The Heretic Land (49 page)

The bandaged woman lost her head to a sword’s swing, but as Sol launched into bloody battle once more, he saw her headless body still swinging blades and spinning in murderous, blood-splashed circles.

Then the hunger consumed his attention entirely, and his daemon revelled in the slaughter.

The priest watches a massacre and prays to the Fade. White snow turns red, and falling flakes are sprayed with blood-mist. Bodies fall, whole or in parts. He sits on the wagon with one hand pressed against the vibrating Engine, the other clasped around his spent cock, and he feels his gods’ excitement at what is happening here.

It confuses him. Excitement?

‘Out of the way!’ the engineer
shouts, shoving past the priest and almost tumbling from the wagon. He attends the Engine and leaps to the ground, thrusting two pronged spikes into the snow and leaning on them as they sink down. They are attached to snaking pipes, which in turn trail up onto the wagon and into the Engine. The pipes move, as if alive.

‘Gods of Fade, aid the Spike in their need,’ the priest says, but already he is afraid. Almost a hundred Spike soldiers are fighting, but their enemy seems, at first, invisible. The priest sees the results of combat, but where violence occurs there are only Spike uniforms.

The Engine thumps against his hand, one heavy, hard impact that cracks bones and bursts the flesh of his fingers like cooked sausages. He cries out and holds the mutilated limb to his chest, and the Fade gods soothe him in his own voice. It is always his own voice they speak in, in his own mind.
Everything will be well
, they tell him, and it is exactly what he wishes to hear.

But looking around, biting his lip against the pain of his shattered hand, he begins to realise that everything is far from well.

Another shattering thud from the Engine, and the wagon beneath it disintegrates. The Engine drops through the mess of broken boards and split axles, impacting the ground and sending a shockwave that ripples the snow all around. Some soldiers fall, and others fall on them as they go down, blades flashing.

The engineer is back at the ruined wagon, and the priest realises that he has swallowed his surprise at what the Engine has done.
It was always more than we thought
, the priest thinks.
The engineer knows that perhaps better than me
.

‘Gods of the Fade, aid us
in our tasks, and give your holy warriors—’ the priest intones.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, pick up a fucking spear, or something!’ the engineer shouts. He is attaching cables and twisting sprung dials, clearing snow from the ground with one foot and then drawing a pattern in the exposed soil, plunging ivory-clamped connectors into the pattern’s centre. He glances over his shoulder at the fighting, his shock and urgency self-evident.

The priest realises at last what is happening when he sees Sol Merry, the Blader who had travelled across from Alderia on the same ship as the Engines. Except he is no longer Blader Merry. His face is the same, his body a similar shape, but everything about Merry has left him. He is a daemon alive with blood, spiked with broken arrows, slashed with gushing wounds, and raging at his former comrades. He kills with a furious precision and hunger that the priest has never seen nor heard of before, and many fall before him.

As the priest sees several other Spike killing their own – and squatter, wilder shapes that must be Skythians – one word plays across his mind.

‘Kolts! The Kolts are among us!’

The engineer glances up at the priest. ‘Oh. So you do talk.’

The priest shuffles away from the Engine, his shattered hand held to his chest. But the engineer grabs his robes and pulls him back. It is a violation, but even the priest does not acknowledge the travesty of the man’s touch.

‘Too late now, priest,’ the engineer says. ‘We’ve all come too far to do anything but carry on. Here.’ He hands the priest a small, flexible bulb. It is black, and warm. ‘If anything happens to me, that goes in the port in the Engine’s upper surface. Understand?’

‘The gods of the
Fade will smile on us, and see away the calamity that we are—’

‘
Do you understand?
’ the engineer shouts. He is scared but excited, and the priest knows why. He has known such excitement since they landed on this island. The Engine is alive, a throbbing potential, and it craves the opportunity for release.

‘Yes,’ the priest says.

But neither the priest, nor the engineer, finds an end to their excitement. The engineer moves around the Engine, connecting other ivory clamps into the ground, and takes a spear through the chest. He tugs a pistol from his belt and blasts the Kolt in the face. It merely shakes its head, then lifts him high and smacks him back against the Engine. Blood stains the construct’s metal surface, and the engineer is dead before he drops to the ground.

