The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  When she could see again, she cleaned up the blood and went back to work.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Shilly?’

  She blinked. Tom was standing in front of her, a worried expression on his face. ‘What?’ Then she looked down at herself and realised that she was standing with her coat unbuttoned and the warmth leaching rapidly out of her. Her whole body was shaking from the cold, and she hadn't even noticed.

  Hastily, she did up the coat and hugged herself. ‘What's going on?’ she asked through chattering teeth. She had no idea how long she had been asleep, just that it had been light when she lay down and it was dark now. ‘Did I miss anything?’

  ‘The man'kin left a couple of hours ago,’ he explained. ‘It didn't take them long to get down to the balloon, and they got it to work right away. Yod doesn't seem to bother them at all. Its tentacles tried to get at them for a while, but then went back into the water. It stayed in the water until Griel and Marmion and the others tried to take the balloon back by force. The man'kin stopped them from getting too close, and then Yod came out again and they ran away. There are caves all around the lake, Shilly. Caves.’

  She nodded, remembering all too well the prophecy Tom had shared with her a month ago.

  He wasn't distracted for long. He recounted the events she had missed with the eagerness of a schoolboy describing a play. ‘Things have been relatively quiet since then. Marmion and the others stay in the caves and Yod stays in the lake. Yod can't kill the man'kin, but it doesn't seem to care about what they might be doing either.’

  It might start to care, she thought, if their impending attack on the tower went well. ‘Did you see Sal down there with the others?’

  Tom shook his head.

  She nodded, knowing that it was only the experience of her future self that made her so anxious. Sal was still alive, somewhere. Of that she could be completely certain. He was probably safely hidden in the caves, where he would have the good sense to stay. She hoped.

  Everyone's dead, her future self had said, a woman so used to living with grief she obviously didn't realise that her voice was laden with it. Everyone who matters, anyway.

  A low thrumming noise rose up over the wind. Heads turned to look at the top of the crater wall, facing in the direction of the lake. Shilly had just enough time to reach down and pick up her stick when the rounded bulk of the balloon rose up and occluded the stars.

  She covered her mouth and nose as the two working propellers kicked up dirt and snow. Tom let out a cheer, but the man'kin crew didn't wave or make any signs of celebration or satisfaction; they simply continued to do their jobs.

  As the balloon settled to a quivering halt in a relatively sheltered space, Shilly got a better look at the damage it had suffered. The man'kin may have got the engines running, but they had done little to fix the gondola. Huge rents gaped in its underbelly and sides. Most of the windows were shattered. Several long slash marks were evident in the balloon itself, hastily stitched back together and covered with strengthening charms. Shilly knew that the crash couldn't have done all of that damage.

  ‘They were attacked,’ she said, feeling even guiltier now about stealing the balloon from her friends. They had probably thought they were safe on the shore—before Yod tried to kill them and their only means of getting away was stolen…

  Tom nodded, apparently unconcerned, then hurried down the steep slope to the balloon.

  The throbbing of the engines died down to a dull drone. The Holy Immortals followed Tom at a stately pace, forming a glowing line to where the battered gondola rested on naked granite. They moved oddly, as always, and blurred as they moved, as though simultaneously facing forwards and backwards. Shilly thought of the charm Vehofnehu had mentioned earlier and wondered how close it was to failing entirely. When that happened, how would the Holy Immortals interact with the rest of the world at all?

  ‘The time is almost upon us,’ said the empyricist, coming alongside her.

  ‘If you're trying to hurry me up,’ she said, ‘it's not going to work.’

  ‘I have every confidence in you.’ He smiled his too-wide smile and leapt with inhuman agility down the rocks to the balloon. He was gone before she could tell him what her future self had revealed about the charm, that it was for changing the shape of the world, not opening the Tomb at all.

  No one seemed to be taking their provisions or personal effects. She supposed they wouldn't need them for the mission ahead. It would either work, in which case they could return at their leisure, or it would fail. The only things she needed were her notes and drawings, which she checked were safely stowed in her new pack and slung over her shoulder. With considerably less grace than Vehofnehu, she wound her slow and painful way down to the gondola.

