The Heretic Land (11 page)

He judged that it was approaching late afternoon. The sun dipped towards the low wooded slopes in the west, setting fire to the treetops and smudging the landscape with vibrant fire colours. He still had time.

The remnant loomed higher above him than it ever had. He circled it twice, examining the
ground where it appeared rooted with the tree. Though it had moved, its end still disappeared into the ground, soil around it disturbed and upset, wet. Its other end also pierced the land, and there was no sign of any upset from the movement – no disturbing of the long grass, scoring of the turf or topsoil. In order to rise as far as it had, it must have grown.

He moved back to the tipped tree trunk again and knelt to examine it. There were thousands of ants crawling around the exposed roots, gathering countless spotted white eggs and transferring them down beneath the soil again.

‘Only just exposed,’ he whispered. A breath of air passed across the clearing, rustling plants growing on the cliff face and waving the grass in complex patterns.

The object he had brought back that morning was still where he had dropped it close to the cart. He remembered the remnant’s strange movement, and dropping the spined object as he dashed for his place beneath the overhang. After that there was nothing, and sleep must have come quickly. This journey had been a long one, and tiring, and he still felt weary.

He touched the object, and the sense of raw power struck him hard. There was no movement this time, but a staggering potential that made everything clear and defined, smoothing blurred edges of doubt. And he knew what he had to do.

The object was light and comfortable in his arms. He pressed it to the remnant many times – its end, its underside, the edge with the longer projecting spines. When he shifted it in his grasp and presented the shorter spines to the remnant’s underside, standing there with the shape arching above him and slicing the darkening sky in two, there was an immediate attraction that tugged the thing from his hands.

The world turned over. Venden fell, fingers digging into the soil, terrified that he was about
to fall off. His heart thudded against his chest, and he squeezed his eyes closed, thinking,
This is what I was always meant to do
. After a pause he rolled onto his back and looked up, and the remnant was more complete.

The object had melded to the arched underside, spines now bent and connected to the remnant as though they had never been apart. Venden stood and stretched up to see, but there was no sign of any connection, no join. The two had become one, and when he reached up and touched the object it felt no different from the remnant.

It was as if they had never been separate, yet, until Venden, they had been forty miles apart.

‘And there are more,’ he said, looking at the five other objects around the clearing. Each had a story of his finding them – guided by the presence that resided within him, shown and told where to go. Scattered across Skythe, they had been brought together again by his hands.

One of them resembled a network of petrified veins, almost the size of his torso. It looked delicate, yet when he had recovered it from a deep pool beneath a waterfall he had felt the strength inherent in its structure. It was something that belonged inside. He had not applied pressure, but knew that, if he had done so, the object would have resisted, perhaps even pushed back. It had lain in the grass beside the remnant for three moons, and now he picked it up to see where it might belong.

This time he was still clasping the thing when it hauled itself against the foot of the remnant close to the upended tree, and though the mountains seemed to shrug, he retained his balance. Part of the remnant for a moment, he felt none of the upset. It was as if it was keeping him safe.

When Venden picked up the boxy, bony shape he had discovered in the
ruin of a Skythian lakeside town, he thought that his actions resembled something like building. But as this shape also moulded itself around the remnant’s underside, he let go and fell back, acknowledging what he had somehow known all along: that he was not building something new.

This was reconstruction.

Milian Mu senses
the sun and moon shifting around her, as if she is central to their existence, and the passage of time is an ambiguous thing. Her breathing fills the cave in rhythm with the tide, and then faster, and faster still as the smell of the sea comes in and the sense of movement fills her torso. Her blood flows, her nerves jangle.

She shifts to a kneeling position, one hand splayed against the cave floor, shelled things falling from her body as she flexes and twists them away. Some of them she picks up and puts to her mouth, sucking out the slick insides and swallowing without chewing. The taste is neutral, but she can feel their goodness spreading through her insides.

