The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  Have we killed you? she wondered as Yod came crashing downward. Will the fall break and burst you, as you deserve?

  In Yod's wake, storm clouds roiled and thundered. Lightning arced between sky and water, or into Yod itself. Its body covered an area the size of a small city. The towers were gone, now buried under their architect's gargantuan mass, with the Angel. Waves surged outwards from the first point of impact, racing the Tomb to the shore.

  In Kail's pouch, which she still clutched tightly in her left hand, something moved.

  ‘That's part of the Caduceus,’ said Sal, catching sight of the knuckle-sized, opalescent fragment when Shilly brought it out into the open. ‘Kail had it all the time.’

  It was beautiful, as many-coloured as oil on water. The Change radiated from it in powerful waves as she held it up to look at it more closely. The buzzing grew more insistent, and a voice whispered in her ear, a voice from far, far away.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, giving it to Sal. The Goddess watched her closely from the other side of the Flame, as though she knew something but didn't want to say. That annoyed Shilly; it reminded her of her older self. ‘See if you can work out what it's doing.’

  The moment Sal touched the tiny fossilised bone, his fingers tightened around it and drew it to his chest. His head tilted back and his eyes closed. Alarmed, Shilly reached out and took his arm, just in case he lost his balance and fell.

  ‘Sal Hrvati?’ she heard a voice say. ‘And, yes, Shilly of Gooron. You would naturally be together. When Surveyor Van Haasteren told me that she had uncovered a strange situation in the hinterlands of the world, I didn't for a moment consider it would be this strange.’

  Shilly took a moment to place the voice. Not just the voice, but the personality behind it: gruff and arrogant, but not in the same way as Mage Kelloman. This man wielded real power, not imaginary. This man knew his place in the world.

  ‘Alcaide Braham,’ Sal said with bitterness in his voice. Adversary was too strong a word for what the Alcaide had been to them. If Sal had really had an adversary, it was the Alcaide's chief administrator Syndic Zanshin, who, as Highson Sparre's aunt, had played a critically destructive role in Sal's life. However, the Alcaide had begrudged helping him when the full weight of all the Weavers had urged him to. ‘Were you expecting Habryn Kail or Eisak Marmion?’

  ‘Either, or anyone, really, other than you. When did you join the expedition?’

  ‘Weeks ago. Didn't Marmion tell you?’

  ‘No, I—’ The Alcaide did a double-take. ‘Of course! He knew I would never have permitted it, so naturally I wasn't told. Is he in league with your father as well, or has that situation at least been contained?’

  ‘You're asking me?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Quite right. Is Marmion there? Hand the Caduceus over and let me talk to him.’

  Marmion had been quizzically watching the exchange. Shilly mouthed the name of his superior and Sal offered him the crystalline fragment. Marmion nodded and didn't shirk from the confrontation. But instead of just taking the crystal, he folded his one hand over Sal's in order to include them in the conversation. Behind the audible exchange, Shilly felt the combined attention of dozens, maybe hundreds, of observers.

  ‘I'm relieved to be talking to you, Alcaide Braham,’ he began. We're in a difficult position here, one that I fear threatens the Strand and all its inhabitants.’

  ‘So you tried to tell me yesterday,’ came the instant reply. ‘Or is there something else you have failed to report, like consorting with fugitives and necromancers?’

  ‘With respect, sir, the past is irrelevant. We are fighting for our future.’ Marmion looked pained, but his mental voice was level. ‘The task exceeds us. I am asking for your aid—and more than that. The time for recriminations is over. In the name of the Goddess I am calling for the aid of all Change-workers, irrespective of allegiance or discipline. We must fight together. Side by side we will save our world. Apart we will all die. That is the challenge before us, Alcaide Braham. Are you up to it?’

  ‘Am I—?’ The Alcaide mentally choked on the words. ‘I'll see you stripped of your torc, Marmion, for speaking to me that way. How dare you?’

  Marmion didn't even blink, and in that moment Shilly saw his true strength.

  ‘I dare, sir, because the times call for action not politics. Punish me later if you wish. For now, just act—all of you listening in. Heed the words of a man who has never found insubordination or disloyalty easy, and stop arguing amongst yourselves. By the time someone has won the argument, we'll all have lost.’

