The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  ‘I did.’

  It was you, said Seth to Hadrian. That was your face I saw. An older you, poking through the Homunculus somehow. It wasn't a ghost at all.

  Hadrian couldn't have been more surprised if Seth had told him it was Albert Einstein. Me?

  Yes, you. I understand why you didn't recognise yourself. It's been a long time since we had a face, either of us.

  Skender was watching them, now, his expression even more concerned. ‘Are you two all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hadrian, fighting a stammer. ‘I—that is, we've had something of a shock. I don't know what we saw. Maybe we imagined it, whatever it was.’

  Skender didn't look convinced.

  Why didn't you tell him? Seth asked.

  Why didn't you? And why didn't you tell me when you guessed?

  Because it sounds crazy. And because…Well, because it suggests that the Homunculus is coming apart at the seams. Is that something you want to boast about?

  Of course not.

  ‘There's no sign of forced entry,’ Marmion concluded. ‘No residue of any kind. I think we should check some of the other houses and see if they're the same. Let's not come to any conclusions until we've done that. Agreed?’

  They all nodded. Hadrian could tell that Seth had already made up his mind about who had killed the family. As they followed the others back out into the street, Hadrian whispered, I can think of only one explanation: Yod murdered them.

  I agree. It's close. I bet it's in the towers right now, building up its strength before breaking out across the world. First it ate the Lost Minds in Bardo, and now the minds of the people in this village.

  Should we tell the others?

  Marmion already knows, little brother.

  Yes. I think you're right.

  They watched Marmion lead the way to another low building, where they found another family, this time three generations of women in two beds, as restful as the others and as cold in death. The warden's face was taut and worried, and it was clear he didn't like being inside for too long.

  The third hut was the same, and the fourth. On the way to the fifth, they found a body sprawled in the street—a man in thick protective hides who lay splayed as though felled in mid-step.

  ‘How long?’ Marmion asked Rosevear.

  ‘Death is hard to read in this weather,’ said the healer. ‘There are signs of insect infestation and decay in all the bodies, but the species aren't the same as the ones back home and the cold slows everything down.’ The healer rocked back on his heels. Two bright red patches glowed on his brown cheeks. ‘Over a week, but not as many as two. That's my best guess.’

  Marmion nodded. He looked about to say something, but at that moment the ground kicked beneath them and the sound of water splashing caught their ears. Rosevear stood and together they ran cautiously through the streets in order to get a view of the shore.

  Thick ripples were lapping against the frozen soil. As they watched, a tall wave rolled in and made a splashing noise similar to the one they had heard a moment earlier.

  Hadrian's gaze drifted from the shore to the centre of the lake, where the three squat towers poked their heads out of the dark water. He knew instinctively that they were the source of this new disturbance.

  Someone's getting restless, he said.

  Do you think—?

  ‘Run, you idiots!’ called a voice from behind them. ‘It'll be here any moment!’

  The twins spun around. The only evidence that anyone had been on the street behind them was a clatter of footsteps receding into the distance.

  ‘I don't like the sound of that,’ said Skender.

  ‘Neither do I. Get after him,’ Marmion said, waving urgently at the twins. ‘You're the fastest. We'll follow.’

  Neither Seth nor Hadrian resisted the bark of command in Marmion's voice. With arms and legs moving in perfect synchrony, they ran in pursuit of the stranger. They didn't have time to think. It was all they could do, even with the refined senses of the Homunculus, to follow the sound to its source. Echoes of their own footsteps and the increased agitation of the lake behind them made the task doubly difficult.

  By the time they caught sight of their quarry, he was well outside the village and making good progress up the crater's sloping edge, to where a series of dark cave mouths gaped at the base of the curving cliff wall.

  ‘Wait!’ Seth shouted. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To hide, of course!’ the boy bellowed over his shoulder. Despite his many layers, he was making impressive time. ‘Warn the others. They don't have long to get out of sight!’ He waved vaguely at the downed balloon and the cluster of figures surrounding it, then he put his head down and sprinted for the caves.

