The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  Ellis fell back, gasping and wiping her hands clean. Dust left broad streaks on the front of her robe.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Recognise it?’

  The light from the Flame wasn't at the right angle to fully illuminate what lay inside. All Hadrian could make out was a rounded shape swaddled in grey cloths, filling the small space within.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I'm not surprised,’ she said. ‘It's been down here ever since the Cataclysm.’

  Seth was looking from him to the sinister shape with a look of deep concern. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘It's a tomb,’ she said. ‘It's the Tomb, if you really want to know, the real purpose for me being where I was. Back in the old days, this wasn't a lake. It was the depression left in the landscape after Yod failed to make the leap. It's also where I emerged when Sheol broke up, so it seemed the obvious place to return when my work was over. By then I'd already found it.’ She indicated the object with a wave of her right hand. Her left was around her chest, keeping her warm. ‘Xol helped me build this enclosure, and I parked myself on top. Nothing could bother it while I was there. That seemed the least I could do.’

  Hadrian nodded, finally picturing where they were. At the bottom of Tower Aleph's hollow core had been a square dais on which Ellis's tomb had sat. They were inside the dais itself, under a mountain of rubble, no doubt, and many dozens of metres of water.

  The rest of her words were slowly sinking in. If the Tomb hadn't actually been for the Goddess, he asked himself, then who or what lay within it?

  The rounded shape couldn't threaten him. It didn't move. He couldn't even smell it. But he was filled with an urge to get as far away from it as he could, and to never stop running.

  You left something behind, she had told him.

  ‘It's me, isn't it?’ he said.

  She nodded.

  ‘When I went to the Second Realm to meet Seth, I never came back to my body. Are you telling me it was just left…here?’

  Another nod.

  He pictured his original body lying where it had dropped, exposed to the elements and to all of nature's predators. ‘I'm going to wring Pukje's neck,’ he said. The imp had been there, urging him to make the leap to Seth and to do the right thing. The expectation, obviously, hadn't gone both ways. ‘I can't believe he just left me to die.’

  ‘He didn't exactly do that,’ Ellis said, reaching into the cavity to pull back the dusty cloth.

  Hadrian flinched, expecting to see scraps of skin and bones bearing no resemblance to the person he had once been. But what he saw was entirely more shocking. The body—he couldn't think of it as him—was thin and hairless, and its skin was deathly pale, but it looked like that of someone who had died that very day. Sitting upright in a foetal position, with its head tilted to one side and resting on bony knees, its eyes were gently shut as though sleeping. Its mouth hung slightly open. There was no sign of decay anywhere.

  ‘Impossible,’ he managed.

  ‘Didn't you ever hear of those monks or priests who died but didn't rot?’ Ellis asked them. ‘This is exactly the same thing. When people transubstantiated directly from the First to the Second Realm, they occasionally failed to cut the cords connecting them to their old body. Their flesh, although empty, remained vital or in stasis for centuries, waiting for the missing mind to return. Sometimes devels or other creatures would get inside, but most of the time the bodies just lay there, unchanging. Some people called them “body-statues”. I think of them—of yours in particular—as anchors.’

  Seth looked up at that. ‘That's why we drew the realms together even when Hadrian was in Sheol with me. His body was still in the First Realm, connected to him all that time. Even when we were in the Void, it's been sitting here, waiting.’

  ‘It's not anything, really,’ Ellis said. ‘It's just tissue—meat kept alive by an echo of your will, Hadrian.’

  ‘Why didn't you bring me here sooner?’ He felt oddly betrayed, and worse, disappointed for a reason he couldn't immediately define. ‘Or even tell me?’

  ‘The time wasn't right. We were fighting a war, remember?’ Ellis met his accusing stare without flinching. ‘Besides, you and Seth were safely in the Homunculus, and separating you prematurely would have been dangerous for everyone. The world needed a controlled Cataclysm, or none at all.’

  ‘But now…?’ Hadrian had trouble finishing the sentence.

