by Tim Lebbon
‘But not if you’re still smoking those stinking things,’ Leki said as Juda lit another cigar.
He drew in the smoke, and it settled his inner darkness. ‘I stop smoking these, and you’re on your own. Without this …’ He exhaled, and the smoke danced around his head. ‘… my nightmares find form. Besides, better this than the stink of you two.’
Juda’s legs ached, and he knew the others were rapidly tiring. But they had no alternative. As he took the lead again, he started telling them about the other dregs of magic he had found.
Chapter 6
reborn
When Venden woke up it was snowing, and there were three auburn tadcats sitting in the snow a few steps from his camp beneath the overhang.
He had seen snow in Skythe before, but only in winter, and only when it was extremely cold and the wind blew from the north. But as far as he could remember it was still late summer, and the breeze blowing as he’d drifted to sleep had been from the west. Maybe even the seasons are confused, he thought, and it was not such a shocking idea. The flora and fauna of Skythe had been damaged by the war so long ago. Why not the weather also?
The tadcats were skittish, and as Venden sat up with a blanket around his shoulders, they backed away. Still watching him, they settled in the long grass at the edge of the clearing and licked their delicate paws. The long, snow-free grass.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and opened them again. Snow still fell. Around the remnant it appeared as deep as his ankles, settling across the smooth lines and jagged parts he had come to know so well. But beyond, past where he had parked the cart, the plants were free of snow, many of them bathed in early morning sunlight.
Venden stood, ignoring the pressure on his bladder. He glanced once more at the tadcats as they scampered away, then stepped forward into the snow shower, convinced that it would fade away as sleep and dreams retreated.
His foot sank into snow. He gasped at the cold and looked up into the swirling flakes. They were fat, floating down slowly enough for him to target one and catch it on his tongue. It melted and freshwater flowed down his throat. Other flakes touched his warm skin, landed in his eyelashes and settled in the soft scruffy beard that had grown over the past year. The snowstorm was troubling but beautiful, and for a moment sleep still haunted Venden enough to relish its beauty.
When he took several more steps towards the remnant, the snow stopped. Sunlight burned through and warmed his face where the ice had recently touched.
‘That wasn’t normal,’ he said. He looked at the remnant again and it was still covered in snow, thick layers that blurred its lines. But elsewhere it was quickly melting, seeping into the ground as though subject to a great, unfelt heat. Grass compressed by the weight popped up again, shaking the memory of snow as if it had never happened. Soon, Venden felt little more than a morning chill, and even that dispersed as he walked around the remnant. For the first few steps his feet squished in muddy ground, but then the soil grew harder, the grass swishing around his feet and whispering dry secrets.
The remnant remained covered in snow. It was frozen, not dripping beneath the sun, and several times Venden went to step closer, to see whether the world around him would stay the same once he touched the great shape. When he’d been attaching objects to it the day before he had been part of it at times, settled by its touch while he felt the world around him shifting, shivering. But stepping forward now, he was afraid that contact with this strange thing would remove him from his world. And much as he had devoted himself to it for some time, he was still afraid.
‘So what now?’ he asked, and as if in answer the snow on the remnant melted. This was no gentle thaw. One moment it was still there, frozen solid, icicles pointing and snow moulded to the remnant’s peculiar extremities; the next moment, everything melted away and washed to the ground, spreading in a puddle through the long grass until the dry soil sucked it down. Venden closed his eyes and breathed in, feeling steam stroke down his throat and into his lungs. He heard movement, felt three harsh thuds against the ground, and when he opened his eyes he caught a glimpse of the shape flexing to motionlessness. It was an insinuation of movement rather than something overt, the air and landscape around him complicit.
The rain came then, great droplets that flattened the grass and splashed from the remnant and the dead tree. Venden cried out in surprise. His voice was loud and lonely, and he reined in the shout because he thought the remnant might frown upon it.
