The Heretic Land Page 6

  With each bump it seemed to slip across the cart’s wooden surface, moving as if alive.

  But it was not alive. When he’d picked it up it had been cold and still, hard.

  The cart jumped over a rock and the ropes jarred through his hand, burning his skin and causing him to cry out. He tugged hard, pulled the axle to the left, and jammed the wheels against a rut in the hillside. Panting, Venden released the cart and sat down. The sun blazed. His water skins were empty. Home was near, but the familiar desire to draw out his journey had been nagging at him for the past two days.

  He liked being at his camp, but when he was out looking for a relic he never wanted to get there. Deep down, past even that shadow at his core, he was terrified of what he was doing.

  Falling onto his back in the long grass, turning his head to the side, he saw a small spiky plant speckled with hundreds of tiny purple flowers. ‘Bruised heather,’ he said, used to talking to himself. For the past years, there had only been the animals and plants of this place to speak to. The Skythians he encountered seemed lost to civilisation, regressed to more feeble times. ‘Haven’t seen it this far inland before. Likes the sea breeze.’ He leaned on one elbow and examined the plant closer. ‘Flowers are catching insects. Drowning them. It’s turned carnivorous. Long stems, flowers too heavy when they’re full …’ He lifted several drooping stems with one finger and found that more than half of them had snapped. At the breaks, the bright green stems were turning a rusty brown, as if their drowned victims’ blood seeped out. ‘Not fit for purpose.’ Sitting up, Venden looked at the sky. Up there where the sun burned fierce and the clouds flowed south to north, there was nothing that looked wrong. The sky was pure and untarnished, while Skythe was tainted by the past.

  ‘It should all be dead by now,’ he said, because from his studies back on Alderia he knew that such natural systems could not persist if things were going wrong. It was early spring, but down the hillside he could see a swathe of trees whose leaves were smudged orange, yellow and red, a gorgeous array of colours that betrayed the errors imprinted in whatever still drove the trees to grow. Perhaps they drew this corruption up from the soil through their roots, infected water, mutated nutrients. Or maybe even Skythe’s air was polluted and wrong.

  Down to the valley floor, following the river, he soon approached the place he had come to know as the ruined vale. From a distance it presented a pleasing vista – the river curving in a gentle arc around an area of uneven ground, trees standing sentinel, and the remains of two stone bridges planted either side of the river. One of them was almost unrecognisable, but the other had only lost its central span, the carved stone formations on either side evidence of the graceful structure it had once been. The ground here was sometimes marshy, but not today. The river had not flooded for several moons.

  As he drew closer a flock of sparrs took flight, startling him to a standstill. The commonest birds in this part of Skythe, they were also the prettiest, with luminescent blue wings, long trailing tails, and a green flash on their chests by which it was possible to identify the males from the females. But in flocks their combined song sounded like a stalking creature’s roar, and Venden could never get used to the brief moment of shock.

  The sparrs flittered up and to the east, higher into the hills, swirling and swooping but never breaking formation. There were hunting things in the air in these high valleys that would pick off any bird straying from the group.

  The ruined vale used to be a large village. Destroyed during or soon after the Skythian War, it no longer betrayed any evidence of its violent demise. Nature had reclaimed the village, subsuming it, smothering the buildings with crawling plants and trees, pulling them back into the ground. There were glimpses of upright stone structures here and there, but time had ensured that there was no longer much order left to this place. Walls had fallen and been taken back to the wild.

  Once, walking through the ruined vale almost two years before, on the day he had named it, Venden had sensed something beneath one of the small hillocks of tumbled stone. There was no sound and no hint of physical movement, but staring at the plant-covered mound he had been taken with the disconcerting sensation that everything within was in turmoil. A terrible aura of violence projected from the motionless pile, and Venden’s heart rate had doubled in the blink of an eye.

  The void inside him had screamed.

  He’d turned and run blindly, collapsing miles away in a sweating, frightened mess. And later that night, as he stared at the stars unable to sleep, he’d acknowledged what he might have witnessed – a shred of old magic.

  It was said by some that dregs of magic still persisted in the darkest, deepest parts of the world, left over from the war. A forbidden thing now, even more so six centuries before, there were still those who sought it. Venden was not one of them. In his illicit studies he had found plenty of evidence to suggest that magic was a dark, insidious power. Some suggested it had possessed a strange sentience. One Skythian parchment, ancient and ambiguous, had even given magic a name.

  Crex Wry, Venden had muttered, and dawn’s cool light had brought a desire to hunt the magical dreg. Fear had changed to excitement. But upon his return to the ruined vale, he could already tell that whatever had been there had flitted or melted away.

  Now, he stood by the river with his cart and the thing it contained, and stared at that fallen building. It remained motionless and dead. The plants growing upon it were a mixture of wild, mutated creeper that sprouted vicious-looking spiked seed pods, and the pale echoes of roses. These flowers were like images faded in the sun, bare memories of the beauty they should project. Their stems were weak and thin. Thorns were blunted by the sickness in the land.

