The Heretic Land Page 4

  ‘The slayers were ready to kill Bon?’ Leki said.

  ‘They were.’ The man still rowed hard, glancing back only to steer their way. ‘Still are. This is where you two need to trust me.’ He glanced across at the beach. The second slayer was keeping pace with them, staring through the spray, and its long spear was now held across its shoulder.

  ‘Why would they want to—?’ Bon asked, and then the man dropped his oars.

  ‘Into the water,’ he said.

  Something on the beach flashed, and a roar louder than the sea swallowed Bon’s voice when he screamed. Leki grabbed his hand, the boat tipped, and they were sinking once again.

  Maybe this will be the one, Juda thought as he pulled himself down the anchored rope, hand over hand, towards the cave mouth. But even if Bon Ugane wasn’t the one, this would be the last time he ever used this route past the slayers. They weren’t stupid, and they might have seen him disappearing out here before.

  Juda couldn’t afford to be clumsy. He was too close for that. To come all this way, wait all this time, to have it undone by clumsiness would be …

  Idiot, he tried to say, but the sea rushed into his mouth and he gagged, coughing and spluttering as he pulled himself towards the underwater cave.

  He had to assume the man and woman were following. Once the slayer had started shooting at them with its pike, there was no way he’d have stayed in the boat, sitting there and waiting to be fried by shellspot poison. He had pulled them out of the water, and only hoped they’d had the sense to go back in, especially after seeing what had happened on the beach. The man – Bon Ugane, the one marked for death – had seemed sickened by that. The amphy accompanying him hadn’t. She must have already witnessed some bad things in her life, and Juda wondered whether it was something that would be of interest to him, and his quest. As he pulled himself through the tunnel and up towards the light, he was already thinking that he might have struck it lucky.

  Juda crawled quickly from the water and scanned the small cave. It was empty and, for now, safe. The oil lamp he’d lit the previous night still burned, and the food and drink he’d stored was undisturbed. He’d worried that sea things might have come in during the night and eaten it, as had happened before. But fate had smiled upon him.

  He picked up the small pistol beside the oil lamp, checked that the steam valve still showed full, and turned around to face the splashing pair.

  The amphy came first, pulling Bon Ugane. Her eyes flickered with the clear film that protected them whilst swimming, and it cast a strange reflection from the oil lamp. She took everything in with a glance and stopped, up to her waist in water. The coat she’d tied on at his invitation drooped heavily. Behind her, Ugane wiped water from his eyes and gasped in several deep breaths. Then he saw what Juda was holding and froze.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ Ugane said.

  ‘Two of us, one shot,’ the amphy said.

  Juda shook his head, laughing softly. ‘The last thing I want right now is to shoot either of you, believe me. But on Skythe, the last thing you want is usually just around the corner.’ He waved the pistol slightly, indicating that they should emerge from the water. It brought them close to him – close enough to make a move for the weapon, if they so desired – but Juda thought it inspired trust. And he knew how cold the water was.

  ‘So,’ the amphy said.

  ‘So,’ Juda said. ‘I know Bon Ugane, but what’s your name?’

  ‘Lechmy Borle.’

  ‘And I’m Juda.’

  ‘Why rescue us to point a pistol at us?’ Bon asked, and Juda could see from his expression that he hadn’t seen many guns. Eyes wide, Bon had the face of the eternally curious.

  ‘For all the fucking Fade gods, can I just sit down?’ Lechmy Borle asked.

  Juda smiled. ‘You don’t look tired.’ He looked her up and down. She was strong and wiry like most amphys, wide chest, webbed feet and hands. He’d always found amphy women incredibly attractive, and this one was no exception.

  ‘I’m good at hiding it.’ Without his permission she sat, leaning back against the wall and groaning softly.

  ‘So you’re our welcome to Skythe?’ Bon asked. He went slowly to his knees, sighing as his joints clicked. Not used to exercise, Juda thought. That would have to change if he wanted to stay alive.