  ‘It all depends on what Sal and Shilly decide,’ she said, ‘but whichever way they go, you'll be free of that responsibility. And that presents us with a number of options.’

  Hadrian felt Seth staring at him. Not angrily or hatefully, but with a new, uncertain anxiety.

  ‘If Hadrian goes back into his body, what'll happen to him?’ Seth asked Ellis. ‘Will he die?’

  ‘No, but he'll probably be quite weak for a bit. And he'll be vulnerable to all the usual things: injuries, sickness—and death, of course.’

  ‘But he'll be alive.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I'll be stuck in here.’

  ‘With me. Doesn't that make you feel any better?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’ She shot him a humourless smile. ‘That's not the only option, you know. You can both go into the body, just like you were in the Homunculus. But it won't be the same. You'll have to share the connection with it. You'll be closer and more reliant on each other than ever before. Does that sound more attractive to you?’

  Seth glanced at Hadrian, then away. ‘No. What else?’

  ‘You could take the body and Hadrian could stay here. That's possible, although more difficult.’

  ‘And creepy.’ Seth shivered. ‘Any more?’

  ‘We permanently sever Hadrian's connection to his corpse and remove the last anchor holding you to the First Realm.’

  ‘Kill me?’ asked Hadrian, feeling slightly shocked by the suggestion.

  ‘Not you. Just your old body. You'd miss it as much as you miss the Homunculus.’

  Hadrian didn't want to say it, but he did miss the artificial body that had been their home for over a month. He missed its strength and reliability. And despite himself he missed the closeness he had shared with Seth. For all their bickering and disagreements, he had become very used to being with his brother. He felt unbalanced now without that constant, ready intimacy.

  But he wasn't certain about the idea of being crammed with Seth into one all-too-human body. That sounded like a recipe for extreme disaster.

  ‘I suppose we should look at this as a positive development,’ he told Seth. ‘For a while there, I didn't think we'd have a choice—beyond death or this.’ He tapped his chest to indicate their current status as ghosts in the tiny space of the Tomb.

  ‘You have a choice,’ Seth grated. ‘I can only go along with what you decide.’

  ‘Do you think I won't make you part of the decision? Do you really think that?’ A sudden, hot anger coursed through him. After all they had been through, did his brother not know him at all? ‘Damn you, Seth. Take the body, if it means that much to you. It's yours. Do whatever you want with it, whatever will make you happy—finally. Take it and get out of here. Go on.’ Hadrian circled the close confines of the stone chamber, following the invisible curves of the Tomb. When he came within range of Seth, he physically lashed out, pushing his brother with both hands. Seth was taken totally by surprise and staggered backwards, losing his balance and tripping over his feet. ‘Get the hell out,’ hissed Hadrian, standing over his fallen brother. ‘We don't want you.’

  A strange thing happened. Seth burst into tears. The first sob exploded out of him like a sneeze, and then it was as though he couldn't stop. He hid his face behind one arm and rolled away. ‘Don't,’ he stammered. ‘Don't say that.’

  Hadrian was as shocked as though Seth had vomited. His anger evaporated in an instant, replaced by contrition and shame. He went to help his brother up, but Seth pushed him away. ‘I didn't mean it,’ he sa
id. ‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.’

  ‘You did mean it,’ Seth said, his words muffled by his arm. ‘Neither of you want me here. Both of us are useless, but I'm the most useless of all. No one—and nobody—’

  Hadrian forced his way through Seth's guard and took hold of him as though they were wrestling. He didn't need to hear the rest of the sentence to know what his brother was feeling, even if he couldn't say it.

  Nobody wants me.

  ‘It's not true,’ he said as firmly as he could. ‘It's not true. Or if it is, it's only because you act like you don't want us.’

  Seth's hands gripped Hadrian's arms, but instead of pushing him away they pulled him closer. That said more than words, and in an instant all their differences were forgotten.

  ‘I don't mean to rush you,’ said Ellis after an unknowable length of time, ‘but could you make a decision before I freeze to death?’

