The Heretic Land

by Tim Lebbon

  Something coughed and hissed, and the woman’s left forearm shattered in a cloud of blood and fractured bone. She slumped to the floor without a sound. A slick of blood spread quickly across the intricate mosaic floor, painting its new, terrible story across that old one.

  Juda was already reloading a new cylinder into his pistol, but Bon knew that their chance was now. The screeching had silenced into shock, and Leki was staring at him, wide-eyed, freckles of blood on her face black in the torchlight.

  Bon grabbed her hand and ran, kicking aside the torch wielded by a Skythian man. Juda waved them on and, as they reached the uneven steps and climbed towards daylight, Bon did not feel any sense of escape. He had seen Juda’s expression.

  ‘They’re here?’ he asked.

  ‘Not quite,’ Juda said. He stared at Bon strangely, as if seeing him for the first time. He had a smudge on his forehead that might have been blood. ‘I saw them on the ridge, and they’ll be coming quickly now that they can smell us. They might even see us. So we have to run, not look behind, and you have to trust me completely.’

  ‘We have up to now,’ Leki said coldly, but Juda seemed hardly aware of her presence. His eyes glimmered as he stared at Bon, burning with a fire Bon did not know.

  ‘Completely!’ Juda emphasised. ‘Whatever I tell you to do, whenever, you have to do it if we’re going to live. It’s ten miles to the gas marshes, maybe more, and they’re faster than us.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bon said, and weariness was smothering him. Tired muscles and aching legs, and the weariness of the soul that had been his curse for years. Leki held his hand, squeezed. She doesn’t seem even remotely scared, he thought, but he was too distracted to dwell on that right now. Beneath them, he heard the scurrying sounds of Skythians shaking off their shock and coming in pursuit. Above, the slayers had his scent in their nostrils, and would not stop until they could smell his spilled blood. Hopelessness hung heavy, misting the air like the Skythian woman’s blood when Juda had killed her.

  But then Juda said something that lifted that weight for ever.

  ‘Venden Ugane,’ he said.

  ‘Venden?’ Bon gasped.

  ‘Living to the north. And we can find him, if we shake the slayers.’

  ‘Venden is alive?’ Unreality struck Bon, swirling him in its dizzying embrace. My son. My son!

  ‘No time now.’ Juda remained motionless for just a moment, wide eyes still on Bon as if he saw something more than human, and greater than everything he sought. Then he turned and ran, and Bon and Leki had no choice but to follow.

  ‘Come on,’ Leki said.

  ‘But Venden?’ I haven’t told Juda his name.

  Leki offered him a tentative, confused smile. Her eyes were alight. She wasn’t really scared back there at all, Bon thought, and she still seemed rich with potential she had not exposed. A stranger, she had layers he had barely touched.

  Blazing sunlight did nothing to lessen the sense of doom closing in, and could not match the fire of hope that had been ignited in Bon Ugane once more.

  Bon’s first act as they rushed across the uneven ground of the ruined settlement was to look back. Through the sparse trees, past the tumbled buildings that hid subterranean secrets, he could see the gentle slope of the valley’s side. He scanned left to right and back again but could see no sign of movement. That did not mean they weren’t there. It only meant that the slayers were either moving covertly, or were already too low down to the valley floor for him to see them.

  If that were the case, they were closer even than Juda had hinted.

  Bon thought of Venden, why he could be here, how … and it made no sense! If he’d been arrested and deported, Bon would have surely heard news of that. If the Guild of Inventors had turned him in for his seditious thoughts and opinions, there would have been at least a whisper of events, and more likely a shout. The Guild’s public face projected a crisp clean image, though any organisation that old surely possessed dark secrets. They would have taken advantage of the revelation that one of their most promising students had betrayed his religion and country, and that he had been discovered and expelled because of those crimes. They would have made an example of him.

  It was always something smaller, Bon had believed. A kidnapping by his Guild tutor, a murder, his body thrown into the river.

  And now Juda, a stranger, said that he was here.

  Bon had so many questions, but hardly any breath with which to ask them. They would have to wait. It had been three years, and now it would have to be a little while longer.

