The Heretic Land (6 page)

She opened her mouth, and her daemon roared.

Those terrible memories haunting her, Milian has begun slowly flexing her limbs. Muscles in her thighs perform involuntary jumps, and her arms shift. They make a sound. It is like rock grinding against rock, and she wonders if she has been in this cave for so long that she has become a fossil. She saw fossils once when she was a child, excavating a hillside thirty miles north of her village with her school class. Her teacher showed her how to hold a trowel and explained why she must be so sensitive when she found a protruding fossil, brushing at it gently so as not to damage it. She had learned that old things demand reverence. She had still believed that when she became a holy woman, revering Aeon.

I’m an old thing now
, she thinks, and she moves her arms again. They scrape across something until they press against the sides of her body. She might have been here for hundreds of years. The air around her has grown old and stale, like her mind.

She wonders how she is still alive, and such musings bring the taste of brine and a chilling coolness closing all around her. She is certain that her daemon is gone, and that she is waking. But
in doing so, her memories seem to come even richer, and more horribly detailed than ever.

She scrambled down the cliff face with three others like her – Skythians made furious, overflowing with daemon. Their rage was a physical thing, heating the air around them, cliffs echoing with their cries. The fear she saw in the Alderians around the Engine drew her on. The anticipation was delicious.

One of the others slipped and fell, bouncing from outcroppings and dashing himself to pieces on the rocky beach below. She heard the impact and saw the splash of blood, and then he hauled himself upright and started across the sands. His left leg was broken and dragging, and a spew of blood and brains stained the back of his ragged shirt. She could hear him panting and groaning as he made for the Engine, and the daemon within him was struggling loose now, bursting from his open wounds like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Its disparate parts danced around his head like cold blue fire, whipping at the air and setting it alight. His hair burned. He rushed on, faster, and then the strangers around the Engine started firing crossbow bolts his way.

They had come to destroy the Skythian god Aeon, but now had no idea what they faced.

The man’s damage was great, and the bolts hit home. By the time she and the two others reached the bottom of the cliff, he was crawling across the sand with a dozen bolts embedded in his face and the lashing flames faded almost to nothing.

Milian ran, and when she came within range of their weapons she roared, and they veered away and broke. Her daemon scream and rage held such power and strength. Feet pounded sand, blood splashed her body from the wounds she had already
received, and she could see the terror etched on the faces of the strange people around the Engine. Three of them worked on it, eight others tried to protect them.

She was anticipating the feel of flesh parting between her hands once again when—

The world lit up. The Engine howled like an impossible beast in pain, its limbs flexing and then rising, issuing a terrible glow that grew brighter and brighter. The ground shook. Sand made fluid by the movement rippled like water away from the Engine, and Milian felt her daemon shiver with something that might have been fear.

The enemy dropped their weapons and took several steps back towards the sea, an unconscious retreat towards their homeland across the water. Their eyes went wide in fright … and then awful acceptance.

Milian pursued them, and then the Engine exploded. The blast threw her far out past the beach and over the water, and behind her the land had come alight. The whole stretch of coast she could see had blossomed into bright white flame, the fires blasting way above the cliffs, spiralling up and out from the Engine on the beach and splashing across the land. Molten rock flowed, trees exploded, and the atmosphere itself thudded with shock after shock. As she dropped, another body fell with her, and they both flitted through the air as if carried by giant hands. Just before she splashed down she saw the ruin of the man it had once been. His body was split by some vast impact, his head a dangling mess pinned with crossbow bolts, and the dregs of his daemon hissed away to the air.

She thought,
How much of that is in me?
Then, moments before she struck the water, something struck her.

The touch of Aeon was unmistakeable. As a holy woman she had imagined its touch, but actually experiencing it was undeniable, and
shattering. It scorched the daemon within her to nothing, instantly ridding her of the thing that had turned her, for a time, into a beast. A moment of joy followed, quickly subsumed by sadness because—

She hit the violent surface of the sea, but hardly noticed.

—Aeon was no more. Object of Skythian worship for millennia, a passive god that observed but did not intrude, exuded power but did not demand fealty and fear, she sensed its passing as surely as she felt this single shard of it passing into her. It parted her soul and settled inside, and the shard became the centre of her perception.

They killed it!
she thought, hardly believing.
They murdered Aeon!
With the cataclysmic power that had just blasted from the Engine on the beach, what was left of Skythe now? What was left of anything?

There is always something left
, a voice had said, and Milian opened her mouth to gasp. Water flooded in, but she did not drown.
I have you
, the voice continued. The voice of her god.
And you have me. This shard is a part of me, and will become a seed. But it will take time. The material part of Aeon is ruined. But … will you carry this shard of me?

Milian could not believe that Aeon was asking her permission. But she agreed silently, and felt her god acknowledge.

What was the daemon?
she thought.
Was that born of the Alderian Engines?

I must rest
, Aeon said. It sounded pained, and shocked, and its voice was growing more and more distant.
I must … recuperate …

And me?

South, away from Alderia
, Aeon said.
And when you reach land, you must rest also.

For how long?

Until I am ready to wake.

They destroyed you
, Milian
thought, and her tears mixing with vast seas could have been endless.

Nothing is for ever
, Aeon said,
death least of all.

With her land aflame behind her, Milian sank into the water until darkness flooded her.

In the cave, back in the present and away from those distant memories for a while, Milian blinks sore eyes. Pain is better than no feeling at all, so she blinks again. Sand in her eyes, or salt, and she goes to lift her hand and rub them. Her hand refuses to move, but there is pressure in her shoulder. Her stomach muscles flex. She is coming alive again, but …

No sign of the shard. No sense of Aeon.