  Hadrian felt Seth's hands loosen, and he sat back, wiping his eyes. He almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Who knew ghosts could cry? Even if the tears were just illusions, they felt as real as the emotions that prompted them.

  ‘Right,’ he said, facing Ellis as Seth got himself together. It didn't take long. Seth's hand came down on Hadrian's shoulder, but he remained sitting on the floor.

  ‘Is it still my decision?’ Seth asked.

  Hadrian nodded. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘We kill it,’ he said. ‘We let it die. We break the connection. However you want to put it. This—’ He waved a hand dismissively at the squat barbecue-shaped structure and the body inside it. ‘—hasn't been part of us for a thousand years. It might look like us after a bath and maybe a good feed, but neither of us gave it a second thought for a thousand years. Why should we start now? It would be hypocritical of us to pretend it meant anything.’

  ‘Does it matter to you, Hadrian?’

  He shook his head, knowing in his heart that that was the only honest answer he could give. It mattered in the same way as a photo of an old girlfriend mattered, or a pair of lost shoes. He felt a connection with it from the past, but it wasn't him. It wasn't who he was now.

  ‘I think it's time,’ he said, ‘to put that part of my life behind me.’

  ‘Even if the alternative is to stay here, with me?’

  ‘Sure. Taking no steps forward is better than taking one backward. Don't you think?’

  Ellis looked immensely relieved. ‘What about a step sideways? How would that sound?’

  ‘It's a little hard to answer that,’ Seth said, ‘when I have no idea what you're talking about.’

  Her smile widened as she raised her hands in front of her, one on either side of the Flame and brought them together with a single loud clap.

  Seth blinked. At first it seemed that nothing had changed. They were still in the sealed space where Ellis had hidden Hadrian's body for all the years they had been in the Void. The dark, damp-stained walls still closed in around him like the walls of a coffin. Hadrian sat next to him, close but feeling light-years away. And Ellis—

  That was when he saw the difference. It wasn't that the Flame cast its light on her in a new way, but that he was seeing her as she really was: stretching across all the world-lines at once, like a reflection trapped between two mirrors, repeated over and over again. The Goddess revealed. He had only seen her look like that once before, when he and Hadrian had stood before her and her sisters in Sheol, before trapping Yod in Bardo. Then, as now, he had felt overawed by her strange power, and unnerved by the evidence of her innate inhumanity.

  She has ways about her that you and I can barely imagine, Pukje had said.

  ‘I said that I would save you,’ she told them, her voice coming at them from multiple branches of the world-tree at once. ‘I wasn't talking only about making you ghosts and keeping you here. That saved you, temporarily—but not from yourselves. The same with sticking you into that body. It'd be a disaster, as you both quickly realised. I need to save your lives, not just keep you living longer.’

  ‘What, then?’ asked Hadrian, climbing to his feet and holding out a hand to help Seth do the same. They stood side by side before her, two united against her multiplicity. ‘What else do you have in mind?’

  ‘Well, this.’ She held out her hands. All the versions of her did the same, in more or less perfect unison. ‘Welcome to the new world-tree. Once Sal and Shilly have picked the branch that's right for their future, possibilities will begin to expand exponentially. Like any tree, the world-tree needs to be tended. That's what the Sisters of the Flame were for, you know. Not so much for helping individuals negotiate their fates, although we did do a measure of that, but for weeding out unnecessary duplications, tying off severed world-lines, grafting disjointed fragments together—all the tasks needed to create a work of art out of what would have been, left to its own devices, a complicated tangle. When I embrace this form, I can see the great work my sisters and I performed, before I became Ellis Quick and met you. I can see the necessity of it, and the problems caused by my absence this last thousand years.

  ‘Take Shilly, for instance, and the way she used different versions of herself to make this world-line the one that survived. That's not so different from the sort of work we used to do. Taking from one and giving to another; overlapping lives to create a new, tougher hybrid. In legends we were sometimes weavers, snipping and tying fates as we willed. But we were more like gardeners in my mind, letting nature do most of the work. The delicate art of the nudge is a difficult one to learn, and we were mistresses of it, achieving maximum effect from minimum intervention.’