  But the mere thought of his son being here – the possibility, however remote and unlikely – had galvanised Bon, and he felt a newfound urgency surging through his muscles. Juda led, Leki followed, and Bon followed her, enjoying the impact of his feet against the soil because that grounded him, relishing the burning in his lungs as he drew shallow, fast breaths because that told him he was still alive and striving to remain so.

  Beyond the ruins the landscape changed, becoming less uneven and easier to navigate. Easier for them, too, Bon thought, and he risked another glance back.

  Three Skythians stood atop one of the ruins, slouched now and unmoving as they watched the escapees fleeing across the fields. Bon had seen gargoyles similar to these on the taller Fade churches of New Kotrugam, statues of Kolts cast into the walls of godliness to evoke the power of faith over faithlessness. One of them stood straighter as if he or she had heard a noise, turned its head, and—

  Bon tripped and sprawled, grunting as he stumbled against a fallen tree trunk and struck it with his left shoulder. He rolled and came to rest on his back. Leki pulled him up again.

  ‘Juda’s not slowing.’

  They stood, Bon shaken, and Juda was sprinting away from them.

  ‘Don’t look back!’ Juda said. He’d shifted his direction slightly, and now ran even faster. ‘Every … moment counts. Got to get … somewhere.’

  They sprinted side by side after Juda. He led them across the undulating fields, places where perhaps the residents of the ruined village they had just left had once grown crops and tended their cattle, but which now were wild. Small creatures scurried through the grass away from them, heard but unseen. Startled birds took flight. Bon’s heart thundered with exertion and fear, surprise and excitement. Memories of his son came unbidden and with a flaming intensity. But the timescale of these memories was confused. Because I always want him with me, Bon often thought. Because I never want to let him go.

  ‘Ahead,’ Juda gasped. Even he was panting now. ‘Those trees … we need to get in there before … they see us.’

  ‘Red fruits?’ Leki asked, and Bon saw the trees she meant – short, squat, branches heavy with what from this distance looked like an abundance of red apples.

  ‘Not fruit,’ Juda said. ‘Run.’

  The trees grew in a wide clump at the edge of the river’s flood plain, and beyond the copse Bon could see the hillside rising out of the valley, speckled with rocky outcroppings and swathes of purple and brown heathers. As they closed on the trees he risked another glance back, and they had run so far that it took him a few moments to place the ruined village.

  ‘Hurry!’ Juda said. He was beneath the first few trees now, leaning against a trunk and looking around in a panic, and Leki joined him, pressing her forehead against a tree and breathing hard.

  Bon walked backwards towards them, scanning the valley floor until he made out the humps of the tumbled village. The three Skythians were still there, stick figures atop one of the humps. If he hadn’t known what they were he’d have thought them bushes or trees.

  They fell out of sight, as if startled.

  And then he saw the slayers.

  He dropped to the ground and crawled backwards beneath the tree canopy, only standing when he was well within their shade.

  ‘They’re so fast,’ he said softly. And they were. They seemed to be outrunning their shadows, loping across the grassland like the red lyons Bon ha
d seen in captivity in New Kotrugam. From this distance it was difficult to make out any detail, but they moved with an inhuman gait. They pounded the ground with heavy feet, as if it too was a target.

  ‘Find sticks,’ Juda said. ‘The longer and thicker, the better.’

  ‘We’re going to fight them with sticks?’ Bon said.

  ‘No. Here.’ Juda lobbed a stick at him, and Bon snatched it from the air, wielding it and feeling like all the gods’ fools in one.

  ‘Those aren’t fruits,’ Leki said. She’d been looking up, not across the plain at their pursuers, and now Bon followed her gaze.

  ‘Stark blight eggs,’ Juda said. He found another stick and handed it to Leki, who took it without looking. ‘I was once close to the Engine I told you about, and I credit the worst pain of my life with driving me to where it lay hidden. One of these …’ – he nodded at one of the shiny red eggs, hanging very much like fruit, but spiked for protection and slightly opaque. There was something moving inside – ‘… burst against my cheek. The thing inside slithered down my neck and got caught in my collar, and by the time I plucked it out and threw it over the cliff it had stung me enough times to drive me mad. When I regained consciousness I was on the beach, close to—’

  ‘Fuck the Engine for now,’ Leki said. ‘What do we do here?’ She was looking past Bon urgently, and he glanced over his shoulder. He could differentiate between the male and female slayers now. Evil and ugly in different ways.

