The Devoured Earth (34 page)

In the wall opposite the tunnel mouth was another door. Treya and the others were busy scraping centuries of accumulated slime away so they could access the charms. On either side of the wall stood two intimidating statues, each of a muscular, snake-headed creature with gold eyes and a mane of broad scales. Wicked-looking canines jutted from their half-open mouths. They looked likely to waken at any moment and attack the intruders.

‘They’re for show,’ Mannah whispered, watching from the sidelines with Sal and catching his concern. ‘Not man’kin. Just… dead.’

Sal nodded. Anger still fuelled his determination to stop Treya and her minions. During the last leg of their journey, a strange wordless song had echoed down the tunnel from the Ice Eater contingent. The ‘Song of Sorrow’, Mannah had called it. It sounded to Sal as though Treya had already given up.

‘I don’t think there’s any point trying to talk to her. You’ve tried and she didn’t listen. But that doesn’t mean I should come out blasting, either. If I can keep the doors closed while the others catch up, that would solve everything.’

‘Do you think that’ll be possible?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sal felt strong, undrained by his earlier exertions. The well of his talent was becoming deeper the closer he got to the Tomb — or to the end of the world. Either way, the effect was the same. ‘Let’s see exactly what I have in me, shall we?’

Lacking Shilly’s skill with charms or Marmion’s discipline, he could do little more than follow his instincts. Pressing his forehead against the damp, cold stone of the tunnel, he reached out with arcane senses for the flaw in the bedrock’s fabric that was the door on the far side of the cavern. It stood out like a burning brand, angular and laced with charms. He could see the way the charms naturally knotted together like the spring of a mousetrap: able to be positioned in such a way as to open and let people through, but naturally preferring to be closed. It would therefore take great skill to tease them open but little more than brute force to keep them shut.

Sal was ready. When Treya performed the sequence of charms that would ordinarily have swung the slabs apart, he applied an equal and opposite force to keep them together. Puzzled, she repeated the sequence. He maintained the pressure.

‘It’s jammed,’ he heard her say to the others. ‘We must’ve missed something. Go over all the seams. Don’t skip anything, no matter how small.’

The Ice Eaters went back to work. Sal allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction but no feeling of victory. He had won a battle, not the war.

‘
How long until Chu gets, here
?’ he asked Marmion.

The reply was weak, barely audible. ‘
She should be there now. Haven’t you heard the charges going
off?

‘Not at all.’

‘
You may be too deep in the bedrock
,’ said Marmion, not terribly convincingly. ‘
Anyway, we’re moving at last. If you can hold on until we get there
—’

‘
We’ll do what we can
.’ Sal cut Marmion off as Treya triggered the charms again, more forcibly this time. The wall groaned, caught uncomfortably between their opposing wills.

‘I think that’s the best she can do,’ Sal whispered to Mannah. ‘If so, we’ll definitely be able to hold —’

A sudden push from the other side of the wall cut Sal off. He frowned and returned his full concentration to the charms. Whatever was behind it possessed considerable strength and knew what it was doing. As hard as he could apply the pressure, it found a way to subvert it. Sal bent over double, waiting for the hum of the Void Beneath to warn him that he was taking too much. It didn’t come, so he kept reaching. Then it occurred to him that he wouldn’t hear the hum no matter how hard he pushed, because that had been Yod hoping to suck him in and drain his life away, and now Yod was not just in the real world but waiting on the far side of the door to eat him alive.

That realisation gave him strength to try even harder.
You act for all of us in there
. Not caring if the Ice Eaters saw him, he staggered from the tunnel and stood facing the door, hunched over like an old man. He clenched his fists and strained. Charms smoked and glowed a fitful red. The massive slabs of rock physically shook. A smell like an overstrained engine filled his nostrils.

He pushed, but the mind on the other side was cleverer than him. With a ground-shaking roar, the door burst open, sending giant slabs of stone tumbling like dice. One rolled over an Ice Eater, leaving nothing but a bloody mess behind. The air filled with dust.

Sal’s head rang like a bell. He stood upright and squared his shoulders, ready to face whatever might come through the hole in the wall, be it a writhing mass of deadly black tentacles, a surge of water with all the weight of a lake behind it, or something he couldn’t begin to imagine.

