The Devoured Earth (40 page)

‘Six, we kill Yod.’

Sal ignored the swinging hands of his opponent. Gabra’il’s golden glow flared brighter and brighter as he sank up to his waist and kept sinking. Only when the stone came up to his chest did it start to fade, first crimson, then a muddy ochre, then, gradually, to an angry hot black. As though the cold earth was sucking all the hateful life out of him, he was almost completely dark by the time his head slipped below the surface.

‘Master!’ he cried.

One massive hand clutched uselessly at the air when the rest of him had gone, then even that vanished. The Change thrilled again, and the stone became solid. Sal raised his head.

‘Seven, Shilly uses her charm and Sal’s wild talent to freeze the realms into the shape of their choosing.’

‘Why didn’t that drain him?’ whispered Seth to Ellis. ‘Shouldn’t he have been sucked into the Void Beneath for pushing too hard?’

‘Not now,’ said Ellis. ‘We’re too close to a potential Cataclysm. That’s where he draws the power from, you see, like an earthquake gaining strength the more two continental plates push against each other. The closer he gets, the more powerful he’s becoming. He’ll stay that way while the geometry of the world is unsettled.’

It’s all about geometry
, Pukje had told Hadrian an age ago. And it still was, it seemed. Not just the shape of things in the world, but the shape of the world itself.

‘The world doesn’t have continental sheets any more,’ said Seth.

‘No, but they still have earthquakes. And you’re looking at one in the making.’

‘Eight, I save your life the only way I know how.’

Shilly limped to Sal and put a concerned arm around him, but he stood without her help. He looked like someone walking away from an aeroplane crash, unable to quite believe what had just happened. He crossed to the point where Gabra’il’s hand had last been visible and touched the stone.

‘It’s hot,’ he said with wonder in his voice.

That broke the stunned silence which had formed around him. The devels had pulled back in shock, temporarily, and they moved in again hoping to take the humans and their allies by surprise. The fight had gone out of them, however, and their remaining number were soon killed or driven away. Within minutes of Gabra’il’s fall, the cavern was silent apart from the sheathing of weapons and the soothing of the injured. Few were unscathed, but only one, a skinny Ice Eater who had leapt into the fray too readily, had died.

Marmion had a similar expression to Sal’s on his face as he moved from person to person, checking their wellbeing. The victory took a while to truly sink in, and Hadrian could see the new energy it brought to those who had previously been half awake. They had prevailed where they should have failed. Their spirits lifted.

‘
Nine, we leave the world to manage itself
—
until the next Cataclysm or until the next invader comes along.’

‘Chalk one up for the good guys,’ said Seth, responding to the charged atmosphere. ‘We should keep moving while we have the advantage.’

‘We will,’ said Ellis. ‘We have to before Yod finds out what has happened and the next wave of creatures comes along. The list of things to do isn’t getting any shorter.’

‘Is there a number ten on your list?’ asked Hadrian as the survivors gathered around Marmion to plan their next move.

‘Of course.’ Ellis smiled without humour. ‘We die. We all do, eventually.’

Without waiting for a response, she forced her way to the centre of the crowd and raised her hands for silence.

‘Okay, it’s time. Listen closely because I only want to explain this once. There are now devels all through these mountains, and some of them are a lot worse than Culsu’s bad boys here.’ She gestured at the stinking corpses. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have time for an argument. You’re either with me or you’re staying behind. Is that understood?’

‘I understand,’ said Marmion, ‘that uncertainty is a luxury we can’t afford at the moment. But I won’t make a choice until I’ve heard everything you have to say. You can’t expect us to follow you blindly — especially if you are who you say you are.’

The Ice Eaters looked shocked, but Ellis just smiled.

‘Ah, yes: my message about not following gods without question,’ she said. ‘Well, you’re spot on there, and it’s my own fault if I’ve backed myself into a corner. But I think we can come to an agreement. The pieces of the plan are all around you. If you’d had the perspective I had in the Tomb, you would’ve seen it too.

