The Heretic Land

by Tim Lebbon

  The man rushed across the clearing, and his raised hands seemed to blur with the air. Venden’s shadow winced back, shrinking deeper within him, but it quickly rallied and came to the fore again. He felt its shock, and knew that it did not mind him knowing. Even great things cry, have fear, and become triumphant.

  ‘Almost there,’ he said softly, and something whistled at the air. An arrow struck the running man and he barely seemed to notice.

  Venden saw the things rushing towards the clearing. He knew what they were, but they were as much removed from his world as his father. Aspects of long ago.

  The running man seemed mad. Tall, thin, he had the look of obsession about him, and addiction, and his right hand was opaque with something revolting. It repulsed the remnant and the shadow within Venden, but the man was beyond noticing. He was raving, laughing and crying as he held this strange hand to the arrow wound, and then rushed from the clearing without a backward glance.

  The woman to Venden’s left shouted something, then dashed towards where Venden’s father still stood.

  Another arrow slashed at the air. Beneath Venden, the shire screamed and reared, the shaft buried deep in its broad, muscled neck. Venden felt a stab of pity for the creature that had carried him so far, but the shadow smothered such emotion and urged him onward.

  Through the shouting and screams and growing chaos, Venden felt a calmness that even drew a smile to his lips as the shire stumbled forward into a fall. He grabbed the tied blanket in one hand, holding tight, and felt movement from inside. Impossible, wonderful movement.

  There was a brief pull from behind him as he heard his father’s voice. He did not understand the words – it was a shout, a warning, or perhaps an exhalation of loss – but as Venden experienced a sinking feeling inside, the shadow bore him up and held him in its caring embrace. Without using words, it told him that everything would be all right.

  The shire fell and Venden tumbled from its back, but it no longer mattered.

  He reached out his hand.

  ‘Behind him!’ Leki shouted as she ran from beneath the shelter of the cliffs. ‘They’ve found us!’

  Bon had already seen the slayers further down the valley, the shot from the pike, and the arrow that burst from Juda’s armpit in a spray of blood. He had seen Juda running on, face mad, hand pressed to the wound. And he had already thought, It’s all over now, as his son Venden urged the animal away from him and towards what might be a god.

  The female slayer fired another arrow, and although Bon could barely believe she could aim over such a distance, this one flicked past Juda’s face and struck Venden’s mount.

  The animal screeched, stumbled, and tipped forward as its front legs folded.

  ‘Bon, we’ve got to go now!’ Leki said as she reached him. She grabbed at his arms, nails scratching through the material of his shirt.

  ‘I can’t leave—’ he began, but Venden was already falling, the wrapped object swinging in one hand, his other hand reaching for the object he had been riding towards.

  Juda fled the clearing, bleeding, laughing or crying.

  And the slayers were upon them. The female paused just by the howthorn bush where they had been waiting moments before, and the male caught up with her. They stood apart so as not to offer an easy target for whatever weapons their prey might bear. They sweated, snorted, steam rising from their sun-darkened skins, foam bubbling on their chins, and they were more base than animals, less human than a rock or tree.

  ‘Too late,’ Leki said. She shrugged off her coat and stepped forward, entwining her fingers and stretching her arms above her head.

  ‘What?’ Bon said in confusion.

  Venden crawled from beneath the fallen shire and reached out to touch the object that had stolen his mind.

  ‘Venden!’ Bon called, and the female slayer came for him. She raised a hand to brush Leki aside, her arm thick and spiked with heavy bands of rough metal. Her eyes were on Bon Ugane – her target, her quarry since the beach, in her sights now and destined to evade her no more.

  Bon tensed himself to fall to one side, knowing it would be useless. He would be dead within moments. He had found his missing son, and he would never have a chance to hold him close.

  And then the slayer grunted and fell to one side. Leki was upon her, punching and kicking so quickly that Bon could barely see the movements. The slayer lashed out, recovering quickly from the shock, but perhaps not fast enough. Leki – a blur, a flitting thing – stabbed again and again with one of the slayer’s own knives, plucked from the murderous thing’s belt. Her victim groaned as black blood splashed the grass. Leki hit the ground, leaped, slashing and kicking.

