The Heretic Land

by Tim Lebbon

  She tries to speak. Her voice is a croak, and the shard she carries of her old god Aeon gives comfort. It does not speak, but exudes an understanding that all will be well.

  Later, when the tide is low, she enters the water at one edge of the cave and starts making her way outside.

  The sea welcomes her in with cold arms. She breathes in the water and panics for a moment, but the shard rises and calms her, urging her on. Those memories of a long, long journey across the bottom of the sea come again – passing through murky depths, and hiding from dark things down there – but they feel more distant now, moved further back in time by her return to life. So she pulls herself past the low stone ceiling, lowering her head beneath the surface when the powerful waters scourge the last remaining molluscs from her skin.

  Eventually she feels something different above her, and she surfaces slowly to the silvery glare of the moon. Outside now, she gasps in the fresh night air. The water buoys her, and the shard sinks back down, not cowed, but secretive. She thinks perhaps it has betrayed itself, just for a moment.

  Milian Mu walks through the surf and onto the beach. When she had arrived here long ago, the beach had been scorched to glass by the cataclysm way across the sea on Skythe. Now it is a rough surface of sand and sharp-edged black rocks, scattered with evidence of life – empty shells, dead crabs, seaweed, and night things that root amongst the tidal deposits to take their fill. Some of them scurry from her. Some sink down and play dead. She ignores them and looks down at herself, and feels a momentary surprise at her nakedness. She is, she realises, beautiful.

  And cold.

  She looks around, and along the beach there is something out of place. The building seems empty, an awkward, blocky shape against the dunes. There are nets hanging from racks beside it, and timber and wire pots piled on the beach in front. A fisherman’s shack.

  As she walks towards the shack, the sand slicks between her toes. The soft sea breeze brings visions of the open ocean and a chill across her newly exposed skin. She drags her feet through the sand, feeling the swish of knotted hair across her shoulders. Her breath is heavy and phlegmy in her throat. How can I be walking? she wonders. How can I be breathing after so long? But the shard rises again to allay her doubts and drive her forward.

  There are many questions, but for Milian they are all answered by the presence of the shard. She is in Aeon’s service now, and whatever the bastard Alderians and their Engines did to her god so long ago, at least she carries a trace of Aeon inside. A memory, she thinks, but that is too vague. No, not just a memory.

  A seed.

  The shack seems abandoned. The door hangs off, one side wall is split and rotting, but when she ventures inside she finds someone’s belongings, heavy with windblown sand. Perhaps a fisherman went out one morning but never returned, and the only evidence of him ever existing remains here.

  There are clothes, sandals, a time-blunted knife, some tobacco and a small shoulder bag. As she dresses, Milian feels a growing warmth heating her insides and exuding outwards. She is alive, again. She has risen.

  Though terrible memories of what she once did still haunt the edges of her perception, she no longer feels like a relic of the past, and the future is suddenly an exciting place.

  Juda viewed the slayers from the dreg of magic he had left behind, and they were terrifying.

  Since finding the wisp of magic he had been training it, kneading it to his mind’s desires, employing untested techniques which were largely theoretical in an effort to make the weak haze his own. This was his final dreg, a precious thing, and every step of the way – Leki and Bon Ugane following on behind, their silence loaded and nervous – he was anxiously probing back with his mind, eager to discover whether anything had worked. If it did work, then much of what he had dedicated a large part of his adult life to might have had a purpose. If it did not, then there would be so much more left to do. He would not give up on magic. He could not. If he did, he might as well wander into the wilds and die.

  He and the others were four miles away from where they had camped when he sensed the slayers. He rested against a tree that had half fallen to grow out across the water, and as Leki’s shadow reached out a concerned hand, he clasped at the air and dragged it aside, and saw back the way they had come.

  The images were erratic, but clear. There were two slayers descending the steep slope towards the camp. They leaped and loped, no caution in their movements, no effort at concealment or surprise. Their heavy feet slapped down and coughed up clouds of bursting fungi, and dark clothes flowed behind them, dragged along like resistant shadows.

