The Heretic Land (34 page)

Suddenly the sea was not so furious, and the angry sky not so threatening. Sol expanded with pride. He gripped the railing and started into the storm, daring it to take him. But it did not dare.

‘Blader Merry,’ a voice said. It shook. ‘Sol. They’ve transcribed.’

‘Gallan,’ Sol said without turning around.

‘Shall I read it, or …?’ Sol turned and leaned casually against the railing. Gallan was wrapped in a heavy coat, soaking wet already, wide-eyed at Sol’s obvious defiance of the storm.

‘Please,’ Sol said.
Words whispered by my Leki
, he thought, watching Gallan opening a small notebook and trying to shield it against the weather.

‘
Aeon risen
,’ Gallan read, his voice slow and measured. He swallowed before continuing. ‘
This was always its scheme. Trying to track. Watching for Kolts. Will send racking again when enemy located. Fade help us all.
’

Aeon risen
, Sol thought, and he closed his eyes, trying to remove himself and shut out the storm. The Engines suddenly seemed so much more important.

‘Fade help us all,’ Gallan repeated. ‘Sol … what will we find there?’

‘It doesn’t matter!’ Sol said sharply. ‘It’s not our job to second-guess. Whatever we find, we triumph over. Aeon, Kolts,
whatever
. With the gods of the Fade behind us, how can we not?’

‘How can we not?’ Gallan echoed. But he looked more scared than comforted.

‘Tell the generals.’

‘They already know.’

‘Good,’ Sol
said.
We defeated Aeon last time
, he thought. But that was hundreds of years before. And, impostor god though it was, if this second coming had always been its scheme, what might Aeon have planned over such a long time?

But a Blader could not be defeatist, even to himself.

‘Fuck Aeon,’ Sol said. ‘If we fear its name, what about when we confront it? Gallan?’

Gallan nodded. ‘Fuck Aeon,’ he said.

‘And that is our mantra when we land,’ Sol said. ‘Spread the word.’

‘Yes, Sol.’ He turned and rushed below deck again, leaving Sol standing alone against the storm.

Another day and they would be on dry land again. Despite what he had just heard – and, being a soldier, perhaps because of it – Sol was looking forward to setting foot on Skythe for the very first time.

Time
was nebulous. Venden was unsure whether a day had passed since Aeon’s rising, or a year. His perception flitted from the violent seas in the south, to frozen wastes in the north that he had never suspected existed. All the while Aeon observed, and the six-century gap in its knowledge was being filled. It saw the lessening of Skythe that had so obsessed Venden. It understood the disruption in evolution, the way that nature had been corrupted beyond and around suitable forms, following random paths that seemed to bear no relevance to environment.

What is your intention?
Venden wondered. He had felt, briefly, his own body coming apart to clothe Aeon’s strange bones, and now the fate of what was left – mind, soul, consciousness – was uncertain. Before, there had been life and death. Now there seemed to be something more.

Over time – moments, or months – Venden came to realise that Aeon was acting like a child. It moved across the landscape from here to there, observing, examining, absorbing information as it went and seeking more each and every
moment. There was a restrained excitement to it, and also a deep sadness that Venden thought might well have been his own.

Only once did a sudden reaction shock him with its extremes. They approached one of the old Engines – Venden knew of three on Skythe, and suspected there were the remains of more buried or hidden away from view – and Aeon recoiled. He felt its disgust, and something deeper that he had no wish to sense.

Fear. Aeon had passed the Engine and been afraid.

Time and distance drifted by …

And, at last, Venden began to sense something forming in the risen god’s mind that could only have been purpose. It went down into the land, past a lake of fading fire and into the frozen heart of Skythe. There it settled for a while.

As yet, Venden could not tell what this purpose might be.

Juda spent some time scouring the Engine’s surface before finding his way inside. The entrance was not where he had found it a day before. He was certain of this, just as he was certain that everything had changed since then. The skies were darker, and the stars seemed less willing to shine their way through. The land was quieter as everything waited for what would come next. It had begun to snow. And the arrow pinning him to the here and now was feeling more like a guide than ever before. It pointed the way, and Juda followed.

