The Heretic Land (30 page)

Something more than wood in there
, he thought, and, really, he had known that from the moment of impact. His shouting, the running, the attempt to flee what had happened and what might still be happening behind him, all were part of his attempt to deny the truth: that slayers never used one weapon when two would work better. Their arrows would usually kill, such was their proficiency at firing them. But if not, the shellspot poison they were dipped in would finish the job.

Juda was fighting
to survive.
If I was a Wrench Arc then madness would save me.
He chuckled at that, and thought perhaps that madness already was doing so.

Everything had changed for him in moments, a dance of transformation played out against the presence of an old dead god. First, the realisation that he had always been utterly wrong about the magic he had expected to find around Aeon’s remains, and that the opposite was true – the god had been destroyed by magic, so its remnants would repulse even the smallest dreg, not attract it.

And then the arrow.

Perhaps under such an onslaught his life would have changed, or neared its end. He had lived with a kind of madness for years, and that rode higher now, surfing the waves of change like spinebacks on violent seas. It insulated him, as he was urging the magic to insulate against pain. But it also allowed him a particular focus. Bon and Leki were vague shadows now, and already he could barely remember their names. His purpose was all. And there was something ahead that lured and dragged him across this landscape of madness and pain, just as surely as old dead Aeon had repulsed the magic that Juda so coveted.

There was the Engine. The possibility that perhaps, with the dregs, he might start it again – initiate its systems and parts, and use it to draw bountiful magic once more – gave Juda a blazing point of light to aim for in the growing darkness of his poisoned, dislocated mind.
No one has ever done it before
, he thought, but that was part of what drove him.

The idea was all he had left, so, as he ran, it grew.

Night fell, but pain lit his way. As if it were precious medicine, Juda had plucked another dreg from the small bag and massaged, moulded, pressed it to his will and then his wound. He could sense
the terrible damage done to his back and arm, but it was a remote realisation, tempered by the dark. He panted as he ran, breath rattling in his chest.
Bleeding in there
, he thought. The dreg sank deeper and soothed.

The shellspot poison was in him, and he was an observer of the battle to expunge it. He had seen three people die of shellspot in his time on Skythe, and their deaths were as hard as any he had witnessed. Two had been victims of the slayers, newly landed banishees from Alderia who he’d not had a chance to help before they reached shore. Few of those marked for death dodged the slayers, but when they did the chase was brutal, fast, and merciless. One woman had just left the beach and ducked into a hengrove swamp when an arrow sliced off her earlobe. She’d screeched, run on and then fallen. Even from a distance, Juda had seen her body convulsing as the poison from the arrow’s tip surged through her veins and touched each muscle alight. There had been no fight when a slayer reached her and buried a short sword in her stomach. The other had been a man who had tried to land on Skythe prepared. He’d brought out two small crossbows he’d somehow managed to procure on the prison ship and fired them both at the slayer rushing towards him. The slayer had plucked the bolts from her body – one from her chest armour, the other from her exposed throat – and stomped them into the sand. As she tended the wound to her throat, she had kicked the man over and dropped a small object into his mouth. His death had been slow and agonising. The slayer stood over him, watching. It had been more vicious than the stabbings and guttings Juda had become used to seeing.

The third person he’d seen die from shellspot had been at his own hand, and he had stood well back from her final throes.

His muscles burned, but mostly from exertion. He was still master
of his own body, and there were no spasms he did not order, no movements that were not of his own will. He could feel the poison in his veins, like a stream of ice flowing around his body and striking, every few steps, his rapidly beating heart. Its journey to kill him was a pulse in itself, yet with each attack he sensed it growing weaker.

There was a change across Skythe, and it took him a while to place exactly where and what it was. Rushing headlong through the darkness with an arrow piercing his body – an injury that should have mortally wounded him, tainted with a poison that must have finished the job – he noticed nothing different in the world around him. The shadows still echoed with the calls of night-hunting things, the silhouettes of trees guarded the dark. Skythe exuded the same sense of frantic wildness it always had; confused, condemned. But the promise of things to come had changed. Even beyond his tumultuous self, Juda could sense that. The potential of tomorrow was shocking in its scope.