And the priest, the Engine’s bulb growing warmer in his hand, can only watch in wide-eyed terror as Sol Merry runs at him. The Blader’s mouth is open, bloodied, his teeth clotted with fresh meat, eyes black pits into shadows that the priest has prayed against his whole life.

As he is broken open and his insides spilled out, the priest’s head tilts back and snowflakes caress his face. His last thought is a prayer to the gods of the Fade, but his only answer is endless, silent emptiness.

With almost everyone around the Engine dead or dying, Sol took a heavy mace across the backs of his legs. He dropped the dead robed figure he had been delving into, tried to turn, and his legs crumpled beneath him.

Two young soldiers faced him, and he roared and lashed out. He tried standing, but his legs failed. One soldier came close with a spear, and Sol twisted slightly, allowing the weapon to pierce his hip instead of repulsing it. It was more the way of a warrior. The soldier grinned, then Sol grabbed the spear and pulled sharply. It slid through his body and the soldier, gripping tightly, came with it. Sol sliced the smile from his face.

The second man cringed, and fell
beneath another Kolt’s blade.

Sol snapped the spear and tugged the shaft from his body. His wound gushed, but the pain was a remote thing, the curse of something far away. He tried to stand, leaning on the dead man for leverage, but his legs folded. They were slashed deeply, bones scored, and the thigh bone in his right leg was shattered.

With the massacre ended and feeding done, the Kolts continued their rampage towards the south. The thing that had been Sol Merry crawled in a wide circle around the Engine. He growled and screeched, picking up discarded weapons and digging deep for sustenance. The food gave him strength. But knitting broken bones and pulling broken arrows was beyond any powers he might have.

Through bloodied snow, his crawled path continued.

At its centre, the Engine exuded a terrible readiness that troubled even Sol’s daemon consciousness.

The Kolts’ trail became harder to follow. Their paths diverted the further south Bon and Leki went, and fresh snow was burying the signs. But Leki paused frequently and splayed her hands in the snow, face creased in concentration, her amphy eyes glimmering as she read the frozen water.

‘South,’ she said. ‘Always south.’

They found the bodies of slaughtered Skythians. A single man, then a small family group, and then, heading down into a wide valley, the expansive stain of blood was evident across the southern slopes. They paused only to gather weapons, and Bon fell to his knees and vomited. It was a thin, pathetic stream, and he could not remember the last time he had eaten.

‘Aeon did this,’ Leki
said. ‘To its own people. It knew they’d die before the Kolts, yet it set them raging.’

‘The Skythians
aren’t
its people,’ Bon said. ‘You still don’t understand that. Still in the Ald mindset. Aeon is a god only to those who choose to see it as one.’

They hurried on, bearing the weapons they had gathered from the dead. Bon carried a spear, Leki a short sword. Bon also carried the fragment of heart, and he thought it was growing warm again.

They reached a ridge and looked south. In the distance a plume of smoke turned the swirling blizzard grey. Leki knelt and read the snow. The act seemed to cause her some hurt, but she braved the pain. Amphys preferred running water. Perhaps reading snow chilled her to the core.

‘More dead bodies,’ she said. ‘Maybe three miles?’

‘Three or four,’ Bon said. He hefted the spear. ‘So, Leki. What do you know?’

She looked at him as if dreading the question. He saw uncertainty, and fear, but he stepped in close and touched her face. She closed her eyes and did not pull away, but he saw her pain.

‘In Arcanum we learned so much,’ she said. And as they set off towards the grey stain on the landscape’s whiteness, Leki laid bare her heart, and her secrets.

‘Arcanum was never about magic. There were always the whispers, from those who might disapprove politically, or sometimes from Faders who believed what we did went against the Fade. They were designed to cast a slur on Arcanum and make it something it wasn’t. These people wanted to promote a climate of fear about a group that was … well, just interested in deeper things. We aren’t magicians, but we do have imaginations. We’re critical of knowledge, because that’s how it progresses. We interrogate beliefs, because that’s how new discoveries are made. And every truth that Arcanum holds dear is interrogated as well. We’re open enough to call a truth a lie, if there’s proof of the fact. It’s how
we
move on. Can you imagine Alderia as it was a thousand years ago?’

