The Heretic Land (29 page)

Carried
within Skythe’s resurrected god, the irony of that idea was difficult to escape.

Aeon was standing straight and tall like a man, only many times taller. Its fleshed-out body resembled nothing Bon had ever witnessed before. He squinted, trying to make sense of what he saw, but there was little sense to be made. Not yet, at least. His mind recoiled, and he felt a subtle madness descend in what might have been a protective cloud.

Yes, I’ll go mad
, Bon said, inviting it in.
I’ll go mad and thank you kindly.

Aeon moved. As it lifted one limb, Bon saw the crushed remains of the male slayer squashed beneath it, the monster’s slick insides spewing across the clearing as the god walked away.

Don’t go!
Bon thought. He reached for Aeon, standing, stumbling after it. But then it ran, and in three bounds it was as if it had never been there at all.

Complete silence. Bon had never before experienced such stillness, such solitude. No birds called, no breeze blew, no living thing made a sound. The world was frozen in the moment.

Then Leki groaned, and Bon went to her. She was warm, and that felt good. Whoever she was and whatever lies she had hidden behind, she felt good, because she was alive.

‘Did you see?’ Bon asked.

‘I saw,’ she said. He thought it was pain, but when he looked at her he realised the quiver in her voice was dread. ‘I saw our doom.’

‘Aeon,’ Bon said.
Venden
, he thought.

‘It’s the end of us,’ Leki gasped. She grasped his hand and stood, leaning against him for support. She was slick with sweat
, speckled with blood from the slayer she had slaughtered. ‘It’s back, and there will be war.’

She’s a soldier of the Spike
, Bon thought, but the idea still did not seem real. ‘You can’t believe that,’ he said. ‘Aeon is … the one god, true and real.’

Leki actually shivered. ‘Of course it is. And it will be looking for revenge.’

Slowly, as Bon and Leki held each other up, the blood-spattered clearing came back to life.

Milian Mu and Bon Ugane travelled with the wagon train for two days until it reached New Kotrugam. They kept separate rooms, but spent all of their waking hours together, shovelling coal in the largest wagon, taking breaks, perusing the impromptu spice markets set up along the wagon’s wide roof. Sometimes they held hands, and Bon felt the thrill of what he had been yearning for his whole life. The first time they kissed, Milian felt the shard shifting, but the greatest movement was undeniably in her own heart.

They were falling in love.

New Kotrugam was an amazing place. Milian and Bon stood on the wagon’s roof along with many others as the long wagon train approached the city. Built in a huge crater several miles across, the city had a natural defensive wall around two-thirds of its perimeter, a high ridge of land that Bon explained was supposedly the ripple of an impact. It was said, he told her, that a giant rock had fallen from the sky before history and smashed the hollow in the land. To scientists it was a valid proposal, and there were those who spent their lives examining the evidence. To others it was a creation myth, and in the caves and potholes deep beneath the city it was believed that the god who fell from the sky still dwelled.

When
Milian asked what Bon believed, he smiled and looked up. ‘We have no idea what’s there,’ he said, and she supposed that was no real answer at all.

They passed satellite communities as they approached the city’s great wall, and some of the smaller wagons broke off to make camp. The bulk of the train went forward, and as it approached the wall a set of huge gates opened, swinging on hinges the size of the smaller wagons, so heavy and wide that its movement caused a breeze that stirred dust and sand across the plain. It took some time to open fully, and a flock of birds swirled and fluttered around the door’s hidden upper edges, swooping in and out again with long thrashing things hanging from their beaks. The hinges sang like thunder, grumbled through the ground, and reflected sunlight made the darkness behind them seem deeper.

