The Heretic Land Part 8

Without Juda, the slayers would have butchered him if he'd even reached that beach. Without Leki, Bon might well have let them.

Bon looked back the way they had come. The river whispered behind them, splashing now and then as sharp fish leaped at the sky. Beyond, the hillside they had descended looked innocuous enough. But when he looked up to the ridge and tried to spot where they had crossed, he could not escape the idea that there was constant movement up there. He squinted and shielded his eyes, even though the cloud cover reduced the sun to a smudge. The movement was too far away to focus on, and too uncertain to trust. It was as if the hillside was breathing, or shrugging, or trying to shift closer or further away. He might be seeing slayers reaching the summit and hurrying after them, or he might not.

And then the fear of those slayers struck him again, the terror rich and heavy. He'd seen that terrible murder on the beach, but now he projected it onto himself, and the sheer unfairness of it was staggering, the taking of his life when that right should only be his. Until recently to Bon, death would have meant the end of the pain of loss, but now it was the end of hope. Because sheltering behind the grief from his dead wife and missing, probably murdered, son, there had always been a glint of hope that he might continue into the future.

Coming here, meeting Leki, had exposed it.

He turned and sprinted after Leki, and as he caught up with her Juda was waving to them from beside a mound of tumbled stones.

'Here!' Juda said. 'We can rest here, for a while. There's things for you to see. And someone I have to meet.'

'But we have to run!' Bon said.

'Yes,' Juda agreed. 'But I must see someone.'

'Who is it?' Leki asked.

Juda looked away, scratching at his cheek. 'Just ... a man.' He chuckled. 'We can't get where we're going without his directions, but ... he'll see no one but me. I'll be back soon.' He left them there, ducking away between the mounds and quickly disappearing into the landscape.

'What's wrong with him?' Leki asked, then when she turned to Bon her eyes opened wide. 'What's wrong with you?'

'I'm afraid,' Bon said. His honesty made him naked. Leki only paused for a moment, then came to him and squeezed his shoulder.

'We're in Juda's hands,' she said. 'Let's take a look around.'

'Maybe he's running on his own,' Bon said. They knew Juda hardly at all, and could trust him even less. 'They might be closer than we think, and he could have ...'

'He wouldn't have brought us this far if he was going to give us up,' Leki said. 'Besides, I'm starting to think we mean more to Juda than he's letting on. I don't think he rescued us out of sheer benevolence.'

'Aren't you afraid?' Bon asked. Weakness had always haunted him, whether or not others saw him in it.

'Down to the tips of my toes,' Leki said. She blinked, and her amphy's clear film swept across her eyes.

They moved past the mound of stones, and as they did so Bon made out a vague order to them. They were fallen, but the mound's base maintained a regular shape, and some of those stones not smothered by moss or purple shrubs exhibited square corners, and even some faded sigils. History swamped this place.

'A door,' Leki said, pointing. Past a huge fallen tree, beyond a copse where a flock of birds seemed to be weaving back and forth between branches in an endless spiral, stood another old building, its roof and one wall collapsed. The doorway was swathed in creeping plants, but some of them were withered and dry, while others were green and lush.

'We should wait for Juda,' he said. 'Ready to run.'

'He said there was stuff we'd like to see,' Leki said. 'And we'll hear him come back. We can't go any further without him, and he won't be long. Come on. Let's see if anyone's in.'

Juda did not have to travel far in order to try and feed his addiction.

He had left his last dreg of magic behind and, ever since, a chill had set in him, a hollowness of loss which he knew he must fill soon, or die. Magic was his heartbeat, his breath. It had become his life.

Away from Bon and Leki, he leaned against a fallen Skythe building and took in several shuddering breaths. Talking to them about magic had gone some way to holding back the grief, but the deep emptiness was growing. Unless he filled it soon, he did not think he could maintain his fragile hold.

I've been just holding on for years, he thought. The promise of a big find had always driven him on, and now there was something about Bon and Leki that hinted at greater things to come. They smelled different, and Bon especially had depths that might hold secrets even he did not know. His name on the list of deportees marked for execution, and his crimes, had cried out at Juda.

