The Heretic Land (23 page)

He hauled himself to his feet to watch them go, leaning on the shire for support. The creature was shivering.

‘I don’t think they were what was left,’ he said. ‘I’m not even sure they were what once was.’ As Venden saw those four figures drifting down the hillside and merging with spidery shadows, his attention was snapped back to the stretcher. It was suddenly the focus of everything. His mother’s final words hit him again, and he could only wonder why.

‘They brought it to me,’ he said, the hillside whispering a breeze that might have been agreement, or wonder.

The heart of Aeon was the size of Venden’s head. Grey and purple, motionless, unremarkable looking and yet the most amazing thing, still it bled. The blood oozed, but did not drip. The stretcher was unstained. The heart vented itself and then reabsorbed, blood emerging and then running deep. Almost as if it had no desire to touch this world.

‘I have you,’ Venden whispered. The object did not respond. His own heart hammered, and for a time he simply stood and watched, expecting Aeon’s heart to start doing the same. But it was aloof and unconcerned.

He sat and breathed deeply, allowing himself to regain strength
and come to terms with what was before him. Aeon allowed this pause. Venden drifted off, and when he awoke it was dusk, and ghost lights haunted the great, dead city.

When Milian Mu first heard the noise she was convinced she could actually feel it vibrating up into her feet, a roar whose promise she could not understand. She had never heard anything like it. She hid. She was exhausted from her long walk, and the sound set her nerves jangling.

Since fleeing the families and the man who had tried to love her, she had walked non-stop in a southerly direction, heading for Alderia’s capital city.
He will be there
, she thought several times during her journey, the words bearing that peculiar sense of coming partly from her, and partly from somewhere deeper. And then the growling rumbling sound in the air, and the ground shaking beneath her feet.

There were a thousand places to hide on the hillside. Rocky outcroppings were numerous, as were holes in the ground, as if something had scooped and dumped great masses of soil and rock and left the wounds to fade with time and weather. The depressions were alive with masses of bright red flowers, the colour of blood and scented with a heady perfume that should calm her, had her mood been more even. The landscape appeared man-made, but Milian could make out no purpose. Things of long ago were often like this. She hid in a dip almost clear of the red flowers, a mound of rocks above and between her and the valley floor, and closed her eyes to sleep.

But sleep did not come. Tiredness urged her down but she remained awake. She thought it might be an earthquake, or the rumble of something huge turning over deep beneath the land, or even the impact of dreadful weather a hundred miles distant.
The shard kept her sharp, and eventually urged her back out to face the source of the noise.

She had to walk almost down to the valley floor, such was the profusion of rock piles and flowering holes. The noise increased and became more complex, and when she peered from behind one of the last rock piles she saw its cause.

The wagon train stretched from left to right as far as she could see, snaking along the undulating plain between her hillside and the next, miles in the distance. It was so far away and so large that it barely seemed to move. But as her attention was drawn inward from the train’s flexing mass, so she began to make out individual details.

There were hundreds of wagons of all shapes and sizes. Some were small enough to be family caravans, pulled by shire-like creatures with longer legs and faces. Others were much larger, running on multiple wheels and driven by steaming motors, gasping clouds behind them that drifted across the plain towards Milian with the breeze. The clear steam exhalations were interrupted now and then by darker, dirtier clouds. Their upper structures were a chaotic collection of storage and passenger compartments, some flying family colours, others dark and perhaps abandoned. It was like nothing she had ever seen before, but she kept her wonder restrained. She was in a foreign land, and the world had moved on while she slept.

The train of vehicles followed a scar carved across the landscape. Nomads, miners, hunters, farmers, whatever these people were, they had a history of moving in this way. They were heading south towards New Kotrugam, and that was the direction Milian needed to take.

She made sure she was well wrapped in the clothing given to her by the travellers, then started out across the plain. She moved at an angle to intercept the tail end of the wagon train, and long
before she reached it there were riders, and running children, and pet wolves frolicking in the long grasses.

