by Tim Lebbon
‘Not easy,’ Bon finished. ‘But now it’s your turn to lead us. Get us out of this place. To where my son is.’
‘Might be,’ Juda said. He dangled his legs over the edge of the wooden ledge, then dropped to the floor of the hollow tree. His feet sank into mud. It released a smell, and the gas marshes made themselves known once again. ‘The man I spoke to … he wasn’t certain. Your son might be there. But, yes, I’ll do my best.’
And the dead god, Juda thought. But talking about gods living or dead to these people would not aid him. They all had a quest, and their journeys might well end in the same place. The fact that they sought different things mattered little.
He glanced at his pack again. Leki seemed preoccupied, adjusting her clothing as if she had only just dressed. If they had found anything that troubled them, they would have said by now.
I’m no Wrench Arc, Juda thought. He repeated the phrase to himself on occasion, but the more he considered the way his personal quest was taking him, the more confused he became. He had killed Skythians. Magic danced at the fringes of his mind whatever he was doing, at every moment of the day, and it passed through every one of his nightmares. He grasped onto his sanity, but worried that such desperation marked him as something very much other than sane.
I’m no Wrench Arc …
They gathered their belongings and left the relative safety of the tree. The morning marsh was a busy place, with night creatures going down and daylight dwellers already beginning their hunt for the day’s food. Birds dived into areas of open water, insects buzzed and bit, amphibians squelched and jumped. High above, a marsh hawk circled on invisible currents, its size impossible to make out for certain. And below their feet something turned and flexed, sending shockwaves that bubbled mud and rippled the water’s surface. Juda never stopped walking, because he did not wish to perceive its movement in more detail.
Leki and Bon were wide-eyed, glancing all around as they moved and keeping close. There was a link between them that hadn’t been apparent before Juda had fallen into sleep, and that troubled him. They had also acquired an awareness of their surroundings that only came with experience. He had no wish to ask what they had seen, because he’d heard all about the marshes, and knew that it must have been terrible.
They passed across the gas marshes. Juda’s vision swam, his lungs ached, his limbs felt heavy. He knew they were being slowly poisoned, but they had no alternative. The marshes’ emissions were more active during daylight hours when the sun heated the water and swelled subterranean gas reservoirs, but the idea of staying for another night could not be considered.
The slayers might have turned around by then to retrace their tracks.
Close to the edge of the marsh, Juda found some scamp bushes. Bon and Leki took a drink while he plucked as many of the seed pods as he could, crushing them in one hand and collecting the fine seed grains in the other. He had no tobacco left, so he would have to crush and chew the pods, and take care about how much he took. In this purest form, scamp would temper his nightmares but might raise demons of its own. But even having the seeds drying in his pocket made him feel more relaxed. More in control.
They started to leave the gas marshes as the sun passed its zenith, and kept walking until they were clear of the smell. They headed north-east, and the autumn breeze came from the north, so they were saved from the fumes drifting after them to remind them of where they had been. Yet the gases remained with them in other ways. Leki started vomiting, and her skin paled to a ghostly white as she struggled to keep up with them. Bon Ugane helped her, but his eyes and nose were running freely, almost blinding him to the trail. Juda felt the sickness also, but he swallowed it down and chewed on a few scamp seeds. He had no idea whether they would aid him, but there was a familiarity about their calming effect. When Leki and Bon both refused his offer of a few seeds, Juda did not force the issue.
They stopped to eat around mid-afternoon. The land was rising now, and they were heading into mountainous countryside that Juda had never explored before. He’d rarely had cause to stray away from coastal areas, but now he was consulting his sketched maps more and more.
The rumours of Aeon lay ahead. All the magic he had ever wanted – a source beyond his imagining – might be present at the site of the murdered god. That was his goal, and having found Bon Ugane, and then heard whispers of his son’s name from the dying Skythian, he believed he had come by the luck he had been painstakingly seeking for years.