And here, he hoped to find out more.

He moved away from the other two, a.s.sembling his pistol as he went and loading the pressurised steam valve. He would need the weapon if and when the slayers caught up with them, but it would likely do little good. Here was where it might benefit him more. If there were fresh rumours and whispers amongst the Skythians, he needed to hear them.

He had become adept at recognising the gathering places of those wild, sometimes mutated Skythians left alive. They maintained a whispered communication with each other, stories spanning miles, rumours drifting with the winds, as if somewhere deep down they were trying to regain their former glory. He suspected this information exchange was instinctive rather than intentional, and sometimes it had been of use to him. But though the Skythians knew what was happening across their damaged isle, in Juda's regard they were weak things, ill-suited to existence in the place they had once thrived. Time moved on, and he had no pity for them. Like any addict, his empathy had been suppressed by his cravings.

Juda stalked. He went beyond the ruined village, glancing back frequently to make sure Bon and Leki could not see him, and found a trail. He paused and sniffed the air. Closed his eyes. Regerran blood pulsed through his nose, his sense of smell greater than most, and he moved off to the left, skirting around a hillock and then slipping down into a shallow ravine. A stream flowed along its bottom, heading left towards the river. In the stream squatted a lone Skythian male. The water washed around his ankles. He stared along the ravine towards the river, his purpose hidden.

Juda looked around quickly, scanning the ravine's sides in case there were others hidden away in small caves or lying in the fading light. But he was alone. He lifted the pistol and fired. The shot struck the Skythian's left shoulder low down, and he fell forward, splashing face first into the stream.

Juda grunted in satisfaction and reloaded the pistol as he approached the twitching figure. New metal shot, new steam valve, and when he was three steps from the whining man he pocketed the pistol, drew a knife and knelt beside him.

Though his left arm was useless, the man had just managed to turn his face out of the water to catch a breath. Blood flowed with the stream. His hair was long and clotted with mud, his skin pocked with disease, left eye cloudy with cataract. He was trying to speak in their strange language, but the water garbled his words. Juda slid the knife between his ribs and leaned all his weight on it, and it was like putting a beast out of its misery. The man squealed, and then slumped down. His final breaths escaped in a series of b.l.o.o.d.y bubbles, which Juda watched disappear downstream.

Heart hammering, he looked back out of the shallow ravine towards the ruins, but no one was watching, no one knew. I can't leave them alone for too long, he thought. But this part was always over quickly.

Knowing that what he did here was redolent of Wrench Arc behaviour a and still trying to deny to himself that he was one of them a Juda took the fleet clinger from the seam of his boot. Long, thin, incredibly hard and sharp, he had bought it from a Broker in New Kotrugam just days before leaving on his journey north. Used mainly by Spike interrogators and investigators, they resembled weapons, but were in reality sensitive devices designed to snag the final, fleeting thoughts of someone dying. Often those thoughts were random and useless. The trick to using the fleet clingers successfully was to feed the right impetus to the dying person.

He plunged the object into the man's ear and pushed it into his brain. Then he connected the trailing nark-gut lead to the top end, held his breath and pushed the needle on the lead's other end into his own neck. He gasped as the cool metal slid home, the pain immediately simmering to white-hot. But he did not have time to hurt.

Juda leaned over the stinking, dying man and whispered into his ear, muttering the Old Skythian word for magic over and over, and soon ...

He had done this five times before, without success. But this time he found something. This Skythian knew nothing of the magic Juda craved to quieten his soul, but he did know of other things, more incredible and valuable than any Juda had ever hoped to find.

In his confused, dying thoughts, the man held rumours of Aeon's resurrection, and whispers of the strange young Alderian who was bringing it about.

Venden Ugane ...

As Juda fell back and tugged the needle from his neck in a spray of blood, he uttered a mad, high laugh at what might come next.