Inside, the Engine welcomed his presence. It should have been dark as the void, but smears of light were seeping from somewhere deeper in the Engine where he could not go, skeins of illumination drifting like exotic sea creatures in an ocean of calm. The bodies of those old dead Fade priests spun like memories stirred by his presence. Amongst them, the few dregs he had not managed to collect on his last visit.

‘And
this is where I belong,’ Juda said again. Not even echoes answered him back; the Engine swallowed all. Perhaps his voice would become an echo in a thousand years, or ten thousand, surprising some other seeker of magic who might venture in here and find …

What? His bones? No, not that, because he had no intention of dying. Not here, and not elsewhere. The slayer’s arrow could not kill him, nor its poison, and so he would embrace the miracle of his survival. He had so much left to do.

The Engine seemed larger on the inside than the outside. He drifted, feet sometimes touching the floor or walls, sometimes not. The light broke against him like waves, fragmenting and crawling around his body and across his clothes to collect again beyond him, and continue on its way. His mind was awash with thoughts of how to work the Engine. Perhaps deeper down there was a power source, but he could not edge himself deeper. Maybe it was buried in the land itself, probing metallic fingers through soil and rock as it sought the magic it had been brought here to fire.

Or it could have been that magic was always free, and the Engine was a prison.

As he drifted, he became aware of how little he actually knew. About the source of magic, how it had been nurtured, brought here, implemented, controlled, harnessed. He would have cried if he had not already wasted his tears on pain, so he brought his hand to his wound and pressed, welcoming fresh agonies.

‘How?’ he asked, and there was no answer. ‘Crex Wry, whatever you are … If you want me to set you aflame, then tell me where to find the ember!’

Nothing.

Delayed tiredness suddenly washed over him. He had been running for a long time, and although the dreg had salved his
wound and absorbed the effects of the slayer’s poison, his left side was soaked with blood. Juda floated against a solid wall that felt smooth as metal, but warmer. He rested against it, assumed it must be the floor, and rolled onto his right side so that the protruding arrow was not touching anything.

I’ll only rest a while
, he thought.
I’ll sleep away the last of the poison, and then when I next wake
—

But he did not sleep.

The shapes came for him through the darkness. Twisting, questing shapes, glinting metallic and yet flexing like the lithest of limbs. They glided, and even though they seemed to touch nothing, he could still hear the whisper of their movement through the air.
Talking to me
, Juda thought, and the first shape arced around as if inspecting him.

He struggled to sit up, but one of the shapes came in and pressed against his bad shoulder. Its touch was shocking – warm, hard, yet seemingly moulded to the place it had touched so that he felt complete contact. It pushed gently, and Juda could offer no resistance.

He smelled magic on these things. His heart stuttered with shock, and the limbs – four of them now, each independent yet acting together – drew back slightly. He gasped, started breathing more easily. The limbs came close again.

One of them clasped the arrowhead and snapped it off.

Juda screamed. Even though the pain had been muffled by the magical dreg, it came in from the distance and smashed home. His skull rang with it. He flung his head back and screamed again, and then the arrow was grasped from behind and tugged back through his body. Its splintered shaft ripped skin and flesh and scraped bone, and the inside of the Engine suddenly lit up. Juda saw his parents standing there, enacting a familiar argument from his youth before his father’s hand lashed out across his mother’s face; he
saw Rhelli Saal, sitting at a table in a tavern and picking up another jug of beer; Bon and Leki watched him, leaning over his bound body as the sun went down behind them. Something in Leki’s eyes made him look twice, but even then he did not see.

Light faded to darkness. True unconsciousness carried Juda away. As he fell, he could feel those limbs tending and fixing him, and the dregs of magic they applied had a touch he had never, ever felt before.

Saving me
, he thought. He wondered why.

Venden saw what the once-beating heart of Skythe had become. Where fires had roared and molten rock had flowed, there now lay a frozen landscape of stilled movement. Trapped in a moment, Skythe’s foundations were a creaking, ice-encrusted remnant of what they had once been. Aeon moved slowly through these caverns to memory. And as it did so, it remembered.

