bird's, long plaited hair a snake's tongue tasting the air. He strode to the fire pit and kicked it asunder, and the woman scampered across and sniffed at the still-warm embers.

Then she stood, and she and the male slayer moved close, conversing in a shockingly human manner. They turned as one, pointed at Juda, and darted at him.

Juda gasped and cringed back against the tree, and for a moment the visions blurred with reality, a merging of scenes that brought the slayers close. He squeezed his eyes shut and drifted back to the camp, then held his breath as his senses opened up once more- -and the slayers were circling like wild animals toying with their prey. There was a hint of fear in their stance, perhaps, but it was mostly fury that drove them, shimmering through their swollen muscled bodies as they stepped left and right around the dreg. He could hear them hissing, smell their scent a meaty, sweaty, a tang of something sweet a and the threat they exuded was palpable, scarring the air. They were even less human than he had believed, and he realised that they would never, ever, stop in their pursuit.

He went to his knees beside the fallen tree and brought himself back, blinking the magical dreg away and feeling the hollowness of its loss. It wrenched at his insides like the death of a loved one.

'They've reached the camp, and it's only made them madder,' he said, leaning forward to let the cool mud calm his hot forehead. 'They're coming.'

'We have four or five miles on them,' Leki said. 'We have a head start.'

'Yes,' Juda said, and he struggled not to cry as the sense of loss throbbed slowly away. 'But they're never going to stop.' He sat up and wiped the mud from his forehead, and they were both looking at him as if he was mad. If that was the truth, it was a madness that suited this land, and he was at home here. Bon and Leki were the ones out of place.

'Why did you save me?' Bon asked. 'You've doomed yourself.'

Juda laughed out loud. 'There are always reasons,' he said, puffing on the cigar again. 'We have to move. There's somewhere we can go where we might be able to lose them. But they're on our heels now. They're filled with rage. And if they catch us, there's no fighting them.'

Juda led their way along the course of the stream and looked for a good place to cross. The slayers would see their footprints and smell their route, but any way to confuse them would give Juda and his charges a few more moments. And if they reached the gas marshes, they might just have a chance.

'You were using magic,' Bon said from behind. Juda could hear the fear there as well as fascination. He did not respond. Bon persisted. 'Juda, you were using magic?'

'You doubt me?' Juda asked without pausing or looking back. Bon's change from statement to question had irked Juda's pride.

'Where does it come from?' Bon asked.

'You believe in magic?' Juda asked.

'Strange question,' Bon said. 'Everyone believes it exists, in places. But most don't even consider using it, even if they could find it. Too dangerous. Trying to use magic is like ... catching hold of lightning.'

'Perhaps that's true,' Juda said. 'Not many people respect it. Fewer still can touch it.'

'And you're one of the few,' Leki said.

'One of the fewer,' Juda said. 'Before I arrived on Skythe ...' He trailed off, the secrecy even now making it hard for him to continue. Even now, in this wild place where many things were possible and with people for whom his revelation might even be welcome.

'You were a Broker,' Bon said.

'I was,' Juda replied. 'The Brokers found me thirteen years ago.' He pulled out a new cigar and lit it, the scamp smoke his shield against thoughts that would do him harm. Occasionally he wondered whether it was a psychological effect, this shielding. But he was too afraid to not smoke and find out. 'I was in the south of Alderia, looking for magic. Had been for two years, since I found my first dreg on the northern face of one of the Chasm Cliffs. I'd been there since I turned twenty, climbing and abseiling, climbing again, scouring the cliff faces for signs of what I knew must be there.'

'How did you know?' Bon asked.

'Because it was calling me, of course.' Juda paused at the foot of a steep slope and looked past Leki and Bon, back the way they had come. He had to think straight. Had to consider every option, every route, every possibility. And here he knew that they must climb. He started up the slope and the other two followed, already placing themselves in his hands without question.

'I'd heard the call years before,' he continued. 'I left home in New Kotrugam and hiked south, looking for something I didn't understand, and which at the time I couldn't even name. I left behind my parents and friends, and could not make any of them understand. My father always wanted me to be a medic, and my mother doted on me after my sister died at a young age. I'm sure I broke their hearts. I told them I'd return home, but never did, and didn't really expect to. They probably think I'm dead.' Juda forged on, breathing heavily and smoking, enjoying the pressure in his chest and the haze of smoke around his head. 'I wandered for years, and in that time I met a few others who seemed to be searching for the same thing.'

'And you hooked up with them,' Bon said.

'No,' Juda said. 'My search was always a very personal thing. A ... love. So we'd talk for a while, perhaps spend a few days camped together comparing notes and fulfilling other urges. But then we'd go our separate ways. My route took me south. I found nothing for years. And then I reached the Chasm Cliffs, and from the moment I saw them I started hearing echoes.'

'Echoes of magic?' Leki asked.

'Nothing so easy.' Juda paused halfway up the slope and took a small spygla.s.s from his pack, extending it and scanning the landscape to the south and west of them. A herd of hat-hat smudged a distant hillside, pa.s.sing back and forth like a mote in Juda's eye. Sparrs and other birds flitted through the air. He instinctively found the route they had taken and scanned its length, knowing that the slayers would be following their scent. He saw nothing, but that did little to comfort him.

'Then what?' Bon asked. The fascination in his voice was evident. And, perhaps, jealousy.

