The Heretic Land (22 page)

It was narrower now, younger. From his studies he knew that its source was far to the north, way past whatever remained of Kellis Faults. He looked at the calm waters in the darkness, moon reflecting from the river in silvery shards, and wondered what it had seen. He knew that some amphys back on Alderia were adept at reading waters, but he had never seen the feat himself. He would have given anything now to be able to do so.

Through the night, when stars sparked the sky and the moon shifted its imperfect sphere, Venden kept his perception open and free. He felt the urgings of the remnant – encouragement from that great, fallen Aeon. He also felt the void deep inside him watching with interest. Somewhere before him lay Aeon’s heart, and he was fated to find it.

As dawn’s early light threw the woodland in the east into silhouette, he started seeing the first buildings.

Perhaps when they had been built and lived in the whole area had been open plain. The ruins were difficult to make out in the forest’s undergrowth, and here and there trees seemed to have burst through the middle of what had once been a structure. Venden felt a chill each time he passed such a place, as if the memories of what had happened there had found homes in the new, living things growing where others had once died.

Terrible deaths
, he thought. He had read much forbidden writing about the Kolts’ rampage across Skythe. The Ald claimed they were the product of corrupted Skythian science, but Venden knew the truth – that they had been forged by Aeon’s destruction. Some rumours had it that the Kolts were corrupted souls who had never been born. Given to living bodies, they turned on family and friend, killing, raging on until
they found others to kill. Strong and ferocious, virtually unstoppable, cannibalistic to fuel their rampage. Beyond human, and inhumane. Terrible deaths.

With each ruin he passed, Venden wondered what history those tumbled blocks and shadowed innards might contain. But he had no time for archaeology. His was a more urgent intent, and, though a loud echo of the past, it more concerned the future.

The forests lessened once more, giving way to areas of open grassland. Venden continued following the course of the river, its timeless erosion providing the only real contours in this landscape – a shallow valley here and there, within which the river must twist and writhe like a snake over thousands of years. The plains were windswept and barren, and there were more ruins.

He thought perhaps they were burial mounds. Roughly pyramidal in shape, the mounds spotted the plains seemingly at random. Sometimes he passed close by, but if he saw one in the distance he rarely diverted his course to investigate. None of them had an entrance, and whatever lay inside would remain untouched. They had a sense of eternity about them.

Around midday he came across another collection of ruins, much larger than any he had seen back in the forests. The settlement must have been home to thousands of Skythians. It spanned the river, and the remains of several bridges were evident on both sides of the waterway. And here were also the tallest ruins he had yet seen on Skythe, two structures reaching weathered fingers to the sky that were ten times his height. One was the wreck of a much larger, wider building; the other seemed to be the surviving wall of a tower. Their uses were unknowable.

As the afternoon wore on he passed more remnants of Kellis Faults’s satellite towns. They were all testament to that great
civilisation’s sudden and cataclysmic demise, and they were all deserted. No surviving Skythian lived there now. Perhaps their race memory was still too painful, or maybe they were simply different people, no longer needing whatever the ruins of their ancestors might offer. But though Venden considered the current Skythians to be barely an echo of what they once had been – a simple race, now, scratching at the ground to subsist from one year to the next – he found their absence troubling and unsettling.

Perhaps they knew something he did not.

The hills started rising again, the ruins more elaborate and ringing with a greater history. On one low hilltop stood a solid stone tower, broken high from the ground so that whatever might once have topped it was now lost. Plants grew around its base, creepers clawed across its grey sides, but nothing could hide it from view.

Across another hillside marched a line of immense stone arches. A few had half fallen, but most remained impressively upright, their curves a natural defence against the ravages of time. Venden remained in the valley and examined them from below, assessing that at their highest points they were perhaps twenty times as high as the ruined Skythian homes he had seen elsewhere. There was nothing behind them but hillside – no tunnels, no welcome doorways to somewhere special – and he found that looking through them gave him a chill. Their size was astounding, and he could not help but imagine what they might have been built to allow through. If they were decorative or symbolic, that was impressive enough. If they had been built for a practical reason, then that reason was long lost. Were he to climb and pass through them, he dreaded to think where he might go.