He grew tired, but would not allow himself rest. Movement was all. If he stopped, his heart might follow, claiming its own rest as a result of the wound and poison given by the slayer. The dregs did the work he bestowed on them, but he needed to be strong also.

With dawn behind him, Juda found himself somewhere familiar, and felt the tugging of those splinters of magic for what might have been home. The sun did not yet light the small valley, but he could still see the bulk of the Engine down there, waiting for him now, hiding no longer. He stopped for the first time since being struck by the arrow. Standing motionless, he felt the exhaustion sweeping over him.

‘Not yet,’ he gasped, starting down the slope towards the Engine. The arrow protruding from his back and armpit had become a weight, pinning him to the world. The left side of his chest
felt heavy. Blood ran cool in his veins, but his muscles were still his own, and he sensed the remnants of the poison weakening with each surge of his heart.

He reached the Engine and leaned against its side, the metal shell not as cold as he remembered.

‘This must work,’ he said. He had spent his whole life coveting magic, and the Engines had been old, dead things. Now, with the sense that another old, dead thing was stirring again, perhaps this Engine of magic might roar once more.

Aeon moved. It strode, floated, sprinted, passing from place to place with a blink of an eye. Venden could detect no sense of effort being expended as it travelled across the huge island where it had been murdered. Perhaps reformed, it had the properties of a spring coiled and ready to unleash. All those years put down were passed now, and Aeon was relishing its new existence. Its senses were nothing familiar, yet Venden’s mind was allowed full sight and sound, smell and touch, and other experiences he had no name for. He lived the lives of flowers, and was a breeze flitting high in the atmosphere. He aged slower than rock, and knew the power of existence so brief that a blink of an eye was an eternity.

He thought for a while that he was allowed by Aeon because he had carried a seed, as had his mother before him for so long. Venden’s body was gone, and the pain of its departing had been bright but brief. Perhaps persistence of existence was his reward, a kindness from the god.

But then he began to see and experience things that indicated otherwise. Through Aeon’s strange senses, Venden was made aware.

At first, the landscapes they passed across were familiar to him. He caught flashes of where they were. A valley here, a lake there; a mountain with one side fallen away in an ancient tremor; a deep
woodland, trees incredibly tall, multiple trunks thin and flexible. He had been to these places in his search for Aeon’s parts, or seen them from afar.

Kellis Faults appeared, its tall spires and towers still somehow stretching for the skies even though they had been abandoned for so long. Aeon flinched as they passed quickly through the byways of the once-great city, because in places there was a stain on the past, a dreg of magic keeping wretched memory alive. It was not afraid of these places, but would rather not touch them. Magic repulsed it.

And then there were places that Venden did not recognise, and he realised that these travels were places in Aeon’s memory …

A lake of ice cracks and groans as massive forces play on it from below. Ice geysers erupt so far into the air that they haze the atmosphere. The ice is deep green and blue, and here and there are shadows of things below the surface. Time has blurred their edges.

A man walks across a scorched plain of bones, and in the far distance a huge city hovers above the horizon.

An armada of fighting ships closes on a long, deep beach, beyond which a wall stands defended by thousands of shapes. The air is thick with violence yet to come. The sea is placid, the beach smooth, the sun ambivalent, and it will rise and fall as always, the battle’s outcome troubling it not at all.

More images, more events experienced and witnessed in a brief, passive flash, and yet Venden understood most of what he saw. He knew the implications of those images, what had gone before, and sometimes how they would resolve themselves. He could almost smell the rotting hulls of that armada as they decayed over centuries on the long, wide beach.

He was living Aeon’s memories, though he was not being shown them. He was simply awash in a sea of recollections, a mote
in Aeon’s eye. Some were so ancient that their incredible age was palpable in their hazy image. Even a god, it seemed, could see its memories fade.