  The twins vacillated for a moment over whether to follow or turn back. They chose the latter. Marmion and the others were just leaving the village behind them. The surface of the lake was becoming choppier by the second, as though a storm was blowing in.

  The twins passed on the message from their unknown benefactor, and added their own interpretation.

  ‘It's Yod,’ said Hadrian, feeling a rising panic of his own. ‘I don't know how, but I can guess why. It spotted us and it's coming for lunch. We have to get the others under cover. This isn't the time to stand and fight.’

  ‘We can watch, though,’ Seth added. ‘We need all the intelligence we can get.’

  Marmion nodded. ‘I'll call Banner. She'll get everyone moving. Now, keep going. It won't do anyone any good if we all die.’

  Hadrian agreed wholeheartedly. As one, the four of them began toiling up the slope. Marmion's eyes half-closed in concentration. Rosevear stayed at his side, one hand ready to catch the older warden should he stumble. Skender pumped his skinny arms in an uncoordinated sprint. His expression was pale and frightened.

  As he ran, he cast one desperate glance over his shoulder, and Hadrian understood.

  Chu was down there with the others, and they hadn't even started running yet.

  Skender mouthed something under his breath and found an unexpected turn of speed. As the caves came nearer, he first drew level with the twins then took the lead. Hadrian was willing to hang back in case Marmion and Rosevear got into trouble. He had seen enough death for one day.

  Come on, come on, Skender urged himself in time with his ragged breathing. One foot in front of the other. Don't think about what's coming up behind. Just run like the crabbler queen herself is on your tail. Run like you've never run before, and then some!

  He didn't hear the keening noise he was making until the nearest of the caves finally came within range. As he ran into its stony embrace, the echo of his wail came back to him, startlingly loud. He choked it off and let himself pant. The shadow of the cave was dark and cold. The light coming from the entrance revealed a narrow but long empty chamber that stretched deep into the bedrock.

  The others weren't far behind. Letting his lungs suck down air like every breath could be his last, he knelt on one knee, took off his right glove and pressed his hand flat against the stone. The Change rippled through it and across his naked palm, distracting him from the cold. Through the stone he felt the distant footsteps of the rest of the expedition. They had started moving at last, warned by Marmion's call. Skender could also feel the shadow of something dark and unfathomable rising from the depths of the lake. It slithered along the bottom like a tangle of snakes, writhing and squirming, and making furious time. It would reach the shore long before Chu and her companions reached shelter.

  Some souvenir, he thought.

  Marmion and the others arrived and gathered around him.

  ‘Tell Kelloman—’ Skender could barely get the words past the gasping of his lungs. He was sweating under all his layers. ‘Tell Kelloman to find stone and touch it. Quickly.’

  Marmion relayed the message. An answer came immediately, direct from the mage.

  What are you thinking, boy? There's a fine spur of rhyolite near here, but it's out of our way.r />
  Just get there and do it—quickly!

  Of all the impertinence! Whatever's going on, it had better be important.

  Skender bit back a flash of irritation. What could be more important than saving everyone's lives? I need to Take from you. You're too far away to touch, but I can reach you this way. Please—we don't have long.

  He hadn't fully recovered from the exertions of the flight up the mountains. That small effort wore him out. Fortunately, Kelloman didn't waste time continuing the conversation. Skender waited impatiently, gripping the cold stone with his fingers until finally he felt an echo of the mage in the bedrock of the world. It was like hearing a sound underwater: muffled and hard to pin down but definitely there. He reached for it, felt Kelloman reach out to him in return, and connected.

  Potential, refined and strong, flooded through him. The mage gave him everything he could spare, keeping only enough to maintain the link between his host body and the one lying far away in the Interior. The exchange was swift and total, leaving Skender feeling full of light, as though his bones were glowing.

  ‘Brilliant,’ he said, looking up from his kneeling position to the entrance of the cave. His scalp tingled. He wondered if his hair was standing on end. It certainly felt that way. ‘Now, I'll have to time this right.’

