The Devoured Earth (43 page)

‘Eda is Seirian,’ Shilly said. All eyes turned to her. ‘Don’t ask me how I know. I just do. Get on with it, Highson. Finish the job.’

Highson nodded. He pressed the parchment flat on his right hand and closed his eyes. His left hand passed slowly over the parchment again, as though smoothing it down.

The symbols vanished. The Homunculus collapsed into a golden ball a hand’s-breadth across. With a noise very much like a sigh, the twins were released.

Any relief Shilly felt on their behalf was soon expelled as a cry of protest, fear and betrayal filled the crystalline space.

* * * *

Seth felt the force of Highson’s will relentlessly dismantling the charm that bound them to the Homunculus. He closed his eyes, fearing what he might see as their body unravelled. Would they be flung back into the nothingness of the Void, lacking all connection to the world? Or would they become bodiless spirits like the golem, condemned to wander forever? Perhaps, he thought with a keen sense of dread, they would simply cease to be.

He had pondered these possibilities before and come to the conclusion that none were likely, since the Goddess and everyone else needed him and his brother together to keep the Change working, at least until they had finished off Yod — but that did nothing to assuage the irrational fear that filled him. He was powerless. His fate was in Highson’s hands.

You want to save the world, don’t you?

A rushing sensation swept through him. He remembered the moment when he and Hadrian had accepted their fate and chosen to be locked in the Void. His mind — his being, his
soul
— had snagged on the Flame and been pared back to one world-line, one fate. He had felt the alternate lives sloughing away like dead skin. That he felt it again now, stronger and more insistent than the time before, only worsened his fear.

He opened his eyes. All was blue, not black. He raised his hands and saw skin and bone, not the black of the Void as embodied by the Homunculus. They were
his
hands, recognisable after a thousand years’ absence even though they were wrinkled and spotted with middle age. He turned them over, marvelling at the nails, the lines, the joints, the
reality
of them.

Then he looked past them, at a collection of blurry shadows visible in the near distance, and realised where he was, and what, exactly, that meant.

‘No!’ he cried, running forward on legs as familiar-yet-unfamiliar as his hands. The shadows were further away than they had seemed. Some he recognised — Pukje, the Angel, Ellis — but others were indistinguishable, their features smeared into anonymity. As he ran, they came slowly into focus.

‘Seth?’ Hadrian’s voice came from the far side of the group. ‘Where are you?’

Seth ignored him. He concentrated solely on joining the others, running with all his strength through air that had become as thick and resistant as honey. ‘Ellis!’ he cried, pushing futilely against unforgiving ground. ‘What the fuck have you done to us?’

In reply, she sadly repeated what she had said earlier. ‘I said I’d save you, boys, and this is the only way I know how.’

Seth gave up. He could get no closer. Sagging, bending over with his hands on his knees — not out of physical, but, rather, mental and emotional exhaustion — he forced himself to accept the reality of their situation.

The words of Ellis’s taller sister, the broad-shouldered, white-haired Meg, came to him from the last hours of his pre-Void life:
We can also, on a whim or in service of the realms, take from someone the ability to choose, so they are trapped along the branches of destiny that brought them here. Such people are unable to change what awaits them; the equivalent of souls without flesh in the First Realm or will in the Second. They are ghosts, confined forever to one path
.

The smaller, wild-haired Ana had picked up the story.
They wait here for the end of time to come, when the barriers between all the realms will fall and the doors of their prison are opened
.

Seth remembered the empty eyes of the ghosts he had seen in Sheol that day. There had been thousands of them, of all races, ages and shapes. Some may have chosen willingly to be trapped; others may have had their fate thrust upon them. Either way, they had been as hopeless as the Lost Minds in the Void. Their world-trees had withered back to a single fruitless stick. The only thing they had left was the chance of oblivion.

The weight of their expectation had been awful: that he would be the one to set them free from their unnatural prison.

Seth bit down on another cry of dismay. He didn’t want to spend a thousand years locked in the walls of his former lover’s Tomb.

An indistinct figure appeared around the curve of his new prison. Not one of the others, it was a man, running.

‘Seth?’

