The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  Skender closed his eyes tightly and put everything he had into the final stretch. He saw nothing but the complex curves and axes of the suncatching charm; he felt nothing but the sun's potential as it swept through him and into the interstices of the blimp. Kelloman's mind blazed feverishly beside his, a shining example to follow. Yet there was something dangerous about that blaze, as though it could swiftly turn on itself and consume the mind that stoked it. If Kelloman's concentration faltered for a second, if the sun's output changed even minutely…

  Wind struck the blimp from an unexpected direction, prompting a new series of rattles and creaks and a rising mutter of voices. His eyes flickered open. He blinked to focus them. The gondola hung near the cliff face. Through the window nearest him on the starboard side he saw the bottom of a massive cleft in the dark stone. As though a giant sword had hacked a notch in the uppermost ramparts of the mountain, the sides of the cleft were steep and jagged. Its V-shaped base was clogged with dirty snow. Wind rushed down it with a sustained roaring sound, making the blimp sway as it came closer to the opening. The vessel shook as individual concentration failed and charms flickered. It held its course, just.

  Wisps of cloud wreathed the sides of the cleft. Skender strained to see through them. All he could see was the cleft itself, snaking off into the distance like a high-altitude version of the Divide.

  ‘Well,’ said Marmion, ‘it appears we still have some way to go.’

  ‘Forward will be a welcome change to up,’ Chu said, prompting a chorus of agreement from human and Panic alike.

  ‘Indeed it will. Mage Kelloman, I thank you for your hard work and suggest you conserve your strength through this section of our journey. We have enough potential in reserve to fly some distance. Let us take the burden from here.’

  The mage looked for a moment as though he might argue, but exhaustion won out over pride, for once. ‘I—yes, thank you. I will rest for a moment.’

  Skender helped the mage's borrowed body to its feet and eased him into a chair. He was surprised as always by Kelloman's slightness.

  ‘The way looks clear of obstructions,’ Marmion told the others, ‘but the winds are going to be tricky. Keep it steady as we go. We haven't come this far to crash.’

  And get stuck, Skender added silently to himself, at the top of a mountain so far from home.

  The propellers whirred at a deeper pitch than before, turning the blimp around to face nose-first into the cleft. The deck rose and fell beneath him with a steady rhythm as they slid gracefully into the cleft, rocked by air currents. Skender peered out either side of the gondola, energised despite his altitude sickness by their finding the summit. Lidia Delfine and her bodyguard-cum-fiancé, Heuve, did the same. Muddy snowdrifts as thick as houses lay below, hugging folds and wrinkles the pallid sun couldn't breach. Nothing but granite was visible between them, black and forbidding like ancient stained bones.

  The twins felt they had spent far too much time staring out the windows at the endless grey cliff sliding by, interrupted by ledges, ramparts, shelves of snow and mighty fissures. Rock was rock. In their original, earthly life they had been used to landscapes where time and nature had flattened the land like teeth worn down by grinding. They hadn't seen snow or mountains until their disastrous trip to Europe. There, Seth had been murdered by the agents of Yod in order to bring the First and Second Realms together. There, the old world had died, taking all its time-worn vistas with it.

  The eyes of the Homunculus, the artificial body in which they were now confined, glazed over as the walls of the cleft slid by. The twins’ earlier disconnection from the world had faded at last; there was no hiding now from its complexities and perils. The same was true of themselves; their memories had cleared as though a curtain had parted. Where unwillingness or uncertainty had shielded them from the worst of their pasts, now nothing protected them from both sets of memories. The feel of Locyta's knife stabbing into Seth's chest; the draci straddling Hadrian; the confrontation with the Sisters of the Flame…

  In Sheol, under the guidance of the Sisters, they had each explored their life-trees, the many-branched tangle of possibilities that revealed every conceivable event in their lives from the perspective of the Third Realm. Only in one world-line—one long, tapering branch—had they seen a chance of escape from their fated deaths at the hands of Yod. Hadrian had followed that world-line to the point where it suddenly diverged into possibility again, and there he had stopped. There he had seen a chance that Yod would fail. That had been enough to give him hope.