I know what you are, he thought, and it was the first time he had ever formed that idea. Before now he had been too afraid in case he caused offence, or the betrayal of such knowledge might mark him for murder. But the remnant already knew that he knew. His exposure of that knowledge was nothing. He was only a human, not …
‘Not a god,’ Venden said, and rain ran down across his face into his mouth. It was cold against his sensitive teeth, questing fluid fingers inside his shirts. He thought he was being examined. But the remnant already knew him, and had been using him for a long time. It would know him better than he knew himself.
Rain ended, hail began. The remnant flexed, and this time it did nothing to hide its movement from Venden. It movement was fluid and beautiful, harsh and terrible, like nothing alive he had ever seen before. It was more solid and real than everything else, and as the hail drove Venden to his knees he began to cry.
The hail ended and melted away, and sunlight warmed the tears from his cheeks. Wind rose up and faded again, caressing the remnant and the prone Venden, yet not touching the trees at the clearing’s extremes, nor the plants hanging down the cliff face. Mist rose and fell, lightning cracked overhead and lit up the shape in a brief, incredibly bright flash. Venden’s skin stretched across his face and his eyeballs dried and his hair started to singe, but then a coolness closed around him like a protective hand.
It’s coming to life, he thought. It’s resurrecting! An idea flashed into his mind, more fully formed and detailed than any that had come before, and he realised that was not quite right. It was not yet living again, not in any way that he could understand. Without its final part it was a shape, not a life. Without its heart, this reconstructed god was an old memory flexing its muscles. New thoughts and memories were yet to come.
‘Fifty miles away,’ Venden said as he recognised the place displayed to his mind’s eye. ‘To the north.’ The void inside him flexed in excitement.
He had never ventured that far north. Skythe was strange and dangerous, and in that direction lay the strangest and most dangerous place of all. Haunted, legendary, a location where myths were still birthed, Skythe’s dead capital city, Kellis Faults, awaited.
The heart of the murdered god Aeon rested in that place, and Venden would help it beat again.
Once dressed, Milian sat on the beach and ate again. She’d found a seabird with a broken wing, and after a quick twist of the neck she plucked it and bit in. The warm blood inspired horrible memories, but she stared out to sea and continued chewing. She craved the sustenance. Those memories were of another time, and a Milian driven by something else. The daemon had made her do those things, that mad soulless thing, and then the shard of Aeon had driven it out.
I owe Aeon so much, she thought. But as she ate and looked around, she was far from certain about that. She had no concept of how the world was now – whether Skythe was still there, what had happened to those Engines, whether the daemons had raged on and on – and no idea of her place in it. She supposed that her first act would be to start exploring.
For the first time she noticed how cool the breeze from the north was. It picked up sea scents and spray and salt, and abraded her skin as it rolled up the long beach. It did not make her uncomfortable. After so long sensing nothing, it was beautiful. She stood and stretched her limbs, turning slowly around and inviting the breeze’s caresses. The sand was cool and smooth between her toes, and she remembered the glassy sheen across the beach the last time she had been here, the sand melted by whatever
cataclysm had occurred to the north.
‘Will I find anyone?’ She looked at the high, wide dunes behind her and wondered what might be beyond. Then she looked down at herself for the hundredth time since leaving the cave. The memories from before her long sleep were vague and informed mainly by dreams, but she could not recall ever acknowledging these curves, her shape, and the athleticism that should not be here now, but was. Perhaps because she never had. Or perhaps, she thought, because she had awoken anew. Refreshed by dormancy. Reborn. She ran her hands down over her breasts, across her flat stomach, and down her muscled thighs to her feet, half buried in the sand. She could feel the potential in her body, coiled and glad to be awake. Standing bent over on that beach, every ache or pain from her joints had vanished, and her mind was clearing by the moment.
And the shard was there within her, that meagre surviving part of her destroyed god, calming fears and smoothing errant doubts about why she was here, and how.