  The slayer staggered backwards across the clearing with her arms waving around her head as if at an annoying insect. None of her punches or kicks touched Leki.

  Bon was unsure what was happening, though he had an idea. It was crazy, and it was shattering, because it suggested things about Leki that he had no wish to confront. But the only people trained in such forms of combat were soldiers in the Ald’s own army, the Spike.

  Leki paused briefly, squatting in the grass with legs splayed, head down, hand held out and covered with black blood. She was panting, eyes wide from the fight. She glanced once at Bon, and then leaped into the fray once more.

  The female slayer was more prepared this time, but her wounds were already wearing her down. She glistened with leaking blood. One arm hung loose and useless. Leki flitted around her on light feet, stabbing and slashing.

  The male slayer came for them both.

  She can’t take two, Bon thought in a panic.

  Then he saw Venden, and what he was becoming. And for a moment everything stopped, the whole of the world taking a breath to watch.

  Venden was aware of the chaos around him, but he was apart from it all. It was in a world beyond his own. He grasped the heart of Aeon in one hand, and was in turn nursed by the hand of the shadow.

  The shadow that rose within him, and was becoming more than he had ever believed.

  Venden stepped away from the dying shire and reached for the remnant. He knew he did not have to press the heart to the remnant’s surface too hard, and that wherever he touched would suffice. This dead god was almost whole once more, and Venden felt his own short life drawing to a close.

  He had achieved much, gathering the disparate parts of this murdered, scattered deity. He had learned a lot about Skythe in the process, but he realised that had been purely for his own edification. He had been allowed. It was the fuel to his knowledge, and his knowledge was merely a means to an end. Something to drive him. A reward.

  There would be thanks from Aeon, both for him and his mother. They had carried a spark of the murdered god – its mind, its soul, its memory or essence. His mother had passed it to him. And both of their lives had led to this moment.

  ‘I wonder how things will change,’ he said, and the weight of Skythe pressed against his skull.

  Someone screamed, someone else shouted. Venden touched the remnant’s underside.

  He felt the change commence, and there was a momentary, blazing agony that belonged to someone so alive. The agony faded, the remnant flexed around him. The heart beat like an earthquake.

  His vision grew dark, and then everything was red.

  Bon went to his knees, forgetting the slayers, and Leki, and Juda fleeing with an arrow through his torso. He forgot where he was and why he was here, and the trials he had passed through since arriving. He saw only the boy he had raised coming apart, and he did not understand.

  Bon Ugane felt his own wet insides ripped as his son’s were opened, his own bones breaking and crumbling. He could not even scream.

  Venden touched the god-shape and disintegrated before it. His hand spread on the sun-bleached, bony surface, the red stain soaking in and pulling at his arm. He was tugged closer, lifted from the ground and sucked against the shape’s uneven underside. The object in his other hand blistered through the blanket
and was lifted up against the shape, penetrating like a sword through flesh and disappearing inside. It left no wound, but a single stain of blood, which was quickly swamped by Venden as he ceased to be a man.

  In the space of a few heartbeats, Venden was sucked against the thing’s underside and crushed there, his body spreading in a haze of blood and flesh. But the blood did not drip, and neither did his exposed insides fall. They spread around and over the pale shape, darkening where they touched, leaving vibrant colour behind. Blood-red, the hue of life.

  Bon started moving backwards on his knees. His son was gone, become something else. He glanced across at the slayers in time to see the female slayer’s head tugged back by Leki, her throat opened to the bone by her own knife, and then a blur as Leki hacked and slashed, tugging the head free of the slayer’s shoulders and flinging it towards the other attacker, now shaken from his shock and advancing quickly upon Leki.

  The headless slayer stood. She remained motionless, other than her left hand fisting and unfisting at her side.

  I’m not seeing any of this. Bon gained his feet and backed away towards the sheer cliff. The mass of it behind him presented some false security.