Chapter 7.

heartbeats On previous journeys to search for and retrieve objects a.s.sociated with the remnant, Venden had taken a whole day to prepare. The location would be a blur in his mind. The distance obscure, like tomorrow seen through a heat-haze. Since the first journey when he had discovered the cart upended at the foot of a small waterfall, he had taken it with him as much as possible, only leaving it behind when the terrain grew too uneven, the journey too long. But this time something pressed him to go alone and unhindered. He had the old clothes he was wearing, some food and water, two knives, some meagre camping equipment, a flint, and cooking implements he had fashioned from shreds of something melted. He had often wondered what they had been before. Perhaps he ate food with deformed cogs from the heart of an ancient Engine.

He readied himself to leave before midday, and then stood close to the remnant, waiting for something else. It will show me where exactly to find the heart, how to retrieve it, how to transport it back here, he thought. But the remnant was silent and still, and he sensed a deep weariness cradling it against the cold, wet ground.

'I'll find the heart of you,' he said. There was no response. 'I'll bring you back.' Silence filled the clearing, seeming to steal the sound of movement from the orange spiders and the rustle of leaves on some of the withered trees to the north. Venden wondered where those sounds had gone, and whether anyone else would hear them.

He reached out to touch the remnant, but was repelled. He frowned, but the closer he moved, the further away the shape seemed. It did not shift or flex, but its altered shape was beyond him.

'I only want to touch you,' he said, but his plea was swallowed by the silence.

So Venden left the clearing, looking behind at the things he had brought back, which, together, went to make up Aeon. The reconstructed G.o.d looked more innocuous the further he walked, and by the time it pa.s.sed out of sight, hidden behind a screen of low trees, he could believe that it was a dead thing that had been there for six centuries. Its bone was dulled and unreflective, giving back nothing of its surroundings. A fine camouflage, he thought, but it also left him feeling bereft. He might as well have seen himself fading into nothing.

'I am not nothing,' Venden said as he walked. 'And Aeon chose me.' The hollow place inside him seemed to churn with potential, and then settled once more.

He planned his route north to Kellis Faults as a way of occupying his mind, but he had little knowledge to draw from. Already he was in the wilds, further north than most banished to Skythe ever came. He saw amazement in the eyes of the few Skythians who encountered him. There was some fear, but they were also fascinated by him, a reaction refreshing on every new meeting. He had seen some of the same regressed Skythians several times. They knew him and his name, and sometimes he believed they spied upon him. Often they seemed somewhat in awe of him, and if he had been more superst.i.tious he might have thought himself a ghost.

Perhaps I am, he thought, pushing through a whispering forest. He had been this way many times before, but there was no evidence of his presence here, nor that of his wagon. No flattened ferns trampled by his feet or crushed by the cart's wheels. No route worn into the landscape by use, even though that use was not frequent. 'I am not a ghost!' Venden shouted, and a small flock of sparrs took flight, and something larger scurried in the canopy thirty steps to his left. He smiled, pleased that they agreed and content with his own reality.

The shadow inside seemed to lean forward and take note. Venden felt the blank s.p.a.ce in his soul that did not belong to him swelling and shifting, and the attention from there was harsher than ever before. He glanced around, but the eyes focused on him were not from without. The sense of being watched was something he had carried with him ever since he could remember a it was one of his earliest memories a but at moments like this it made his skin crawl, and gave him reason to run. He halted instead, breathing deeply and squeezing his eyes closed. It's just another part of me, he thought, as always. Just a part of me I don't yet know ... my older self, waiting to meet me ...

Venden walked on, not a ghost but never quite himself.

They headed south, away from the sea and deep into a continent where Milian had never set foot during her first life. Bouncing along in the back of one of the wagons, she lay with her eyes closed, trying to cast aside terrible memories. All that time lying asleep in the cave, she had dreamed. And now, awake at last, those dreams had left their taint.

She opened her eyes, and the woman and child were staring down at her. Milian was taller than average, her features wider, and her skin was paler than most on Alderia. But these people seemed untroubled by her appearance, and perhaps they were unaware that she was Skythian. I wonder if there are even any Skythians left, she thought, shocked at the idea.