All of them made her welcome, despite the fact that she could only speak a few words of their language. They called her an Outer – foreigner, she assumed – and that suited her well. It seemed mostly not to lower her in their estimations. Using a mixture of signing and basic language, some offered her food and water, others pointed towards where she might find accommodation and work. Milian Mu nodded her thanks. Inside, the shard was quiet and content.

Every man she met might have been the one, and she examined them all with frank, hungry eyes.

The wagon train took two days to reach New Kotrugam. In that time Milian learned that it was comprised of a variety of people, she applied herself to learning more of their language and she caught a glimpse of the man who might be the one.

A surge of heat flushed through her when she saw him.
Him
, a voice said. Her voice, but not her thoughts.
Him. It might be him. Watch and learn
. But he was gone as quickly as he had come, disappearing into the shadowy maze of corridors and rooms in the heart of the big wagon.

The smaller wagons generally belonged to families or groups of friends, so Milian settled on one of the huge steam-driven structures. There were cabins to let, and though barely large enough to lie down in, the one she was allocated suited her perfectly. Having no money to pay her rent, she was directed to one of the several huge engine rooms, given a shovel and instructed to shovel coal.

This she did for much of the first day. The exercise was exhilarating and freeing, and she glanced at the other stokers, looking for him.
He won’t be here
, she thought. He was learned, an academic. Strong. Not physically, perhaps, but she
had seen the strength in his eyes, and the books and parchments he carried. The shard observed from the background, neither feeding nor detracting from her thoughts about the man. It seemed content that he had been seen, and would be seen again. Of that, Milian was certain.

She would see the man again.

The train stopped for the night, and a large proportion of passengers disembarked to make camp, start fires, hunt and cook meat and sing songs. Milian wandered the length of the train, drinking from a wine bottle she had been given by the engine room’s foreman as part payment for her day’s work. Her muscles ached pleasantly, the wine imparted a calming haze. She felt good about herself for the first time since emerging from that cave on the beach.

Out in the open, the full breadth of the wagon train’s inhabitants became obvious. There were fishermen here, their families busy fixing nets and rods, the fishermen talking amongst themselves about catches they had made and others that had got away. Milian drifted close to one group and listened for a while, gleaning what she could from a language still mostly alien to her. She recognised the tones, the sharp peaks and soft slopes of the words, and she found herself quickly learning more, and more. The fishermen had been working the lakes to the north, not the sea itself. None of them even mentioned the sea. It was as if the ocean between Alderia and what had become of Skythe did not exist.

She moved on, drinking and observing and in her silence remaining unobserved. Hunters butchered and hung their kills, smoking meat and stretching hides. Mystics washed stones and crystals, beaded necklaces, drew shapes in the soil, and chanted over fires turned purple by the addition of powdered minerals. Several soldiers gathered together away from the crowds,
sitting around their own fire and talking in hushed tones about their own secret plans.
If they knew who I was
, Milian thought.
If they knew what dwelled within me.
She hurried on in case such thoughts betrayed her.

She saw families gathered protectively around nurseries of playing children, lonely people staring into firelight, even lonelier people lying back and looking to the stars. There were printers transcribing writing onto ink pads, herb sellers packing their wares, and some families cooked and sold food from huge iron pots. It smelled wonderful, and Milian drifted close to one group until they waved her over, handing her a free flatbread sandwich when they realised she had little language and believed her to be an Outer.
Such treatment for someone so different
, she thought, and a tang of bitterness soured her smile. They asked her to stay and she walked away, because her memories of before were suddenly blood-soaked by these people’s ancestors. Their bloodline had come to Skythe with Engines to channel magic, and caused the deaths of everyone Milian had known.

A large group of people sat listening to a Fade priest. Some of them smiled, some of them cried. Milian could have told them about a god, and the shard bristled at such an idea. Her hands clawed, and the wine bottle in her left hand cracked beneath the pressure. Smothered by loud prayer, no one heard the sound of breaking glass.