Like a human’s final heartbeat, Skythe’s history flipped backward to a time before humanity in an instant. Mountains rose, fought and fell. Seas eroded, volcanoes erupted and built new lands around them, the world turned and became unrecognisable from the world Venden knew, or knew of. Alderia and Skythe were joined as one mass. Rivers were the huge continent’s arteries, and there was no difference to the water if it flowed north or south of where future seas would rise. No distinction between lands, no borders, no false gods.

No gods at all.

Aeon walked the land, and remembered its movement like an adult might recall his or her first steps in the world on their own. Brave and confident, facing fresh possibilities as if they would only ever result in a good outcome, not bad. It passed across ocean floors, stepped through mountain
ranges, and here and there were vistas that Venden almost recognised. Forests stretching as far as the eye could see, though these trees were larger than any he had ever witnessed. Mountain ranges shifting beneath colossal, timeless forces, rising and falling like ocean waves slowed a trillion times. Strange creatures the likes of which he had never seen, though in some of them he could perceive features that he might recognise in a million years.

A larger shape, a shadow, passing across a gap between two huge trees. Wings, heavy legs, and what could only have been a face turned his way.

There were lakes of molten rock, coughing frequent geysers that threw fire bombs across the desolate landscape. The land was in flux, birthing the future with every gaseous gasp. Aeon passed across the upheaval on long legs that barely touched, and at the other side stood scores of monoliths of cooling rock that touched the sky, smoking, a couple still glowing. Rain beat down and rose again as steam. Between them, a shape moved back and forth like a snake. This shape was as large as Aeon, its skin scaled and fine. It moved with grace and purpose. Aeon paused before it.

The two ancient creatures conversed. Living Aeon’s timeless memories with it, Venden could understand the importance of the conversation, and the urgency.

The snake-creature went one way, Aeon the other.

Through tumultuous landscapes, close to where a sea was crashing down mile-high cliffs, Aeon paused to touch a rock. The rock was larger than Aeon, and it moved with a fluid grace that belied its solid appearance. Its eyes were golden fires in its rough-cast face. They grew paler as Aeon and it conversed, and then it flowed into the ocean.

Aeon moved on, and its memory followed the journey.

More creatures came and went, as inexplicable as Aeon.
What we cannot understand, we call gods
, Venden thought. They all had a part in some tumultuous place, and Venden understood that these beings were present at the beginning of history. They observed the shaping of the world, and yet he could not glean whether the world was here because of them, or they were here because of the world. Perhaps that was something no one could never know.

Down in Skythe’s frozen depths, Aeon shivered at these memories, and Venden did not know why. Sadness, or fear?

He remembered with Aeon, wondering what their purpose together might be.

And then Aeon asked him to speak.

Bon woke from nightmares to sparks, and the gentle shushing of water on a lake’s shore.

Beyond the fire Leki sat staring at him. Her contemplative expression did not change, as if she had not even noticed him waking. In her hands she nursed Juda’s pistol.

‘When did you steal that?’ he asked.

‘He dropped it.’ Still her face did not shift. She was neither benevolent nor threatening, just cold. Empty.

‘Thinking about shooting me?’

‘Yes.’

Bon blinked, frowning away that final image of what had been his wife.
She fell and died, that’s all
, he thought, but of course that was not all. Milian was more than she seemed, he was sure of that now. As was Venden. And as was Leki.

‘But I can’t,’ she continued. ‘Shoot you. I can’t.’ She looked down at the pistol in her hands as if surprised at its presence, then slipped it into her jacket pocket.

‘If you wanted to kill me—’

‘I don’t want to kill you, Bon.’

‘But you’d have shot me yesterday.’

‘If you’d
interrupted the racking. But …’

‘What?’ Bon stood, knees clicking. He did not take his eyes from Leki.
She’s so beautiful
, he thought, an idea about another woman that had not touched him since Milian’s fall.

‘Now we need to move.’ She stood and started kicking soil and dust over the failing fire.