‘I’m not
sure I can,’ Bon said. ‘So much of what we’re taught is lies, and so much of what I believed to be the truth turns out to be … untrue.’

‘Arcanum could imagine,’ Leki went on. ‘If it weren’t for us, that’s where we would still be. We have been steering from behind the scenes for centuries – advising the Ald, conversing with the Fader priests, being open when we were welcomed, manipulating when we were not. And in all that time, our understanding of magic has increased.

‘Six hundred years ago we believed it was a force to be conjured and controlled. More recently, we began to suspect that it had a sentience we could barely comprehend. But all our suspicions were based on supposition, and analysis of the few dregs we managed to procure.’

‘Aeon told us the truth?’

‘It told me more in one breath than Arcanum has learned in centuries. If only it would come with us.’

‘I don’t believe Aeon has any intention of doing anything it doesn’t desire,’ Bon said. They were negotiating a steep slope, heading down from a ridge and into a deep valley, at the end of which the smoke trail rose. Either of them could slip at any moment and perhaps alter the course of the world. The fragility of existence struck Bon then, and that interweaving of every person, every thing.

‘The Engines are
Arcanum’s,’ Leki said.

‘You told me you knew nothing of the Engines!’

‘I’m sorry, Bon. Truth and lies … we all trade in both. Arcanum had more input into the Engines’ construction than the priests, and the Ald, and the engineers they both hired for the task. I’ve seen carvings gathered from the western deserts that provided the early Ald with schematics for Engines, and I have met those whose sole work is to refine the designs. Incorporate all the Fade sigils and elements, but—’

‘Fade?’

Leki did not seem eager to continue, but Bon pushed.

‘Fade, Leki? You started this. Don’t tell me half and then walk away.’

‘The schematics … no one can age them, or place their origins. They were carvings in a cave, that’s all I know. And there are sketches on weathered parchment, found in other places. And they contained aspects of every Fade god, built into the Engines in a very active way. Not just aesthetically. These are the guts of what seem to make them work.’

‘But the Fade gods—’

‘Don’t exist? What about what Venden said to you?’ She shook her head, trying to make sense. ‘About Crex Wry seeding the Fade to aid its own resurrection. Don’t you see? What if those seven gods of the Fade that the Ald insist their people follow, believe in, worship and fear, were all made up by Crex Wry, so that specific aspects of them were incorporated into the Engines to give Crex Wry its route back? If that’s true, then for millennia most of Alderia has been following a false religion initiated by the one thing that
might
be close to a god.’ She laughed out loud.

‘But the Fade began …’ Bon thought of all those origin stories, told to youngsters by their teachers at school, and by parents as darkness drew in and fear made their children more receptive.

‘The Fade made
the world,’ Leki said. ‘So the story goes. There have been rumours of the Fade for as long as there has been language, and writing.’

‘And carvings on cave walls,’ Bon said.

‘Divine or not, those Engines we build work at raising magic.’

‘And you built without understanding them,’ Bon said, both awed and horrified.

‘Early Arcanum did their very best to understand,’ Leki said. ‘We continue to do so. There are those who can’t handle such proximity to magic, and I’ve seen many grown mad like Juda. But we’re trying to learn more. To
become
wise.’

‘What matters now is that we need to stop them,’ Bon said. The true impact of what Venden had hinted at was staggering, but it was also meaningless to them. And even if they survived the next day and made it back to Alderia, theirs would be just another rumour. Another story against the Fade, ready to be put down by the Ald’s agents, prosecuted, expunged. In the Ald’s blind and blinkered faith, Crex Wry had built itself the perfect defence.

‘I’ve spent years studying the Engines, and I know as much about them as anyone,’ Leki said. ‘If one has been initiated, it will be drawing magic from the fold where it lies. If two are fired up, the prashdial generators will be forging a circuit around which magic can travel. Once its flow is established, its energy and power will build.’

‘And the third Engine will release it.’

‘The third completes the circuit,’ Leki said. ‘Magic draws up at the centre of the triangle.’ She hurried on ahead, the silence between them loaded. Neither could forget what Aeon, through Venden, had shown them of Crex Wry, that fallen magical being.