Some time later, Milian Mu manages to walk around the cave. Motionless for a long time, her body has lost touch with the world, and being a moving part of it once again is like being reintroduced to a former lover.

She tries to speak. Her voice is a croak, and the shard she carries of her old god Aeon gives comfort. It does not speak, but exudes an understanding that all will be well.

Later, when the
tide is low, she enters the water at one edge of the cave and starts making her way outside.

The sea welcomes her in with cold arms. She breathes in the water and panics for a moment, but the shard rises and calms her, urging her on. Those memories of a long, long journey across the bottom of the sea come again – passing through murky depths, and hiding from dark things down there – but they feel more distant now, moved further back in time by her return to life. So she pulls herself past the low stone ceiling, lowering her head beneath the surface when the powerful waters scourge the last remaining molluscs from her skin.

Eventually she feels something different above her, and she surfaces slowly to the silvery glare of the moon. Outside now, she gasps in the fresh night air. The water buoys her, and the shard sinks back down, not cowed, but secretive. She thinks perhaps it has betrayed itself, just for a moment.

Milian Mu walks through the surf and onto the beach. When she had arrived here long ago, the beach had been scorched to glass by the cataclysm way across the sea on Skythe. Now it is a rough surface of sand and sharp-edged black rocks, scattered with evidence of life – empty shells, dead crabs, seaweed, and night things that root amongst the tidal deposits to take their fill. Some of them scurry from her. Some sink down and play dead. She ignores them and looks down at herself, and feels a momentary surprise at her nakedness. She is, she realises, beautiful.

And cold.

She looks around, and along the beach there is something out of place. The building seems empty, an awkward, blocky shape against the dunes. There are nets hanging from racks beside it, and timber and wire pots piled on the beach in front. A fisherman’s shack.

As she walks towards
the shack, the sand slicks between her toes. The soft sea breeze brings visions of the open ocean and a chill across her newly exposed skin. She drags her feet through the sand, feeling the swish of knotted hair across her shoulders. Her breath is heavy and phlegmy in her throat.
How can I be walking?
she wonders.
How can I be breathing after so long?
But the shard rises again to allay her doubts and drive her forward.

There are many questions, but for Milian they are all answered by the presence of the shard. She is in Aeon’s service now, and whatever the bastard Alderians and their Engines did to her god so long ago, at least she carries a trace of Aeon inside.
A memory
, she thinks, but that is too vague.
No, not just a memory.

A seed
.

The shack seems abandoned. The door hangs off, one side wall is split and rotting, but when she ventures inside she finds someone’s belongings, heavy with windblown sand. Perhaps a fisherman went out one morning but never returned, and the only evidence of him ever existing remains here.

There are clothes, sandals, a time-blunted knife, some tobacco and a small shoulder bag. As she dresses, Milian feels a growing warmth heating her insides and exuding outwards. She is alive, again. She has risen.

Though terrible memories of what she once did still haunt the edges of her perception, she no longer feels like a relic of the past, and the future is suddenly an exciting place.

Juda viewed the slayers from the dreg of magic he had left behind, and they were terrifying.

Since finding the wisp of magic he had been training it, kneading it to his mind’s desires, employing untested techniques which were largely theoretical in an effort to make the weak haze
his own. This was his final dreg, a precious thing, and every step of the way – Leki and Bon Ugane following on behind, their silence loaded and nervous – he was anxiously probing back with his mind, eager to discover whether anything had worked. If it did work, then much of what he had dedicated a large part of his adult life to might have had a purpose. If it did not, then there would be so much more left to do. He would not give up on magic. He
could
not. If he did, he might as well wander into the wilds and die.

He and the others were four miles away from where they had camped when he sensed the slayers. He rested against a tree that had half fallen to grow out across the water, and as Leki’s shadow reached out a concerned hand, he clasped at the air and dragged it aside, and saw back the way they had come.

The images were erratic, but clear. There were two slayers descending the steep slope towards the camp. They leaped and loped, no caution in their movements, no effort at concealment or surprise. Their heavy feet slapped down and coughed up clouds of bursting fungi, and dark clothes flowed behind them, dragged along like resistant shadows.