What he wasn’t ready for was the slight figure that stepped over the rubble and out of the settling dust to stand in the centre of the cavern, looking balefully at the scattered Ice Eaters and the one wild talent among them.

‘Well, well,’ said Chu to him. ‘I thought I recognised your hand in that futile little scuffle. I can’t imagine what you think you’re doing here. Haven’t you caused enough trouble already?’

Sal swallowed. Chu was looking at Sal when she spoke, but it wasn’t Chu behind her eyes.

‘Upuaut.’ He kept his attention as much on the golem as the Ice Eaters collecting themselves around him — and the flickering glow coming from the far side of the door. The crazy mix of green, orange and white was already beginning to hurt his eyes.

‘Oh, yes. Do you like my new home?’

Sal tried hard not to think of her as Chu, not while the golem was in charge. ‘Let her go.’

‘Why? She’s quite a catch. It was very convenient of her to drop in when she did. I don’t know what she was thinking. One little girl against the whole might of Yod? Insane.’

Sal desperately wanted to ask about Skender, but didn’t want to alert the golem to the presence of another potential victim — especially if Skender was lurking nearby, waiting his chance. Best to keep the thing talking.

‘I thought you weren’t on Yod’s side.’

‘I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m on
my
side.’ Chu’s thumb jerked at her chest, drawing attention to blood dripping down her right side. ‘Yod’s going to win this battle, so I know where my allegiance lies. And it knows what it wants. It wants the wretched Tomb open. I’m here to make sure it gets that much.’

‘No one touches the Tomb,’ said Treya, rising from the rubble like a ghost, painted grey with rock dust and mud. ‘I will not allow it.’

Upuaut turned to face her with a sneer twisting Chu’s fine features. ‘You will not allow it, eh? You’ll do as you’re told, mortal, or you’ll pay the price.’

‘You can’t kill her,’ said Sal, ‘or the Tomb will never open.’

‘No, but I can kill everyone around her, one by one, until she changes her mind.’

‘How, exactly, are you going to do that?’ Sal walked closer to the golem-infested girl, hating the way the thing robbed her of the vitality she had always possessed. He could tell that the fit wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t a Change-worker. He sensed a struggle going on behind the twisted features, but it would take more than wishing to free her. ‘You’re just one against all of us.’

‘Actually, I’m two, and the one behind me eclipses all of you combined.’

The flickering light dimmed as tentacles of oily blackness crept through the doorway. They coiled sinuously around the room, passing between people like smoke but never touching. Sal froze as one came within an arm’s length of him. He could faintly see Treya through it, her fearful expression distorted as though by curved glass.

‘Don’t move!’ she ordered her followers. ‘It can’t make us do anything we don’t want to!’

One of the Ice Eaters, a terrified man with long white hair, bolted for the tunnel. A single black limb unfurled and swept the life out of him in a heartbeat. His body dropped like a sack of wheat to the slimy ground.

‘Who next?’ asked Upuaut. ‘Whose life will you allow it to take?’

‘It can take all of them,’ Treya said. ‘I will not open the Tomb for you.’

‘That’s right. Don’t,’ said Sal. ‘Yod can’t be allowed inside, whatever happens. If it does, it’ll infect every possible world and kill everyone everywhere. There’ll be no hope at all.’

Treya seemed startled that he agreed with her. Her face was pale as she stood up to Upuaut. ‘The Goddess charged us to protect her Tomb,’ she repeated like a mantra. ‘We will fulfil that duty to our deaths.’

‘Then die,’ Upuaut growled. ‘Die with your stupid Goddess, wherever she is. Yod will devour this world all the same. Only we who serve will remain — and I will dance on your bones for an eternity.’

The golem took Chu’s body and retreated through the door. Sal took a step forward, but was pressed back by constricting coils of blackness. The space around him was rapidly narrowing. A dozen Ice Eaters dropped singly and in pairs as Yod took them, not caring which life went first. A roaring filled Sal’s ears at the imminence of his own death. There was nothing he could do to avoid this fate. The Change had no effect at all on the encroaching blackness.

