by Tim Lebbon
‘Sol … you’re so wrong.’
Traitor, he thought, but he did not respond. His wife was lost to him, and Sol turned his back on her.
The remaining soldiers had formed into three groups, each placing itself between two of the Skythians’ large fires. Aeon paused at the edge of the battlefield, its pale body reflecting blood-tinged flames in streaks of red and orange.
‘Alderia!’ Sol shouted. Without another glance at Leki he hefted his sword, charged Aeon, and knew with complete faith that the remainder of his Blade followed.
Bon surfaced, blinking away pain, and wondered if he was the only person to notice the sky.
It was smeared with dawn in the east, and the snow had stopped, yet the sky was ominously heavy with something ready to fall. He noticed Leki close by, looking up and frowning.
‘Something wrong,’ he said.
She turned, surprised at his voice. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Laden with doom.’
Bon sat up and Leki helped him, and her words struck home. Laden with doom. His whole time here on Skythe had felt like that, and now it gathered towards a climax. Doom watched him, and he looked around to see what else it saw.
Fires burned, piled bodies cast spiky skeletal shadows, and Aeon was here. They were attacking it, but ineffectually. Spears ricocheted from its body, some snapping in two. Swords wielded by experienced hands seemed not to touch its legs, nor its stomach where it dipped low enough for them to reach. Its huge head turned lazily, knocking two soldiers to the ground almost by accident. It’s not fighting back, Bon thought. It’s almost as if …
‘Waiting for something,’ Leki said.
‘I think so too,’ he said.
‘What about …?’ Leki nodded at the Skythians, scores of them still lying on the ground.
‘Waiting as well.’ Aeon doesn’t need them to protect it, he thought. A pile of Skythian corpses burned close to the bridge, grotesque shapes of bone and simmering flesh thrown out by the flames, and he felt so sad. Tears blurred his vision. It sent those as well as us, and …
‘What if we’ve both failed?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look at the sky,’ he said. Dawn was brightening, but the sky was still rank with something terrible.
‘Oh, by all the gods,’ Leki said, and she slumped against him. ‘Bon, I see it now. I smell it. I think maybe one of the Engines is working already.’
‘Already?’
‘Magic draws close,’ Leki breathed.
‘And this is growing warm.’ Bon had pulled the bone-thing Aeon had given them closer with his foot. Wet mud steamed around it, slushy snow melted. He was about to kick it away again when Venden spoke in his mind. The voice was his son’s when he was very young, barely able to talk. But the words carried great weight.
Hold this part of Aeon’s heart, and close your eyes again, father. Whatever you hear, whatever you sense … close your eyes.
Sol Merry had fought Outer rebellions, dissenters in western Alderia, a plague of rabid Ban Chock tribesmen in the east, and a rash of rawpanzie attacks on the Chasm Cliffs. But he had never faced an enemy like this. Aeon was beyond imagining, because it was blasphemy to imagine a false god. To even consider them capable of being imagined was heresy, and as he drove a spear towards the monster’s underbelly, and darted between its legs to hack at the heavy swinging parts either side of its head – tentacles, or other appendages – he felt the gods of the Fade moving with him. He was fighting for them and every honest, devout Alderian who paid them the homage they deserved. He was fighting for his dead father’s warrior heritage, his politician mother who strove to better her town’s outlook and future, and his sister and her burgeoning family.
But he was no longer fighting for his wife, and that left a knot of scar tissue at the centre of his soldier’s bloody heart.
Aeon did not seem concerned at the attack. It moved towards the river, kicking apart one of the Skythian’s fires, and the Spike followed. It swung its huge head from left to right, knocking two soldiers aside. But their fall was an accident, not a deliberate attack.
‘We’re not touching it!’ Tamma yelled.
‘The Engines will touch it,’ Sol said, lunging with his sword, blade skittering from the thing’s hard foot. He felt hollow, bereft. Empty of every good thing. Even the memory of his family seemed to be fading, replaced with an all-consuming understanding that nothing he did, and nothing he had ever done, held any significance.
