The Devoured Earth (7 page)

‘Death would be a relief,’ she said aloud, for the benefit of ears not her own. ‘For me and everyone.’ She raised a gnarled fist and shook it above her head, to where the sun would have been were she not still in shade. ‘Damn you and all your ugly friends. Why don’t you just finish us off and be done with it?’

The anger faded just as fast as it had flared, leaving her feeling more tired than ever. She clutched the walking stick Sal had carved for her — also much the worse for wear now — and braved the burning glare outside the sheltering overhang once more. Its heat was the heat of fever and pestilence, not life. Her skin crawled under its touch. She hissed a percussive, urgent rhythm as she walked, telling herself to hurry, to get out of sight as quickly as possible, to avoid drawing attention to herself, to make it home one more time without the sun’s diseased eye focussing down on her and seeing her for what she was, at last.

She was drenched in sweat and aching all over by the time the end of the ravine came in sight. Upon reaching it, she turned right and walked a dozen metres, sticking close to the rubble-strewn cliff that overlooked the desert beyond. Nothing lived in the desert. Nothing she wanted to meet, anyway.

At a struggling bush she stopped and poked her walking stick into the ground. When it hit resistance, she twisted it half a turn clockwise. With a gentle sigh, a hole opened in the cliff and closed behind her when she walked through it. Following a well-worn path down a short, rough-hewn corridor, she entered the welcoming, cool space of her underground workshop.

It was smaller than the one she had inherited from Lodo, or seemed so at first glance. Her living area was little more than a cave containing a niche for her to sleep in and several low cupboards for instruments and books. A mage had made it for her, years ago, before his betrayal and murder. The space-bending Way that connected it to the edge of the desert was short, but it was enough distance to divert Yod’s dogs from finding her as well. Ways were difficult to trace if they led underground.

The air was musty and smelt of old woman. A feeble spring sent a muddy trickle of water down the wall which she channelled into a ewer. She was able to filter the worst of the muck out of it and drink it cold, straight from the container.

Sometimes pieces of the ceiling fell on her, dislodged by distant tremors. But the place had its uses, and not just as a shelter.

She had chosen it over her former home for one simple reason.

Putting down her supplies for unpacking later, she did what she always did after spending any time outside and went to inspect her unfinished masterwork.

At the rear of the workshop was a curtain draped over a narrow crack that led deeper underground. She slid through the curtain and the crack with a grace that belied her years. Her posture straightened by several degrees. Many times a day she made that short journey, down into the caves she had discovered long years ago. Undisturbed by humans, they had been inhabited by a solitary crumbling man’kin who had befriended her for reasons of its own. A tiny hunched monk with big eyes and a hint of curling beard, he answered to the name Bartholomew.

The same man’kin awaited her at the bottom of the crack.

‘Give us some light,’ she said.

Bartholomew struck a dissonant brass gong. As the sound propagated through the enormous chamber, an expanding field of tiny glowstones sprang to life. Each hung by silk threads from the ceiling, spun by worms trained specially for the purpose. The wave of light illuminated a sea of sand below, a sea that stretched from her vantage point to the shadowed edges of the cave, where the glowstones reached their limit. Each handful of sand had been carefully carried by her and Bartholomew from the desert at the end of the Way and placed into this chamber to create a canvas large enough for her to work on. She had initially tried many different methods, but this was the one that came closest to meeting her needs — the same one she had used in Fundelry when first learning how to draw. And even though of late she had begun to wonder if it might be insufficient, it was all she had. Time was running out. It would have to do.

Time.

She reached up to touch the back of her neck. Her hackles were rising, which could only mean one thing. The girl was back.

‘D’you see this?’ she asked, speaking not to Bartholomew but to the empty air, to the one she knew was watching. ‘Are you looking with your eyes open, this time? I haven’t spent my entire life on this just so you can screw it up.’