She had been on Alderia for centuries, and now Milian Mu felt the urge to explore.
She left the beach behind and climbed the first of the sand dunes. Panting, sweating, relishing the exertion, she gained the summit and turned back to look out to sea. Even from this slight elevation she could see much further. A small sailing ship ploughed the water a couple of miles out, flying a flag she could not see and would not recognise if she did. It approached land at an angle, and Milian looked left along the coast to see if she could make out its destination. But dunes, trees and a headland to the west meant that her view along the coast was restricted. She watched the boat, hypnotised by its movement until something inside jarred her onward.
‘I’m going!’ she said, surprising herself. She spoke a language as old as her dead god, and wondered whether anyone here would recognise the words.
As the sound of the sea slowly faded behind her, she felt a tug of loneliness. I’ve been hearing that for hundreds of years. She was woken, but could she really move on? Her condition was remarkable, but if she attributed it to that thing inside her then she was not wholly herself. I am me! Milian thought. But it carried little weight. She felt the shard in the background, and if she defied or denied it, perhaps then it would come to the fore.
So she walked south, because that was the way she felt compelled to go.
The dunes stretched further inland than she had anticipated, and they grew larger than she could have imagined. Those close to the sea were mere sand humps, speckled here and there with grasses and spiked on occasion with driftwood worn smooth by the sea. Soon the slopes became higher, held in place by numerous tall trees hanging heavy with a deep orange fruit. She plucked one and ate it, and it purged the taste of raw meat from her mouth.
Some valleys between dunes were strafed by sunlight, others shadowed by the huge sand hills. She found freshwater streams and drank, gulping down so much that her stomach sloshed when she moved. She soon needed to urinate, and moments after that she was drinking again. She felt herself growing stronger and more whole, and the next time she passed a small copse of fruit trees she ate from them once again.
With every step she took, she moved on from the memories that had haunted her strange hibernation. She welcomed the distance, because with it went the sickness about what she had done. This Milian Mu was becoming a whole new person. And though as yet she did not know how that was possible, or why, simply being was enough.
She walked on through the day. The landscape changed, sand dunes giving way to a gently rolling plain. It was dotted with rocky mounds that looked artificial, reminding her of burial mounds back on Skythe, and here and there were swathes of woodland singing with bird life. Much further south she could see high hills, hazed with sunlight and glinting with what might have been water or veins of exposed, pale rock. Some hilltops were craggy where rock falls had sharpened them, others seemed smoothed by erosion.
Later, she heard voices from the other side of a low ridge. She paused and remained motionless for a long time. The falling sun caught her shadow and cast it eastward, and she lengthened into dusk without once moving. She was a tree, a rock, a mountain, etched as part of the landscape until the sun went down and her shadow combined with the general darkness.
There were several children, shouting and arguing as they played some game remote from the adults conversing in more level tones. No one attempted to disguise their presence. The glow of a campfire lit the air above the small ridge, and as dusk bled across the hills in the west, the smell of cooking permeated the air. Stomach heavy with soft fruit and freshwater, still Milian salivated. She could not identify what they were cooking, but it was rich and tangy. That, more than anything, drove her to move closer.
There were two covered wagons and several shires, similar to creatures she had known on Skythe but taller, stronger, with shaggy hair on their legs and much broader shoulders. The wagons were parked parallel, and between them a large cooking fire had been set. Six adults fussed around the fire, and beyond them Milian could see the silhouettes of frolicking children.
The smell of cooking meat was almost overpowering.
A shadow fell across her, cast by faint starlight. Milian froze. A woman spoke. Milian did not understand the language, and did not reply. She thought that to betray herself would be a bad idea.
She turned around. The woman stood six steps away, wary but not threatening. She was short and stocky, with a wild head of hair and intricately woven clothing. A tall man stood just behind her, a long object of some sort nursed in both hands. His clothing was equally fine. He said nothing, but his eyes spoke volumes. Reflecting his camp’s firelight, they flickered as they took in this mysterious woman, her stained clothing and the tatty fisherman’s bag by her side. He looked her up and down. Milian could almost taste his lust.