Who am I what am I why am I? It should have been a scream, but when he opened his mouth, he only gasped.
His friend was staring at him. Gallan had dropped his sword and mace and stood wide-eyed, as if a profound realisation had struck. His face looked calm and uncreased by the stress of war. Hollow man, Sol thought, and as he and Gallan locked eyes, something filled them both.
The world exploded and blew Sol backwards, sprawling in muck and blood, conscious only of the shattering violence erupting around and within him. There was no refuge from its fury, no islands in this convulsive turmoil. Something entered and wrestled with his consciousness, a twisting mad thing, ancient and abhorrent and yet suddenly rejoicing in this strange freedom.
Kolt! Sol thought as his mind was shattered, shredded, ripped apart by the invader. Sol’s scream of agony was silent, because his body was paralysed by the extent and shock of the pain. Everything he was – every dream and love, habit and history – shrivelled to nothing, and witnessing the loss was awful. Sol’s last full, conscious experience was seeing his whole life and self erased and replaced with something monstrous.
Sol Merry ceased to exist at that moment, leaving a travesty of what he had once been. His new present – his here and now, where existence was as interesting to him as a bug’s existence to the bug – was filled with one impetus.
He picked up his dropped sword and spear and examined his surroundings. There were more who looked like him, but they were of no interest. There were other shapes prone on the ground, not like him, but these also held no interest. And there were two more shapes huddled together around something that burned and shone like the sun.
Sol flinched from the glow and started running, raging, as an instinct he did not understand took him south.
Bon kept his eyes squeezed tightly shut against the rage. He could feel Leki pressed against him, the fragment of the heart of Aeon blazing between them, her breath warm against his cheek, her heartbeat welcome against his chest, and he so hoped that she was keeping her eyes closed as well. Whatever was happening, neither of them should see it.
The explosion had been incredibly violent, and all but silent. Bon had felt himself compressed and then pushed across the ground, sliding through mud and blood with Leki clasped against him. They had come to rest against a pile of Skythian bodies.
I smell blood and fear and something unknown, Bon had thought, and the storm raged. He heard the subtle rustle and clink of other bodies striking the ground, clothing and weapons knocking together. The air seemed to writhe and flex around them, whipping back and forth as if indecisive about which way to blow, scouring his skin.
He kept his eyes closed and felt Leki’s hand squeeze his shoulder, and the pressure remained as she found comfort in the contact. Was that the end of Aeon? he thought, and he could almost not bear to look. But the thing between them kept them warm and safe, and Venden’s words rang with him, spoken in the voice of his beautiful young son before he had grown up and away. Whatever you hear, whatever you sense … close your eyes.
Bon almost opened his eyes. Leki seemed to sense his inclination, because she pulled him tighter, closer, and pressed her mouth against his ear.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to see as much as you, but no. We do what Aeon told us.’ She kissed him below the ear, a desperate, hard kiss. ‘A few more moments of ignorance might be all we have.’
So they hugged close, and though the object Venden had handed Bon was pressed between their stomachs, it did not come between them.
Bon kissed Leki on the side of the face, the eye, and then a full kiss against her lips, sharing passion and need and pleased to feel them both returned.
‘I should have helped you,’ he said, meaning what he had seen between her and her husband.
‘I could have helped myself, if I’d needed to. Besides, Sol would have killed you, and I would have never forgiven myself.’
‘I should have helped you.’
‘You have helped me.’ Leki’s tears touched his cheek.
The sense of the world being turned upside down and inside out settled, and in its place was a dreadful, foreboding silence. Something is watching us, Bon thought, and the skin on his arms and the back of his neck prickled.
‘It’s horrible,’ Leki whispered, because she felt it as well.
The fragment of Aeon’s heart was cooling between them. Bon shifted slightly to touch it, and Leki clasped his arms as if he were moving away.
