The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  ‘But you were wrong about the charm!’ she shouted back. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  He just gripped her arm. ‘You'll know. I trust you.’

  She thought frantically of her future self's work and found it hard to concentrate on anything but the lightshow and the growing thunder. The elder Shilly had shown her the charm numerous times, pointing out specific features and broader patterns that she knew better than anyone. The sketches Shilly had taken down were pale shadows of the finished product. She required the essence of the pattern, the mental image of what it should be. As long as it existed in her mind, that would be enough to bring it into the world, for a while.

  The trouble was, it didn't exist in her mind, not in its entirety, and not even in all its component parts. She was beginning to see how some of the pieces slotted together. Every time she slipped into the mind of her future self, she came back with a little more of the knowledge required—and the most recent time, when the exchange went both ways, she had gleaned even more. But knowledge wasn't the same thing as understanding. She needed that before she could do anything.

  More of the petals fell away, dropping faster and faster as though the loss of the outer petals had unleashed a pressure from within. The bolt of lightning became thicker and more fluid until it began to look like a fishing line cast into the sky. The booming of thunder became a low throbbing that made her insides tremble. A feeling that she might wet herself only made her efforts to concentrate that much more difficult.

  Then, in a wild storm of violence, the final layers of the Tomb suddenly blew apart, sending crystalline shards in all directions. Shilly shielded her eyes as wind and energy raged, whipping her hair around her face. When she dared look again, everything was covered in snow-like dust and lit from above by an intense column of white light. What had once been lightning or a line whipping through space no longer moved at all, just pointed up into the night sky like a spear. A spear a god could have wielded against the stars, as wide across as the base of the Tomb.

  Tom stood with his mouth open, aghast. Vehofnehu peeped out from around his knees. Even Gabra'il was taken by surprise, with one arm upraised against the brightness of the light. Only the Holy Immortals and the man'kin were unmoved by the silence that filled the air—the silence that wasn't silence at all, but a sound so large and loud that it defied perception.

  The circle of Holy Immortals contracted as they stepped hand-in-hand into the light and onto the dais, closely followed by the man'kin. Gabra'il drew his sword with a snarl and physically threw himself after them, roaring like an animal. Metal met stone with a terrible sound. Pieces of man'kin flew in all directions. One powerful stroke split the steed that had carried Shilly up the mountains in two, from forehead to tufted tail.

  ‘Now, Shilly!’ cried Vehofnehu, rising from his crouch and waving for her attention. ‘This is the moment! Use the charm now!’

  Shilly frantically tried to gather the fragments and assemble them into a whole. Whatever inspiration Vehofnehu had been hoping for, it wasn't coming easily. A faint shadowy structure began to take shape in her mind, a broad outline of what her future self had been trying to impart, but it was as slippery as a fish. Every time she tried to pin it down, it slipped through her mental fingers and darted away.

  Help me! she silently cried out to the other versions of herself who were entangled in this dreadful conspiracy.

  Urgency gave her the power. One mighty mental lunge saw her catch the image in her mind. ‘Yes,’ she breathed, seeing finally how the fragments could fit together. Individual patterns coalesced into broader swathes that attracted more and more pieces of the puzzle, until it almost seemed that she really could emulate her future self's feat and bring the charm into being.

  The potential in her stick stirred at her command, ready to answer her call.

  Then something struck her head from behind. Something hard. She went down with stars flashing before her eyes. The surprise was as debilitating as the pain and made her even more confused. Who had hit her? Had someone else stepped out of the shadows like Gabra'il had? What other menace had come forward to deal with them?

  She raised herself to her hands and knees, prompting another round of stars. Some of them were real, she slowly realised. Through blurry eyes she made out the crystal fragments of the Tomb rushing upwards around her, shining with their own light like miniature suns. A wind was rising, hot and dry. Her hair curled against her scalp. She reached up to touch the centre of the pain and felt a warm stickiness on her fingers.