  Shilly felt the observers becoming restless, wanting to intrude on the conversation between Alcaide Braham and his man on the inside. The Alcaide, however, wasn't relinquishing control so easily. His blustering become louder and more strident until eventually Marmion simply gave up. He took his hand off Sal's and walked away.

  ‘Uh, I'm afraid you're talking to just us now, Alcaide Braham,’ Sal said, cutting forcefully across the man's tirade. ‘And I fear I will be unsuccessful too if I try to take up the argument. Is there no way we can convince you?’

  ‘Of course there is,’ put in Shilly. Her mood was hard and brooked no disagreement. ‘Alcaide Braham, look through Sal's senses and you'll see what we face up here.’

  ‘We have already seen through Habryn Kail's—’

  ‘And that wasn't enough? Then you've half the brains I thought you had. Or half the spine. Which is it?’

  ‘I'm not half as gullible as you'd like me to be, that's for sure. A shape in the sky; a muttered threat. Do you expect me to hand over my authority so easily? I've bent the rules enough for you already, Shilly of Gooron. They can only be bent so far.’

  ‘Like people.’ Shilly nudged Sal and nodded at Kail's body. ‘Look at this, Alcaide. Look long and hard, and think about what it means.’

  Shilly sent Sal a charm that would take everything he saw, heard and felt and ram it down the Caduceus link to those at the other end.

  ‘Kail?’ said the Alcaide in disbelief when he saw the body laid out on the far side of the room. ‘Is he—?’

  ‘Yes. If we're all conspirators in some grand scheme, why would we have killed him?’

  ‘An accident, perhaps, or a mishap. Or he betrayed you like his uncle betrayed the Strand before him.’

  ‘Kail was an honourable man, and a strong one. You can't tarnish his memory. That's beyond your power. What is in your power is the means of stopping other good people from dying. Will you exercise that power or let pride get in the way?’

  A long silence answered her, but not an empty one. Shilly sensed a furious exchange of words taking place just below the limits of her perception.

  ‘Where are you?’ the Alcaide eventually asked. ‘I don't mean whereabouts on Earth, but in what sort of place.’

  ‘We're in the Tomb of the Goddess,’ Sal replied.

  ‘Nonsense. That's a legend.’

  ‘No more than she is.’ Sal stared pointedly at the woman herself, who endured his scrutiny patiently, as though knowing exactly what was going on behind his eyes. She probably did, Shilly thought. ‘I'd advise against telling her she doesn't exist. I don't think she'd like it.’

  ‘This is too much,’ the Alcaide spluttered. ‘It simply cannot be as you say.’

  ‘Can you afford to take the chance that it isn't?’ Shilly asked in a softer tone, hiding her frustration and anger behind a mask of reasonableness.

  ‘No,’ the Alcaide admitted. ‘No, I can't, the Void take you.’

  ‘Does that mean you're going to do something about it?’

  ‘Perhaps. Give me a landmark.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A clear sensory image that we can latch onto. You'll have your answer within the hour.’

  ‘In what form?’

  ‘I can't tell you that right now. Don't push your luck.’ The Alcaide was bitter in defeat, but not vindictive. ‘About that landmark…?’

  The first that came to Shilly's mind was the
silhouette of an old man visible in the cliffs near the ruins of the crashed balloon. She sent as focussed an image of it as she could through Sal to the Alcaide, who accepted it without comment.

  Then a new voice joined them. ‘Is Skender there?’

  Shilly recognised Skender's mother, last seen in Laure before Marmion's expedition had left for the Hanging Mountains.

  ‘Yes,’ Sal said, seeking out a glimpse of his friend among the others in the Tomb. Skender was sitting beside Chu, long-faced and bruised.

  ‘I don't have time to talk right now. Just tell me: is he all right?’

  ‘He'll survive.’

  ‘And Chu?’

  ‘Unconscious.’ Sal didn't elaborate on the young woman's possession by the golem or speculate on the damage that might have been done. Shilly was glad for that. ‘It's not been an easy time for any of us, I fear. We really do need help.’