‘You’re seeing them,’ Bon said, but Juda waved away his words, closing his eyes. He plucked a cigar from his pocket and lit it, drawing in the spiced smoke and welcoming its calming influence. It made the visions clearer.

One slayer was female, one male. The female was heavy-boned and her large bare hands were scarred where she clasped her pike, yet she had made a grotesque effort at make-up, smearing blusher across her pale, inhuman face. Juda found the effect more disturbing than the various weapons tucked into her belt and shoulder harnesses, and as she went to all fours and sniffed across the camp he diverted his attention to the
male. This was a larger slayer, his muscled arms and legs bare, body clad in thick leathers bathed so many times with blood that they had taken on a port-wine hue. His misshapen head jerked this way and that like a bird’s, long plaited hair a snake’s tongue tasting the air. He strode to the fire pit and kicked it asunder, and the woman scampered across and sniffed at the still-warm embers.

Then she stood, and she and the male slayer moved close, conversing in a shockingly human manner. They turned as one, pointed at Juda, and darted at him.

Juda gasped and cringed back against the tree, and for a moment the visions blurred with reality, a merging of scenes that brought the slayers close. He squeezed his eyes shut and drifted back to the camp, then held his breath as his senses opened up once more—

—and the slayers were circling like wild animals toying with their prey. There was a hint of fear in their stance, perhaps, but it was mostly fury that drove them, shimmering through their swollen muscled bodies as they stepped left and right around the dreg. He could hear them hissing, smell their scent – meaty, sweaty, a tang of something sweet – and the threat they exuded was palpable, scarring the air. They were even less human than he had believed, and he realised that they would never, ever, stop in their pursuit.

He went to his knees beside the fallen tree and brought himself back, blinking the magical dreg away and feeling the hollowness of its loss. It wrenched at his insides like the death of a loved one.

‘They’ve reached the camp, and it’s only made them madder,’ he said, leaning forward to let the cool mud calm his hot forehead. ‘They’re coming.’

‘We have four or five miles on them,’ Leki said. ‘We have a head start.’

‘Yes,’ Juda said, and he struggled not to
cry as the sense of loss throbbed slowly away. ‘But they’re never going to stop.’ He sat up and wiped the mud from his forehead, and they were both looking at him as if he was mad. If that was the truth, it was a madness that suited this land, and he was at home here. Bon and Leki were the ones out of place.

‘Why did you save me?’ Bon asked. ‘You’ve doomed yourself.’

Juda laughed out loud. ‘There are always reasons,’ he said, puffing on the cigar again. ‘We have to move. There’s somewhere we can go where we might be able to lose them. But they’re on our heels now. They’re filled with rage. And if they catch us, there’s no fighting them.’

Juda led their way along the course of the stream and looked for a good place to cross. The slayers would see their footprints and smell their route, but any way to confuse them would give Juda and his charges a few more moments. And if they reached the gas marshes, they might just have a chance.

‘You were using magic,’ Bon said from behind. Juda could hear the fear there as well as fascination. He did not respond. Bon persisted. ‘Juda, you were using magic?’

‘You doubt me?’ Juda asked without pausing or looking back. Bon’s change from statement to question had irked Juda’s pride.

‘Where does it come from?’ Bon asked.

‘You believe in magic?’ Juda asked.

‘Strange question,’ Bon said. ‘Everyone believes it exists, in places. But most don’t even consider using it, even if they could find it. Too dangerous. Trying to use magic is like … catching hold of lightning.’

‘Perhaps that’s true,’ Juda said. ‘Not many people respect it. Fewer still can touch it.’

‘And you’re one of the few,’ Leki said.

‘One of the fewer,’ Juda
said. ‘Before I arrived on Skythe …’ He trailed off, the secrecy even now making it hard for him to continue. Even now, in this wild place where many things were possible and with people for whom his revelation might even be welcome.