  Both of them now wished that he had gone further, to see what actual chance awaited them. How would Yod be beaten? What did the twins need to do to ensure their survival? Of those who had helped and hindered them since their arrival in the new world, who would live and who would die? Skender, Marmion and the others had been strangers once but were no longer. They mattered too.

  Either way, Yod was back, rattling at the bars if not yet fully free. It had devoured the Lost Minds in the Void Beneath, gaining strength for…something. With every day's ascent, they felt its presence growing darker and stronger, looming deeper and more ominously. Now, with the end of their journey so close, Yod sucked at them like a black hole, tugging them onward and inward to their destiny.

  Reflected in the window facing the dark cliff, they saw the silhouette of the Homunculus staring back at them. A shadow with hard edges, it had no recognisable features: no eyes, no nostrils, no wrinkles, no personality at all.

  Who's an ugly boy, then? whispered Seth into Hadrian's mind.

  Hadrian felt absurdly like laughing—but the impulse had gloom at its heart as dark as the Homunculus's aspect. I reckon we've lost weight.

  Something glowed with a faint silver light deep in the reflection. They leaned closer to the pane of glass in order to see more clearly. The Homunculus's face seemed to swallow the entire view.

  What's that? Hadrian asked. Low in his view was a shining cross where his chest might have been.

  Not a cross, little brother. An ankh.

  Hadrian understood, then. In the Second Realm, Seth had confronted eight godlike beings known as the Ogdoad. The ancient sign they had marked him with had enabled them to survive in the Void Beneath when so many other minds had not. Seth had taken the mark for granted all that time, and Hadrian had had no reason to think of it. Only at that moment did they realise what a great boon it had been.

  It stopped us from dissolving into the hum, Seth said.

  So we thought. But we know now that the hum was Yod itself, which means—

  The ankh protects us from Yod, Hadrian finished. Does that mean Yod can't kill us?

  Don't get too excited. Maybe it just stops Yod from noticing us.

  Hadrian leaned away from the reflection, and his brother came with him. Still, it's something.

  It is indeed.

  The twins pondered their new understanding as the blimp traversed the cleft. The Homunculus was immune to altitude sickness, but they slept more and more the higher the balloon took them, sometimes as long as three hours a night, and their dreams were spectacular. In one of them, Yod had taken the form of a giant clown whose mouth was the entrance to a glittering fairground. Rows upon rows of people queued patiently and filed inside. The clown's eyes grew redder and darker, filling up with blood, until finally a flood of crimson tears flowed down grimacing cheeks and swept the twins away.

  Skender came and sat next to them, pulling his black robe tightly around himself in order to keep the draughts off his stockinged legs.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked them. The white-skinned young mage wasn't looking at them or his girlfriend, for a change; his attention was firmly fixed on the dark edifices visible through the windows.

  Only then did Hadrian realise that they had almost reached the end of the cleft. People peered and whispered excitedly among themselves at glimpses of their destination. His first impression was that a whole other range lay in the misty distance—as though they ha
d crossed one barrier only to encounter another just as large beyond it. Then he realised that the northern and southern ends of that range curved westward to form a giant circle.

  ‘A crater,’ Seth said. ‘Like a volcano, only much bigger.’

  ‘I've read about volcanoes in The Book of Towers,’ Skender said. ‘They're mountains that vomit fire, right?’

  Seth nodded, studying the far side of the crater with a sense of unease. The jagged peaks were white with ice and snow as though dusted by a giant baker.

  ‘A volcano with a lake in it?’ asked Chu, overhearing and pointing ahead and down. Just coming into sight was the shore of a mighty body of water. The crater was flooded, filled halfway up its steep sides with run-off from the surrounding peaks.

  ‘How could there be a lake up here?’ Skender asked. ‘Why hasn't it frozen over?’

  ‘Both good questions,’ said Warden Banner, seated not far from them with a crutch held tightly in her hand. Since breaking her leg during the attack of the Swarm on Milang, she had been confined to light duties. ‘Here's another: are those houses down there?’