  Down the slope they had followed, he could see the village and its three piers. The surface of the lake roiled like the surface of a saucepan of water on a stove. A mist had risen up over the water, hiding the tops of the towers from view. Strange shapes danced in the mist; inhuman figures came and went.

  The twins stiffened. Their odd double gaze was fixed on the village. Breath hissed out of them like steam.

  A moment later, Skender saw what they had spotted. Something black and fluid wound along the narrow streets, snake-like but as tall as a human. Skender couldn't tell if it was made of water or smoke; it possessed a little of both in its translucency and flexibility—yet the shape of it was fixed in cross-section along its length. It progressed in the same way that a drop of water trickled down a window pane, growing longer at its leading edge rather than wriggling like a snake.

  The tip of another tentacle appeared, sliding soundlessly along a second street. Its path curved to intersect with a house, which it passed right through as though the wooden walls weren't even there. Behind it, Skender glimpsed a dark mass bulging out of the restless water—the source of the black tentacles, he was sure—and imagined it sniffing out life in the town. Drawn by their movement, perhaps, or by subtle disturbances in the flow of the Change, this strange limb of the creature living in the lake had been woken and sent forth to investigate.

  And to feed.

  Skender roused himself. He had been frozen with horror for far too long. Chu and the others would surely not have reached cover yet, and he didn't dare doubt that another such deadly limb would be rising to devour them. What happened when the tentacles touched something living, he didn't know for certain, but he wasn't going to wait to find out. A village full of dead people suggested it wasn't anything good.

  A distraction. That was what he needed. The back of his mind had been riffling through the many charms he had glimpsed once and never forgotten. Charms to turn solid stone into liquid and liquid stone into solid; charms to create bizarre metal alloys and extract impurities from mixed samples; charms to make fire burn cold or to make it invisible; charms, in particular, to focus sunlight into brightly coloured beams powerful enough to split a tree in two. Even on a frosty plateau where the sun seemed hardly to have any strength at all, the potential was obvious.

  There wasn't time to physically prepare the pattern required. He would have to do all the hard work with his mind alone. Keeping his cold-numbed hand tight against the rock, he bent forward and squeezed his eyes tightly shut, imagining a series of concentric circles radiating out from him, through the entrance of the cave and onto the beach. Adjacent circles spun in opposing directions, creating a strange, highly stressed tension in the air. He could feel the Change throbbing all around him. Beside him, Marmion drew in a sharp breath.

  That was only the beginning of the charm. The art lay in what came next. Ordinarily a mage would draw the lines together, forming a cone leading from the focus up into the sky, to where the sun hung overhead. The cone would concentrate the sun's radiant energy, which could then be directed away from the mage in whatever direction he or she chose. Skender didn't want a tight beam. That wouldn't be distracting enough. Instead he gathered what sunlight he could from as wide an area as he could reach, held it for a moment, feeling as though he was holding the world's breath in a giant set of lungs. Then he set it free.

  Even in the cave with his eyes shut, he saw the charm take effect. Dull afternoon turned to brilliant daylight in an instant—and went beyond even that, to a powerful, searing glare that burned the skin where it touched and made ice crystals flash instantly into steam. It pulsed to a rhythm much faster than a heartbeat, a rhythm he could almost hear with his ears as well as see through his closed eyelids. Around him, Marmion, Rosevear and the twins fell back with their hands over their eyes.

  Not too much, he told himself. He didn't want to blind anyone. Tweaking the charm again, he encouraged the light to focus on a patch of earth midway between the balloon's crash site and the village. With luck, the tentacles would be drawn to that spot, to the energy concentrated there, rather than follow the life signs of those fleeing from it.

  The light ebbed in the cave. Someone edged towards the entrance. A moment later, one of the twins—Seth—said, ‘It's working. They're getting away.’

  ‘That's amazing, Skender,’ added the other twin. ‘How do you do that? It's like magic.’