  Then Tom's hands were under her armpits, hauling her to her feet. Disoriented, she batted at him with her cane. He shouted words she couldn't quite understand. Everything was doubled and the world swayed violently beneath her. The green light of the Holy Immortals had vanished and the blue light was getting stronger. A hurricane seemed to be brewing at the bottom of the hollow tower. The Tomb was closing, trapping the Holy Immortals. Although the view swam crazily in and out of focus, she thought she saw Gabra'il caught half-in, half-out of the crystal petals, trapped like a giant bee in blue amber.

  ‘I'll help you,’ said a voice she didn't recognise. A woman's voice, mature and confident. Hands grabbed Shilly under her right arm, taking half her weight from Tom. Still she couldn't stand, but she could turn her head to look. She saw a small pale-skinned woman with a crooked nose and hazel eyes, clad in a black robe with a hood that draped down her back. Her hair hung in a long ponytail over her right shoulder, bound in brass. It was brown and shot through with streaks of grey.

  Together, she and Tom dragged Shilly to where the balloon was waiting for them, the sound of its engines rising sharply in pitch.

  We're going to escape, Shilly realised through the pain and the disorientation as they scrambled into the gondola and lay her across a seat. No one was stopping them. The floor moved and the balloon leapt upwards, gaining altitude much more quickly than it had descended, thanks to the swirling hot wind. They shook from side to side, but Vehofnehu kept them as far away from the walls as he could. Only once did they brush something with a terrifying scrape and lurch that almost threw Shilly from the seat.

  Tom crouched beside her with pieces of white crystal in his hair. She wanted to ask him so many questions. What happened? Who hit me? Who's she? But she felt her consciousness slipping. Her fingers were stained red with the blood from her head wound.

  The mystery woman joined Tom just as the world began to recede. Shilly tried to reach for her, but her arm wouldn't move. A hunch formed too late for her to do anything more than stare.

  Then all thought ceased and she was gone.

  The view across the lake was magnificent. Even in its current agitated state, the water reflected a large number of frequencies, many of them invisible to the human eye. The alien observer found time to appreciate the play of this reflected light across the world. There were more things to life than hunger, to eating or being eaten. Transcending such base axioms, it sometimes considered, was what life might actually be about.

  Accordingly, it found the antics of the humans more than simply amusing. Their strivings might have seemed petty or pointless to some, but not to it. In aspiring to greatness—by opposing a force more potent and deadly than any they would normally come up against—they exposed the spark that was missing from realms that contained no sentient life. They called that spark will, and it was both a blessing and a curse for them. It made them vigorous and vital, but such vitality always aroused attention.

  Eat or be eaten. Not everything aspired to transcend. And there was definitely greatness to be found in any extreme, be it one of consumption or of destruction, or of any act that might on the surface seem similarly pointless. Was there a point to humanity's striving to save itself, or were beings who wondered about such things deluding themselves? The alien observer didn't know, and it didn't spend a great deal of time worrying about it.

  One particularly powerful chimerical discharge lit up the night like a supernatural firework
, causing a shockwave that sent ripples cascading out from Tower Aleph. The alien told itself to stop watching water and light and to concentrate on the world right in front of it. Things were coming to a head. It had work to do.

  ‘We are buds on the outermost twig of a tree

  vaster than we can imagine. It stretches in

  directions we cannot see or measure, and grows

  new branches with every passing breath, thought

  and deed. Each branch connects one possible life

  to another, so all that might have been is united in

  the Third Realm—even though it seems

  profoundly disconnected to us here in the midst

  of our lives.’

  SKENDER VAN HAASTEREN X

  ‘Be careful with that, you ugly mug!’

  Chu's shout came clearly from the uphill fringes of the lake shore, where she waited out of reach of the deadly black tentacles.

  Blacker than the night itself, they rolled like currents of oily smoke across the churned earth where the balloon had rested. They were capable of sudden and surprising turns of speed, especially at their tips, so the twins had learned to be very careful in a very short amount of time.