And then she saw him again, passing not ten steps from her with a bag over one shoulder and a heavy roll of wrapped parchments beneath his arm.

There he is
, she thought, and the shard exuded those words at the same time. They matched so perfectly that she and the shard might have been one.

She followed, and practised what she might say.

* * *

He was tall,
with long hair bound and clipped with metal ties, a heavy leather jacket hanging open to display a rough cotton shirt, and a wild blond beard. He walked with his head up, looking around but with an air of detachment that Milian found compelling. He did not feel like part of this wagon train. Other people seemed either to fit in, or were content to belong at least until the journey was over. Even those on their own were incorporated in some way, identifiable by their clothing, manner, or belongings as part of a whole. But this man walked alone, and she knew that he was very far away.

She followed him from the camp, out onto the plain and away from the influence of the dozens of large campfires. She stayed far enough back so that he did not see her shadow thrown before him, but the further they went the longer their shadows became. When he paused and looked down at the ground beside him, she too halted.

‘I’ve seen you,’ he said. The words were not familiar, but their meaning filtered through, given weight and sense as the shard repeated them. The seed of Aeon she carried was allowing her to hear.

‘I’m sorry,’ Milian said. ‘I saw you and …’
And what? And you are the one?

He turned around and stared past her back at the wagon train. She glanced back over her shoulder and caught her breath, because she had missed out on its beauty. Fires burned, lights blazed, people cooked and laughed, played music and danced.

‘You don’t want to be there?’ he asked.

‘I want to be here.’ She walked closer to him, and something passed between them. She saw that he felt it too as his eyes opened wider, pinprick pupils dilating as he shifted focus from the wagon train to her, and her alone.

Milian
had not felt the true warmth of another human being for so long.

‘Cold,’ she said.

‘I was just about to build a fire.’ He retained his grip on the rolled and wrapped parchments, but dropped the shoulder bag and squatted beside it, inviting her to join him.

‘But you have …’ She nodded at the parchments, and when he put them down she saw that there were two books folded in there as well, rolls of bookbinding string, and a pocket of pens and ink.

‘I study Skythe, but it will wait,’ he said. He watched her as he said it, examining her for any reaction.

‘An amazing place,’ she said. She was not surprised at his interest in her old home. In the darkness between blinks she lived a hundred memories, and her vision blurred.

‘They’re conducting a Fade mass back there.’ He nodded past her at the wagon train.

She shrugged, dismissive.
Testing me
, she thought. He scratched his bristly cheek. She sensed his doubt, but not suspicion.

‘Let me help you with the fire,’ she said.

‘I’ve seen you,’ he replied, repeating himself. ‘Yesterday, on the big wagon.’ He said no more, but his silence spoke volumes.
He’s seen me and noticed me, and he is the one, and surely there’s more than chance to that?

The shard remained silent, heavy with intent.

‘My name is Milian Mu,’ she said.

‘An Outer name, I assume. I knew by your accent, and your … way with words. As if they’re new to you.’

‘New,’ she said, nodding and smiling. She helped him set the fire. ‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘how impolite of me. Bon. I’m Bon Ugane.’

‘I am
happy to meet you, Bon Ugane.’

‘And I you.’

He is the one
, Milian thought, and the shard agreed. This was a man who was destined to discover truths and eventually act upon them. Any child of his – and hers – would take on the precious shard, and strive to know the secrets of Aeon. Perhaps, in time, this child might act upon those secrets, and find what remained of that murdered god.

The fire made an island of their first meeting, and she and Bon sat together and talked until dawn.

Juda surfaced
to a smell he could not identify, and sounds he did not know, and the feel of rough hands pressing his arms against his body.
They have me!
he thought, because his nightmares had been of the slayers. They had caught up with him, Leki and Bon just before they reached the gas marshes, crucifying the other two on sparse trees. Then they had slashed Juda’s ankles to the bone, so that as he lay in the mud he could watch the two people he’d tried to save die. They had screamed as their weight hauled them down against the nails in their wrists, suffocating slowly.