The Heretic Land

by Tim Lebbon

  She had not known what to expect, but nothing could have prepared her for what she saw as they emerged from the tunnel. The city was huge. Some buildings seemed to touch the sky, and there were floating walkways between them, the air above almost as busy as the thriving streets below. The wagon followed a wide thoroughfare apparently emptied for its arrival, and either side were bustling markets, theatre squares, recreation parks where people played sports and games, bathing pools, fire pits where all manner of foods were being cooked, open-air Fade churches, and countless shops and display rooms swathed in materials, books, paintings and weapons. There was too much detail for Milian to take in, so she closed her eyes frequently. But every time she opened them again, there was something even more amazing to see.

  Above the city floated huge shapes, their impossible shadows moving across the streets and squares and slinking over the sides of tall buildings.

  ‘The steamships,’ Bon said. ‘The Ald ride up there, supervising the city.’

  ‘Don’t they ever come down?’ Milian asked. She felt a stab of hatred for the Ald, but also amazement.

  ‘Sometimes, I suppose,’ Bon replied. ‘I don’t really know.’

  The steamships drifted slowly high above, mostly silent, sometimes hissing and emitting clouds of vapour that quickly dispersed to the air. They were incredible, and Milian watched one until the train turned out of sight behind a tall, wide building. Watching down on us like gods, she thought. The shard shifted inside her, and she silently told it to grow still. It froze. She caught her breath. She had never spoken to it like that before.

  ‘Fade church,’ Bon said, indicating the high building they were passing. If some of the buildings they had seen were grand, this was ostentatious. Milian could barely imagine how long it had taken to construct such a complex, beautiful, frightening building, with its towers and sharp edges, coloured glass façades, dark openings, and gargoyles that caused her to clasp Bon’s hand and squeeze tight.

  ‘What are they?’ she asked.

  ‘The gargoyles? Kolts.’ She heard the doubt in his voice. ‘Monsters, supposedly called up by the Skythians six hundred years ago. Do you not know …?’

  ‘Not where I am from,’ she said. Six hundred years! She had supposed centuries, but not so many.

  Bon nodded uncertainly at this, because he had not yet asked her about her home. ‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ he said. ‘All in the past.’

  The shard of Aeon shifted once more, and Milian closed her eyes until it grew still.

  They moved on, and wonders assaulted her from all sides. Later, she asked, ‘Why is it New Kotrugam? What happened to the old?’

  ‘There are those who believe there was a city here before the crater was made.’

  ‘And you believe?’

  Bon shrugged, cautious. ‘There’s always something before.’

  It was a day of discovery and wonder, and when they left the wagon at last and Bon took her through the streets to his home, Milian became a part of New Kotrugam. The place evoked obscure memories of Skythe, but she did her best to drive them down. A vague grief threatened to engulf her. They called the daemons Kolts, and blamed them on us!

  Having Bon beside her made her calm, and the grief and rage existed only as a distant ache.

  A day after arriving, after a meal at a local tavern and several glasses of wine from a vineyard in the hills south of Kotrugam, they made love for the first time. Clumsy, awkward, yet there was a passion Milian could not deny, and which Bon had been searching for his whole life. There had been several women through his twenties, but none of them had possessed him in the same way as Milian. There was something about her. Exotic, perhaps, with her obvious Outer origins. But she seemed larger on the inside than out, as if her capacity for secrets was deep. And her eyes. And her body. And her laughter, always with a hint of melancholy that Bon believed was the sign of a good heart. Anyone could believe that things were good, but his true love could only be someone who believed they could be better.

  The next morning they awoke with sunlight slanting across their naked bodies, smiling shyly and with eyes heavy with memories of the previous night. They made love again.

  Milian felt the change. As they came together and a tear leaked from her left eye, she sensed the shard leaving her and filtering down into the new life seeded in her womb. She rolled from Bon and fell onto her back, crying out, bereft and shattered at the sudden hollowness. Countless years, she thought, and she knew she could not lose something she had carried for so long without it ripping the heart from her.

  The shard left no apology. She still sensed it, nestling into the potential child she and Bon had made. She could feel its weight, if she squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated. But it was no longer a part of her.

  The loss was an agony, and as she began to sob uncontrollably Bon hugged her tight. He wanted to care for her even though he had no idea what was wrong, and for that she loved him more.

  There should have been a future laid out before them. There should have been pleasure in each other’s company, and joy, and lovemaking and being together. And to some extent there would be. But from that moment on, Milian Mu was dying inside. She found it ironic that she had existed for so many centuries, yet was not destined for a long life.

  Long enough to protect the child, she thought. That was as long as she would bear to live, trying to hide her origins, her age, her sense of loss and hollowness. Live, in this city ruled by the people who had ruined her world and destroyed her god, condemning her to this fate. Protect my child until it’s old enough to know what is required of it, and what it is here to do.

  ‘Everything feels so special,’ Bon said, drawing a circle around her navel with his finger.

  Milian found that her fake smile came easily.

  Old enough to raise a dead god.

  PART TWO

  FALL

  Chapter 13

  wound

  Calm, calm, douse the fire, quench the pain.

  Juda ran, each footstep driving agony deeper.

  Sink in, seep down. Remove the damage, separate, slice it away.

  From where he had fled, the sounds of conflict and shouting and chaos, and then a stunned silence filled with a held breath of impossibilities. The world behind him had been erased – much as he sought now to erase the wound from his mind, his body’s systems – and a new history was being formed from the stunned moments between moments. Juda could feel the force of this, though he did not turn to look. He could not turn. To turn would be to lessen his onward pace, and that would submit to the pain.

  So he forged onward, digging deep to recall the teachings of the Brokers he had met, and Rhelli Saal’s gasped words of wisdom into the sex-soaked rooms after they had rutted. It had never been love between the two of them. Brokers were too selfish for that. Even while they licked and fondled and came, it was magic that possessed their thoughts.

  You can mould dregs to your ways, because what’s left is weak and old and can be manipulated. You need strong hands, a hopeful heart, and desire. Sometimes you need pain.

  Juda had pain and desire aplenty, and his hands had been made strong over the years, lifting and sifting those few dregs of magic he had been lucky enough to find.

  Dilute the pain, hold it away, swallow it, lose it to the air.

  As he ran he pressed his right hand to his left armpit, letting the dreg do the work he urged. He kept his left arm raised and held away from his body. The arrow had entered his back, struck his shoulderblade and been diverted down, emerging beneath his arm and slashing across his left bicep. His sleeve and jacket on that side were soaked with blood. He had yet to inspect the damage closely.

  Wash away the pain …

  The arrow’s shaft felt splintered, its sharp metal head sticky with clogged parts of him. That would make it almost impossible to withdraw, even if he could somehow snap off the flight and tug it through from the front. The fractures in the koa wood would act as barbs.

&nb
sp; He pressed hard against the wound, shouting out at the agony and screaming the faint away. He could not stop, could not fall. The precious dreg spread around his arm and shoulder as he willed it, warm against his skin, cool against the burning fire in his flesh.

  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 mem
ory 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.