People drifted down from the sheer cliffs above the yawning gates on wings of gossamer material, opaque and yet obviously strong. They steered their kites and landed on the larger wagons. They were short, thin people, with bright red skin and flaming yellow hair. Milian thought they looked like flame given life. Bon told her that they were also Outers – he believed her to be one, and always would – originally brought to Alderia as slaves because of their skills with medicine. That skill had since earned them some respect, and in many cases an element of freedom. The fire-people folded their false wings when they landed and started to trade, and Milian watched in fascination. They moved with such grace and certainty that she was not quite sure just how false those wings were. She would ask Bon when they were through the gates. There was so much for her to ask him.

But faced with the wonders of New Kotrugam, the fire-people would be all but forgotten.

Milian grew cold inside as they passed from sunlight into shadow
, and Bon held her hand and smiled as they were swallowed into the tunnels beneath the cliffs.

‘It won’t take long,’ he said. ‘And I’m here to hold you.’ He was not quite telling the truth. The tunnel ran for over a mile, thundering to the sounds of the wagon train’s wheels and coughing steam engines, lit by lights in caves along its edges where people went about obscure tasks or simply sat and watched, and heavy with the smells of industry. But Bon
did
hold Milian, and they kissed as New Kotrugam opened to them.

She had not known what to expect, but nothing could have prepared her for what she saw as they emerged from the tunnel. The city was huge. Some buildings seemed to touch the sky, and there were floating walkways between them, the air above almost as busy as the thriving streets below. The wagon followed a wide thoroughfare apparently emptied for its arrival, and either side were bustling markets, theatre squares, recreation parks where people played sports and games, bathing pools, fire pits where all manner of foods were being cooked, open-air Fade churches, and countless shops and display rooms swathed in materials, books, paintings and weapons. There was too much detail for Milian to take in, so she closed her eyes frequently. But every time she opened them again, there was something even more amazing to see.

Above the city floated huge shapes, their impossible shadows moving across the streets and squares and slinking over the sides of tall buildings.

‘The steamships,’ Bon said. ‘The Ald ride up there, supervising the city.’

‘Don’t they ever come down?’ Milian asked. She felt a stab of hatred for the Ald, but also amazement.

‘Sometimes, I suppose,’ Bon replied. ‘I don’t really know.’

The
steamships drifted slowly high above, mostly silent, sometimes hissing and emitting clouds of vapour that quickly dispersed to the air. They were incredible, and Milian watched one until the train turned out of sight behind a tall, wide building.
Watching down on us like gods
, she thought. The shard shifted inside her, and she silently told it to grow still. It froze. She caught her breath. She had never spoken to it like that before.

‘Fade church,’ Bon said, indicating the high building they were passing. If some of the buildings they had seen were grand, this was ostentatious. Milian could barely imagine how long it had taken to construct such a complex, beautiful, frightening building, with its towers and sharp edges, coloured glass façades, dark openings, and gargoyles that caused her to clasp Bon’s hand and squeeze tight.

‘What are they?’ she asked.

‘The gargoyles? Kolts.’ She heard the doubt in his voice. ‘Monsters, supposedly called up by the Skythians six hundred years ago. Do you not know …?’

‘Not where I am from,’ she said. Six hundred years! She had supposed centuries, but not so many.

Bon nodded uncertainly at this, because he had not yet asked her about her home. ‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ he said. ‘All in the past.’

The shard of Aeon shifted once more, and Milian closed her eyes until it grew still.

They moved on, and wonders assaulted her from all sides. Later, she asked, ‘Why is it New Kotrugam? What happened to the old?’

‘There are those who believe there was a city here before the crater was made.’

‘And you believe?’

Bon shrugged, cautious. ‘There’s always something before.’

It
was a day of discovery and wonder, and when they left the wagon at last and Bon took her through the streets to his home, Milian became a part of New Kotrugam. The place evoked obscure memories of Skythe, but she did her best to drive them down. A vague grief threatened to engulf her.
They called the daemons Kolts, and blamed them on us!

Having Bon beside her made her calm, and the grief and rage existed only as a distant ache.