There was no answer. Thus far there hadn’t been, although she could feel the link growing closer every time. True conversation was inevitable at some point. Huffing quietly to herself, Shilly slowly moved her ageing body out onto the sand, stepping delicately across marks she’d made weeks, months, even years before. The resin Bartholomew had applied to the finished sections protected it from footprints, but she still trod lightly over complex whorls and rayed stars, and between sections defined by arterial lines as long and straight as a taut string. She knew every mark of the charm intimately, lovingly. She felt potential radiating from it, even though she herself would never be able to wield it.

It took her a gratifyingly long time to reach the centre of the charm from its outermost edge. Her life’s work wasn’t complete, but it still covered a space as large as a small town. She was proud of it, and wished only for the chance to finish it before she died.

‘Get
it
down, girl,’ she said, hearing the disgruntlement in her voice and knowing it came from the ever-present fear of failure. There was no time to be pleasant. ‘Take down every detail. Don’t miss a smudge. You’ll probably have to finish it without me, the way things are going here, so don’t waste this opportunity. It might not come again.’

Her weakening eyes watered at the charm’s mind- and space-bending properties. Sometimes when she stood as she was now and just looked at it, letting her eyes skate over its form rather than dive down into its intricacies, she felt awestruck at what she had accomplished. She had always known that she could bring great things into the world, given the chance. Her talent might not have been for the Change itself, as Sal’s had been, but hers had ultimately, in a way, been the most powerful. The Change burned too brightly if used unwisely.

Shilly blinked tears from her eyes.
Damned charm making them water
, she told herself, even though she knew that was a lie. She wanted to tell the watcher to kiss Sal for her, to convey some of the feelings that had been bottled up and preserved for so long. But she held her tongue; she kept it all in. In her world-line, she would never see Sal again. She was used to that idea now, even if the pain never went away.

‘Get this right for Sal’s sake,’ she told her younger self in a world where there was still hope.

‘He’ll need it, and he’ll need you. And you need him just as badly. Don’t make the mistake I made — not unless you want to end up like me. And who would want that, eh?’

Not a ghost of a reply came down the link connecting her to her other self. Brushing the memories and hope aside, along with her fears, she hobbled to the far edge of the resin and dipped the tip of her cane into the soft sand beyond. With smooth, economical gestures, she began once again to draw.

* * * *

Shilly opened her eyes. The image of a flat expanse of sand etched with lines in a pattern too intense to comprehend briefly overlaid itself onto the broad shelf of perfectly white snow that lay before her, wind-carved into a series of intricate ripples. The colour was wrong, and the temperature was much colder than it had been in the dream, and instead of one tiny man’kin there were dozens all around her, and glowing green people, and an old man who wasn’t quite a man, and —

Shilly closed her eyes at the sight of the glassy black figure watching her from the fringes of the group. The glast. She couldn’t deal with him —
it
— right now. At one sound from those smooth crystal lips she might shatter into a million pieces.

‘What did you see?’ asked Tom, brushing her wavy brown hair back from her face. He of all of them understood what it was like to have crazy dreams. ‘How was she, this time?’

Not so angry
, Shilly thought. That was a change, but she wasn’t sure it counted as an improvement. The awful grief she felt in her future self wasn’t new — she had picked that up before, in fractured, fleeting glimpses — but its cause had never been obvious. Now she knew. In that world, Sal was dead. Her future self had let him down, somehow. That the world was dying seemed a lesser concern against that one hard, unbearable fact.

But this other Shilly was bearing it, somehow. She continued with her life’s work: the creation of a charm that was supposed to be important. She endured.

Shilly felt a bubble of sorrow swell up inside her. Swallowing it was difficult. This latest dream confirmed so many of her present fears: that Sal was in danger, that the world might not be saved, that all her efforts could yet come to nothing. What would happen to her if she failed to understand the charm in time? Would she become the future self she saw in her dreams, hunched and withered and living in a hole in the ground?

The complexities of past and present were too much for her to grasp. It was difficult enough concentrating on the charm alone. That was the point of it all. That was what Tom was really asking. She forced herself to push everything else aside, to swallow the bubble, and answer him as best she could.