  The fact that the twins were balancing Chu's wing on their combined shoulders and running uphill at night didn't make the situation any easier at all.

  Remind me again how we were volunteered for this, Seth muttered.

  Later. Hadrian ignored the determined grumbling of his brother. Let's get out of this alive first.

  They circled a long knot of tentacles that had rolled out of the lake a moment before, the tips blindly groping, trying to find them. The tentacles seemed confused, disoriented by the ankh glowing brightly in the twins’ chest, but Yod had numbers on its side. Once already the twins had almost been cornered.

  They lost sight of the lake behind a wall of black. Starlight was barely sufficient for them to navigate by, even with the Homunculus's superior eyesight. Marmion kept a mirror shining at the entrance of the caves. Hadrian did his best to hold that small beacon in sight.

  ‘To your right!’ Chu shouted.

  A new knot of tentacles had burst from the water. The twins changed course, shifting the wing's considerable momentum with a grunt. One of Seth's feet slipped on the icy soil and they almost went down. Hadrian lowered his head and refused to let them fall; Yod wouldn't win like this, with them spent uselessly on a barren shore. They would have their confrontation; they would see it done.

  Seth recovered. Together they dodged the latest threat and found a clear path up the shore. The young flyer met them eagerly at the entrance to the caves.

  ‘You did it,’ she said, inspecting the wing for signs of damage before the twins put it down. ‘I knew you could.’

  Hadrian said nothing. In fact, Chu had been highly sceptical of the twins’ chances of getting back alive with the wing in one piece. It had been her idea to retrieve the wing from where she had unpacked it from the gondola. Had she tried to do so herself, she would almost certainly have died. The number of tentacles on the shore was rising with every hour.

  ‘You're welcome,’ said Seth pointedly.

  The flyer looked up and blinked. ‘Oh, yes, thank you. I mean it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Hadrian.

  ‘What's that?’ asked Marmion, pointing at the twins’ chest.

  The twins were both startled. ‘You mean you can see it?’

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn't I?’

  They explained about the ankh—how it had been given to them by the Ogdoad and their suspicion that it might help hide them from Yod. Their proximity to the enemy of life seemed to make the charm more active. As they studied it from their position of relative safety, it began to fade.

  ‘Is there anything else we don't know about you?’

  ‘Nothing springs to mind at the moment.’ Hadrian tried to keep sarcasm from his tone.

  Heuve barked an alarm. Lidia Delfine's bodyguard was watching the distant tower tops through a spyglass. His eyesight was keener than anyone else's, apart from the twins’.

  ‘Movement,’ Heuve said. ‘At the tower.’

  Everyone clustered around the bodyguard: the twins, Marmion, Chu, Lidia Delfine, Rosevear, Banner and Griel. Skender was still recovering with Kelloman in the Ice Eaters’ underground sanctuary, ordered to return there via the cave system riddling the crater walls despite his insistence that he could help with matters on the surface. His protests fell flat in the face of the abortive attempt to recover the balloon from the man'kin earlier that evening. Any chance they might have had vanished when Yod's tentacles had emerged from the lake to drive them off. Since then, all they had been able to do was watch as the man'kin had performed rudimentary repairs on the craft and flown it away.

  Heuve and the twins had monitored its progress from the caves, first to the top of the crater wall to collect some more passengers, then out across the water to the submerged towers. Even at night, it had been easy to follow. Apart from the golden chimerical light of its propellers, a bright green glow had filtered through the holes in the gondola, indicating that at least some of the passengers were Holy Immortals. Unmolested by Yod or anyone else, the balloon had flown in a straight line to the largest of the towers then apparently landed.

  When Kelloman had suggested the wardens raise a storm to knock the balloon out of the sky, Marmion had vetoed the idea immediately.

  ‘Shilly might be aboard,’ he had said. ‘Or Tom. I'll do nothing to risk their lives until I know for certain, either way.’

  ‘Even though they ran away,’ asked Chu, ‘and stole our only means of getting home?’