The river narrowed drastically, and he heard the waterfalls long before he saw them. They were wide and low, but meant that he
would have to climb the shallow hillside beside them to proceed. It looked steeper than it probably was, and was scattered with rocks and the remains of buildings. There were also long, low walls that he thought had probably been built to terrace the entire hillside, either for farming and irrigation, or perhaps for more obscure reasons.

‘It’s not high,’ he said to the shire. ‘It’s not steep.’ He had not spoken since sun-up, and his own voice startled him. He was in the beyond now, way further north than he had heard of anyone venturing, and these were probably the first words of any language spoken here in centuries.

The shire was tired and hungry, continuously pausing to dip its head down to take grass or berries. But the afternoon was moving on, and Venden was beginning to sense that he was drawing close. He urged the beast on. He forced
himself
on, fighting exhaustion, denying the pain in his limbs and body from the long ride.

The hill was higher than it had looked from below, and scattered with more obstacles. The falls were higher also, and louder, and their roar accompanied Venden as he urged the shire onward, over fallen walls and trampling ground untrodden by man for centuries. By the time he reached the top he was as exhausted as the shire. He fell from the creature, legs refusing to hold him upright. The grass was long and damp from constant spray from the waterfalls. A stone wall stood surprisingly free of plant growth and mosses, especially this close to water, and there were several vague, shadowy shapes blasted onto its surface. Limbs twisted, heads thrown back, Venden found the outlines of tortured humanity in the darkened stones.

When he rose unsteadily to his feet, he looked north. A wide, shallow valley was bordered by a range of six hills, and within their protective influence lay what remained of the massive
city of Kellis Faults. Skythe’s capital sat untouched by all but the slow, insidious caress of time. Vegetation meant it belonged to the land once more, yet the city’s layout was still obvious in many areas, its streets, parks and squares a green-blurred map of what had been. Crumbled stonework rose from the forested carpet. Towers pointed fractured fingers at the sky, some of them solid and seemingly decorative, others bearing windows, balconies and separate turrets, now home to birds and other flying things. Many had tumbled, some had not. Over time perhaps they too would fall, but now they stood as testament to the proud civilisation that had once existed here.

At the city’s centre stood the remains of a statue, so vast that he could make it out even here, perhaps a mile or more away. Its arms had fallen and its features were abraded by the seasons’ onward march, but its Skythian form was obvious, and defiant.

Venden gasped in shock, and with a sense of invading some private place, an open mausoleum to a dead world.

And walking towards him uphill from that shattered city, four tall figures carried something amazing between them.

‘Who are you?’ Venden asked as they drew closer. He realised that, in his shock, he had spoken in Alderian, and the people seemed not to have heard. So he asked again, in the regressed language Skythian had become. ‘Who are you?’

His heart sprinted, faster than it had done following the shire’s anguished hill climb. The presence he had always carried inside him stirred, becoming alert and … excited. A wolf sniffing food.

They came closer, heading directly at him as if he had always been their intent. They carried an object on a wooden stretcher, a heavy blanket covering it and hanging over the sides,
dragging through the grass, edges darkened with moisture. The object was small but seemed heavy. They took a corner each.

They were not the Skythians he had come to know.

‘Some of you survived?’ he said, glancing past them at the remains of the once-great city. Perhaps down there, buried in the ruins, dug deep and hidden away, a whole society had moved onward without outside interference and without betraying themselves. The idea was incredible, wonderful. Impossible.

This city was as dead a place as he had ever witnessed. And there was something strange about these Skythians.

They came closer up the slope, and Venden began to make out how they were different. They did not seem to be panting, or even breathing hard, though the slope was steep. They walked without expression, steering around rocks, stepping over cracks in the hillside, finding the easiest route up to him without seeming aware of quite where they were. There was something mechanical about their movement, not natural.