  ‘Who says it isn't?’ asked Seth. ‘A spell by any other name…’

  ‘Tell me when they're safe,’ Skender grated through clenched teeth. The necessary concentration was taking its toll. He could feel himself rocking back and forth on the spot. His arms tightly clutched his stomach and sides, as though holding his insides in. Kelloman and the sun might have provided the energy for the distraction, but he was responsible for making it behave in an unnatural way. There was a price to be paid for that.

  ‘Give them a bit longer,’ Hadrian urged him. ‘Almost there, almost there…That's it. You can kill it now.’

  Skender let his concentration unravel and fell back with a gasp. His hand came free from the stone with an audible snap, like a miniature lightning strike. He flexed his fingers, wondering if he would ever feel them again. Bonelessly, helplessly, he slumped over onto his side.

  Chu was safe.

  ‘That was very well done,’ said Rosevear, putting a cool hand against his forehead and peeling back both eyelids to inspect his condition. ‘You'll be okay, and so will the others, thanks to your quick thinking.’

  ‘What's happening down on the beach?’ he asked. ‘Is it leaving?’

  ‘No,’ Marmion said from the cave entrance. ‘It's spreading out again, searching for us.’

  ‘I'm sure it's Yod now,’ said Seth.

  ‘So am I,’ added Hadrian.

  Marmion didn't argue. ‘That would make sense.’

  ‘We call it the Death,’ said a voice from deeper inside the cave.

  Everyone turned. Skender managed to crack open an eyelid.

  Out of the shadows stepped a skinny boy of about thirteen dressed in dirty skins. His expression was haunted and hunted both, mixed with a strange kind of desperate hope. He came for them, ready to bolt at the slightest odd move, but it was clear he wanted to do anything but.

  ‘It was you,’ said the twins. ‘You're the one who warned us, who led us here.’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Are you from the village?’ asked Marmion.

  Another nod, abrupt and fearful.

  ‘What's your name?’ asked Rosevear more gently.

  ‘Orma.’ The boy looked close to tears. ‘I ran away the night the Death came to my home. I didn't know until the next morning, whe
n I went home and found—’ He swallowed. ‘Have you come to save us?’

  ‘We certainly hope so,’ said the twins. ‘Are there more like you, living back here?’

  The boy nodded a third time. ‘It can't feel us in the caves. Or if it can, it can't reach us. We're safe here while food lasts. There's room for all of us, and more.’

  ‘These caves must go a fair way, then,’ said Marmion. ‘Could you lead us to where our friends have taken shelter?’

  ‘I could.’ Orma's gaze settled on Skender, still sprawled on the cold ground. ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘He will be,’ Skender grunted, forcing himself to move. His lassitude didn't stem from any physical injury. He simply felt so drained as to be almost transparent. ‘Just give me a moment.’

  ‘Orma.’ Marmion took the boy by the arm. ‘Tell us more about this thing, this Death. How fast does it react? How far can it reach? Can it be in more than two places at once? We need to know everything you do if we're going to stop it before it hurts anyone else.’

  ‘Y—yes, sir.’

  The boy stammered answers as best he could while Skender struggled to his feet. He made it, but the air in the cave seemed suddenly too thin. His head spun. Stars sparkled before his eyes.

  ‘No way,’ he said, putting a hand to his forehead. He could feel the world receding, growing faint and dim. ‘I can't—I have—’

  The thought that he had too much work to do remained unfinished. He was unconscious before he hit the stone.

  He dreamed of the hearths of home, of the busy Keep kitchens and the chatter of his fellow students; of his father's stern face and his mother's voice coming from an adjoining room. A real fire was burning in the commonroom, which struck him as odd because the Keep wasn't well ventilated and smoke tended to accumulate in the upper floors. This fire was special, though: its flames gathered in long skender ropes that twisted and snapped at the ceiling. Their focus was on a shadow in a corner that grew deeper and broader the more they whipped at it. A wave of cold radiated from the shadow, sucking all the heat of the fire out of the room. Skender shivered. How could it be so cold? And why did the shadow seem to be sucking him in too? He sensed something ageless and malign staring out of the shadow at him, exerting all its will to draw him nearer…