‘First,’ she said, explaining to the others what the twins already knew, ‘we return to what’s left of the Tomb, all the way back down there.’ One short-nailed finger stabbed at the gaping doorway. ‘No exceptions. We’ve had two strikes already. One more and no one’s ever going home again…’

* * * *

Skender waited until the last of the bug-eyed creatures scuttled past before coming out of his hiding place. The tunnels were swarming with devels of all shapes and sizes, some passably human but others so improbable they barely looked alive. A couple of mixed-species gangs had spotted him but had kept moving rather than take him on. They were massing together, it seemed, not far from his own destination, for their numbers grew the closer he came to the Ice Eaters’ secret cavern. He was becoming increasingly nervous about what lay ahead. Only his determination to avenge Chu’s death kept him going.

Barely had he taken a single step from his nook when a Shockwave thrilled through the Change, sending a chorus of angry chitters, howls and whispers echoing along the rough stone passageways. He didn’t know what had happened to stir the devels up, but he determined to take advantage of it. Putting his head down, he hurried as fast as he could to the next junction and followed his memory of the route he and Chu had taken in reverse.

He made it a surprising distance before encountering resistance. A clot of snake-tentacled, upright bugs blocked the way ahead when he was just three junctions from the cavern. He cursed and hastily backtracked. He didn’t know how they saw him — since, as far as he could tell, they didn’t have any eyes — but they emitted a series of squeals so high-pitched he could barely hear them and followed him with tentacles waving.

The clicking of their chitinous feet pursued him as he ran back the way he had come, wishing he had Sal’s wild talent or Kelloman’s skills with the Change. What small potential he had would be of no use against even one of the devels chasing him, and he wasn’t going to waste that until he thought of a particularly clever way to use it — or until he had absolutely no choice.

He took a different turn to the one he had followed earlier, hoping it might reveal another way to the cavern, but instead found himself running towards another clutch of devels. With scissor-hands ahead of him and cockroach-tentacles behind, he skidded to a halt and told himself to think fast.

A hand reached out of the wall behind him and pulled him into a crack he hadn’t seen.

‘Quickly,’ said Orma. ‘Come with me. They haven’t found this passage yet.’

Skender followed the young Ice Eater along a circuitous — and sometimes uncomfortably tight — route through the naked stone. The way hadn’t been fashioned by hand; it was a natural feature linking narrow cracks and chimneys that doglegged so often Skender’s sense of direction was soon completely scrambled. He didn’t waste time or stale air asking questions, though. He just thanked the Goddess for good luck and Orma’s excellent timing.

‘I was dead back there,’ he told his guide when they stopped to catch their breath in a relatively large chamber. There was just enough room to sit face to face. ‘Thank you for saving me.’

Orma shifted uncomfortably. ‘I thought about leaving you. If those things had followed us, we’d both be dead.’

‘You did the right thing, and I hate to ask you for anything else, but I need you to take me to the others. Are they in the cavern? I can’t get a fix on them in here. There’s too much weird interference on top of all the stone.’

Again, the Ice Eater looked uncomfortable.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Skender, feeling suddenly colder than ice. ‘They’re still alive, aren’t they?’

Orma nodded. ‘Yes, but — I ran. That’s what I’m doing out here. I ran like a coward and hid while the others fought. I’m afraid of the Death.’

Skender put a hand on Orma’s shoulder. ‘You should be afraid. There’s nothing wrong with that. And you wouldn’t be the first person to run from something scary. I’ve done it myself.’ Images of the Swarm in the trees of Milang came unbidden. He pushed them down with an effort. ‘But I’m not going to be a coward this time and I need you to help me. You don’t have to fight. You can just take me where I need to go, and then you’ll be free to run. I promise you. Will you do that for me?’

Orma hung his head. ‘All right. I know how to get there. The way should still be clear.’

They crawled through cracks that looked too small for a rat, let alone two teenagers. The background levels of the Change continued to fluctuate as though the very essence of the world was uneasy. Skender had never felt anything like it before, and he tried not to think too much about it now. It was tricky enough finding toe- and finger-holds with digits that had lost all feeling. Were he to get stuck in the ground just as he had under Milang that would do no one any good.

Images of Chu’s face from their first encounter, four long weeks ago, goaded him on when all other motivations ebbed.

