The Heretic Land (12 page)

‘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 spyglass 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, passing 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 gods 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 god of the Fade,’ Juda continued. ‘Being able to touch Astradus, feel Flaze’s heat as he passes 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 fucking.’ 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 – 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 passively 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 grassland 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.

‘Hopefully.’

‘But not if you’re still smoking those stinking things,’ Leki said as Juda lit another cigar.

He drew in the smoke, and it settled his inner darkness. ‘I stop smoking these, and you’re on your own. Without this …’ He exhaled, and the smoke danced around his head. ‘… my nightmares find form. Besides, better this than the stink of you two.’

Juda’s legs ached, and he knew the others were rapidly tiring. But they had no alternative. As he took the lead again, he started telling them about the other dregs of magic he had found.

When Venden woke up
it was snowing, and there were three auburn tadcats sitting in the snow a few steps from his camp beneath the overhang.

He had seen snow in Skythe before, but only in winter, and only when it was extremely cold and the wind blew from the north. But as far as he could remember it was still late summer, and the breeze blowing as he’d drifted to sleep had been from the west.
Maybe even the seasons are confused
, he thought, and it was not such a shocking idea. The flora and fauna of Skythe had been damaged by the war so long ago. Why not the weather also?

The tadcats were skittish, and as Venden sat up with a blanket around his shoulders, they backed away. Still watching him, they settled in the long grass at the edge of the clearing and licked their delicate paws. The long, snow-free grass.

He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and opened them again. Snow still fell. Around the remnant it appeared as deep as his ankles, settling across the smooth lines and jagged parts he had come to know so well. But beyond, past where he had parked the cart, the plants were free of snow, many of them bathed in early morning sunlight.

Venden stood, ignoring the pressure on his bladder. He glanced once more at the tadcats as they scampered away, then stepped forward into the snow shower, convinced that it would fade away as sleep and dreams retreated.

His foot sank into snow. He gasped at the cold and looked up into the swirling flakes. They were fat, floating down slowly enough for him to target one and catch it on his tongue. It melted and freshwater flowed down his throat. Other flakes touched his warm skin, landed in his eyelashes and settled in the soft scruffy beard that had grown over the past year. The snowstorm was troubling but beautiful, and for a moment sleep still haunted Venden enough to relish its beauty.

When he took several more steps towards the remnant, the snow stopped. Sunlight burned through and warmed his face where the ice had recently touched.

‘That wasn’t normal,’ he said. He looked at the remnant again and it was still covered in snow, thick layers that blurred its lines. But elsewhere it was quickly melting, seeping into the ground as though subject to a great, unfelt heat. Grass compressed by the weight popped up again, shaking the memory of snow as if it had never happened. Soon, Venden felt little more than a morning chill, and even that dispersed as he walked around the remnant. For the first few steps his feet squished in muddy ground, but then the soil grew harder, the grass swishing around his feet and whispering dry secrets.

The remnant remained covered in snow. It was frozen, not dripping beneath the sun, and several times Venden went to step closer, to see whether the world around him would
stay the same once he touched the great shape. When he’d been attaching objects to it the day before he had been part of it at times, settled by its touch while he felt the world around him shifting, shivering. But stepping forward now, he was afraid that contact with this strange thing would remove him from his world. And much as he had devoted himself to it for some time, he was still afraid.

‘So what now?’ he asked, and as if in answer the snow on the remnant melted. This was no gentle thaw. One moment it was still there, frozen solid, icicles pointing and snow moulded to the remnant’s peculiar extremities; the next moment, everything melted away and washed to the ground, spreading in a puddle through the long grass until the dry soil sucked it down. Venden closed his eyes and breathed in, feeling steam stroke down his throat and into his lungs. He heard movement, felt three harsh thuds against the ground, and when he opened his eyes he caught a glimpse of the shape flexing to motionlessness. It was an insinuation of movement rather than something overt, the air and landscape around him complicit.

The rain came then, great droplets that flattened the grass and splashed from the remnant and the dead tree. Venden cried out in surprise. His voice was loud and lonely, and he reined in the shout because he thought the remnant might frown upon it.

I know what you are
, he thought, and it was the first time he had ever formed that idea. Before now he had been too afraid in case he caused offence, or the betrayal of such knowledge might mark him for murder. But the remnant already knew that he knew. His exposure of that knowledge was nothing. He was only a human, not …