The Heretic Land (7 page)

In that same cave now, she can hear the sea. It is distant, but comforting, a constant that would sound the same one age to the next. And now there is the faintest light as well, bleeding in somewhere and reflecting and refracting through the cave to where she lies. She is all but buried after being there for so long. Even the cave feels new, reshaped around her over time as seasons and years have come and gone, rocks have fallen, and the sea has done its timeless, erosive work.

It will take some time for her to find herself again. Her mouth is moist once more, but her eyes are still gritty and sore. She can feel the weight of slumped organs in her body, though her muscles seem to be reacting to her commands, doing their utmost to obey.

She thinks her god’s name, but Aeon is silent. She probes for it, but there is no response. Perhaps over the time she has been hidden down here, it has faded away to nothing. It was a mere shard of what Aeon had once been, after all.

Some time later, Milian Mu sits up at last.

Venden Ugane
dropped the cart’s reins and fell upon a red-spined snake, one hand clamping hard behind the powerful jaws, the other pressing down halfway along its length, trying to prevent the creature’s thrashing and avoid it curling around his arm. A year ago he’d witnessed a specimen smaller than this wrap itself around a hillhog and squeeze until the swine’s guts exploded from its arse.

‘Calm it, for the bastard gods’ sakes!’ he hissed. The snake seemed to weaken, and then its movements drew to an abrupt halt. He’d seen serpents feigning death before, a defence mechanism or a hunting ploy. He would not lessen his grip.

‘Fifteen spines. Shorter than they should be. Won’t catch anything with them.’ He lifted the head and pressed, its dislocated jaw dropping open under the pressure. Sickly yellow venom dripped from its long fangs, and he was careful not to breathe in any of its fumes. ‘Teeth should be longer to break through a hillhog’s hide. Hogs growing heavier and tougher. Don’t adapt, don’t survive.’ He stood slowly, then heaved the snake down the hillside. It twisted and rattled through the
air, then fell in a clump of bushes and slithered away. He watched it go, wondering how it could still be alive and whether its offspring would persist for long. It was far from a perfect specimen, but then he was already certain a perfect specimen would no longer exist. On Skythe, perfection was further away than anywhere else. The snake hunted imperfect prey, living among flora that barely understood seasons. That confusion led to beautiful landscapes of many colours – lush greens and blooming wonders, as well as the autumnal hues of orange, red and brown. But such beauty was unnatural, and wrong.

His mind never still, Venden enjoyed retroscrying; trying to discern how these animals and plants might have been in the past, and how perhaps they should have been in the present. And he could sometimes retroscry back to the point when everything had changed – when Alderia’s assault had blighted the land, and polluted it for centuries to come.

Back where he’d come from the idea that Alderia had implemented magic was a forbidden concept, but here there was no one to forbid. Not this far north, at least. On the southern shores there were the slayers, and some people still foolish enough to fear uttering the truth. But here he was deep in the heart of Skythe, and deep in the wild past.

The war had changed things more than most people could ever believe. Discovering the truth was a challenge that had become a personal quest since he had come here to live, and every oddity he found only served to pique his interest more. Back on Alderia, his interest had necessitated the gathering of forbidden information – parchments, diagrams, whispered rumours passed on in dingy basement rooms. He had never questioned his strange interest in a war six hundred years old, not even when he was a child. But coming to Skythe meant that he could wander the corrupted site of the war and discover evidence for
himself, and his fascination seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It was what he had been born to do, and he felt more at home than ever before.

Especially since discovering the remnant, when in a flash his life had taken on new meaning. Since then, his retroscrying of local flora and fauna had become little more than a way to pass time during his journeys. What he sought now was something far less known.

Venden picked up the cart’s reins and started hauling it forward again. He had come this way once before on one of his scouting trips for further remnants, but any tracks he had left behind had been wiped away by the weather. The gentle slope of the hillside was relatively free of trees and rocks, and a good route along the valley towards his destination. Soon he would drop down to the valley floor and follow the river. The cart was small, light, but it was the object on it that might cause him some problems. It had taken eight days to come forty miles, and now he was almost home.