  Yet still they grew. For Venden this was the greatest shame, and the worst crime of the Skythian War. Alderia’s use of forbidden magic had not killed Skythe, but had destined it to a future of weakness, mutation, and steady, slow decline. It had been six hundred years, and it might be six hundred more until this land was truly dead.

  He pulled his cart through the ruined vale and the object rocked on the cart’s bed, its protruding parts tapping like fingertips on a wooden table. Past the vale he entered the narrowing valley, beyond which he passed through the fallen shoulder between mountains. That was the hardest part of the journey, when much of the time he was lifting and manhandling the cart rather than pulling it. The solid wooden wheels, though braced, bore some considerable damage on the fallen scree of boulders and sharp rocks, and Venden worked all through the day to make his way east.

  As darkness fell, he found a relatively flat area in which to camp. In the flickering campfire light he saw pairs of eyes watching him.

  He sighed, hand stealing to the knife in his belt. Venden – a genius, a silent boy, a searcher – was a stranger in a strange land, and there was never any telling how these meetings might end.

  Some of them crawled, though their limbs looked little different from their brethren’s. Some loped, stooping low. A couple still walked tall. Those who were not naked wore old, torn clothing. They were dirty, scarred, their muscles knotty and worn. The women’s breasts hung empty and sad like drained water sacs, and the men’s genitals were withered and thin. Venden had once encountered a group of these mutant Skythians rutting beside a lake, and aside from the violence of the group act, it was the apparent lack of success that had shocked him most.

  In the forbidden books he had viewed before leaving Alderia at the age of thirteen, images of Skythians showed them as tall, proud and cultured. Their clothing had been beautifully woven, their hair worn in long, intricate braids. They’d been a head taller than most Alderians, and their art-and science-based culture was much more advanced, and less troubled.

  We did this to them, Venden thought, though the damage had been done six centuries before his birth. There were others he had encountered who had seemed to haul themselves forward somewhat, establishing camps and even attempting to farm the land. But they were the minorit
y. Skythians today were a wild breed, and Venden found their fall so depressing.

  Resting one hand on his knife handle, he raised the other, palm out. The Skythians paused, one woman scurrying forward to within a few steps. She raised her head and sniffed at the air.

  ‘I’m Venden Ugane, no threat to you,’ Venden said. ‘You know me. You’ve seen me before.’ He tapped his cart, trying to jog the Skythe woman’s memory.

  She sniffed some more, edging a step closer. ‘Venden,’ she rasped. She looked at the thing in the bed of the cart, her eyes going wide. They were bloodshot and weeping. She scampered back and cried something else, her voice a high whistle that seemed to contain little sense, and the few Skythians with her drew back as well, a sigh passing amongst them. It was not quite fear, and Venden had seen it before.

  ‘It’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he said, still holding out one hand. He watched the way they moved, hunkered down on splayed limbs like dogs waiting to leap. Fear seemed to lower them. Evolution was a debatable theory, and for the most devout of the Ald – Alderia’s ruling sect and unelected government – it was a blasphemy, because it denied the creation of things by the seven Alderian gods of the Fade. But most intelligent people, whatever their depth of belief in the Fade, accepted evolution as part of what made things the way they were. In these Skythians, Venden could see distinct evidence of devolution. And that made him sad, because it was man-made.

  He sat down close to the fire to eat. They would not join him, but he knew that they would hang back in the darkness to watch. He would leave them some food when he left in the morning.

  * * *

  Dawn brought a light sheen of rain that painted rainbows on the eastern skies. Venden remembered a story the Fade priests told children about Shore, the Fade goddess of the air, who cavorted with the sun and moon and sighed rainbows of delight when Venthia, the god of water, cast his seed through her. It had been an innocent tale of gods and dancing for the children, but its connotations had become more apparent the older Venden became. Rainbows were the ecstatic emissions of the gods. As he stood beside the dying fire, he looked at the colours and smiled. They were beautiful, but they were factors of light and water, little more. Venden did not understand the science of rainbows, but that did not mean he had to ascribe them godliness.

  There was no sign of the Skythians, but he knew they were still watching. They watched him on every journey. He broke camp and went to pick up the cart’s reins, and then noticed a strange thing. The light rain did not seem to touch the pale object. It lay upon dampened boards, but its surface seemed dry. He placed his palm on the smooth body, ran a finger along one of the short, thin limbs, and it was untouched.

  He frowned. Perhaps the water soaked in so quickly that the thing could not feel wet. But as with the rainbows, his lack of understanding did not drive him to the gods. Its mystery was not divine.

  When he moved on, the Skythians emerged from their hiding places and took the food he had left for them. They followed him for a while, as he knew they would. They mumbled and muttered amongst themselves, and in their language he could hear nothing of the wondrous Skythe tongue he had studied in those books and parchments. So much had been lost.

  The rain persisted, but the soaking did not dampen his spirits. The Skythians soon disappeared, and he was alone once more, pulling the cart with the reins over each shoulder. By midday he was close to where he had made his camp, in the fertile land at the junction of two mountain ridges where the river found its source. The flow here was more a series of trickling streams, the land between them boggy, and Venden followed a route he had taken many times before. It involved a steep climb, but then a level, mostly dry path across the mountainside to the sheltered area he called home. Here was the rocky overhang beneath which he lived. Here, too, was the remnant.