  ‘You’re seeing them,’ Bon said, but Juda waved away his words, closing his eyes. He plucked a cigar from his pocket and lit it, drawing in the spiced smoke and welcoming its calming influence. It made the visions clearer.

  One slayer was female, one male. The female was heavy-boned and her large bare hands were scarred where she clasped her pike, yet she had made a grotesque effort at make-up, smearing blusher across her pale, inhuman face. Juda found the effect more disturbing than the various weapons tucked into her belt and shoulder harnesses, and as she went to all fours and sniffed across the camp he diverted his attention to the male. This was a larger slayer, his muscled arms and legs bare, body clad in thick leathers bathed so many times with blood that they had taken on a port-wine hue. His misshapen head jerked this way and that like a bird’s, long plaited hair a snake’s tongue tasting the air. He strode to the fire pit and kicked it asunder, and the woman scampered across and sniffed at the still-warm embers.

  Then she stood, and she and the male slayer moved close, conversing in a shockingly human manner. They turned as one, pointed at Juda, and darted at him.

  Juda gasped and cringed back against the tree, and for a moment the visions blurred with reality, a merging of scenes that brought the slayers close. He squeezed his eyes shut and drifted back to the camp, then held his breath as his senses opened up once more—

  —and the slayers were circling like wild animals toying with their prey. There was a hint of fear in their stance, perhaps, but it was mostly fury that drove them, shimmering through their swollen muscled bodies as they stepped left and right around the dreg. He could hear them hissing, smell their scent – meaty, sweaty, a tang of something sweet – and the threat they exuded was palpable, scarring the air. They were even less human than he had believed, and he realised that they would never, ever, stop in their pursuit.

  He went to his knees beside the fallen tree and brought himself back, blinking the magical dreg away and feeling the hollowness of its loss. It wrenched at his insides like the death of a loved one.

  ‘They’ve reached the camp, and it’s only made them madder,’ he said, leaning forward to let the cool mud calm his hot forehead. ‘They’re coming.’

  ‘We have four or five miles on them,’ Leki said. ‘We have a head start.’

  ‘Yes,’ Juda said, and he struggled not to cry as the sense of loss throbbed slowly away. ‘But they’re never going to stop.’ He sat up and wiped the mud from his forehead, and they were both looking at him as if he was mad. If that was the truth, it was a madness that suited this land, and he was at home here. Bon and Leki were the ones out of place.

  ‘Why did you save me?’ Bon asked. ‘You’ve doomed yourself.’

  Juda laughed out loud. ‘There are always reasons,’ he said, puffing on the cigar again. ‘We have to move. There’s somewhere we can go where we might be able to lose them. But they’re on our heels now. They’re filled with rage. And if they catch us, there’s no fighting them.’

  Juda led their way along the course of the stream and looked for a good place to cross. The slayers would see their footprints and smell their route, but any way to confuse them would give Juda and his charges a few more moments. And if they reached the gas marshes, they might just have a chance.

  ‘You were using magic,’ Bon said from behind. Juda could hear the fear there as well as fascination
. He did not respond. Bon persisted. ‘Juda, you were using magic?’

  ‘You doubt me?’ Juda asked without pausing or looking back. Bon’s change from statement to question had irked Juda’s pride.

  ‘Where does it come from?’ Bon asked.

  ‘You believe in magic?’ Juda asked.

  ‘Strange question,’ Bon said. ‘Everyone believes it exists, in places. But most don’t even consider using it, even if they could find it. Too dangerous. Trying to use magic is like … catching hold of lightning.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s true,’ Juda said. ‘Not many people respect it. Fewer still can touch it.’

  ‘And you’re one of the few,’ Leki said.

  ‘One of the fewer,’ Juda said. ‘Before I arrived on Skythe …’ He trailed off, the secrecy even now making it hard for him to continue. Even now, in this wild place where many things were possible and with people for whom his revelation might even be welcome.

  ‘You were a Broker,’ Bon said.