Venden was also a memory. And as he saw them, so these other memories saw him – a young man hauling a cart across Skythe; that same man sheltering beneath an overhang; a boy watching his mother plummet, ending the fall that had begun for her the moment he was conceived. Venden’s own memories were fresh and fiery, and he would have cried had he still possessed eyes.

They sat beneath the overhanging cliff, and Bon knew that this was where his son had made his home. There was a rolled sleeping mat and some clothing stored beneath a tightly woven waterproof mat, a solitary pair of worn boots, and a campfire formed from scorched stones and half-burned kindling. A few cooking implements were piled beside the fire, some of them still stained with the hardened remnants of a meal. There were footprints in the soil.

This is where Venden lived
, Bon thought.
He sat here and ate, staring at the thing he was rebuilding. He laid his head here, and slept, and perhaps he dreamed of me.

‘Perhaps he dreamed of me,’ Bon said. He sat close enough to the bedding roll to touch it.

‘Maybe he still does,’ Leki said. She knelt close to Bon, cleaning and binding her wounds with a proficiency that illustrated her lie. She had been taught how to treat battlefield injuries. Expressionless, shutting off the pain, she clamped several cuts closed and treated them with a chewed paste. A deeper wound between her thumb and index finger she cleaned with water before slicing at it with her knife and forcing the paste into the gashes. She was sweating, shaking, but her face was stern and determined.

‘You’ve kept
so much from me.
Deceived
me.’

‘Would it make any difference if I said I’m sorry?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bon said. ‘Would it?’

Leki glanced at him, then returned to her careful ministrations. Watching her, Bon tried to analyse what he might still feel about her.
It’s complicated
, he thought, and he almost laughed. What had happened here had been so amazing that he still felt the mists of madness promising to close around him. If that meant calmness and understanding, he would welcome it. But he knew in truth that it would merely mean confronting events later on.

Venden … Aeon … Leki. Three names that meant different things to him, and about which everything had changed in the blink of an eye. Venden had been found and lost again. Aeon, the old god in stories that some still believed, had risen before him. And Leki had revealed herself as an impostor.

‘What do you think happened to Juda?’ Bon asked.

‘Ran off and died somewhere,’ Leki said. She relaxed back on her haunches and sighed, closing her eyes, still shivering. From the shock of her wounds, perhaps. Or fear.

‘You don’t sound concerned.’

‘There’s nothing either of us can do for him.’ Leki looked at him, and her eyes were the same as before. Her
face
was the same, though more lined, more tense. ‘The slayers’ weapons are almost always tipped with poison. Shellspot, or sometimes dusk blight venom. And even if venomless, they never clean their blades.’

‘You have wounds,’ Bon said, nodding at Leki’s hand, her upper arm.

‘I’m inoculated.’

‘Against such poisons?’

Leki did not answer. She stood, groaning at her aching limbs. ‘We should go.’

‘I suppose
the Ald retain plenty of such knowledge for themselves.’

‘We have to track Aeon,’ she said. ‘Find out where it’s going.’

‘And if I’d been slashed by a slayer’s blade?’ Bon asked.

‘Then I’d have fucking saved you! What, you think because I’m Spike-trained I’m without heart?’

‘I don’t know, Leki.’

‘If you don’t know, then you’ve not felt a thing between us all these days.’

Bon looked away, confused. He started rooting through Venden’s belongings, sparse though they were.

‘Bon?’

‘Can I trust any of that?’ he asked. He did not look at her. He wanted to judge her through her voice, not the face he was growing so familiar with.

‘I cannot lie with my emotions.’

‘They don’t train you in that, then?’

‘They try,’ she said. ‘And it does work sometimes. But mostly with devouts.’

Bon turned on her, angry, confused. He hated the idea of his affections being toyed with, and he felt open to her, as open as if a slayer had split him neck to groin. He might be an object upon which she practised her intense Spike training. Or she might be telling the truth.

‘You expect me to believe you’re not a Fade devout?’

Leki shrugged. ‘Pile of nark shit.’

Bon could not hold back his smile.