  The Angel was waiting there when she arrived. She hadn't noticed it catch up before then. It looked only marginally more battered than the first time she had met it, and it stood firm beneath the irregular dusting of snow across its narrow back and head. As she approached, it dipped its featureless head in something like a bow.

  She didn't know how to respond to that. Instead of bowing back, she simply patted its rough nose as she hobbled by.

  Tom reached down a hand to help her aboard. She was careful where she put her feet, mindful of the holes and broken boards everywhere. Even stationary, the whole structure creaked and swayed. Already she dreaded the flight out across the water.

  ‘Never again,’ she said as Tom showed her to a seat and she dropped gratefully into it, hugging herself to keep the cold out. ‘Leaving the ground, I mean. When I get back home, I'm not so much as climbing a tree.’

  ‘It's not that bad, is it?’ Tom said, squeezing his bony frame in next to her.

  ‘Oh, it's fine if we don't crash. That's a big “if”, though.’

  ‘Do you think we'd be going if Vehofnehu wasn't sure we'd make it?’

  Shilly liked and respected the empyricist well enough, but she still reserved judgement on his plans. ‘Making it there, I'm sure he's sure of. It's what comes after I'm worried about.’

  Once they were all aboard, the propellers picked up speed. The gondola rattled and shook and with a lingering scrape took to the air. Shilly peered forward along the crowded interior. Every available space was filled with glowing people and man'kin. Vehofnehu operated the controls with vigour, while ahead of him someone had propped up Mawson like a figurehead.

  Slowly they rose above the jagged lip of the crater and began moving towards the lake.

  Shilly looked back at the campsite and the Angel, wondering if she would see either again. As she did so, she caught sight of a dark figure standing among the bedrolls and packs, watching her right back. She sat up straighter and was about to cry out when she recognised the glast. Its glassy flesh caught the starlight. Silver flickered and faded as it raised a hand in farewell, then began climbing slowly down the crater wall.

  ‘This doesn't bode well,’ she said to Tom. ‘Isn't the glast supposed to be the key to everything?’

  ‘I don't think anyone's so sure about that now,’ he replied. ‘It hasn't said or done anything since it woke up. Maybe Vehofnehu was wrong.’

  If Vehofnehu could be wrong on that point and on the purpose of the charm, she wanted to say, he could be wrong about everything else. But she kept that to herself as the balloon laboured its way across the shore and out over the lake.

  The people hidden in the caves made no move to impede the balloon's progress. All through its long journey across the lake, it was unmolested in any way. Yod's tentacles ignored it, although the surface of the lake, visible by starlight, was restless. The only thing that attacked them was the wind.

  Shilly's feet were numb by the time they reached their destination, the largest of the three blunt towers that rose out of the lake ahead of them. As they approached, Shilly could make out weatherworn charms carved over its curved walls, although their meaning eluded her. Ancient dead things, they spoke of another world, another time, and she w
asn't up to translating it. She had too many mysterious shapes and signs in her head as it was.

  The top of the tower puzzled her: black and featureless, or so it seemed to her; unmarked by any hand, natural or unnatural. Only when they came directly overhead was she able to peer down and see that it was in fact a hole, thirty metres across. The tower was hollow.

  ‘We're not,’ she said as the balloon began to drop. ‘Please tell me we're not.’

  ‘It looks like we are,’ said Tom.

  Her stomach rose into her mouth, and not just at the speed of their descent. They were going down into the tower.

  ‘Doesn't anyone else think this is a terrible idea?’ she asked the crowded gondola.

  The only reply was the sound of the engines’ steady pitch as they controlled the balloon's gradual fall.

  A breath of warm air brushed her face. Shilly leaned closer to the open window and realised that hot air was blowing past her, rising out of the tower like smoke from a chimney. The stars seemed to shimmer as the top of the tower rose up to shut them out. She looked down and saw, faintly, a bluish light. She couldn't estimate how far away it was. It could have been at the very bottom of the lake, for all she knew.