Hadrian was drawn in strange, incomplete brush strokes. Parts of him were rendered in perfect detail — hands, arms, genitals — but others were indistinct, as though drawn from hazy memory. His neck was a simple tube. His feet were as amorphous as fuzzy slippers. His face, although recognisable, had the quality of an impressionist painting.

When Hadrian came close to Seth, Hadrian’s features stabilised into the mirror image of his older self.

He’s seeing me
, Seth understood.
We’re reinforcing our memories, helping us rebuild each other in our own minds
.

‘What happened?’ Kail asked Ellis from the space between the Tomb’s curving walls, from the real world. ‘What did you do to them?’

‘She turned us into ghosts,’ Seth told him, doing his best to ignore Hadrian and the feelings of terror and entrapment welling within him. ‘We’re trapped in here, just like we were in the Void.’

‘At least you’re alive,’ Ellis insisted. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’

‘For now,’ Seth said. ‘But you’d better think of something else, or it’s not going to last long.’ He could see the stress and fear on his brother’s wrinkled face, perfectly mirroring his own. Choosing imprisonment in a Void was one thing; being confined against their will was another entirely.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ellis. ‘Hang in there. We still need you to keep the realms together.’

‘What about you?’ Hadrian asked her. ‘Do you still need us?’

She didn’t reply.

‘So now what do we do?’ asked Lidia Delfine. ‘We’ve got the Homunculus, but we don’t have Yod. The golem said it had gone. Where? And how are we going to find it?’

The twins watched impotently as Ellis turned her mind to more immediate concerns. Seth kept a restless lid on his churning emotions as, beside him, his brother reached out and took his hand.

* * * *

Skender stared at the forlorn figures of the twins with a feeling of helpless despair. They were separated at last, but still trapped together. Perhaps they always would be, cursed by fate or some unseen design to be linked in a way he could never understand. Embedded in the icy blue walls of the Tomb as they were, their features were partially obscured, but he could tell how similar they were. He recognised the faces he had glimpsed in the Homunculus, long and lined from hundreds of anxious years in the Void.

What, he wondered, if they were all similarly cursed? Was Highson always going to lose the woman he had loved? Was Marmion always going to have authority snatched away from him in times of crisis? Was Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth always going to be lonely?

He crouched on the floor of the Tomb cradling Chu in his arms. She hadn’t moved since Shilly had got her breathing again. Her flyer’s uniform was wet and heavy; her skin was cold to the touch. He tried to warm her with his body, holding her as close as he could and rocking her gently. With what little strength he had, he willed her to get well, hoping against hope that if her flesh was strong her mind would return. The bilby sat with him, sensing Skender’s distress. Every few breaths, it licked at Chu’s cheek as though trying to get a response.

Skender’s memory haunted him with images of her in the clutches of Upuaut, filled with a dark malevolence that was as alien to her as manners. Its casual discarding of her body, once it had finished with it, was surely only the last in a series of insults and injuries inflicted upon her. Black bruises mottled her throat and cheeks, as though she had been brutally beaten.

If she didn’t get well, her flesh might linger in a passive state forever — like the body Kelloman inhabited — and Skender swore that he would do everything in his power to spare her that awful fate.

‘Yod won’t have gone far,’ said the Goddess. ‘Since the topography of the Second Realm in its present form has no centre, the Tomb is free to move from place to place. Given a bit of a nudge, it should be able to — yes, here we go.’

Skender felt the floor move beneath him as the Tomb lifted from its stony resting place. He put out a hand to steady himself. The crystalline walls dimmed in brightness, allowing a glimpse of the waters, frozen in mid-churn outside. The twins stood silhouetted against the murky backdrop, momentarily distracted from their situation by the new development.

‘What shape
is
the world?’ Hadrian asked the Goddess.

‘Flat and curved at the same time,’ she said. ‘It’ll hurt your mind trying to picture it.’

‘Try me.’

‘Well, if you walk in a straight line in any random direction, you’ll eventually end up back where you started. But there’s no horizon like there was in the old First Realm and you can’t see across to the other side of the world like you could in the old Second Realm, so that means the world is also flat. The curvature occurs in another dimension, one we can’t see or measure. We can only see its effects on a world we
think
is flat.’