  ‘Your unofficial welcome,’ Juda said. He nodded up at the cave’s ceiling. ‘And better than the alternative. I don’t have the strength or inclination to gut you both. So what are you here for, Bon Ugane and Lechmy Borle?’

  ‘Sedition,’ Bon said.

  ‘Call me Leki. And yes, me too.’ Juda noticed Bon glancing at the woman. Perhaps it was his first time hearing why she was being deported. ‘Shoot us now if you have to,’ Leki continued. ‘And if you don’t have to, are you going to share that food?’

  Juda hesitated for only a moment before lowering the pistol. He unscrewed the steam valve and pocketed it, then dropped the weapon into the bag he’d left there the previous night. He’d only once had to use it in this place, and that was something he did not like to remember.

  He plucked a metal case from his jacket’s inner pocket, opened it, took out a cigar, and lit it from the oil lamp. Inhaling the smoke, he felt his blood absorbing the drug and smoothing it through his body, and the pressures of darkness receding for a time. But soon even the scamp smoke would not keep his familiar nightmares at bay.

  ‘What are those things on the beach?’ Bon asked. ‘And why were you calling my name?’

  Juda reached over for the food, keeping his head down. The cave was small, and often flooded during high tides or when the Forsaken Sea developed one of its irregular surges. With the three of them inside, it already felt crowded.

  ‘There are plenty of questions,’ Juda said. ‘But now isn’t the time. If you’re hungry, eat. If you’re thirsty, drink. Scratch your arses if you have to. Then we have to leave.’

  ‘Back through there?’ Bon said, nodding at the dark water.

  ‘Trust me,’ Juda said.

  Bon glanced at the bag containing the pistol. Leki raised an eyebrow.

  ‘The slayers were waiting for you,’ Juda said.

  ‘Slayers. Nice name,’ Bon said.

  ‘Sums them up. And if I hadn’t been here today, you’d have met the same fate as the man you saw on the beach.’

  ‘That wasn’t just an execution,’ Leki said.

  ‘Of course not. It was fun. The slayers are bred violent, have been for decades. The Spike nurture them to serve the Ald. Big, mindless things, they like killing, and that’s why they’re here.’ He handed a small loaf of bread and a chunk of meat to each of them, but took none for himself. Juda had been on Skythe long enough to know how to eat well.

  He closed his eyes as they chewed, the clicking of their teeth and their grateful gulping echoing around the small cave. He tried to remember the way up out of the cave, following the route through memory, and frowned as one junction gave him multiple opportunities. Each dark tunnel mouth – wide, narrow, low, or high up on the uneven cave wall – offered nothing familiar. He’d been this way ten times before, in and out, but that part of the tunnels …

  ‘What is it?’ Leki asked. Juda opened his eyes and saw his hands raised before his face, trying to feel this way or that.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Stretching.’ But he saw the glance between Leki and Bon, and knew that they would be on their guard.

  That was fine. He didn’t yet mean them any harm.

  ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘Once a slayer has a name, they won’t rest until they’ve spilled its owner’s guts.’

  ‘Great,’ Bon said, spitting breadcrumbs.

  ‘You’ll be safe with me,’ Juda said.

  ‘Great.’ Bon took another mouthful of bread.

  Juda picked up the oil lamp and turned towards the rear of the cave. Now he only had to hope that the slayers had not discovered the cave entrance. If they met one in these tunnels …

  ‘H
urry,’ he said. ‘Shake your bits and get a fucking move on. I’ve been awake since dawn.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’ Leki asked, behind him.

  You don’t want to know, Juda thought. But he said nothing, and as he crawled into the first of the low tunnels leading inland, he heard Bon and Leki scrambling to keep up.

  Chapter 2

  shards

  Sometimes, Milian Mu opens her eyes. Nothing is revealed in the endless darkness, but the action inspires an awareness that is otherwise absent or confused. As part of this awareness, she can sense the incredible time that has passed – centuries, perhaps – and feel the weight of rock encasing her in a womb-like cave. With her eyes open, she feels more there than she has been for a long, long time.