‘What are you bringing me?’ he asked, and something inside him shifted. His gut fell, sickness rose. He went slowly to his knees, careful not to strike a pose of worshipfulness, his shaking legs barely letting him kneel gently.

The shire stomped its hooves, kicking up clods of mud and shredded grass. Its mane hung across its face, and when Venden glanced its way, its eyes were wide with fear rather than defiance.

The tall figures came, fifty steps away, thirty. The stretcher remained completely level between them, whatever the lie of the land. Venden could not make out their sexes. They had long hair, long limbs, narrow bodies that somehow exuded strength. Their clothes were old and holed. Their eyes were dead.

He tried
to stand, back away, but his limbs would not obey. The idea that they were not bringing something to him, but were intending to take him away, struck him a blow to the head, and he leaned to his left in a half-faint. But the thing inside squeezed him awake again, stabbing him in the side and insisting that he watch.

When they were five paces away the figures halted. They
were
Skythian, Venden was sure, but unlike any he had seen, either in the flesh or in old books and parchments of the past. And when they lowered the stretcher and each lifted a corner of the blanket – exposing what it carried without flourish or ceremony – he began to understand.

His heart stopped as he laid eyes on the heart of Aeon.

Venden went away. He retreated into memory, carried there unwillingly, subjected to his past and having to submit because there was little else for him to do. He was not in control. He saw his mother leaning over him and smiling sadly, and it was a memory older than any he had ever experienced before. He lay in his crib, baby hands fisted before him as he examined them, and his mother’s smile filled his vision and his heart. Her eyes were distant and wet, the smile one of gentle mourning rather than motherly love.
She
did
love me
, Venden thought, and though that was true there was something more. He saw his mother again later, when he was old enough to run and she was older than her years. His father ran with him, trying to launch a kite from one of the hills outside Sefton Breaks, laughing as the wind whipped the kite from his hands and flung it to the ground. The cross-brace was broken, he remembered, but his father would fix it later that day and make a successful launch. By then his mother would have returned home.

I know where this is going
, Venden thought, but he could not fight his memories’ impetus. He was being shown rather than
reliving, and the part of him that had never been his own rejoiced.

They ate as a family and discussed their trip to New Kotrugam, where Venden might view the Museum of Inventors and perhaps gain some ideas. He was already a clever boy, and his creations using wood, moulded metal and steam pods were impressing his teachers.
You can make something to be pleased about
, his father said.
You can make us proud
.

Their journey, New Kotrugam, the staggering size of the city that went up from the land as well as across it, metal bridges, steam ships fogging up and down the river, towers of wood and metal—

And after the Museum of Inventors when they were climbing Aesa’s Tower to see where that famous architect had completed his most celebrated work, his mother grabbed his hand and pulled him close. His father was ahead, ascending the curving staircase and chattering with delight as he related facts and stories about Aesa and his theories.
I’ve always served you
, his mother said, and even then Venden was not sure who she was talking to. Her son, or her son’s inside. His shadow. His future.

She stepped through the narrow doorway onto a metal balcony, and without looking back tipped over the railing. Venden rushed onto the balcony in time to hear the impact from the street below, and then the screams. And though young and painfully uncertain of himself, he reached the railing and looked down, down at the circle of people gathered around—

Venden screamed himself back into the present. The shire shifted slightly, but its main source of fear was not the screaming, crying man kneeling beside it.

The Skythians were retreating. As they backed away from what they had brought, they changed. They lost their threatening aura,
though Venden was not sure why – because they had placed down the heart, perhaps, or maybe because they were moving away from him now, not towards. And they began to lessen. As they stepped away they also shrank, in his vision and his regard. Their skin sagged towards the ground, their shoulders drooped. Their long, strong legs bowed beneath their weight, though that weight seemed to be decreasing. From dangerous to wretched, when at last they turned their backs on Venden to walk away they were even less than the Skythians he sometimes dealt with now. And then, only a little more than ghosts.