  ‘I was,’ Juda replied. ‘The Brokers found me thirteen years ago.’ He pulled out a new cigar and lit it, the scamp smoke his shield against thoughts that would do him harm. Occasionally he wondered whether it was a psychological effect, this shielding. But he was too afraid to not smoke and find out. ‘I was in the south of Alderia, looking for magic. Had been for two years, since I found my first dreg on the northern face of one of the Chasm Cliffs. I’d been there since I turned twenty, climbing and abseiling, climbing again, scouring the cliff faces for signs of what I knew must be there.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Bon asked.

  ‘Because it was calling me, of course.’ Juda paused at the foot of a steep slope and looked past Leki and Bon, back the way they had come. He had to think straight. Had to consider every option, every route, every possibility. And here he knew that they must climb. He started up the slope and the other two followed, already placing themselves in his hands without question.

  ‘I’d heard the call years before,’ he continued. ‘I left home in New Kotrugam and hiked south, looking for something I didn’t understand, and which at the time I couldn’t even name. I left behind my parents and friends, and could not make any of them understand. My father always wanted me to be a medic, and my mother doted on me after my sister died at a young age. I’m sure I broke their hearts. I told them I’d return home, but never did, and didn’t really expect to. They probably think I’m dead.’ Juda forged on, breathing heavily and smoking, enjoying the pressure in his chest and the haze of smoke around his head. ‘I wandered for years, and in that time I met a few others who seemed to be searching for the same thing.’

  ‘And you hooked up with them,’ Bon said.

  ‘No,’ Juda said. ‘My search was always a very personal thing. A … love. So we’d talk for a while, perhaps spend a few days camped together comparing notes and fulfilling other urges. But then we’d go our separate ways. My route took me south. I found nothing for years. And then I reached the Chasm Cliffs, and from the moment I saw them I started hearing echoes.’

  ‘Echoes of magic?’ Leki asked.

  ‘Nothing so easy.’ Juda paused halfway up the slope and took a small spyglass from his pack, extending it and scanning the landscape to the south and west of them. A herd of hat-hat smudged a distant hillside, passing back and forth like a mote in Juda’s eye. Sparrs and other birds flitted through the air. He instinctively found the route they had taken and scanned its length, knowing that the slayers would be following their scent. He saw nothing, but that did little to comfort him.

  ‘Then what?’ Bon asked. The fascination in his voice was evident. And, perhaps, jealousy.

  ‘Rumours,’ Juda said. He inhaled some more scamp smoke, feeling the sharp edges of his knowledge being dulled once again by its effect. But past that dullness lay his memories. ‘Suspicions of magic, beautiful. The whispered words of hundreds who had come before me, or thousands. All tempting. All …’ He remembered being drawn to the Chasm Cliffs and standing at the edge of the first ravine, the whole landscape before him a sea of wounds and scar tissue on the land. ‘Perhaps some of those before me got so close that their thoughts …’ He did not complete the sentence, because already his memory was ahead of itself. He was down in that deep chasm, nursing a broken ankle and crawling along a rocky floor that was never touched by sunlight, heading for the dark place that felt like nowhere in the world. ‘We should move on,’ he said.

  ‘But I want to hear—’ Bon said.

  ‘We move on. I’ll talk as we climb.’ Juda tucked the cigar in the corner of his mouth and started climbing again, grabbing tufts of heathers to pull himself up the steepening slope. He did not look back to check if Bon and Leki were following. In a way he was talking to himself, because it had been some time since he had remembered this much. But he was also probing, planting seeds, and hoping that their own purposes here might collide with his own. ‘I don’t know how long I was down there. Day and night seemed the same. I was watched, all the time, but I only felt in danger when the watchers revealed themselves. A lyon came close with fire dripping from its nostrils, but my screams and shouts scared it away. Three dusk blights stalked me through the deeper shadows, but I stood my ground and pulled my knife. I cut one. It dulled my knife blade and numbed my arm for the next half a day, but my fearlessness saw them away. And I was fearless. I knew I was down there for something else. Not to be scorched and eaten by a lyon, or carried deep by dusk blights. There was something that had drawn me down to the deepest places in those Chasm Cliffs. And whether the gods existed or not, I believed myself touched by something beyond my experience.