  But that barely-there existence is preferable to the memories.

  Those ancient, terrible memories …

  As Milian sprinted downhill towards the collection of angular stone buildings, a hail of rockbill feathers came at her from the shattered windows to the left of the main entrance. They whistled as they twisted through the air, flights slicked with oil to give them direction, tips glinting with the poison ever-present in their quills. She roared, the air before her blasting with an intense heat haze, and the poisonous feathers – a favoured weapon of the military of her homeland of Skythe – were diverted left and right, or snapped and shredded before her as they fell to the blood-muddied ground. There they merged with a mess of bodies and insides that still steamed in the morning sun. Not everyone had made it to cover, and Milian splashed through the gory mess.

  She had been running since early evening, when the strange explosion had rippled across the landscape and freed her from the weak thing she had been. She’d felt the thing worming into her, a terrible intrusion, and for an instant she had been terrified. Daemon within me, I feel its heat, I taste its fury! Then the presence had surged to the fore. It had become her, shredding all but her most basic perceptions and memories. Milian Mu – the holy woman, the wife, the mother – had become a thing meant only for killing.

  She dripped with fresh blood, and crackled with blood already dried. Some of it was hers. Her fingernails were torn away, fingers slashed, hands clawed, and there were several deep gashes across her palms where some had tried defending themselves. None of them had succeeded. She and the many others like her killed them all, and seeing herself reflected in her victims’ eyes – a similar face, the same pale skin – did nothing to lessen her viciousness.

  Milian ran through the next hail of rockbill feathers and knocked some aside, others slipping past her as though the air around her had curved, steering them away. She heard the cries and smelled the fear of those inside, and that drew her on like a fly to raw meat. Inside, a heavy sword swung at her from shadows to the left of the entrance. The weapon was wielded by a tall, terrified man. She grabbed and broke both, merging them together in a wet sculpture of metal and flesh. A flurry of movement in the shadows, a startling illumination, and three burning hay bales came at her. She kicked them back where they had come from, and the stench of burning hair filled the farmhouse.

  ‘Aeon save us, Aeon help us!’ someone pleaded to Skythe’s known and loving god, and though Milian could hear the words she did not know them. Her mind was fried and detached. She ran through the smoke and flames and stomped on the burning woman, crushing her skull, taking pleasure from killing the wretch beneath her feet rather than from putting her out of her misery.

  Misery was her currency, and madness her means of delivery.

  There were seven of them hidden in three rooms, and Milian took them all apart. Blades came at her and she broke or dodged them, thrown punches were caught and fists crushed, a haze of poison spray swept across her eyes and was blinked away by the mad daemon inside her. It took heartbeats, and then the screaming ended and she could feed again. She dug for the livers, because she liked them best.

  Afterwards, she left the farmstead and ran on, down towards the sea fifty miles distant where fishing villages would provide more game. Instinct urged her this way. The need to kill, and feed. The daemon that had entered her was stronger than ever now, and becoming used to the fit of her body. It had its own agenda. It revelled in this newfound freedom.

  To her left and right she saw occasional shapes bounding across the moonlit landscape. Blood hazed the air behind them. They were like her, Skythians giving home to daemons, and the only things she was not driven to kill.

  She had murdered more than thirty people since dusk, and the night had only just begun.

  Later, standing on the shore with the village ablaze behind her, still her hunger was not sated. Her stomach was distended with all she had eaten; liver, so rich. Her teeth were clotted with the flesh of many bodies, and the daemon inside her thrummed in its eagerness for more.

  Wet cold dark alone, she thought, and a wave crashed in around her feet. Several sand runners came in with it, claws held high as they surfed the water and then started busily scouring the sand for burrowing, fleshy things to eat. In their enthusiasm they brushed against her bare legs, shrivelled, and died.

  Further along the coast she smelled people still living, and she turned that way.