Memories of his previous life – the sad, wasting man who was his father; the dead mother – came clearer in dreams now than in waking hours, an indication that he was leaving his past way behind. It was a long time since he had whispered apologies to his father before dropping into a peaceful sleep.

Sometimes he thought to whisper to that void hiding inside of him instead, but he had long given up trying to understand.

The cart bumped, and the thing it contained thudded against the timber sides. Venden glanced back at it. Every time he looked, his stomach dropped and he felt sick. It was a sickness at his loss of control, at the feeling of
being
controlled. He should never have known where to travel to find it.

It had been the same with every other remnant.

The memory of his long
journey north from Skythe’s southern shore, and what he had found close to the source of the river, was as fresh now as the time he had first relived it. Each recollection seemed to make it more real, as if his mind was solidifying his experience to hold back the subtle madness he felt.
Everyone blessed with genius is also tainted with madness
, his father had told him on the day Venden was accepted into the Guild of Inventors. But that was a continent, and a lifetime, away.

‘I’m not mad,’ he said to the wilderness. Each reiteration chipped away at his confidence in the idea, and the watcher inside had never deigned to offer an opinion.

All through his journey north from Alderia to Skythe, he had suspected that he was being drawn to something. After many days stowed away on the supply ship – fearing capture, stealing food – the open freedom of this strange land had refreshed him. It washed out the fears that had built in him, and the regrets about what he had done. And finding himself somewhere he had dreamed of for years, it had not been difficult to follow the lure.

He guided the cart down the gentle slope, turning so that he was behind it and the weight of its contents pulled it down. Staring at the shape exposed to the harsh sunlight, Venden felt that shiver again, the mysterious sense that this hidden thing was always meant to be found by him. The first time he touched it, the smooth shape seemed to fit his hand perfectly, as if he had always known it. It had lain in the ruin of an old Skythian temple for centuries, buried beneath a fallen wall, swathed with sickly crawling plants, patiently waiting. It had taken only a morning to pull back the rubble and cut away the plants that sought to smother the object, and it had felt like granting freedom.

The length of his arm but slightly thicker, the spine-like object had
fourteen protuberances down both sides, each of them as long as his thumb. They were round and smooth, and pocked with between three and thirteen holes. These holes had been home to crawling things, but since loading the object onto the cart they all seemed to have crawled away. The central trunk was almost circular, with one side slightly heavier than the other. If cut it would have the cross-section of a seagull’s egg, but Venden would never try to cut it. He wasn’t certain it
could
be cut – even after so long, its surface was completely unscarred by anything time, or the falling temple wall, had thrown at it.

With each bump it seemed to slip across the cart’s wooden surface, moving as if alive.

But it was
not
alive. When he’d picked it up it had been cold and still, hard.

The cart jumped over a rock and the ropes jarred through his hand, burning his skin and causing him to cry out. He tugged hard, pulled the axle to the left, and jammed the wheels against a rut in the hillside. Panting, Venden released the cart and sat down. The sun blazed. His water skins were empty. Home was near, but the familiar desire to draw out his journey had been nagging at him for the past two days.

He liked being at his camp, but when he was out looking for a relic he never wanted to get there. Deep down, past even that shadow at his core, he was terrified of what he was doing.

Falling onto his back in the long grass, turning his head to the side, he saw a small spiky plant speckled with hundreds of tiny purple flowers. ‘Bruised heather,’ he said, used to talking to himself. For the past years, there had only been the animals and plants of this place to speak to. The Skythians he encountered seemed lost to civilisation, regressed to more feeble times. ‘Haven’t seen it this far inland before. Likes the sea breeze.’
He leaned on one elbow and examined the plant closer. ‘Flowers are catching insects. Drowning them. It’s turned carnivorous. Long stems, flowers too heavy when they’re full …’ He lifted several drooping stems with one finger and found that more than half of them had snapped. At the breaks, the bright green stems were turning a rusty brown, as if their drowned victims’ blood seeped out. ‘Not fit for purpose.’ Sitting up, Venden looked at the sky. Up there where the sun burned fierce and the clouds flowed south to north, there was nothing that looked wrong. The sky was pure and untarnished, while Skythe was tainted by the past.