The woman spoke again, slower, her words just as incomprehensible.
Milian touched her ears and mouth and shrugged. The woman nodded, seeming to sink slightly as tension left her. The man looked away.
So now I am deaf and dumb, Milian thought. But she knew that subterfuge could last only so long, and that her otherness would be revealed in a thousand ways.
She put herself at the campers’ mercy until the shard urged her what to do next.
‘That first dreg in the roots of the Chasm Cliffs changed my life. I carried it back towards New Kotrugam, intending to examine and study it. But it started a hunger for more. Thirty miles from the New Kotrugam wall, I spent three days in an inn with a heavy head cold. I drank water and ate rice, and only ventured down to the inn’s public rooms late on the third evening for beer and more food. Starting to feel a bit better. Hungry. And that’s where I met the Brokers.’
Juda was marching quickly, telling them his story as if to lure them on. Bon Ugane and Leki followed, apart from Juda and together in their silent acknowledgement of each other. They walked without looking or touching, but a connection had been made which Bon felt would not be broken. Leki might act distant and aloof at times, but he knew that she felt the same. She hadn’t needed to tell him.
‘I’d heard of them before, and thought them fools,’ Juda said. ‘Maybe that made me a fool’s fool. Because they have records, and knowledge, and what they do can’t be denied.’
He’s talking about people who openly seek forbidden magic, Bon thought. He had heard and read so much, and his doubts led to him continuing his son Venden’s research into the war. That was sedition, and such dissidence had resulted in him being deported to Skythe. Now, Juda was talking about the forbidden magic that Bon and many others believed had been borne by the Ald to assault Skythe’s manifested god. There had been no plague, and the war had left dregs of magic scattered across both lands. Bon believed that as fact, but proof had always been much harder to find.
Though terrified, Bon could not help being fascinated by Juda’s tale.
‘I spoke to the Broker,’ Juda said, ‘but I’ve always been … on my own. People didn’t like my Regerran blood, though it barely meant anythi
ng to me. The green eyes are unusual. So I stayed another day, and late that afternoon I showed them what I’d found. I was expecting a certain reaction. A certain … shock.’ Juda leaped a small stream easily six steps wide and carried on, not once looking back. After Leki crossed she did look back, one eyebrow raised, smiling gently.
‘Come on, then,’ she said softly, and Bon kept his eyes on her as he jumped. He landed awkwardly and tipped back, and Leki grasped his hand and pulled him upright. He staggered forward, exaggerating his momentum so that they ended up face to face with their arms around each other.
‘My saviour,’ he whispered.
‘The Brokers knew exactly what they were looking at,’ Juda said. He’d stopped away from the stream but hardly seemed to see them. He was looking elsewhere, at another time. ‘Finding it is all very well,’ one of them said. ‘But do you know how to use it?’
‘How much further?’ Bon asked. He and Leki disentangled themselves, and he felt a warm flush as her hand swept across his back.
‘Far enough to tell you the rest.’ Juda looked up the slope they had descended, scanning it quickly with his telescope. ‘And we have to reach the gas marshes before nightfall. I don’t have many scamp smokes left, and …’
‘We know,’ Leki said. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll tie you tight.’
Juda’s green eyes flickered strangely, and Bon realised then that he would never know this man. It wasn’t his part-Regerran ancestry that made him a mystery. It was his quest. The Brokers were considered one of the most dangerous criminal organisations on Alderia by the Ald, and there were frequent cases of the Ald’s personal army, the Spike, assaulting a suspected refuge. Bon had once passed the site of such an assault in the slums of New Kotrugam’s eastern quarter. Five properties had been gutted by fire, a dozen bodies were laid under blankets in the street outside – several adults, the rest children. The bitter memory had always remained with him.