But there was something else out there. It edged him aside, away from the route he believed they should be taking. It was a weight pulling him with dreadful gravity, or a force repelling him from the path. And when he closed his eyes, Juda felt the familiar tingling sensation inside that told him what might be close. He had never decided whether it was a manifestation of his excitement, or a physical reaction to magic. But right then he did not mind.
They moved on, and Juda changed their course. The other two seemed not to notice – Leki had stopped vomiting but looked weak and pale, and Bon’s eyes and nose were red and raw. Memories of the gas marshes came with them.
Juda felt it close by. An Engine. One that no one knew about on Skythe; he was sure the other four he had visited were the only ones anyone else was aware of. He’d questioned many people, listened in on enough whispered conversations in shadowy corners of taverns in Vandemon and other places to be certain. He had only ever heard vague whispers of an Engine this far north, and that was because few people came this far. There was no need, and though few would admit it, Skythe exerted a fearful miasma that pushed most people against the coast. Perhaps with a few, Alderia to the south called and they could no longer answer.
With the possibility of an Engine so close, the temptation was too great. Magic lures me on, Juda thought. Not for the first time, he sensed a terrible sentience behind its allure, and the more obsessive he became, the more intense its stare.
When they stopped again to take a drink, he took the calm moment to broach the subject.
‘I believe there is an Engine close by.’
‘Really?’ Leki’s eyes widened.
‘No,’ Bon said. ‘Not now. My son, Juda. You tell me he’s alive and out here somewhere, and now you want to show us an Engine?’
‘You were interested before,’ Juda said. He began to shiver, fearful that they would insist upon passing it by. He had long known himself an addict of magic. His scamp dependency was nothing in comparison.
‘That was before you told me about Venden!’
‘Bon—’ Leki began, but Bon threw down his water canteen.
‘Neither of you have children. You have no fucking idea!’
‘The Engine is on the way,’ Juda said. ‘I can sense it close by. We’ll reach it by nightfall.’ His heart was hurrying with need, and with a fear that the chance might be taken from him. He knew it would not, and could not, because he was in charge here. But with a chance of dregs close by, his reasoning was wavering. The feel of it the taste of it the sensuousness the touch …
He would not let them sway him.
‘I don’t care!’ Bon shouted.
‘I used all I had left to spy on the slayers. To save you. If I find more, it will help us track your son, and find him. And protect us on the way.’
‘How?’ Bon said. ‘You told us yourself you’re clumsy with it.’
‘Being clumsy with magic is as good as being an expert at anything else,’ Juda said. ‘And besides … you’re following me.’
Bon paused, staring at him.
‘Isn’t that right?’ Juda asked. His heart settled a little, because he felt the solidity of his control.
‘You’re threatening me?’ Bon asked.
Leki looked back and forth between them. Something about her, Juda thought. But she was beyond his concern right now. He turned away from both of them and examined the rough map once more, trying to place where they were. Though this map had been Rhelli Saal’s, there was nothing to mark even the app
roximate location of the Engine. Perhaps most of it was guesswork.
‘You haven’t even told us how you know about Venden,’ Bon persisted. ‘Who did you speak to back at that old village? How did they know? And right now I don’t care. But … you’d threaten me with not finding my son?’
Juda felt a faint wash over him. He chewed more scamp, then slashed at the air with his hands, tearing aside a curtain of flitting shadows. I should just kill them both, he thought. But …
But there was something about Leki that made him suspect she would be hard to kill. And he was not that sort of man.
He was not.
‘I’m no Wrench Arc,’ Juda whispered at the shadows, not for the first time that day. He was not sure whether it had been loud enough for the other two to hear. He wasn’t sure he cared.
Without responding to Bon’s outburst, he started walking again. He knew that they were following him, because they had little choice. If there were dregs of magic at this long-lost Engine, they might prepare him for the encounter to come. Even the remnants of a god would be something amazing.