Then he was suddenly, miraculously, sliding into a much wider space and could hear voices in the near distance. Orma had brought them to a chamber below the main level of the cavern. As Skender and his guide clambered up the last few natural steps, he listened to what the others were saying.

‘— works like this.’ A woman’s voice, one he didn’t recognise, speaking in firm, certain tones. ‘We’re near a critical juncture in this world-line. All possibilities exist side by side, as the man’kin will attest, so neighbours can influence each other. In one world-line, the realms are severed and the Change disappears; in another, where the realms are joined, everyone has the Change. Sal is drawing on this latter version of the future. That’s why he’s a wild talent in the first place. If this critical juncture couldn’t possibly exist anywhere, he would be the same as anyone else.’

‘But why me?’ came Sal’s voice. ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

‘Why is a crooked letter, Sal. Your parents were gifted in particular ways, and that was important. But there were other wild talents born at the same time. It could be one of them standing here, instead of you, if they hadn’t burned out or died before their time. And perhaps there could be someone else in Shilly’s place, too. It’s entirely likely that in a world-line one or two over, I’m standing with a completely different group of people, pleading exactly the same case.’

‘Except for us,’ said one of the twins. Hadrian, Skender thought. ‘We’re always the same.’

‘And you,’ said Seth. ‘Ellis, I’m all for the universe-next-door speech if it’ll help us kill Yod. But can’t we move on and get this
done?’

‘Sal needs to understand what’s going on. Shilly’s all too aware, I think. She’s here now because of a great deal of effort on the part of many other people — many other versions of
her
, in fact. She knows she doesn’t stand alone.’

‘This is what Tom talked about,’ Shilly said, ‘when he said that we’d argue about the end of the world. To break the realms apart or to join them together. That’s the question.’

‘But how is the glast going to come between us?’ Sal sounded impatient and exasperated. ‘When I talked to it earlier, it didn’t say anything about this.’

‘Did you ask it?’

‘No, but —’

‘It seems simple to me,’ said Skender, clambering out of a hole in the ground near the edge of the cavern. Heads turned to face him, and he wondered what sort of impression he was making, filthy and black-eyed from where Chu had punched him. ‘Unite the realms,’ he said, ‘and let’s blast this fucker back where it came from.’

Shilly was the first to move. She limped towards him, relying heavily on her cane. Her eyes were full of sympathy and relief. ‘Skender, I wondered if I’d ever see you again.’

He waved her words away and also the hand she put on his shoulder. ‘That’s not important. It’s what we do next that matters. We’ve got to make it count. We might not get another shot.’

‘That exactly what I’ve been saying.’ The owner of the unfamiliar voice wasn’t a tall woman but she had tremendous presence.
Ellis
, Skender remembered one of the twins saying. Ellis Quick, he presumed. The Goddess. ‘Nice to meet you, Skender,’ she said with a knowledgeable smile. ‘Now you’re here, the fun really starts.’ She turned back to the others. ‘Did you hear what he said? Let’s stop arguing and do this.’

‘There’s another reason to get a wriggle on,’ Skender said as Kelloman shook his hand, looking absurdly pleased. The bilby scampered up his arm and bit his ear. ‘There are devels everywhere out there. It looks like they’re gathering for a big push.’

‘We’ve already seen some of that action,’ said Seth, pointing one of the Homunculus’s arms at a pile of pale bodies on the far side of the cavern.

‘That’s just a welcoming committee compared to what’s coming.’ Skender performed a quick double-take as a long, lined face appeared in the Homunculus’s usually black features, then retreated. He forced himself to ignore it. A babble of voices had risen up around him, and he had trouble keeping track. He looked around for Orma, but the Ice Eater had gone to stand with the other indigenous survivors. He looked pale and afraid. Slender hoped he hadn’t condemned Orma to a horrible death by bringing him back.

Don’t be stupid
, he told himself.
He’ll die anyway if Yod gets past us. Better with hope now than without hope later
.

He wondered if that was how Chu had died, with that thought in mind.

Sal came up next to him. ‘There’s something you need to know.’

‘I don’t care about the details of the plan,’ Skender said. ‘If you really can make us all wild talents, I’m all for it. You should be too. Don’t you want Shilly to have what you have?’