  Abi Van Haasteren sighed. ‘Don't worry about the Alcaide. I got him this far, didn't I?’

  With that, the Caduceus fell still. Sal held it awkwardly, unsure what to do with it for a moment, then he gave it back to Shilly.

  ‘I think you should look after it,’ he said. ‘Anyone who can stand up to the Alcaide the way you just did has earned the right twice over, I reckon.’

  She slipped it into Kail's pouch and bit her lip in a sudden wave of sorrow. Grieve later, she reminded herself sternly. Don't fall apart now. People need you. Sal put his arms around her and held her tight.

  ‘Take us to the balloon crash site,’ Sal told Ellis over Shilly's shoulder. ‘We make a stand there.’

  The Goddess nodded, and the Tomb changed course for the lake shore.

  ‘What does that mean, exactly? What sort of stand?’ Hadrian whispered to Seth.

  Seth shook his head, not knowing. No one was paying any attention to them or their doubts. Just because Yod had been put into a body didn't mean that it wasn't still dangerous. Its fall had sent tsunamis high up the shore, sweeping away the empty Ice Eater villages, and more were on their way as the giant creature assumed its final form. What that would be was hard to tell. Behind clouds of spray, only a broad black back was visible, ridged as though flayed with a whip, and as long as a skyscraper tipped on its side. It was patently still moving, and not dead as they had hoped.

  Seth paced around the interior of the Tomb, following the curving crystal wall and dividing his attention between inside and out. The return of an individual body—his body, discomforting in its new unfamiliarity—made him restless, as it did his brother, following Seth a pace or two behind as though tied to him by a string. Seth didn't know whether to push him away or hold him close. His insides churned with uncertain, conflicting emotions.

  Kail was dead. Any one of the people who had willingly put themselves in harm's way to draw Yod into the trap could have died, but it had been Habryn Kail, the lonely, sometimes severe man who had helped the twins when they had most needed it. He had been their first true ally in the new world, certainly the first who had tried to explain how the world worked and where they might fit into it. Their exchanges might have been confusing and fraught with misconceptions, but they had been honest. They had helped Seth and Hadrian connect.

  Now there was nothing for them to connect with. Their new body was gone. Kail was gone. All purpose had ended.

  In this world-line, the Homunculus was the important thing. It was the means by which Yod could be embodied and therefore made vulnerable. The twins may have mattered back in their day, when the Cataclysm needed stopping, but they had since outlived their usefulness. If their continuing presence wasn't still required to keep the realms together, Seth wasn't sure that anyone would have cared if it had been him and his brother who had died, not Kail.

  Hang in there, Ellis had said. We still need you.

  Bullshit, he thought. Pure and utter bullshit.

  ‘What's wrong?’ Hadrian asked him, still following like a puppy on a lead. ‘Why are you so angry? We're free now. We're separated. We're with Ellis. What more do you want?’

  That was the question. What more did he want? To kill Yod? To be a hero?

  He stopped and turned on Hadrian. ‘We're not free.’ His finger stabbed at his brother's chest, sending him backwards in full retreat. They might be ghosts to everyone else, but to each other they were perfectly solid. ‘You're an idiot if that's what you really think we are.’

  ‘I'm not an idiot.’

  ‘We've never been free, not since the day we were born.’

  ‘Is anyone, Seth?’ Hadrian knocked his hand away and stopped so suddenly they almost collided. ‘You say you want to be free, but what would you do if you were? I don't see you wishing for anything specific. You have no grand plans of your own. You have no dreams. All you do is react.’

  ‘And what's wrong with that?’

  ‘You tell me. What are you missing out on? What exactly?’

  Seth turned away. He couldn't answer that question. There was no answer. All he had when he tried to find one was a raw, aching hole where something had been ripped out of him. Perhaps that was Hadrian. Or perhaps the hole had never been there and the wound was really an integral part of his psyche, rubbed raw by his sudden return to his old body.

  ‘I'm sorry,’ he said. ‘I don't know what I've lost or what I want. I don't know anything. But don't act so smug and self-righteous as though you have all the answers. You're as much in the dark as I am. I do know that much.’