  The blazing village cast her shadow across the sea, and more of her kind – normal, loving Skythians changed by events into killing things – trailed after her. Some of them were burning. These walked until they fell, and even then she could feel their daemons raging on, darkening the land without shadow.

  From the ridge of the next spur of land protruding into the sea, on a scree of fallen rocks at the foot of the cliff, she saw one of the fabled Engines set into the land. She had heard the rumours about Alderians sailing towards some of the more remote southern beaches. She had heard whispers of the Engines, Alderian constructs supposedly sent to destroy the Skythian god Aeon. No one had believed that the Engines could be real. Alderia is our friend, people had said of the continent four hundred miles to the south, and that had been true for so long. Why would they turn against us and the truth of Aeon? Would they truly be foolish enough to build Engines that could conjure magic?

  But that had been before Aeon’s manifestation into a physical presence. The Alderia’s Fade religion could not be touched. Perhaps they feared Aeon, which could.

  The thing within Milian raged, damping down such sane contemplations. Her hunger burned.

  The sand and rock around the Engine were melted into shapes that mimicked the living. Its curved metal casings glimmered with moisture. Long limbs arced from the construct and into the beach, and it looked like an exposed organ from within some gigantic living thing. The land has been ripped open, Milian thought, and the idea suited the red-tinted rage of her daemon.

  Around the Engine fussed busy, frightened people in clothing she recognised as Alderian. She had seen them before on trade and cultural visits, but now they were the invaders, the aggressors. These were the real targets for her newfound rage.

  She opened her mouth, and her daemon roared.

  Those terrible memories haunting her, Milian has begun slowly flexing her limbs. Muscles in her thighs perform involuntary jumps, and her arms shift. They make a sound. It is like rock grinding against rock, and she wonders if she has been in this cave for so long that she has become a fossil. She saw fossils once when she was a child, excavating a hillside thirty miles north of her village with her school class. Her teacher showed her how to hold a trowel and explained why she must be so sensitive when she found a protruding fossil, brushing at it gently so as not to damage it. She had learned that old things demand reverence. She had still believed that when she became a holy woman, revering Aeon.

  I’m an old thing now, she thinks, and she moves her arms again. They scrape across something until they press against the sides of her body. She might have been here for hundreds of years. The air around her has grown old and stale, like her mind.

  She wonders how she is still alive, and such musings bring the taste of brine and a chilling c
oolness closing all around her. She is certain that her daemon is gone, and that she is waking. But in doing so, her memories seem to come even richer, and more horribly detailed than ever.

  She scrambled down the cliff face with three others like her – Skythians made furious, overflowing with daemon. Their rage was a physical thing, heating the air around them, cliffs echoing with their cries. The fear she saw in the Alderians around the Engine drew her on. The anticipation was delicious.

  One of the others slipped and fell, bouncing from outcroppings and dashing himself to pieces on the rocky beach below. She heard the impact and saw the splash of blood, and then he hauled himself upright and started across the sands. His left leg was broken and dragging, and a spew of blood and brains stained the back of his ragged shirt. She could hear him panting and groaning as he made for the Engine, and the daemon within him was struggling loose now, bursting from his open wounds like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Its disparate parts danced around his head like cold blue fire, whipping at the air and setting it alight. His hair burned. He rushed on, faster, and then the strangers around the Engine started firing crossbow bolts his way.

  They had come to destroy the Skythian god Aeon, but now had no idea what they faced.

  The man’s damage was great, and the bolts hit home. By the time she and the two others reached the bottom of the cliff, he was crawling across the sand with a dozen bolts embedded in his face and the lashing flames faded almost to nothing.

  Milian ran, and when she came within range of their weapons she roared, and they veered away and broke. Her daemon scream and rage held such power and strength. Feet pounded sand, blood splashed her body from the wounds she had already received, and she could see the terror etched on the faces of the strange people around the Engine. Three of them worked on it, eight others tried to protect them.

  She was anticipating the feel of flesh parting between her hands once again when—