Juda did his best to follow his senses. He gauged direction from the falling sun, and close to dusk the Eastern Star emerged above the shoulder of a mountain.
The familiar twinge of dread nestled in his heart as dusk approached, but he chewed more scamp seeds to mush between his teeth and swallowed them, feeling its gentle effect settling his twitching muscles. It illuminated the promised shadow of nightmare in his mind, and gave him room to search for the Engine.
As daylight waned, they topped a rise, and something looked so wrong.
From a distance it resembled a rocky deposit at the mouth of a deep valley between sharp mountains. Juda paused on the sloping ridge leading to the mountain on the left, looking to the left and right of the object, trying to see past and through the shadows. Trees grew across the slopes, all of them leaning away from the thing, and the sides facing the object were unhealthy, branches drooped and leaves sickening.
However much scamp he ate, his excitement would not be dimmed.
‘I’m exhausted,’ Leki said.
‘We can’t stop now,’ Bon said. ‘Venden could be in the next valley. He might hear us if we shout.’
‘He’s not in the next valley,’ Juda said. In truth he might have been, because the rumour he’d gleaned from the dying Skythian had been hazy at best. Venden Ugane, a stranger, seeks to bring together Aeon long gone … The closer they drew, the stronger Juda believed he would sense the pull of the dead god Aeon. It could be that Bon and Leki might feel it as well, though perhaps they would attribute it to something else.
But right now he felt nothing but the lure of the Engine.
‘There,’ he said, pointing down the slope.
‘I can’t see anything,’ Bon said.
‘That’s because there’s nothing there,’ Leki said.
Juda started down the slope, his heart beating so hard that it filled his hearing, turning everything else into something distant, insignificant.
‘And he’s been chewing on that stuff all day,’ Leki said. ‘After we carried him …’ Her voice trailed off.
This might be an Engine no one has ever found, Juda was thinking. Untouched, unplumbed since …
‘… through the marshes, and he’s so drugged up we might as well …’
… since the war. And what will that mean? What will I find there? Will there be bodies? And magic. Dregs of magic, for sure. His head throbbed, limbs tingled.
‘I don’t see why you even believe him about Venden. What if he’s …?’
The voices faded further as Juda began to run.
‘I see it now,’ Bon said. ‘But what is it? It shouldn’t be there. It’s horrible.’
Bon and Leki must have run to keep up with him, because they stood either side of him now, staring at the Engine.
‘I told you what it was,’ Juda said. ‘You’re in my world now. You need to listen to me. You need to …’ He trailed off, every sense possessed.
‘An Engine,’ Bon said, voice filled with dreadful disbelief.
‘Need to what?’ Leki asked.
Juda stepped forward so that he could not see them in his peripheral vision. He wanted to be alone.
‘How can the Ald deny the existence of something like this?’ Bon whispered.
‘Need to what?’ Leki asked again, insistent. Her voice shook.
‘You need to watch.’
Juda walked away from them and towards the Engine. He could smell magic, hiding in the depths of this great structure like blood pooled in a corpse’s lowest parts. He could taste it on the air, a touch of something other tainting the breeze that dared flow around and through the apparatus. He could almost hear it, absorbing and giving out noises like nothing natural – it voiced sunlight and time, gave music to history and dark drums to deeds long gone. It was his everything, and he would do anything to acquire it.
Though he knew magic would never be owned. It had never belonged to the Ald, and Juda and all other Brokers understood that. It was a thing unto itself.
That’s giving it a mind, Rhelli had told him at one of his first Broker meetings, and naming it as a god. That’s something the Wrench Arcs do, and they even have a name for it – Crex Wry. Crex Wry, the Skythian god of the Pit. Don’t go that way, Juda. Don’t give it a mind, or your own mind will be doomed. But Juda had always understood the difference. People worshipped gods because they believed the gods cared about them. But magic had its own concerns, and they were way beyond the petty ministry of humanity.