A day after arriving, after a meal at a local tavern and several glasses of wine from a vineyard in the hills south of Kotrugam, they made love for the first time. Clumsy, awkward, yet there was a passion Milian could not deny, and which Bon had been searching for his whole life. There had been several women through his twenties, but none of them had possessed him in the same way as Milian. There was something about her. Exotic, perhaps, with her obvious Outer origins. But she seemed larger on the inside than out, as if her capacity for secrets was deep. And her eyes. And her body. And her laughter, always with a hint of melancholy that Bon believed was the sign of a good heart. Anyone could believe that things were good, but his true love could only be someone who believed they could be better.

The next morning they awoke with sunlight slanting across their naked bodies, smiling shyly and with eyes heavy with memories of the previous night. They made love again.

Milian felt the change. As they came together and a tear leaked from her left eye, she sensed the shard leaving her and filtering down into the new life seeded in her womb. She rolled from Bon and fell onto her back, crying out, bereft and shattered at the sudden hollowness.
Countless years
, she thought, and she knew she could not lose something she had carried for so long without it ripping the heart from her.

The shard left no apology. She still sensed it, nestling into
the potential child she and Bon had made. She could feel its weight, if she squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated. But it was no longer a part of her.

The loss was an agony, and as she began to sob uncontrollably Bon hugged her tight. He wanted to care for her even though he had no idea what was wrong, and for that she loved him more.

There should have been a future laid out before them. There should have been pleasure in each other’s company, and joy, and lovemaking and being together. And to some extent there would be. But from that moment on, Milian Mu was dying inside. She found it ironic that she had existed for so many centuries, yet was not destined for a long life.

Long enough to protect the child
, she thought. That was as long as she would bear to live, trying to hide her origins, her age, her sense of loss and hollowness. Live, in this city ruled by the people who had ruined her world and destroyed her god, condemning her to this fate.
Protect my child until it’s old enough to know what is required of it, and what it is here to do.

‘Everything feels so special,’ Bon said, drawing a circle around her navel with his finger.

Milian found that her fake smile came easily.

Old enough to raise a dead god.

Calm,
calm,
douse the fire,
quench the pain.

Juda ran, each footstep
driving agony deeper.

Sink in, seep down. Remove the damage, separate, slice it away.

From where he had fled, the sounds of conflict and shouting and chaos, and then a stunned silence filled with a held breath of impossibilities. The world behind him had been erased – much as he sought now to erase the wound from his mind, his body’s systems – and a new history was being formed from the stunned moments between moments. Juda could feel the force of this, though he did not turn to look. He
could
not turn. To turn would be to lessen his onward pace, and that would submit to the pain.

So he forged onward, digging deep to recall the teachings of the Brokers he had met, and Rhelli Saal’s gasped words of wisdom into the sex-soaked rooms after they had rutted. It had never been love between the two of them. Brokers were too selfish for that. Even while they licked and fondled and came, it was magic that possessed their thoughts.

You can mould
dregs to your ways, because what’s left is weak and old and can be manipulated. You need strong hands, a hopeful heart, and desire. Sometimes you need pain.

Juda had pain and desire aplenty, and his hands had been made strong over the years, lifting and sifting those few dregs of magic he had been lucky enough to find.

Dilute the pain, hold it away, swallow it, lose it to the air.

As he ran he pressed his right hand to his left armpit, letting the dreg do the work he urged. He kept his left arm raised and held away from his body. The arrow had entered his back, struck his shoulderblade and been diverted down, emerging beneath his arm and slashing across his left bicep. His sleeve and jacket on that side were soaked with blood. He had yet to inspect the damage closely.

Wash away the pain
…

The arrow’s shaft felt splintered, its sharp metal head sticky with clogged parts of him. That would make it almost impossible to withdraw, even if he could somehow snap off the flight and tug it through from the front. The fractures in the koa wood would act as barbs.

He pressed hard against the wound, shouting out at the agony and screaming the faint away. He could not stop, could not fall. The precious dreg spread around his arm and shoulder as he willed it, warm against his skin, cool against the burning fire in his flesh.