  The thought of the lake and all the water it contained gave her another reason to be nervous. She could practically feel the water pressure rising around them. As the temperature increased and the air became stuffier, with a sharp metallic sting that hurt the back of her throat, she wanted to scream—but she knew that if she did the echoes might never stop. That thought alone kept her mouth shut and her terror contained.

  She soon reached a point where she could no longer tell how fast they were moving. The walls reflected the glow of the Holy Immortals so amorphously that sometimes she actually seemed to be rising, not falling. When the uncertainty began to make her feel dizzy, she shut her eyes to block it out.

  But with her eyes closed there was nothing to keep out the memories of her future self. She wasn't sure which was worse. The charm still wouldn't come into focus, and everything burned with grief for Sal. A sense of futility threatened to overwhelm her.

  ‘It's okay, Shilly,’ whispered Tom over the droning of the propellers. ‘You don't die here. I know that.’

  ‘But what about you?’ she shot back, forcing her eyes open again. ‘What about the rest of us? It's no comfort at all if I live and no one else does.’ I've seen it, she thought bitterly.

  Tom looked startled by her impassioned response, and she felt instantly bad. He was only trying to help. But what comfort was there at the bottom of a lake when Yod could presumably kill them all at any moment? She didn't know how they had survived this long.

  The light from below had grown brighter while she sat with her eyes closed. It was strong enough to cast the walls of the tower into sharp relief, overpowering the green light of the balloon's strange passengers. Shilly leaned cautiously out the window for another look, and saw what appeared to be a large brilliant sky-blue crystal, on the tower's floor below. Its light was cold and oddly distant; she stared at it for several breaths before glancing away and finding that it left no after-image.

  The balloon began to slow. Creaking, swaying, shuddering in the steady updraught, it reluctantly obeyed Vehofnehu's hand at the controls as he guided it slightly to one side to avoid the object resting at the bottom of the tower. Shilly noticed that walls were now receding, flaring out in a broad bell-shape across a floor of naked black stone. The crystal rested in the middle of that space on a squat stone dais, broad and ugly, that was only visible when they landed.

  It wasn't a crystal at all—or like no crystal Shilly had ever seen, anyway. Instead of flat, angular planes and clean, geometric lines, the glowing structure was all curves and ragged edges, as though someone had smashed a bantam's egg then put all the fragments back together with no concern for its original shape. Shilly was reminded of the petals of a flower as it first blossomed from its bud. The fragments of the shell overlapped and clashed everywhere she looked, creating a jarring impression of violence frozen in mid-motion. The light remained a chilling steady blue.

  With a sigh of discontent, the balloon touched down. Man'kin dropped from the gondola and anchored it to the stone, using their own weight and strength to physically hold it in place. One by one, the Holy Immortals filed out to inspect the object they had found. Flickering, indistinct, inscrutable, they were barely recognisable.

  When it was Shilly's turn, she followed Tom closely, taking comfort from his familiar humanness. Vehofnehu put the balloon's propellers on a steady idle that echoed through the space like the buzzing of giant bees. The clicking of her walking stick was the only harsh sound to break that ambience.

  The glowing blue structure towered over them all. Shilly craned her neck to look up, wondering who had built it and for what purpose. It was as large as a building but had no obvious doors or windows. There were no charms inscribed on or implied by its curving faces. It radiated neither cold nor heat and it emitted no sound that she could discern.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked.

  ‘Now you open it,’ said a voice from behind them.

  Shilly, Tom and even Vehofnehu jumped. Out of the shadows stepped the tallest creature Shilly had ever seen: a vast, imposing figure in a suit of orange armour that stood head and shoulders above the most massive man'kin in their party. All sharp edges and cruelty, the figure wore a long two-handed sword at its hip that looked strong enough to fell a ghost gum with one stroke. The face visible through the helmet possessed masculine lines, with high cheekbones and pale white skin, but had a distant, calculating air that was anything but human.