The Engine loomed before him. Resembling a pile of tumbled boulders, it was larger than those he had seen closer to Skythe’s coast, and seemed more complete. Untouched by time and inquisitive hands. His Broker’s selfishness had led here, and he had lived that life for so long that he could feel no remorse. Not over the lies he had told, nor the people he had betrayed, killed. This was a construct intended solely for the gathering and placement of magic, and it stood for everything he lived for.
Brokers don’t murder, a vague voice whispered, but he ignored it. Broker, Wrench Arc … in the presence of the Engine, such definitions ceased to matter.
Here was a source of his true drug. It was beautiful. And yet he could not linger, because the ultimate source might be closer. This thing had helped destroy Aeon, and what he might find here would be nothing compared to the magic that might still smother that dead deity’s remains.
‘This will be quick,’ Juda said, though as he broke into a run and approached the Engine, he knew that was not the case at all. Once he touched it, he would be possessed, and time would be lost to him.
The sun was setting, but for the first time in years he did not fear the night.
The Engine looked as if it had grown from the land, an imposition that could have been grotesque, and yet Juda found it beautiful. Great metal limbs curved up and out from its main body, burying themselves in the rocky ground, and the stone had melted and reset around these piercings. There were five limbs, smeared and dulled with corrosion and swathed with creepers and a crawling, flowering cactus. The main body of the Engine was bulky and inelegant. It seemed to have tilted to the west over the centuries it had been here, and now it presented its uneven upper surface to the setting sun. There was no real order to its design, and that set it aside from the four other Engines Juda had seen. They had been curved and regular, whereas this was blocky, as if parts of it had been attached with no consideration to order.
Fine metal bracings arced way above the main structure, and something might once have spanned between them. There were rumours of flesh and blood in these things, long since rotted away. There was talk of a mind.
He walked around the Engine. Over time it had truly merged with the ground, sinking down, plants growing against it, and in a couple of places rocks had tumbled from the slopes above and impacted against the shell, shattering or coming to rest as they subtly altered the landscape. The Engine might have been her
e for ever, as much a part of the landscape as mountains and rivers and valleys. But Juda knew otherwise.
‘Is there anything?’ Bon asked from where he and Leki watched from a distance. But Juda did not reply. He felt a brief rush of anger at them for intruding on his moment, but then he simply shut them out. This was him, and his Engine.
Somewhere there would be a way inside.
He skirted the Engine twice more and sensed no dregs. It was not surprising. After so long, any dregs left outside would have faded away or been subsumed into the ground. But it troubled him, because it could also mean that this Engine had been explored and plundered. Even six centuries ago, there might have been people here who knew what to look for. He didn’t know who – not the surviving Skythians, for sure, because that far back they would have been hauling themselves back onto two feet. But who did not really matter. The thought of missing out was awful.
‘It’ll be inside,’ he said softly. ‘Near the heart of the thing.’ He had to find a door.
He felt Bon’s and Leki’s eyes upon him, but he ignored them. He circled the Engine one more time, and then started to climb. There was no way in at ground level.
The metal was rough to the touch, abraded, dented. Grasses and moss grew in pockets where windblown soil had gathered. He found handholds and footholds and hauled himself up, pressed close to the metal walls and feeling the subtle warmth stored in the Engine during the day. The sun was touching the ridge to the west now, and the huge device was releasing its heat. That’s all, Juda thought. Nothing else. It’s dead, now. But he remained alert as he climbed, expecting at any moment to hear the growl and grind of metal from inside, and the whisper of softer things, as it became aware of his presence.
‘Juda, the sun,’ Bon called.
‘I’m fine.’ He did not even look their way as he answered, because he was scrambling across an almost-level platform covered in moss and bird droppings, and something ahead had grabbed his attention.
Juda paused and took a pinch of scamp seeds from his pocket. Shadows danced at the extremes of his vision; bad dreams waiting to pounce.