  ‘Even so. Our options aren't as limited as you think.’ And there had been no changing his mind, no matter how much Kelloman had argued. The debate had only ended when Chu had come up with the plan to get the wing to safety and fly it out to the towers in an attempt to find out what the man'kin were up to.

  ‘Something's leaving the tower,’ said Heuve. ‘The balloon, I think, but it's hard to be certain.’

  The twins took the spyglass from him and trained it on the distant tower. Their eyes detected subtle flashes and currents of energy that the human eye couldn't see. Earlier that night, the sky had been lit by brilliant white streaks visible only to the Homunculus's senses. Now, they saw a black lozenge rising against a growing maelstrom spewing out of the tower. The lozenge was clearly the balloon, but it was missing its green glow. Whatever had happened in or around the tower top, the Holy Immortals hadn't made it back.

  ‘It's the balloon.’ The twins confirmed Heuve's guess. ‘It's not flying so well. There's a lot of turbulence out there.’ They explained about the missing Holy Immortals.

  ‘Should we set that mirror shining again?’ asked Lidia Delfine. Marmion had extinguished the light upon the twins’ return with the wing.

  The warden nodded and gestured for Rosevear to see to it.

  Hadrian thought the attempt to attract their attention important but didn't see that it would make much difference. The balloon was making speed at a wide angle to the cave they huddled in, fleeing rather than making a dignified retreat.

  Fleeing from what? he wondered.

  I'd have thought that was pretty obvious, said Seth.

  At that moment, a bright orange flash lit up the sky. Hadrian pulled the spyglass away with a pained gasp as night turned suddenly to day. He wasn't the only one to react with shock. The flash lasted barely an instant, but its intensity remained, painting the gloom of the cave a virulent purple no matter how often he blinked.

  ‘What the Goddess now?’ exclaimed Banner. A noise like thunder rolled over them, making the air shake.

  Seth took control of the spyglass from Hadrian and trained it back on the distant towers. A column of steam was belching from the lake, as though a volcano had erupted under the water. The balloon wasn't anywhere to be seen for a moment, and the twins felt a stab of concern that it had been knocked out of the sky by the shockwave
following the blast. Sweeping the spyglass in wider and wider arcs, they eventually found it limping through the air, much further from where they had last seen it. One of its two working engines emitted streamers of red sparks. The gasbag itself seemed to be leaking again. Crippled, it made for the nearest shore as best it could.

  The twins relayed what they could see to the others. Marmion listened, tight-lipped, to their prognosis.

  ‘The balloon's going to crash again for certain,’ they said. ‘The only question is, can it make the shore in time?’ The water under the balloon was too far away for the twins to make out clearly, but they had no doubt that it was as full of black tentacles as anywhere else.

  The column of steam grew thicker and more turbulent. It mushroomed as it ascended, forming a ceiling that slowly spread to occlude the stars, one by one. Hadrian followed his brother's lead and concentrated on the descending balloon, wishing there was something he and the others could do to help.

  With a distant red flash, the balloon came down near an outcrop that resembled the silhouette of an old man's face. His bulbous nose stood out clearly from a wrinkled, sagging cheek. ‘I think they made it down in one piece,’ Seth said, ‘but it's hard to tell.’

  Beside them, Marmion stiffened. He gripped their shoulder and pointed in a completely new direction. ‘Look over there, quickly.’

  They did so. A winged black shape was coming towards them. Too large to be a bird, it looked like a pterodactyl or even a—

  Dragon.

  Hadrian stood a little straighter, straining to see more closely. By starlight, both of them could make out two people clutching its muscular back. One of them wore blue.

  Could it be? Hadrian asked, unable to believe his eyes.

  I don't know. Let's wait to find out.

  ‘They're following the light,’ Marmion said. ‘It's Sal and Highson.’

  ‘What are they flying on?’ asked Chu, squinting. ‘That's not a wing. Not one like I've ever seen before, anyway.’

  ‘I don't know.’ Marmion stepped out of the cave to meet the new arrivals. She followed close behind.