‘I think now,’ he said. His voice quivered. The fear was terrible. What would he find remaining of Aeon? And what was staring at them?
Bon opened his eyes.
They had come to rest against several dead Skythians, whose sightless eyes watched what happened. Perhaps they were the more fortunate ones.
He looked around the dawn-lit battlefield. It was taking on colour with the sun, and the predominant hue was red. The ground was sucking in the blood, the snow wet with it. Fires were still crackling, and beyond them he saw the body of Aeon.
It moved, casual and slow as ever. Alive!
But then, to his right, between where they lay and the river bridge still piled with bodies, he saw what had become of everyone else.
‘Bon,’ Leki whispered, because she had seen as well. ‘Are they …? Can they really be …?’
‘I’ve been so wrong,’ Bon said. ‘It wasn’t Aeon’s demise that made them, but Aeon itself. Aeon made the Kolts.’
The Kolts were standing, grabbing weapons, and all of them had changed, Spike and Skythian alike. They wore the same clothes and were the same shape, but were no longer the same people. They did not fight. Faces filled with hate, eyes with fury, skin glowing with red rage, mouths grimacing and teeth begging the feel of weak skin and wet flesh, the Kolts scanned the battlefield once, and then ran away towards the south. There was no organisation here, and no orders being called. These things had been born, and would live and die, alone.
One purpose. One aim.
‘They’re going to kill everything,’ Bon said.
‘What about us?’
Bon touched the object between them, cooling now. And he watched Leki, ready to hold her again should she crumple and descend into grief. He had seen her husband, changed from the soldier he had been to the mindless, driven killer Aeon had made him. Walking dead, Sol was gone from a man to a monster.
‘Why?’ Leki asked. But already Bon was trying to see what might happen next.
Father, Venden said in his mind. Bon gasped, and Leki looked at him.
‘He’s talking to me,’ Bon whispered.
One last request of you both.
Bon looked past the battlefield and beyond the fires at Aeon, virtually motionless in the pristine snow. ‘It’s not over,’ he said.
Leki clasped his hand. ‘Then whatever comes, we do it together.’
Sol Merry ran, seeking something to kill. Others ran around him, but not with him. A woman with a bandage around her neck, a tall man. Some looked alike, others were shorter and wilder, different. But only on the outside. On the inside they were all the same, and the proof of that was not long in coming.
They came across the group hiding on the leeward side of a small hill. Twenty adults and thirty children, they quickly fell beneath sword and spear. Sol slashed and stabbed, the daemon within relishing the blood that bathed him and the gore that splashed in the snow at his feet. He felt the sting of weapons striking him and merely brushed others away, not even blinking as his arm snapped the arrow shafts, his roar bent swords – his fury exerted a terrible weight, but the ability was no surprise. He turned and went after the attacker, but she had already been taken down by two others like him.
Sol heard the screaming, the pleading. He mimicked the sound, his voice surprisingly high, and it rose into a bloodthirsty scream as he thrust his sword deep into a woman’s chest. He ducked a sword and fisted the swordsman in the face, then turned to gut him. Kneeling, hacking through the hot remains, Sol picked out the choicest morsel and pressed it to his mouth. His eyes rolled as he bit the slippery liver in half.
The rage was hot, the daemon on fire. It thrummed through him, pulsing in his toes and fingers, head and knees, stomach and back, and he painted it across the landscape in blood.
The slaughter was soon over, and Sol and the others ran on. Kolts! he heard some of their victims shouting. He knew the word and felt its comfortable fit. He nurtured the killing and the rage, along with the daemon settled within him. Running south, he soon lost sight of anyone else like him. But sometimes, from left or right, he heard an occasional shout of surprise, and a scream, and then silence as another Kolt made a kill.
His mind was red, and nothing else. A blind purpose drove him on.
Chapter 21
following
Juda walked across the frozen landscape and felt watched every step of the way. Sometimes he thought he caught sight of the man he followed – the man he knew was him – but other times he thought perhaps it was only a shadow. Never close, always half hidden from view, the wraith drew him south.