  ‘They’re weak and disorientated when they emerge,’ Juda said. ‘But that doesn’t last for long.’ He knocked one of the bulging red eggs with his stick, and when it split open he ran.

  Bon had an instant to see what came out, and to try and make out what it was. He’d never heard of stark blights, and the glimpse he caught gave him few clues as to what species they might be. There was a flutter of what could have been wings, the snap of a beak or claws, the sinuous remnant of a neck or body. Pale red, streaked purple, fluid accompanied it to the ground as it slipped from its egg, like a haze of gas easing it down. Moments after it hit the grass it gave a cry or a growl, like serrated metal grinding across stone, and then Bon was following Leki and Juda into the trees.

  They ran line abreast, careful not to stray into each other’s paths. The eggs were everywhere, and the problem wasn’t so much aiming as avoiding them with other parts of their bodies. They hung heavy and low from some of the lower branches, and Bon had no wish to touch them with his hands or bare forearms, or his face. He watched the ground for obstructions, swung the stick, felt it striking branches and leaves and eggs, saw the things falling from the corner of his eye, and ran on, listening to their deep scratching calls as they stirred behind him.

  They reached a clearer area where a rough circle of stones surrounded a flat rock. Whatever it had been was long lost to antiquity, but Juda paused and turned, eyes wide as he looked past Bon and down through the woods. Bon and Leki followed his gaze.

  The woods sloping downhill to the plain seemed tainted red. The air hung heavy with it, a drifting mist that was staining trees and lower plants a light pink. Floating through these faint clouds, the stark blights.

  ‘Won’t they just run around?’ Leki asked.

  ‘This close to us, I’m hoping their caution is lessened,’ Juda said. ‘Hoping they’re blinded by …’

  Juda was staring at Bon again, but now his eyes were wider. ‘Keep still! And don’t—’

  Bon felt movement in his hair. He slapped at it with his hand, and the stark blight wrapped filaments around his fingers, stinging the back of his hand, his palm, his wrist, and he could feel its toxins pumping along the veins in his arm, a slick of heat that set fire to his hand and moved quickly up towards his elbow.

  He glared at Juda, trying not to scream.

  Leki came at him, then Juda. Though Bon knew they were talking he could not hear, because his heart was thudding so hard it was all he heard. His treacherous heart, pumping the fury about his body and setting fires.

  Bon dropped his stick and fell, thinking, Not again! And as he felt the power of the scream leaving his throat the pain exploded, and his heart beat him into darkness.

  Chapter 8

  breaking

  Darkness was closing, and Juda felt the familiar madness readying to take him. He had often cursed his heritage and the tainted sleep it gave him, but he would never curse the magic that aggravated the condition. Especially now, when the man he carried might lead him to discover the greatest source of magic there might be anywhere in the world – a dead god, risen.

  Juda had smoked his final scamp cigar, and if they had time he could have searched for more scamp growing between the moist roots of trees. He was sure he had seen some moths fluttering from leaf to leaf as they’d worked their way uphill. But there was no time.

  If they did not reach the gas marshes by nightfall, and find somewhere to hide away, it would be the end. He could not accept the end when he was so close to a new beginning.

  Juda had never been a strong man, but his strength and stamina now came from a bitter determination. Bon lay slung over his right shoulder, head nodding against his back as Juda planted foot after foot and lifted himself up the hillside. Leki was behind him, helping him as much as she could by pushing against his lower back. She was not so much lifting him as propelling him forward, and her effort aided more than he could have hoped. It was the physical contribution that helped, but also the simple fact that they had the same aim. Juda had always been a loner, but he was finding this company pleasing.

  Wrench Arcs craved no company save that of magic. Perhaps, after all, he had some way yet to go.