  ‘Ah,’ said Vehofnehu, a little shakily, ‘the traitor. Gabra'il. I'd wondered if you had survived the Cataclysm.’

  ‘No Cataclysm, so-called King.’ The giant man's voice echoed through the chamber like the clashing of steel. ‘A hiatus only. My master's work will soon be finished and the Cataclysm complete. You will fall, every one of you.’

  The empyricist stood straighter and strolled with studied nonchalance around the base of the glowing object. ‘They're fine words, coming from a guard dog.’

  ‘The Tomb of the Sisters falls under my protection. There is no shame in that.’

  ‘Only one sister left, I'm given to understand. And most people today refer to her as the Goddess.’

  ‘There are no gods but my master.’

  ‘Who you let into the Second Realm. Isn't that right? You betrayed the people who gave you life; you betrayed every living thing. Is your conscience easy? Do the years weigh heavily upon you?’

  Instead of answering, Gabra'il took two long strides forward. His armour grated and clashed, and Shilly backed hastily away. Expressionlessly, coldly, he reached down and cupped Vehofnehu's head in his massive right hand.

  ‘Open the Tomb, or I will kill you now.’

  Vehofnehu didn't flinch. ‘I don't know how to open it.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I serve.’ Gabra'il's gloved hand tightened around Vehofnehu's head and began to squeeze.

  Instead of answering, the empyricist pointed at the Holy Immortals.

  Unnoticed, the circle of green figures had linked hands and formed a circle around the base of the Tomb. Strange energies swirled among them, and their flickering increased. The greenish light they radiated seemed to war with the blue of the Tomb, creating a stuttering, erratic light display that hurt Shilly's eyes.

  Gabra'il let go of Vehofnehu and stepped back. One great hand rested on the hilt of his sword, ready to draw it and cut everyone down.

  Shilly fought the urge to be violently sick. She didn't know who Gabra'il was, but Yod was clearly the master he spoke of—and why would anyone willingly do something it wanted? Only her utter impotence in the face of the giant's strength and the length of his sword stopped her from doing what she normally did in such crises: rush in and start laying about with her cane.

  She co
uldn't open the Tomb, so it was up to the Holy Immortals now. They seemed to know what they were doing. She watched through narrowed eyes as the jarring light grew brighter, oscillating wildly from blue to green with occasional flashes of pure white. The stone beneath her began to vibrate. Dust rained down the length of the tower, making the air even thicker and fouler smelling than it already had been. She put her free hand over her nose. A low rumble rose up, drowning out the sound of Tom's coughing.

  A cracking sound came from the Tomb, corresponding with a streak of lightning that carved a jagged path up the tower and into the sky. Then another. Shilly stepped back, feeling utterly overwhelmed by the power swirling around her. She had never felt such a concentration of the Change before, even around Sal. There was more in each mote of dust than there had been in Lodo's workshop; more perhaps than in the entire Haunted City. Whatever source the Holy Immortals were tapping into, it outshone anything humanity had ever tamed.

  With the third crack, the lightning came and didn't go away. An intensely bright line of energy cast hellish shadows all through the tunnel, dancing and leaping and making Shilly even dizzier than she had been before. Telling herself not to falter, she gripped the top of her cane and walked forward, closer to the source of the lightning. She had to see what was going on.

  The Holy Immortals still circled the Tomb, hand in hand. One of the Tomb's shell-like ‘petals’ had fallen away. Another followed, dropping heavily to the stone and shattering into countless tiny crystal shards that flashed in all directions. Shilly took another step forward and felt a crunching underfoot. Gabra'il's attention was focussed firmly on the unfolding Tomb, and with each falling petal he stood straighter and gripped his sword more tightly. Lightning cast his angular features into sharp relief.

  Vehofnehu had sidled away from the giant's side and come close to Shilly. ‘Be ready,’ he shouted into her ear. The words were barely audible over the opening of the Tomb.