Deep, thunderous sounds echoed in from the north. They were so much a part of the landscape that they did not register with him for some time. There were snow and ice, trees and rocks, small birds and an occasional larger creature. There was a grey sky and high crags, a smudge of sun in the east, and that momentous cracking sound, like giant rocks being crushed together many miles away. Juda paused until the noise rumbled in again, and he thought he felt a slight shock through his feet. He could not be certain. It was very cold. He wondered at the size of the impact to be felt through the ground. Glaciers cracking, perhaps. Ice cliffs falling.
How far away? he wondered. He glanced back at the mountains in the hazy distance. They looked like a memory.
Juda walked on, disconcerted rather than afraid. It was hard going, because his feet sank into the deep snow, and soon he had to rest. He was already exhausted. The shadow he followed rested as well, leaning against a tree and not moving at all while Juda stared at it. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, welcoming the weak sunlight on his face. When he looked again, the shadow had moved position.
I’m following, he thought, talking to the shadow from his dreams.
And then he remembered his dreams, and for the first time in years they were a long way from nightmares. There was repetition in following the man up hills and down, as if he were remembering the same walk again and again. There was constant cold, ice caves containing unknown things, and the ground opening and giving birth to huge glaciers. But his half-Regerran blood must have frozen in Skythe’s sudden winter, because the dreadful nightmares that had haunted him for so long seemed to have withered away.
Something was driving, and luring, him south. A compulsion he could not quite identify, and a sense that everything important was happening there, not here.
As the sun painted the eastern horizon a gorgeous array of reds and oranges, there was also the shadow following him. It was more obvious than the shape he pursued, though further away. He recognised his own gait, and his own shape. He saw himself.
Wondering if the man before and the man behind were thinking the same things, Juda hurried on towards something momentous.
‘Oh Venden, my sweet son,’ Bon said, and he could not tear his eyes away from the terrible sight. He had seen this once before, but now his son’s agony was plain to witness as he manifested from Aeon’s hide, squirming and writhing against the god’s embrace. As his mouth formed his scream came, a gargled, distant thing at firs
t, then something that roared to life across the silent battlefield. It brought sound to the grisly scene.
‘Be strong,’ Leki said, holding Bon’s hand. ‘Be brave. He’s come to tell us something important.’
‘Why can’t Aeon tell us itself?’ Bon asked, and just for that moment he hated Aeon. ‘It spoke to me before. Why can’t it just let us know?’
‘I think it’s tired,’ Leki said. ‘It’s barely moving. You heard Venden in your mind, but perhaps that takes great effort. This way must be easier.’
Easier to torture and mutilate what is left of my son, Bon thought, but he did not speak what was on his mind. Torture and mutilation was often the way of humankind. He only had to look around at the scene revealed by the dawn to acknowledge that. Perhaps it was the same for a being like Aeon.
Venden drew out and formed, rising up from a squat to the tall boy he had once been. ‘Nothing is won,’ he rasped. ‘Aeon has raised daemon-shadows from the depths, and tasked them, and they will surge southward to take away the Alderians’ means of controlling the Engines.’
‘You mean to kill them all,’ Leki said.
Venden’s eyes did not change. His expression was empty.
‘And will the Kolts go back down?’ Bon asked.
‘That is no concern,’ Venden said. ‘Halting the rise of Crex Wry is everything.’
‘You’re not only here to tell us that, son,’ Bon whispered. Venden’s head turned, just slightly.
‘The Kolts will not end the Engines. They will kill the Alderians. But two of the Engines are alight. One more, and the magic will come through, and Crex Wry will rise to claim its wretched soul. The land will grow dark. The world will shudder. Time itself will fall.’
There was urgency in Venden’s voice, now. And perhaps fear.
‘What do you want us to do?’ Leki asked.
‘Three Engines are needed. Destroy the one not yet alight, and the others will die.’