The woman spoke, forming her strange words slowly and deliberately, but still Milian could not understand. She shrugged and shook her head, touching her ears again. The boy giggled and copied her. Milian smiled, touched her nose, and the boy did the same. He shrieked in delight. She sighed, he sighed. She laughed, he laughed, and she found that simple act of laughter illuminated the darkness.

The shard of Aeon is still within me, but I am whole again. The daemon is long gone. Perhaps the things I did a the things it did a went with it. The shard nestled, piercing her heart and soul and the landscape of her memories, but dormant for a time. Silent.

The woman started forming some sort of sign language, but Milian shrugged again. She felt her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s moving beneath the scruffy clothing, and the woman's disquiet took on new tones. She eyed Milian up and down, and the species of fear in her eyes was obvious. But the last thing on Milian's mind was f.u.c.king.

They're not the ones, she thought of the two men steering the wagons. The thought echoed again with the shard's influence. Never quite dormant, it seemed.

Later, Milian was woken from an unsettled sleep by cries of delight and children's laughter. She blinked herself awake and groaned as she worked stiffness from her joints, warmed her muscles by tensing and moving. Whatever strange influence had allowed her to hibernate for so long and emerge alive had not yet driven all signs of age from her body. Only on the outside, perhaps. If they cut her open, she might be grey and dead.

She crawled across the bedding and clothes strewn around the covered wagon's interior and pushed open the small wood-framed door. She realised that they had stopped moving, and when she stepped out onto the wide wooden deck at the back of the large vehicle, she understood why.

The two families stood off to one side, the adult couples holding hands, children dancing and leaping under the multi-coloured sky. There was a river not far away, its gentle movement audible in the background, and it glowed with sunlight as if possessed of a sun itself. The gently undulating landscape was interrupted in a score of places by tall, thin spires, their wider bases supported by heavy b.u.t.tresses, doorways and window openings shadowing their entire heights. But it was the pinnacles and what danced above them that grasped Milian's attention, and held it for a long time.

Rainbows played through the air. Flexing, melding, fading and reforming, sheets of light frolicked from one spire's top to another, arcing high above with a sound like a giant walking through fallen leaves. The hairs on Milian's arms and neck stood on end, bristling. She caught her breath and held it, and for a panicked moment a rush of thoughts sickened her: If I breathe that in, if it touches me, if it leaks down from there and drowns me. But the fear was momentary, because the adults and children looked back at her as one, and grinned. The tall man who had first found her shouted something and laughed, and waved a hand at the sky as if fearing she had not seen. But how could she not? Milian stood alone on that wooden deck for a while longer, watching the display and feeling a sadness inside her, stirred and reborn by the certainty that she had no memories this wonderful of Skythe.

It had been a beautiful place, but much of the beauty evaded her now. Most of those vague, ancient-feeling memories from before the daemon and the shard revolved around something growing dark, or things going wrong.

The sight inspired tears, and the distortion only made the flailing, sweeping light-show more wonderful. I am truly alive again, she thought, revelling in the wonder. The light and colours dipped down as if to bounce from the spires' highest points, then streaked up into the sky once more. It was lightning with colour, and lacking the violence.

Milian examined the closest spire some more, focusing on the openings she could see pocking its surface from the ground all the way up to its highest point. They betrayed no light, and when the colours were right they illuminated part-way inside. There was no sign of anyone standing at the doorways watching the display. Maybe the strange buildings were abandoned or never meant for habitation. Or perhaps the people inside were used to the display, and would not give it a second glance. It shocked Milian that such beauty might be ignored.

She closed her eyes and the colours still danced.

The families returned to the wagons, flushed with excitement and chattering amongst themselves. The tall man grinned at Milian, and it was the nervous sideways glance at his wife that betrayed his thoughts. She would have to be careful. She had no wish to cause a problem. They were taking her south, and the shard seemed happy with that direction.

The slayers were pursuing them, intent on slashing Bon's throat and spilling his guts to the ground, and the man who had made it his mission to save them might be mad. And yet Bon found that he was enjoying these moments alone with Lechmy Borle.