  At the centre of the clearing, the spread of Venden’s disintegrated body animated the thing that he had claimed was a god. And what, if not a god? Bon wondered. The end of his journey suddenly felt like a beginning.

  The decapitated slayer fell onto her side, a black slick gouting from her neck and steaming in the long grass. Her partner fired his pike at Leki. She dodged the shot with an incredibly quick sidestep, and the poison pod shattered against a tree. The slayer ran at her, fired an arrow from his quickly drawn bow, rolled, and then he was upon Leki, grasping her in two massive hands and swinging her up and over his head, dropping her behind him, falling back and turning as he fell, mouth gaping to reveal the long, rotten teeth with which he would rip out her throat.

  But Leki was no longer beneath him when he hit the ground. She kicked out at his head and leaped aside, slashing out with his fallen comrade’s knife. It sparked from a band of metal armour across his chest.

  Possessed with the fight, Leki and the slayer did not seem to notice the movement behind them.

  But Bon did.

  Using the flesh of Venden’s remains, Aeon had clothed itself. But its body was thirty times larger than Venden, and his parts must have merely been a catalyst for regrowth. It expanded into being – limbs thickening, torso widening, and Bon could not look upon it. It was becoming again. His mind could not cope with the impossibility of this, nor the implications. His body could not bear the weight of its presence without going down again, slumping against the cliff, feeling wet grass around him and the comforting solidity of rock.

  ‘Venden, what have you done?’ Bon asked, and for the first time in his life he feared his son.

  Milian whispered from his memory, so sad when Venden had come along, so bereft when she should have been so alive. See what he became, Bon thought, and he thought perhaps she had always known.

  Aeon ripped itself from the ground and became independent. It lifted each of its limbs in turn, shaking mud and clinging plants free. Then it raised its long tail from beneath the fallen tree. Still forming, its flesh and skin tones changing as shadows passed back and forth across the appearing body, it turned what might have been its head.

  It looked at Bon, and he closed his eyes. But he could still feel the unbearable weight of its regard.

  He heard Leki scream, then the thump of a body.

  And then another thud, a shocking impact, and the crunching sound of someone meeting their end.

  Venden was now the shadow. He was the shade in the great mind of a god, whereas before the mind of Aeon had been the shadow within him, and in his mother before him. Borne over centuries, the god had emerged from its chrysalises to find its home again, at last. It revelled in its rejuvenation.

  Venden’s pain was no more, because his body was no more. But there was a peculiar awareness. He retained a form of consciousness, though he was unsure of his senses, and thought perhaps the old way of seeing, and understanding, was long behind him.

  Aeon rose, and Venden rose with it. He wondered how long this would be. Around Venden, circling like stars surrounding the speck of dust he might barely be, Aeon’s mind was so vast that he could barely conceive of it. It extended in directions he could not even begin to comprehend – past and future, sure enough, but other ways too. Across boundaries he did not understand, and through histories his limited mind would never know.

  As Venden sensed action being taken – and Aeon’s great mind interacting with the world for the first time since its death – his human emotions echoed Aeon’s disgust and loathing at what it saw: Dead things should stay dead.

  Carried within Skythe’s resurrected god, the irony of that idea was difficult to escape.

  Aeon was standing straight and tall like a man, only many times taller. Its fleshed-out body resembled nothing Bon had ever witnessed before. He squinted, trying to make sense of what he saw, but there was little sense to be made. Not yet, at least. His mind recoiled, and he felt a subtle madness descend in what might have been a protective cloud.

  Yes, I’ll go mad, Bon said, inviting it in. I’ll go mad and thank you kindly.

  Aeon moved. As it lifted one limb, Bon saw the crushed remains of the male slayer squashed beneath it, the monster’s slick insides spewing across the clearing as the god walked away.

  Don’t go! Bon thought. He reached for Aeon, standing, stumbling after it. But then it ran, and in three bounds it was as if it had never been there at all.