‘I saw a new section,’ she said, still with her eyes shut.

‘Do you think you can get it down?’

She nodded. Images of lines and patterns danced in the pinkness of her closed eyelids. She felt the pen and parchment in her hands, poised to draw. The details were difficult to hold in her mind. After five days of concerted effort, she still had little more than disconnected fragments, many dozens of them, with no clear way of putting them together.

Her right hand began to move, almost of its own volition. She opened her eyes a crack to follow its progress. Details were all she had, and she would get them down as best she could. For half an hour, all she did was draw, ignoring Tom and the others as though they, too, were in another world — one she was equally happy to forget for the time being.

When she was done, she felt exhausted to the very core. Altitude sickness was only part of it. Twice every day, the growing band halted its headlong journey in order to let her sleep in peace. An hour was enough, with the help of Vehofnehu and his strange meditation techniques, for her to dream of her other self. A time of feverish drawing usually followed. Then it would be back onto the man’kin steed she shared with Tom to resume the journey. And somehow, while she slept, their numbers kept on growing…

Vehofnehu helped her to her feet and rubbed her mittened hands between his to bring circulation back to her fingertips. She could barely feel them. ‘This is hard for you,’ he said. ‘I know.’ His dark brown eyes were recessed slightly above prominent cheeks and whiskery white hairs, but they radiated nothing but compassion. The corners of his wide mouth were very slightly turned down. His fingers were callused, but long and strong and very warm as they wrapped right around her hands. ‘We are asking a lot. If it wasn’t so important —’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said, dismissing his concerns with a weary nod. She was the only one with a link to the distant future. The vision of all the other seers failed beyond a particular point. Even the Holy Immortals, who travelled backwards in time as naturally as humans travelled forward, couldn’t say what happened after that point. That the future Shilly glimpsed appeared to be another life entirely, or was only a possible future rather than a certain one, didn’t devalue its importance. A glimpse was better than nothing.

She counted sixteen of the green figures sitting together at the edge of the campsite. She was sure there had been no more than fourteen when she had gone to sleep.

‘Are we almost there?’ she asked, aching to tug off all the layers of clothes confining her and feel warm air against her skin again. ‘Please tell me we are.’

‘We’ll be at the top no later than tomorrow.’

‘Thank the Goddess.’

Vehofnehu’s face split into a broad grin. ‘With luck, you’ll be able to in person.’

‘And not before time. My arse is killing me,’ she muttered as he let go of her fingers and moved to get the travellers on their feet.

‘Here,’ said Tom, pressing a flask into her hands.

She drank deeply of the ice-cold water within, then winced at the sudden pain in her temples it provoked. ‘I’m so sick of this,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘There must be a better way to travel.’

Their steed thudded mutely over to her and knelt forward on two legs. A broad-backed statue with a wildly maned bestial head and thick tail, it had an unerring ability to find toeholds in even the sheerest of cliffs. Its claws dug deep into slippery ice walls. Thus far, it hadn’t even tripped once.

But its back was hard, even through the blankets bound around its waist, and the straps that held her and Tom in place were tight by necessity. There had been numerous traverses during which she had kept her eyes tightly shut for fear of slipping free and plunging to her death. When she dozed in transit, she dreamed of wild leaps across crevasses and hanging upside down over bottomless pits.

The grief of her future self encouraged her to stop complaining and mount her ride. Anything would be better than enduring that fate. A small sacrifice now might make all the difference. What was a little discomfort when the future of the world was at stake?

She felt someone watching her, and turned to see the glast’s white-pupilled eyes fixed in her direction. A chill went through her, colder than the bitter air of the mountains. She forced herself to ignore it, as she had before, while climbing awkwardly onto her steed’s back. Arranging her lame leg so it wouldn’t cramp, she fastened herself in, then waited patiently for Tom to do the same. His long frame was bony against her back but welcome when the wind kicked up and tried to steal her heat away.