'Leki,' Bon said, voice low. 'Over here. I've never seen anything like this.'

They had worked their way through the half-collapsed doorway, and discovered that there was a set of steps leading down. The cellar was a complex of eight rooms, three of which had been buried by tumbled ceilings. But the others were surprisingly free of damage. Time had imprinted itself in these places a mineral stalact.i.tes drooped from the ceilings, pale and delicate, and there were traces of animals' nests and dens in every room a but considering they were more than six centuries old, most of the rooms were surprisingly well preserved.

Leki had found the torches, and lit them with her flint. I wonder if the last person to carry this was Skythian, Bon had wondered as she handed him a blazing torch, and the idea was both thrilling and chilling. He could not help wondering what had become of them. Killed by the Kolts, perhaps a those Skythians driven to murderous frenzy by Aeon's destruction. Such a fate was beyond imagining.

'What have you found?' Leki asked. She crossed the room, kicking through grit and rubble and uncovering the remains of the intricate tiled floor. There were mosaic designs there, but Bon hadn't been able to make them out in any detail.

'I think this must have been their Aeon shrine,' Bon said. He nodded at the wall, and Leki added her light to his. There were gorgeous images in ceramics, their colours as brash and bright as the day they were created, and all of them displayed wondrous scenes of Skythian landscapes, wildlife and plants. The animals were powerful, the plants lush and blooming, and much of what he saw was a mystery to him. There were similar species on Alderia, but others were unknown. They had vanished from the world, but still existed here, a frozen history. Bon's breath caught and he swallowed, a lump in his throat. 'This is everything they lost. Everything we took from them.'

'Not "us",' Leki said. 'You and I didn't take anything.'

'The Ald. Leaders of Alderia. Same thing.'

'Six hundred years ago,' Leki said. 'You still truly blame a race for actions that old?'

'Don't you?' Bon asked, aghast.

'I blame the Ald now for continuing to blame the Skythians for what happened here, yes. But when they used magic back then, they were doing what they thought best. They didn't know whether Aeon would be benevolent or not.'

'So they killed it,' Bon said. 'And faced with the same thing now? Don't you think the Ald would do exactly what they did then, to protect their Fade?'

'Protect a lie from a lie,' Leki said. 'Yes, I suppose they would. That's what depresses me most, you know. Always has. The fact that everything that happened to this place happened because of one false belief facing off against another.'

'You don't believe Aeon really appeared.'

'Do you?'

'I don't know,' Bon replied, because he didn't yet want to say yes. But he'd spent years reading forbidden books about the war and its causes, and speaking to academics who had spent their whole lives living a secret. And yes, he did believe that Aeon had appeared, because why else would the Ald back then have launched something so devastating against Skythe, and something with such unpredictable results? They would not have used magic to wipe out a rumour, a faith that had always existed. They would have used it to destroy the root of that faith a Aeon. The appearance of the Skythian G.o.d had proved them, and their Fade religion, wrong. And they could not stand for that.

'Certainly is beautiful,' Leki said softly.

'I wonder who lived here,' Bon said. 'Big house.'

'I'd like the time to explore,' Leki said. 'But we have to move on. Don't know what Juda's up to here, but I'm trusting him less and less. There's just something about him ...'

'Perhaps the fact that he's mad,' Bon said.

Leki smiled. 'Maybe. But right now, I don't think we can afford to doubt him. We've got to a.s.sume those things are still chasing us.'

'And the gas marshes sound like fun,' Bon said, and something growled.

A deep, wet growl.

'Oh,' Leki whispered. 'Maybe we should have checked all the rooms.'

'Juda,' Bon whispered, fearing treachery.

'I don't think so,' Leki said. Something moved in the next room, pa.s.sing before a fallen length of wall, its bare skin pale yellow with reflected flame. 'I think bad luck.'

Bon drew his knife. The blade felt ineffectual in his hand, no weight to it, no heft. He could use it for peeling fruit, but little else.

'If we move slowly ...' he began, but the growl came again, and, it seemed, from a different direction.