  He glanced across the clearing to his camp, and for a moment the change did not register. He frowned, trying to perceive the difference, and because it was something taken away instead of added, he had to search further.

  It’s dropped, he thought. He released the reins in reaction to this, leaning back against the cart, because even from here he could see what the remnant had become.

  The first time he’d seen it, he’d thought it was a fallen tree. Eight times as long as he was tall, it arced out of the ground from the foot of another dead tree’s stump and pointed north, lifting and dropping again so that he could just pass underneath it without stooping. Graceful and horrible, its surface was speckled and pocked, and close to one end it changed from pale brown to black. He’d shivered and leaned back against a living tree’s trunk, eager to touch something not so dead.

  He had decided to stay there for a while, camped beneath the overhang, before even looking at the thing again. Such a delicate remnant, he’d thought, naming the object without realising it right then.

  Now it had relaxed. The action of the remnant’s highest point lowering towards the ground had pushed out both extremes, tilting the dead tree at one end, and gouging an uneven furrow at the other. The five objects he had already brought here from across Skythe, and placed close to the remnant in positions that had somehow felt right, remained in place.

  ‘Someone has been here,’ Venden muttered, but he immediately knew there was more to it than that. Though there were those on Skythe who would think nothing of invading his space and stealing anything of use – the south coast was home to several settlements where those banished here had chosen to make their homes, and they were wild and lawless places – they rarely ventured this far north. Those who travelled usually did so for reasons more complicated than simple theft or vandalism.

  There were no footprints in the long grass, no signs that anyone had been here. He had been away for eleven days searching for the latest object, true, and much could have happened which the weather might have covered in the meantime. But the clearing had the sense of having remained uninterrupted. Untouched. There was a wildness here that he had sensed in many places across Skythe, as if the land had shrugged off all memory of human interaction and returned to its primal state. Even though he had lived here for almost three years, the cave and surrounding area managed to retain that feeling.

  Venden had often thought it strange. Now it was stranger still.

  He stepped from the trees’ shade and crossed the grassy clearing, unafraid, cautious. He listened for any sounds out of place, sniffed the air, remained alert, but he was as alone as ever. When he reached the remnant and held out his hand to touch it, something moved.

  Venden fell and struck the ground hard, one hand held out to break his fall, the shadow deep inside him rolling with apparent delight. The wet grass stroked across his face. Everything had moved but for the remnant. It was as if the land had shrugged, the sky shimmered, and the falling rain wavered at the audacity of Venden’s touch. The only solidity was the remnant and those objects he had brought to it – the objects he had been guided to by the shadow he carried inside – and he was struck with a certainty that if he had been touching it, he would not have fallen.

  The trees were still, and there were no sounds of panicked wildlife or falling rocks. The world had moved for him alone.

  Water soaked through his clothing. He lay motionless, looking up at the falling raindrops. Those that struck him seemed suddenly warm.

  From the cart came the sound of movement, and he rolled onto his side and lifted up on one elbow to look across the clearing. The object lay motionless where he had left it, yet he was certain he’d heard the sound of its many short limbs drumming against the wood. He gained his feet and walked back to the cart, nervous that the same sensation would strike him again, but he was steady and sure.

  The object was almost weightless, motionless, in his hands, cool, and nothing like anything alive. It was only as he started across the clearing with the thing in his hands that the remnant began to move.

  Chapter 4

  remnant

  Days after Milian Mu’s awakening in the
cave, she catches her first food. Tiredness no longer preys upon her. Yet she is still weak and almost withered away, and it will be a while until she can move again.

  There is no day and night, only the ebb and flow of the tide to time her slow heartbeats – five beats ebb, five beats flow. She has been sleeping and ageing with the land. The shard of Aeon has been resting with her, and perhaps dreaming as well, because she can feel it still inside like a forgotten memory.

  She has been listening to skittering back and forth on the cave floor. Hearing the animal locates it in the dark, and the warmth of its meagre supply of blood has raised the temperature on Milian’s right side. She reaches out slowly and grabs the creature. There are waving, scabrous legs, a spiked carapace. She squeezes, and the sounds of breaking things echo. She puts it to her mouth as it still struggles, keen to feel its life against her lips. The dying animal moves against her mouth. There is no taste, only sensation, and she swallows because she knows she must to grow strong. Her future awaits. The shard swells within her, a cold thing reminding her of where she came from, in preparation for where she must go.

  She chews some more. The memory of hunger is a bloom of heat from a spreading fire, rumbling in her stomach, vibrations spreading along limbs she has not been able to feel since waking. The more she chews and swallows – soft innards, spiky shell and legs – the more awake she feels.

  After finishing eating she sits for a while in the complete darkness, listening to the water washing against the shore outside the cave. She can almost feel the sun on her skin, the wind blowing abrading sand against her face, and she can taste much more than the crushed dead thing.