  ‘I crawled, drinking from streams and eating sour berries that grew somehow down in those shadows. And then I grew closer, and I could sense it with every part of my body, every sense I knew and some I didn’t. It smelled of age and distance. Its tang was on the air, tasting of something unknowable. It vibrated through the ground and whispered to the shadows, and when I set eyes on it …’ Juda trailed off again, taking a deep pull on his cigar as panic closed in and teased him with things he had no wish to know. His heart thrummed. Between each blink lay madness, and the scamp closed his eyes to that.

  ‘We’re almost at the top of the rise,’ Bon said, panting behind and below Juda. ‘We should rest … once we’re up there.’

  ‘It was ordinary,’ Juda said. ‘A smudge of solid light in the dark. Ice on coal. It looked like nothing but was …’ He turned around then, pausing just below the ridge and looking down on Bon and Leki climbing behind him. They were both sheened with sweat and panting, and when they halted and looked up at him he saw the caution in their eyes. They were afraid of him. ‘Imagine actually seeing a god of the Fade,’ Juda continued. ‘Being able to touch Astradus, feel Flaze’s heat as he passes by. It would make them ordinary, too.’

  ‘But you took it up,’ Bon said.

  ‘Of course,’ Juda said. ‘I put magic in my pack.’ He mimed the words, sliding his hand into his empty backpack where a dreg of magic had once rested. He felt naked and lost now that he had left that last dreg behind. But he knew there was something greater ahead. That was what drove him. He was being pulled forward by promise, not pushed ahead by threat.

  ‘So why come to Skythe if there was still magic in Alderia?’ Leki asked.

  ‘That dreg I found seemed to be the last,’ Juda said. ‘And magic is … insidious. It had me. There was nothing more to life from that moment on. Except maybe fucking.’ He tried to smile, but they all recognised the humour as forced.

  ‘And us?’ Bon asked.

  You will lead me to more, Juda thought. He had scoured much of the south of Skythe and had even ventured inside the ruins of old, incredible Engines in his search, but he had come to believe that there were others who might lead him to a true source of magic, not just a leftover. His search had shifted from magic to people, and his sense of magic had made Bon Ugane’s name sing with promise – an enemy of the Ald who refuted the Fade, and who kne
w so much about the old war, and perhaps the magic used to fight it.

  But first they had to lose the slayers.

  ‘We can’t rest,’ Juda said, looking over their shoulders. ‘Hope you’re feeling strong. Now, we run.’

  They hit the ridge and Juda led them quickly down the other side into the next valley, not wishing to present a silhouette to the pursuing slayers. They would still be way out of range of their pikes, but if the beasts actually saw them in the distance it would fuel their determination, perhaps drive them even faster. And Juda already had doubts about being able to escape. If only I knew magic better, he thought. If only I could have trained it to act for me, rather than passively observing. But being able to train magic at his relatively young age meant using Wrench Arc techniques, and though he had started examining their philosophies, that took a whole lifetime of learning. Juda, though obsessed with magic, still retained shreds of those morals instilled by his upbringing and long-lost family. The Wrench Arcs would torture magical dregs instead of training them, twist them to their needs instead of teasing them to follow their desires. Theirs took a special kind of knowledge and cruelty, and anyone in their way would suffer. Murderers and mad people, the Wrench Arcs had left humanity behind. Juda comforted himself in thinking that he had some way yet to go.

  The next valley was much wider and shallower, a gently sloping side leading down to a wide plain of grassland speckled with pockets of trees and undergrowth, and a river snaking along the valley floor. Juda knew that there was a ruined village just across the river, but it would only be visible when they were almost upon it. Perhaps it would be a place for them to rest past midday. But the more they rested, the closer the slayers would come.

  ‘We’re heading for a place past those distant hills,’ he said. ‘Gas marshes. Very dangerous, but there are ways to cross them. And that’s where we must shake off the slayers.’

  ‘They’ll lose our scent,’ Bon said.

  ‘Hopefully.’