  She came around the squat stone structure, half walking to the left and half to the right. When she coalesced on the far side, she faced both the twins all at once.

  ‘Shilly's hard work, although essential, was clumsy and dangerous. It wouldn't have been allowed in my sisters’ time. The connections between her and her other selves would have been severed before they ever existed. The purity of the world-lines would have been protected at all costs. But if that had happened, she would never have devised the charm. The rules needed to be broken in order to save anything—and that's why I went away for so long. My sisters opted for oblivion rather than be part of my plan; I placed myself in stasis for a thousand years, until the Ice Eaters woke me, letting me know that the time had come for the Flame to burn again, for its one remaining guardian to take control.

  ‘So, now Shilly has what she needs, normality can resume. I'll return to keeping the world-tree in shape, and Shilly can stop playing hard and fast with causality. But that doesn't solve everything. This won't be the first time I've done this kind of work on my own, and I know two things about it with great certainty: it's hard and it's lonely. My sisters carried the load while I was gone well enough, but even they found it tough. That's how Yod managed to get a toehold in the First Realm, when otherwise they might not have allowed it. Even they would have taken action rather than risk the destruction of the entire world-tree. That's the worst possible outcome.

  ‘No, it's like you said, Seth: three is the magic number. Not two or one. Three. Do you understand me?’

  Seth glanced at Hadrian, who looked as though he was hypnotised. ‘What are you saying?’ he asked.

  ‘What exactly?’ Seth echoed. ‘Stop beating about the bush.’

  ‘I want you to join me here, in the Tomb, and help me do my job. As equals, not subordinates, in an alchemical marriage between the twins and the Three—Siblings of the Flame, if you will.’ She flashed a quick smile, one that echoed down every world-line at once. Then it was gone. ‘Or a triumvirate. I'm not joking, just in case you're wondering. I don't want to rebuild Sheol, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a tomb of any kind. I want to find a new way of doing my job. You can help me do this, and I can make it happen. You're already in all the branches of this world-tree, like me. All you have to do is decide.’

  ‘But—why?’ asked Seth. ‘Why us?’

  ‘Because you de
serve a chance to prove yourselves. All your lives you've been pushed around, on the back foot. You're quite right in feeling that you don't matter, that it's what you are that counts. So here's an opportunity to show that you do matter, after all.’

  ‘And?’ asked Hadrian.

  ‘And, well…’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘And we get to finish what we started all those years ago.’

  ‘In Europe?’

  ‘In Europe. Yes, I know it's not going to be easy. It could, in fact, be a disaster. But what's new? Life is all about taking risks and stumbling from one fuck-up to another. At least here we'll be outside the world-tree—off the permanent record, if you like. There's a lot to explore when we're not busy, and if it doesn't work out there are plenty of places to slot you back in, together or apart. I'm not saying this will fix everything,’ she concluded, ‘but it's the only way I can think of that gives you the choice you badly need. What do you think? Do you want to take it?’

  Seth and Hadrian exchanged glances.

  Seth wondered what his brother was thinking. He was thinking about travelling back along the world-line to see their parents, and the world as it once was. He couldn't change anything, but he could at least visit what had been lost. He could remember. A thousand years in the Void Beneath had scoured so much away. He had forgotten almost everything that didn't come back, ultimately, to Hadrian and Yod.

  And as for Ellis—he had forgotten a lot of that, too. He remembered the anguish and jealousy of juggling her and his brother while on holidays somewhere. Would it be any better now they were older and given a new purpose? He didn't know. Older wasn't necessarily wiser.

  An alchemical marriage…Maybe it wouldn't work. Maybe age hadn't made them any smarter. Maybe old jealousies and fears would rear their familiar slimy heads. But was it better than nothing? Better than death?