  Complete silence. Bon had never before experienced such stillness, such solitude. No birds called, no breeze blew, no living thing made a sound. The world was frozen in the moment.

  Then Leki groaned, and Bon went to her. She was warm, and that felt good. Whoever she was and whatever lies she had hidden behind, she felt good, because she was alive.

  ‘Did you see?’ Bon asked.

  ‘I saw,’ she said. He thought it was pain, but when he looked at her he realised the quiver in her voice was dread. ‘I saw our doom.’

  ‘Aeon,’ Bon said. Venden, he thought.

  ‘It’s the end of us,’ Leki gasped. She grasped his hand and stood, leaning against him for support. She was slick with sweat, speckled with blood from the slayer she had slaughtered. ‘It’s back, and there will be war.’

  She’s a soldier of the Spike, Bon thought, but the idea still did not seem real. ‘You can’t believe that,’ he said. ‘Aeon is … the one god, true and real.’

  Leki actually shivered. ‘Of course it is. And it will be looking for revenge.’

  Slowly, as Bon and Leki held each other up, the blood-spattered clearing came back to life.

  Milian Mu and Bon Ugane travelled with the wagon train for two days until it reached New Kotrugam. They kept separate rooms, but spent all of their waking hours together, shovelling coal in the largest wagon, taking breaks, perusing the impromptu spice markets set up along the wagon’s wide roof. Sometimes they held hands, and Bon felt the thrill of what he had been yearning for his whole life. The first time they kissed, Milian felt the shard shifting, but the greatest movement was undeniably in her own heart.

  They were falling in love.

  New Kotrugam was an amazing place. Milian and Bon stood on the wagon’s roof along with many others as the long wagon train approached the city. Built in a huge crater several miles across, the city had a natural defensive wall around two-thirds of its perimeter, a high ridge of land that Bon explained was supposedly the ripple of an impact. It was said, he told her, that a giant rock had fallen from the sky before history and smashed the hollow in the land. To scientists it was a valid proposal, and there were those who spent their lives examining the evidence. To others it was a creation myth, and in the caves and potholes deep beneath the city it was believed that the god who fell from the sky still dwelled.

  When Milian as
ked what Bon believed, he smiled and looked up. ‘We have no idea what’s there,’ he said, and she supposed that was no real answer at all.

  They passed satellite communities as they approached the city’s great wall, and some of the smaller wagons broke off to make camp. The bulk of the train went forward, and as it approached the wall a set of huge gates opened, swinging on hinges the size of the smaller wagons, so heavy and wide that its movement caused a breeze that stirred dust and sand across the plain. It took some time to open fully, and a flock of birds swirled and fluttered around the door’s hidden upper edges, swooping in and out again with long thrashing things hanging from their beaks. The hinges sang like thunder, grumbled through the ground, and reflected sunlight made the darkness behind them seem deeper.

  People drifted down from the sheer cliffs above the yawning gates on wings of gossamer material, opaque and yet obviously strong. They steered their kites and landed on the larger wagons. They were short, thin people, with bright red skin and flaming yellow hair. Milian thought they looked like flame given life. Bon told her that they were also Outers – he believed her to be one, and always would – originally brought to Alderia as slaves because of their skills with medicine. That skill had since earned them some respect, and in many cases an element of freedom. The fire-people folded their false wings when they landed and started to trade, and Milian watched in fascination. They moved with such grace and certainty that she was not quite sure just how false those wings were. She would ask Bon when they were through the gates. There was so much for her to ask him.

  But faced with the wonders of New Kotrugam, the fire-people would be all but forgotten.

  Milian grew cold inside as they passed from sunlight into shadow, and Bon held her hand and smiled as they were swallowed into the tunnels beneath the cliffs.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ he said. ‘And I’m here to hold you.’ He was not quite telling the truth. The tunnel ran for over a mile, thundering to the sounds of the wagon train’s wheels and coughing steam engines, lit by lights in caves along its edges where people went about obscure tasks or simply sat and watched, and heavy with the smells of industry. But Bon did hold Milian, and they kissed as New Kotrugam opened to them.