'Rumours,' Juda said. He inhaled some more scamp smoke, feeling the sharp edges of his knowledge being dulled once again by its effect. But past that dullness lay his memories. 'Suspicions of magic, beautiful. The whispered words of hundreds who had come before me, or thousands. All tempting. All ...' He remembered being drawn to the Chasm Cliffs and standing at the edge of the first ravine, the whole landscape before him a sea of wounds and scar tissue on the land. 'Perhaps some of those before me got so close that their thoughts ...' He did not complete the sentence, because already his memory was ahead of itself. He was down in that deep chasm, nursing a broken ankle and crawling along a rocky floor that was never touched by sunlight, heading for the dark place that felt like nowhere in the world. 'We should move on,' he said.

'But I want to hear-' Bon said.

'We move on. I'll talk as we climb.' Juda tucked the cigar in the corner of his mouth and started climbing again, grabbing tufts of heathers to pull himself up the steepening slope. He did not look back to check if Bon and Leki were following. In a way he was talking to himself, because it had been some time since he had remembered this much. But he was also probing, planting seeds, and hoping that their own purposes here might collide with his own. 'I don't know how long I was down there. Day and night seemed the same. I was watched, all the time, but I only felt in danger when the watchers revealed themselves. A lyon came close with fire dripping from its nostrils, but my screams and shouts scared it away. Three dusk blights stalked me through the deeper shadows, but I stood my ground and pulled my knife. I cut one. It dulled my knife blade and numbed my arm for the next half a day, but my fearlessness saw them away. And I was fearless. I knew I was down there for something else. Not to be scorched and eaten by a lyon, or carried deep by dusk blights. There was something that had drawn me down to the deepest places in those Chasm Cliffs. And whether the G.o.ds existed or not, I believed myself touched by something beyond my experience.

'I crawled, drinking from streams and eating sour berries that grew somehow down in those shadows. And then I grew closer, and I could sense it with every part of my body, every sense I knew and some I didn't. It smelled of age and distance. Its tang was on the air, tasting of something unknowable. It vibrated through the ground and whispered to the shadows, and when I set eyes on it ...' Juda trailed off again, taking a deep pull on his cigar as panic closed in and teased him with things he had no wish to know. His heart thrummed. Between each blink lay madness, and the scamp closed his eyes to that.

'We're almost at the top of the rise,' Bon said, panting behind and below Juda. 'We should rest ... once we're up there.'

'It was ordinary,' Juda said. 'A smudge of solid light in the dark. Ice on coal. It looked like nothing but was ...' He turned around then, pausing just below the ridge and looking down on Bon and Leki climbing behind him. They were both sheened with sweat and panting, and when they halted and looked up at him he saw the caution in their eyes. They were afraid of him. 'Imagine actually seeing a G.o.d of the Fade,' Juda continued. 'Being able to touch Astradus, feel Flaze's heat as he pa.s.ses by. It would make them ordinary, too.'

'But you took it up,' Bon said.

'Of course,' Juda said. 'I put magic in my pack.' He mimed the words, sliding his hand into his empty backpack where a dreg of magic had once rested. He felt naked and lost now that he had left that last dreg behind. But he knew there was something greater ahead. That was what drove him. He was being pulled forward by promise, not pushed ahead by threat.

'So why come to Skythe if there was still magic in Alderia?' Leki asked.

'That dreg I found seemed to be the last,' Juda said. 'And magic is ... insidious. It had me. There was nothing more to life from that moment on. Except maybe f.u.c.king.' He tried to smile, but they all recognised the humour as forced.

'And us?' Bon asked.

You will lead me to more, Juda thought. He had scoured much of the south of Skythe and had even ventured inside the ruins of old, incredible Engines in his search, but he had come to believe that there were others who might lead him to a true source of magic, not just a leftover. His search had shifted from magic to people, and his sense of magic had made Bon Ugane's name sing with promise a an enemy of the Ald who refuted the Fade, and who knew so much about the old war, and perhaps the magic used to fight it.

But first they had to lose the slayers.

'We can't rest,' Juda said, looking over their shoulders. 'Hope you're feeling strong. Now, we run.'

They hit the ridge and Juda led them quickly down the other side into the next valley, not wishing to present a silhouette to the pursuing slayers. They would still be way out of range of their pikes, but if the beasts actually saw them in the distance it would fuel their determination, perhaps drive them even faster. And Juda already had doubts about being able to escape. If only I knew magic better, he thought. If only I could have trained it to act for me, rather than pa.s.sively observing. But being able to train magic at his relatively young age meant using Wrench Arc techniques, and though he had started examining their philosophies, that took a whole lifetime of learning. Juda, though obsessed with magic, still retained shreds of those morals instilled by his upbringing and long-lost family. The Wrench Arcs would torture magical dregs instead of training them, twist them to their needs instead of teasing them to follow their desires. Theirs took a special kind of knowledge and cruelty, and anyone in their way would suffer. Murderers and mad people, the Wrench Arcs had left humanity behind. Juda comforted himself in thinking that he had some way yet to go.

The next valley was much wider and shallower, a gently sloping side leading down to a wide plain of gra.s.sland speckled with pockets of trees and undergrowth, and a river snaking along the valley floor. Juda knew that there was a ruined village just across the river, but it would only be visible when they were almost upon it. Perhaps it would be a place for them to rest past midday. But the more they rested, the closer the slayers would come.

'We're heading for a place past those distant hills,' he said. 'Gas marshes. Very dangerous, but there are ways to cross them. And that's where we must shake off the slayers.'

'They'll lose our scent,' Bon said.