Then the true source of the roaring galloped out of the tunnel mouth, sending Mannah flying with a cry. The sound of the Angel’s pounding feet filled the cavern, and Yod’s black tentacles recoiled from it like water breaking on a headland. Astride the giant man’kin rode the glast, its transformation complete. The black glassiness of its skin was a perfect match for Yod’s dire limbs. In one hand it held a familiar stone head up like a prize.

The bizarre trio almost rode straight over Sal. He threw himself between two retreating tentacles barely in time and found himself on the ground near one of the Ice Eaters, who was staring at the new arrival with an expression of utter shock on her face.

The Angel galloped without pause from one side of the cavern to the other, driving Yod before it, out of the chamber.

‘Sal!’ Mannah’s voice broke the taut silence left in the Angel’s wake.

Sal forced himself to move. He looked up and saw Treya clambering over the rubble and disappearing into the open doorway, followed by the surviving Ice Eaters. He cursed. With Mannah close behind, he pursued them through the door.

‘
Why didn’t you tell me about the Angel
?’ he asked Marmion as he went.

‘
I tried, but you didn’t respond
,’ came the faint reply.

‘Things are a little hairy down here. The door is open. Upuaut is loose. You might want to think about turning back.’

‘Never. We’ll be there as soon as we can.’

Sal didn’t argue with him. He himself was hurrying into the maw of the monster rather than sensibly heading for safety. If a chance existed to make a difference, he would try it.

The doorway led to the base of a giant vertical cylinder that Sal guessed was the interior of one of the three towers. Steam boiled from its walls and swept upwards in a thickening stream, hiding any possible view of the sky above. Black tentacles writhed in agitation among the clouds, occasionally licking out to menace the Ice Eaters below. The black-robed figures crossed a rubble-strewn floor to a fiercely glowing, flower-like structure that could only be the Tomb. Sal was taken aback by its size and its strange, angular beauty, and the contrast it made to the ugly dais on which it sat.

Standing before it on three stone legs, beautiful in its own weird way, was the Angel. Sal recognised fragments of limbs in the rubble at its feet: the remains of man’kin destroyed in the seers’ attempt to open the Tomb. The glast hopped down from its back and paced around the Tomb, emitting a nerve-tingling hiss every time a tentacle came too close.

Sal caught up with Treya just as she reached the stone dais. She seemed oblivious to everything around her — everything except the Tomb itself. It captivated her. Its flickering multicoloured glow painted her face with expressions that were impossible to read.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she breathed, reaching up to touch one of the Tomb’s curved, glassy planes. ‘I never thought it would be so beautiful.’

‘We should head back,’ Sal told her. ‘I don’t know how the glast is holding Yod back, but I bet it won’t last forever.’

Treya nodded but didn’t move. ‘Eternal life. That’s what she promised my ancestors, a thousand years ago.’

‘The Goddess?’

She nodded again. ‘None of them saw the day when the Tomb was opened. Why should I be different?’

Then she froze. Where her hand touched the Tomb, a face had appeared through the translucent shell. Even, through the flickering of the Tomb, Sal recognised the gentle green glow of one of the Holy Immortals. The figure leaned closer, as though trying to see out.

Treya’s mouth opened in shock.

The figure looking back at her, glowing green and trapped on the inside of the Tomb, was none other than Treya herself.

Sal stepped back, stunned by the growing realisation. ‘No,’ he said to her as she opened her arms and gathered the Ice Eaters to her. They shoved Sal aside, responding to her natural authority. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘You can’t do this.’

‘She can,’ said Mannah. ‘And I think she will.’

Mannah indicated the glowing walls of the Tomb. More green figures had appeared, including one who looked just like him. They spread out around the base of the Tomb, facing the Ice Eaters, one by one. Each confronted a reflection of themselves, even Mannah, drawn closer by his own visage coalescing out of the glowing blue crystal. Treya took the hands of those on either side of her, and the circle spread to surround the Tomb.

Sal retreated, wanting to intervene but not knowing how to — or if it was even possible. The chain of logic which led him to full understanding had a terrible momentum — beginning with recognising Mannah on first meeting him, but not knowing where from, and ending with the realisation that he had been in the Panic city all along. Mannah was a member of the Quorum that had served the Panic as seers. The Ice Eaters and the band of Holy Immortals, whose lives stretched backwards in time, were one and the same.