  Sure enough, on the southern shoreline of the lake huddled a cluster of low, black-roofed dwellings, perhaps forty in all, with a long, narrow pier protruding into the water.

  No, the twins told themselves on a closer inspection. Not into the water. The shoreline had dropped precipitously in recent times, by the look of the frosty mud caked below its original highmark. Now the houses stood twenty metres back from the shoreline and the pier led to nothing but more mud. There were no boats visible anywhere.

  ‘Who would live up here?’ asked Griel.

  ‘Maybe no one, now,’ said Marmion, and Seth could see his point. No smoke issued from the houses; no people walked the village's narrow streets.

  Skender looked disappointed. ‘I was expecting something grander, I'll admit.’

  ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Hadrian told him. ‘I've had enough excitement for one lifetime.’

  ‘Two, even,’ Seth added.

  ‘True, true,’ Skender said. ‘Do you recognise anything? Is any of this familiar to you?’

  Hadrian shook his head.

  ‘Look at the lake,’ said his brother, pointing with one black finger. ‘They're not islands.’

  Attention shifted from the village to the centre of the lake. Three broad columns stood out of the water, dozens of metres high and as black as jet. One loomed higher than the others, its top truncated as though sheered off by a giant knife. The light caught it and radiated sickly gleams.

  ‘Tower Aleph,’ Seth said. ‘That's from the Second Realm.’

  ‘So you do recognise something?’ Marmion asked, peering as closely at the twins as he was at the distant structures.

  ‘What Seth's saying,’ said Hadrian, ‘is that these are the tops of three towers Yod was building before it made the big leap. They were supposed to act as bridges across Bardo when the Cataclysm took effect. We stopped Yod in its tracks, of course, so I guess these got stuck halfway too.’

  ‘I've never heard of them,’ said Skender. ‘You'd think they'd be mentioned in The Book of Towers.’

  The twins had no opinion on that, just a similar, nagging feeling of being left in the dark. Skender glanced at his girlfriend at the other end of the gondola and the Asian-looking miner from Laure winked back at him. Embarrassed, the twins looked away. The mutual attraction between the two young lovers reminded them of cold nights in Europe and an unhappy ending in Stockholm, long ago…

  Something moved in the corner of Hadrian's eye. On the already receding flanks of the cleft, a long-limbed grey figure broke cover and took a running leap across the space between it and the gondola. The twins barely had time to recognise the terrible shape before another followed. There was no mistaking their intent. The two hideous creatures leapt with limbs flailing and steel-grey teeth bared. Long-bladed scissors opened and closed where hands should have been.

  ‘Watch out!’ Seth yelled.

  Then all was breaking glass and shrieking wind, and the terrible clash of blades snipping at everything in reach.

  Devels? Here? Impossible!

  Seth ignored his brother's mental protest and pushed Skender behind him. His hands went through the young mage's back until Hadrian added his own impetus to the shove. They forced their way up the aisle to where Panic and wardens struggled with this new danger. Both groups were exhausted from the long ascent. Any reserves of strength they possessed would be sorely tested.

  Seth and Hadrian pushed through with necessary brusqueness. The two scissor-handed devels lunged and snapped at anyone within reach, issuing terrible, ear-piercing howls. One of the balloonists fell back with her throat fatally cut.

  A roar came from one side, where the forester Heuve slashed ferociously back at the nearest devel. The bodyguard looked almost grateful for something to do, but the expression was soon wiped off his beardless face—almost literally when a pair of blades barely missed his nose. Only a wild lunge backwards saved him. A skilful parry from Lidia Delfine defended his exposed stomach from another slash. Together, the two of them drove their adversaries back to the fore of the gondola, where Marmion and Chu were guarded by Griel. Seth shouted at one of the devels and lunged to keep its attention firmly on him. While it was distracted, Griel rammed the point of his hook deep into its spine and twisted. Black blood sprayed in a thick arc across the inside of the gondola, befouling the air with a potent chemical stench.