‘But the sun and the moon —’

‘Very different phenomena from the ones you knew. And the stars in the sky aren’t real stars, either. They’re echoes of the world below. If the realms were fully joined, what you saw in the sky and what happened in the world would be intimately connected. Now, things aren’t quite so clear. So neither astronomy nor astrology work. It’s much more complicated.’

‘To this,’ said Vehofnehu, ‘I can attest. Things were simpler when the worlds were separate.’

‘Simple is boring,’ said Pukje, standing up on the glast’s shoulder so he towered over the Panic empyricist. ‘Simple is machines and modernism and mass media and marketing. There’s no magic. There are no miracles. Do you really want to go back to those terrible days?’

‘Yes, if gods and sacrifices and holy wars are the alternative.’ Vehofnehu’s expressive face twisted into a bitter sneer. ‘What you propose is madness.’

Shilly raised a hand. ‘Let’s not do this now.’

‘Yes,’ Sal agreed. ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do before we have to make that decision.’

‘Do you really think you’re up to it?’ Skender asked Highson, unable to repress a measure of scepticism. ‘Sticking the equivalent of a god inside the Homunculus sounds impossible to me.’

‘Any more impossible than sticking two twins into one body?’ Highson shrugged. ‘In principle, it couldn’t be simpler. The Homunculus takes the shape of the mind inside it, regardless of the mind. The tricky part comes from getting it in the right place. The charms I used on the twins were first devised by a mage called Roslin of Geheb. They’re old but effective, designed to trap golems, anchor loose spirits, that sort of thing, by locking mind and vessel together.’ Highson indicated the golden sphere floating weightlessly before them all. ‘The Homunculus needs to be in contact with the mind it’s intended to house. With Yod, I guess that will mean those black tentacles we saw coming out of the lake — although how we’re going to bring the two together, I don’t know.’

‘There’s a way,’ said the Goddess, ‘but we’ll talk about that in a moment. What about the parchment?’

‘That fixes the charm in place. It needs to go in there too, as the Homunculus takes its shape.’

‘Can we do both at the same time?’

Highson nodded. ‘There’s no reason why not.’

‘We could attack from two sides at once,’ said Kail. ‘I’ll volunteer to be the second person.’

‘No.’ Marmion stared down the tall tracker. ‘It’ll be me and Mage Kelloman.’

‘What?’ The mage looked as startled as if Marmion had goosed him. The bilby twitched at the alarm in his voice. Skender absently reassured it with a pat.

‘You’re less at risk from Yod,’ the warden explained. ‘You can return to your real body in an instant, should something go wrong.’

Kelloman scowled, but didn’t argue. ‘All right. But why you? What do you have that the others don’t?’

‘I have… means.’ Marmion’s truncated arm shifted awkwardly.

‘It should be me,’ said Highson. ‘I know how.’

‘Exactly. That makes you indispensable. If we fail and you die, no one will know. We have to be prepared for a second attempt.’

Highson looked as though he was about to argue, but the sudden emergence of the Tomb from the waters distracted him from the subject.

Soundlessly and without any apparent effort at all, their crystalline vessel levitated into clear air. They were still inside the tower, but had risen above the water that rushed in to fill it up. Directly above, Skender could see the black and grey of frozen storm clouds covering the sky, or so it looked to him at first. As the Tomb continued to rise, floating past the oddly striated interior walls of the cylindrical tower, the view above came into focus.

‘Goddess,’ breathed Shilly. Then she realised what she had said. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Ellis Quick. ‘I understand completely. I’ve seen this in the world-tree before, and it frightens me too.’

The Tomb bobbed out of the top of the tower as gently as a soap bubble and drifted to rest on the nearest edge. Skender barely noticed. He was looking at the ghastly black shape stretched across the sky like an enormous, hundred-legged spider hugging the underside of the clouds. It was frozen in place, as were the clouds themselves and the waters of the lake below, but he could see motion implied in every curve of every limb. The creature wasn’t resting after having leapt out of the subterranean den where it had been patiently gathering strength for its big push. It was intent on embarking on that big push with all its will and hunger. It was on the move.