  Hadrian surprised him then. Instead of arguing, he put his arms around Seth from behind and hugged him. Instantly Seth's anger evaporated, and a new and equally powerful emotion—grief—rushed in to take its place.

  ‘Your problem,’ Hadrian said, ‘is that you think we're the same as everyone else. We're not. We're mirror twins. That sets us apart, just as if we were incredibly tall or congenitally blind. There's no point fighting it. We can only adapt and live in our own way.’

  ‘You would call this life?’ Seth waved to encompass their Tomb-wall environment.

  ‘Well, it's not death, and it might not be permanent. Don't rattle the cage until we know it is a cage. That's all I'm suggesting.’

  Seth nodded, feeling exhausted from the emotional roller coaster. More than anything, he just wanted to sleep. Being back in an illusion of his body brought back memories of hostel beds in Europe: stale-smelling and lumpy, but as luxurious as anything he could imagine at the moment. He could barely remember a time before that: at home in Australia with their mother, in a normal life, a normal world.

  Not normal, he corrected himself. Hadrian was right. They had never been normal. The Castillo twins had always stood apart—and not just because society saw them differently. They were different right down to the bone.

  Perhaps the idea of ‘normal’ was fundamentally invalid, anyway. The face of the entire world had changed many times. Change was the only constant.

  ‘Look,’ said Hadrian, pointing outside the Tomb, back the way they had come, where the mist was settling and Yod's final form was becoming clearer.

  In shape it looked something like a sea urchin, one with thousands of spines clustered in five broad patches at each corner of its black body. The knobbly carapace undulated like a manta ray's, and was at least a hundred metres across. Every movement kicked up powerful waves, making it difficult to see exactly how it held itself up, but it seemed to Seth that its underside was spined as well.

  ‘Jesus,’ he breathed. He could see no eyes or mouths—indeed no obvious front or back at all. And the shape was still changing: five skender limbs, reminiscent of shark-fins, were rising up between the stalk-clusters and curving inwards like teeth. ‘What's it doing?’

  ‘Growing,’ said Hadrian. ‘Becoming.’

  ‘Becoming what?’

  ‘I don't know. Whatever it wants to be, perhaps. It wasn't like us. It never had a real body, so it's building a form that suits its needs, evolving right in front of our eyes.’

  ‘It needs to stay alive,’ said Seth,
trying to put himself in the position of the alien invader. ‘That means not being crushed as it fell, hence the shell. Then it wouldn't want to drown, and the stilts help with that. They'd also give it a way to move.’

  ‘Which I think it's trying to do.’

  Seth could hear the concern in his brother's voice. ‘Move where?’

  ‘One guess.’

  ‘After us?’

  ‘We put it in the Homunculus. If anyone can get it out, it's us. Maybe it just wants to stop us before we do any more damage. Or maybe it wants revenge.’

  ‘It took us ages to get used to things after we got our new body,’ Seth said.

  ‘We might be able to use that to our advantage. And the ankh. The Tomb will be harder for Yod to find while we're inside.’

  Hadrian waved his hands to attract Ellis's attention. She came over and stood before them, gliding through the others as though they didn't notice her.

  ‘I don't know what you guys have planned next,’ said Seth, comfortable being the spokesman, ‘but I suggest you get a move on. That thing isn't sitting on its hands—or whatever it uses for hands.’

  Ellis nodded. ‘I know, and the solution is temporarily out of my hands, now. The board is set; the pieces are in play. I'm just one of those pieces, as you have been. We can but sit back and watch the conclusion.’

  ‘Nonsense. You're the Goddess. You can tell them what to do.’

  ‘Should I do that, Seth? Should I take over the world as someone like Yod or Tatenen would and solve every problem for the people who live here? Or should I just solve the important ones, and leave everyone to squabble over unimportant things? I don't think that sounds terribly satisfying for any of us, even if it were possible, and I don't think they'd truly want it. I brought them where they needed to be, and now I take them elsewhere. The rest they can work out for themselves, or else they won't be worth saving.’

  Hadrian reeled. ‘That's a bit harsh, isn't it?’

  ‘You say that in the face of Yod, who would eat everyone alive if given the chance? I can't do anything more. Accept that, and let's move on.’