  The second creature slashed a hole through the ceiling and leapt outside. The twins snatched at its heels too late, and clambered after it, wary of the blades that instantly snapped at their emerging head. The creature snarled at them, prompting memories of crossing Bardo to the Underworld. Then, a creature identical to the one he was following had taken Seth by surprise and cut off his hand. The hand had grown back almost instantly, restored by the persistent impression of himself that was more important in the Second Realm than actual flesh and blood—but that hadn't lessened the shock and pain Seth had experienced.

  The memory gave him an idea. As the blades snapped at them again, he raised his right arm and thrust it deliberately between them.

  The blades bounced off his skin with a shower of sparks, repelled by the Homunculus's rock-solid maintenance of his sense of self. The devel shrieked in frustration. Seth twisted his arm to free it, and lashed out with a clenched fist for the creature's face.

  It recoiled with a hiss. Together, Seth and his brother slithered out of the gondola, mindful of their footing on the ice-rimed wooden exterior. Three metres above them, the giant bladder strained and rocked, held down by dozens of thin, charm-strengthened cables. Strange geometric shapes raced across the balloon's light brown skin.

  The remaining devel raised its scissor-handed arms and faced the twins. Wind snatched at them as they planted their four feet wide and held their arms high.

  ‘Who sent you?’ Seth shouted. ‘Culsu? Yod?’

  Grey eyes blinked at them. They didn't doubt that it could understand them. They had seen enough of the new world to know that Hekau worked just as well as it had in the Second Realm: anyone who wanted to be understood could be understood, regardless what language they were speaking.

  For a second they thought the devel might reply. It hesitated, tilting its head to one side as though wondering who or what they were.

  Then it reached out with both arms and began snipping cables.

  ‘No!’ The twins jumped forward, knocking the creature flat on its back. It didn't retaliate. In its brief moment of consideration it seemed to have decided to care less about its own life than bringing down the gondola. Even as it sprawled across the slippery roof, its scissor-hands snapped at every cable and wire within reach. Each sharp twang sent a nail of fear through the twins. How many cables could snap before the whole contrivance unravelled, sending the gondola tumbling down to the unforgiving rock below?

  The balloon shuddered. Its angle of flight steepened upwards. The
twins threw themselves bodily at the devel, knowing they had to deal with the threat quickly.

  The roaring of propellers grew louder as the twins wrestled with their assailant, tumbling from side to side through the forest of cables. With a snarl, the creature slipped free and lunged for a dense knot near the rear of the balloon. The twins caught it in a flying tackle, sending it skidding across the slippery gondola. The points of its scissors struck off splinters of ice as it sought to find a grip. The attempt failed. Emitting a high-pitched cry, it slipped over the side and was sucked into the balloon's rear-port engine.

  Propeller blade and scissor-creature met with a powerful explosion. The twins ducked instinctively. Shrapnel whizzed past them, ricocheting off the gondola and arcing into open air.

  When the echoes of the explosion faded, they raised their heads to inspect the damage. All that remained of the propeller and its chimerical engine was a smoking black stump. A high-pitched whistling came from several jagged tears in the balloon.

  ‘Crap.’ Seth drove them back to the hole in the gondola. Griel needed to be told about the damage. The balloon shook and rolled, already destabilised by the severed cables.

  ‘I know, I know. I'm doing everything I can,’ said the Panic soldier as they dropped into the gondola's chaotic interior. The pilot console was emitting a persistent chiming sound; needles dipped and shuddered on every gauge.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘Just hold tight. I'm going to try to bring us down safely.’ Griel tugged at levers and pushed buttons. The balloon swayed giddyingly.

  Seth filtered out the sound of people shouting in order to concentrate on what lay through the shattered windows ahead: the crater lake and its dark ruins.

  ‘I'd be happy to land in one piece,’ said Marmion, gripping a black-stained wooden pole for balance.

  ‘Give me space and I'll do what I can.’ Griel waved them away. Chu pressed forward from where she had been standing with Skender. The twins noted her shaking hands and ashen skin. The cold air rushing through the gondola was taking its toll on those less hardy than the Homunculus.