‘It should all be dead by now,’ he said, because from his studies back on Alderia he knew that such natural systems could not persist if things were going wrong. It was early spring, but down the hillside he could see a swathe of trees whose leaves were smudged orange, yellow and red, a gorgeous array of colours that betrayed the errors imprinted in whatever still drove the trees to grow. Perhaps they drew this corruption up from the soil through their roots, infected water, mutated nutrients. Or maybe even Skythe’s air was polluted and wrong.

Down to the valley floor, following the river, he soon approached the place he had come to know as the ruined vale. From a distance it presented a pleasing vista – the river curving in a gentle arc around an area of uneven ground, trees standing sentinel, and the remains of two stone bridges planted either side of the river. One of them was almost unrecognisable, but the other had only lost its central span, the carved stone formations on either side evidence of the graceful structure it had once been. The ground here was sometimes marshy, but not today. The river had not flooded for several moons.

As he drew closer a flock of sparrs took flight, startling him to a standstill.
The commonest birds in this part of Skythe, they were also the prettiest, with luminescent blue wings, long trailing tails, and a green flash on their chests by which it was possible to identify the males from the females. But in flocks their combined song sounded like a stalking creature’s roar, and Venden could never get used to the brief moment of shock.

The sparrs flittered up and to the east, higher into the hills, swirling and swooping but never breaking formation. There were hunting things in the air in these high valleys that would pick off any bird straying from the group.

The ruined vale used to be a large village. Destroyed during or soon after the Skythian War, it no longer betrayed any evidence of its violent demise. Nature had reclaimed the village, subsuming it, smothering the buildings with crawling plants and trees, pulling them back into the ground. There were glimpses of upright stone structures here and there, but time had ensured that there was no longer much order left to this place. Walls had fallen and been taken back to the wild.

Once, walking through the ruined vale almost two years before, on the day he had named it, Venden had sensed something beneath one of the small hillocks of tumbled stone. There was no sound and no hint of physical movement, but staring at the plant-covered mound he had been taken with the disconcerting sensation that everything within was in turmoil. A terrible aura of violence projected from the motionless pile, and Venden’s heart rate had doubled in the blink of an eye.

The void inside him had screamed.

He’d turned and run blindly, collapsing miles away in a sweating, frightened mess. And later that night, as he stared at the stars unable to sleep, he’d acknowledged what he might have witnessed – a shred of old magic.

It was said by
some that dregs of magic still persisted in the darkest, deepest parts of the world, left over from the war. A forbidden thing now, even more so six centuries before, there were still those who sought it. Venden was not one of them. In his illicit studies he had found plenty of evidence to suggest that magic was a dark, insidious power. Some suggested it had possessed a strange sentience. One Skythian parchment, ancient and ambiguous, had even given magic a name.

Crex Wry
, Venden had muttered, and dawn’s cool light had brought a desire to hunt the magical dreg. Fear had changed to excitement. But upon his return to the ruined vale, he could already tell that whatever had been there had flitted or melted away.

Now, he stood by the river with his cart and the thing it contained, and stared at that fallen building. It remained motionless and dead. The plants growing upon it were a mixture of wild, mutated creeper that sprouted vicious-looking spiked seed pods, and the pale echoes of roses. These flowers were like images faded in the sun, bare memories of the beauty they should project. Their stems were weak and thin. Thorns were blunted by the sickness in the land.

Yet still they grew. For Venden this was the greatest shame, and the worst crime of the Skythian War. Alderia’s use of forbidden magic had not killed Skythe, but had destined it to a future of weakness, mutation, and steady, slow decline. It had been six hundred years, and it might be six hundred more until this land was truly dead.