  They had heard the slayers entering the woodland. Their grunts as they ran, animal sounds like swine being herded to the slaughter. The impact of their wide feet on the leafy ground. Clanking of poorly tied weapons, chafing of leather armour, rasping of breath through mouths crowded with too many teeth. Juda had never learned exactly where the slayers originated, but he suspected some sort of interbreeding programmes by the Spike. Steppe warrior and lyon, perhaps. And there were other rumours.

  They had heard the squeals, and then the screams, and then the impact of falling bodies as the stark blights had fulfilled their natural function of protecting themselves and their kind from attack.

  ‘Not far to the top,’ Leki said from behind him, and Juda knew she was trying to reign in her exhaustion. She could not let herself sound tired when he was carrying Bon’s weight as well as his own. He looked up from the ground directly before his feet and saw that she was right. The trees were much sparser here, though still speckled with stark blight eggs. The ridgeline was close, and beyond that would be the wide plateau that led eventually to a deep ravine. They would descend, follow the flow of the raging river, and then enter the gas marshes spread across its flood plain. They were constantly shifting places, a slow-moving sea of mud and gas, rocky outcroppings and swallow-holes, and he had never dared venture across them before. He’d heard tales from one who had, and she had claimed to be the only survivor of a group of eight. Poison gas and steam to melt the flesh from your face, she’d told him over a bottle of bad wine in one of Vandemon’s saloons, looking into a hazy distance of painful memory. Bottomless marshes, swallow-holes, wasps the size of your head, and wet-wolves that breathe mud and surface anywhere, without warning. They eat bones. They spit out the flesh and blood.

  He’d doubted her stories, suspecting them to be embellished excuses for a badly planned journey. He’d been free to doubt, because he’d had no reason to ever travel within miles of the gas marshes.

  Now they were the only place where they might shake the slayers from their trail. Through the marshes, the slayers would lose their scent to the acidic air. Juda and the others would flee north.

  North, towards Venden Ugane and what the Skythians believed he had found. Though Juda had considered seeking out Venden on his own, to get the boy’s trust it would be best to stick with his father. And with the slay
ers still on their trail, he hoped there was safety in numbers.

  ‘How long will they be down?’ Leki asked.

  ‘Depends how many times they were stung.’

  ‘Bon was only stung once. Maybe they’re dead! Maybe those things have killed them!’

  ‘No,’ Juda said, too exhausted to explain how he knew. The slayers might have died many times before. He’d heard those rumours, whispered in dark saloons, and could not afford to doubt them now.

  ‘You sure we’ll lose them in the gas marshes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Juda gasped. He had to stop, and it seemed that momentum was driving him, because the sudden weight dragged him to his knees. ‘Help me … up.’

  Leki lifted, and Juda considered shifting Bon to his other shoulder. But nothing would be comfortable. So instead he thought about how things had changed, and what might come, and he tried to forget the dangers behind them and the promise of madness the approaching night would bring to him. His nightmares would be bad, so he concentrated on his dreams.

  Every Broker is a selfish beast, Rhelli Saal had told him. Rhelli was one of the first Brokers he’d met in New Kotrugam, and she had become a friend and sometime lover for the short time they’d spent together. How can they not be, when magic is such a personal thing? We join forces and give ourselves a name, but we all want the same thing, and that’s for magic to be ours and ours alone.

  You want that too? he’d asked, looking at her across the sea of bubbles in the giant bath they were sharing.

  Of course, she said.

  But we’re not like the Wrench Arcs. Not like them.

  There’s a difference between selfishness and cruelty. I can be selfish but maintain my morals. Selfish, and like myself.

  They must start like that. He’d been thinking of the Wrench Arcs a lot since being welcomed, cautiously and tentatively, into the Brokers’ embrace. Independent, vicious, cruel, and quite certainly mad, the Wrench Arcs wandered the continent with a shadow of myth and a haze of rumour camouflaging them against being caught. They slipped from darkness to darkness, and only made themselves known when a whisper of magic passed from lip to ear. Then they would come and take it, and whoever might be in their way would suffer.