Perhaps I
am
dead
.
Landed in the sea after the Engine erupted, sank, settled on the seabed and dreamed of Aeon. And the movements I feel are the sea creatures of the Duntang Archipelago tasting my eyes and tongue, my skin, rooting in the wounded flesh across my chest and stomach and hips …

This is real, however, and the movements she feels are her own. These thoughts are level and unpanicked, not the drone-like ravings of the murderous thing she had once been. And the old memories carry a story that is not yet finished.

As she sank into the sea, saltwater soothed her wounds. She only noticed them as the pain receded, and awareness returned to her as her senses became more deprived – sight limited by darkness, hearing by the pressures of depth. Above her she saw the remains of the ruined man drifting down towards her. A cloud of blood softened his outline, and past him the sea’s surface shone and glimmered with an unknowable light-show. It looked both beautiful and deadly.

A large shadow flitted quickly through the water, streamlined and sharp, and snatched the man’s remains from within the spreading
cloud. The shadow disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, leaving only an echo of the dead man’s presence slowly dispersing into the water.

Am I bleeding too?
she wondered. It seemed an age since she had thought of herself, though she knew it had only been hours since the daemon had come – those shockwaves that had seemed to thump through the air, the land, the rock of the world itself, and then the thing ripping into her, fixing against her soul with barbed tenacity.

She opened her mouth to cry out at the horror of what she had done, but the last of her air had already escaped her lungs. She sank deeper, coming to rest on the ocean floor. Something large and flat moved beneath her feet, and in the faint light she saw only a hint of the wide, circular creature as it glided gracefully into the obscure distance.

I should be dead!
she thought, and a wave of heat closed around her from the direction of the land. Whatever was happening back there was also forcing heat into the endless sea. She turned slowly, raising her hands to protect her eyes and face from the swarm of creatures fleeing away from the land and towards her. Jellyfish slicked by, trailing tentacles that set fire to her skin wherever they touched. Tiny fish nibbled at her eyes and lips. Things with shells almost as large as her sprung along the seabed, landing around and upon her and leaping again, their spiked feet piercing her thighs and ankles. Sharks arrowed by, a sea snake curled around her flailing arm, fishes nibbled at her bleeding flesh. There was no pain from the bites, though the jellyfish caresses burned so much she was amazed her skin was not aflame.

Something inside hurt worst of all. The shard – silent now, and buried deep – reminded her of madness and the things she had done, and then it prodded home again, a terribly sentient pain that seemed to speak to her and guide her, demanding something she barely understood.

She tried
to breathe, but water filled her lungs. Death surely circled her but, like the dozens of arm-sized bone sharks that formed a dark cloud above her head, it did not close in entirely. The shard of Aeon warded it and them away, and she felt it urging her onward. Away from the land. Out across the ocean floor.
South
, it had said.
And when you reach land, you must rest also
. Hundreds of miles south was Alderia. All that was left of Aeon wanted to hide under its enemy’s nose.

Her body leaking blood and tears, senses all but useless the steeper the seabed sloped down, creatures investigating this intruder in their midst, Milian followed the shard’s bidding.

She walked across the seabed, leaving both madness and sanity behind. In their place settled a curious, distant calmness, as though both fear and normality were being crushed from her by immense pressures. Soon, the glare of fires was lost above and behind her. The darkness welcomed her in and down.

Great things moved in the waters around her, and in the ocean floor beneath. Eyes sought, nostrils flared, other organs sensed her heat and electrical charge, her womanhood and the memory of the songs her mother sang, echoes of her past drawing giant star-nosed slugs that fed on pain. But these things would mostly move aside as she approached, or fade back to their own nebulous pasts at the last moment. They were confused, and then forgetful. She was there, and then she was not. The shard of the dead god within was protecting her.

She fell into chasms and was lifted by warm tides. She passed the rearing edifices of the islands of Duntang Archipelago, and avoided their rise towards land. She stumbled through seaweed forests for days, avoided the sharp beaks of decapuses
and the poisonous spines of sand spites, and once she saw a deep pirate swimming rapidly away from her. The waving weed fronds rose high above, shifting slowly back and forth to the sea’s beat, which might perhaps have been the pulse of the whole world. But, for her, such musings were rare. She continued to exist because the memory of the dead god Aeon was within her, and rarely did she consider what purpose she might be travelling towards.

She could not count the days. But at some point in her journey she felt the urge to stop for the first time, crawl down among the broken ruins of old ships that had been swept against an undersea cliff by ancient tides, and hide. The sea itself seemed to pause in its constant movements – there were always currents, cool and cold contacts, but now everything was still. She sat silently for a long time. Crawling things investigated her and moved on.

And then something came close.

She never saw what it was, but she felt it, probing at her thoughts with a mind utterly alien and cold. Its presence pervaded the whole area, and she saw several fluorescent fish swimming so hard away from it that they simply died, slowing and sinking to the seabed, their lights fading to nothing. The shape passed close by, sending a heavy, cool wave across and through the piled wrecks. They moved as though unsettled by the massive thing’s presence. It took a long time to drift past, and the sense of size was staggering. Even after it had gone she remained where she was for some time, unsure of exactly who she was or what she was doing anymore.

Then she was moving again, and the memory of her ruined god moved with her.

Much later, when so much time had passed that she could no longer recall the origins of her journey – not then, at least – the sea floor began to rise.

She emerged
eventually into sunlight, onto the strange shore of a continent she had never visited before – Alderia. The beach was cracked with spreads of melted, glassy sand, glimmering black in the daylight. Bright blue birds plucked insects from the wing. A slow mammal walked along the beach on four wide feet, not seeming to notice her. Way behind, the horizon glowed with a sickly heat. She was very, very tired, and the world was so far away. She had no wish to see any more.

She found a cave in the cliffs at one end of the beach, its entrance barely exposed even at low tide. It went deep, and so did she.