by Tim Lebbon
He struggled to sit up, but one of the shapes came in and pressed against his bad shoulder. Its touch was shocking – warm, hard, yet seemingly moulded to the place it had touched so that he felt complete contact. It pushed gently, and Juda could offer no resistance.
He smelled magic on these things. His heart stuttered with shock, and the limbs – four of them now, each independent yet acting together – drew back slightly. He gasped, started breathing more easily. The limbs came close again.
One of them clasped the arrowhead and snapped it off.
Juda screamed. Even though the pain had been muffled by the magical dreg, it came in from the distance and smashed home. His skull rang with it. He flung his head back and screamed again, and then the arrow was grasped from behind and tugged back through his body. Its splintered shaft ripped skin and flesh and scraped bone, and the inside of the Engine suddenly lit up. Juda saw his parents standing there, enacting a familiar argument from his youth before his father’s hand lashed out across his mother’s face; he saw Rhelli Saal, sitting at a table in a tavern and picking up another jug of beer; Bon and Leki watched him, leaning over his bound body as the sun went down behind them. Something in Leki’s eyes made him look twice, but even then he did not see.
Light faded to darkness. True unconsciousness carried Juda away. As he fell, he could feel those limbs tending and fixing him, and the dregs of magic they applied had a touch he had never, ever felt before.
Saving me, he thought. He wondered why.
Venden saw what the once-beating heart of Skythe had become. Where fires had roared and molten rock had flowed, there now lay a frozen landscape of stilled movement. Trapped in a moment, Skythe’s foundations were a creaking, ice-encrusted remnant of what they had once been. Aeon moved slowly through these caverns to memory. And as it did so, it remembered.
Like a human’s final heartbeat, Skythe’s history flipped backward to a time before humanity in an instant. Mountains rose, fought and fell. Seas eroded, volcanoes erupted and built new lands around them, the world turned and became unrecognisable from the world Venden knew, or knew of. Alderia and Skythe were joined as one mass. Rivers were the huge continent’s arteries, and there was no difference to the water if it flowed north or south of where future seas would rise. No distinction between lands, no borders, no false gods.
No gods at all.
Aeon walked the land, and remembered its movement like an adult might recall his or her first steps in the world on their own. Brave and confident, facing fresh possibilities as if they would only ever result in a good outcome, not bad. It passed across ocean floors, stepped through mountain ranges, and here and there were vistas that Venden almost recognised. Forests stretching as far as the eye could see, though these trees were larger than any he had ever witnessed. Mountain ranges shifting beneath colossal, timeless forces, rising and falling like ocean waves slowed a trillion times. Strange creatures the likes of which he had never seen, though in some of them he could perceive features that he might recognise in a million years.
A larger shape, a shadow, passing across a gap between two huge trees. Wings, heavy legs, and what could only have been a face turned his way.
There were lakes of molten rock, coughing frequent geysers that threw fire bombs across the desolate landscape. The land was in flux, birthing the future with every gaseous gasp. Aeon passed across the upheaval on long legs that barely touched, and at the other side stood scores of monoliths of cooling rock that touched the sky, smoking, a couple still glowing. Rain beat down and rose again as steam. Between them, a shape moved back and forth like a snake. This shape was as large as Aeon, its skin scaled and fine. It moved with grace and purpose. Aeon paused before it.
The two ancient creatures conversed. Living Aeon’s timeless memories with it, Venden could understand the importance of the conversation, and the urgency.
The snake-creature went one way, Aeon the other.
Through tumultuous landscapes, close to where a sea was crashing down mile-high cliffs, Aeon paused to touch a rock. The rock was larger than Aeon, and it moved with a fluid grace that belied its solid appearance. Its eyes were golden fires in its rough-cast face. They grew paler as Aeon and it conversed, and then it flowed into the ocean.
Aeon moved on, and its memory followed the journey.
More creatures came and went, as inexplicable as Aeon. What we cannot understand, we call gods, Venden thought. They all had a part in some tumultuous place, and Venden understood that these beings were present at the beginning of history. They observed the shaping of the world, and yet he could not glean whether the world was here because of them, or they were here because of the world. Perhaps that was something no one could never know.
Down in Skythe’s frozen depths, Aeon shivered at these memories, and Venden did not know why. Sadness, or fear?
He remembered with Aeon, wondering what their purpose together might be.
And then Aeon asked him to speak.
Bon woke from nightmares to sparks, and the gentle shushing of water on a lake’s shore.
Beyond the fire Leki sat staring at him. Her contemplative expression did not change, as if she had not even noticed him waking. In her hands she nursed Juda’s pistol.
‘When did you steal that?’ he asked.
‘He dropped it.’ Still her face did not shift. She was neither benevolent nor threatening, just cold. Empty.
‘Thinking about shooting me?’
‘Yes.’
Bon blinked, frowning away that final image of what had been his wife. She fell and died, that’s all, he thought, but of course that was not all. Milian was more than she seemed, he was sure of that now. As was Venden. And as was Leki.
‘But I can’t,’ she continued. ‘Shoot you. I can’t.’ She looked down at the pistol in her hands as if surprised at its presence, then slipped it into her jacket pocket.
‘If you wanted to kill me—’
‘I don’t want to kill you, Bon.’
‘But you’d have shot me yesterday.’
‘If you’d interrupted the racking. But …’
‘What?’ Bon stood, knees clicking. He did not take his eyes from Leki. She’s so beautiful, he thought, an idea about another woman that had not touched him since Milian’s fall.
‘Now we need to move.’ She stood and started kicking soil and dust over the failing fire.
‘Tracking Aeon?’
‘Yes. What else is there to do?’
What else, Bon thought, because he did not know. They had banished him to Skythe with the sense that his aimless life was not moving on, but ending. No hope of progress, no thought to better himself or make good out of bad. Too weak even to consider killing himself, his future had stretched out as an unknown land that he had no desire to explore. Then Leki, and Juda saving him from the slayers, and whispers of Venden, and suddenly he was a new man.
Now, everything had changed once more. Venden was dead. That confused Bon, because his son had been dead to him for years. Their brief reunion had yielded nothing to sate the grief, and Bon was waiting for the mourning to strike in once more, as hard as it had been picking at him since Venden’s disappearance. He’d had no opportunity to know his son.
‘What else?’ Bon said. He turned his back on Leki and walked into the bushes to piss. This morning she was not the woman she had been to him yesterday. Perhaps today he would meet her anew.
And Aeon was abroad, striding somewhere across the Skythian landscape with its aims obscure, its intentions unknown. That terrified him, but excited him as well. Like a ghost from the past, Aeon had returned to haunt the Ald and every lie they had ever told against it.
As he pissed, Bon thought of Leki’s comment that she would have shot him yesterday. If he’d interrupted her strange racking, she would have pulled Juda’s pistol and fired at him. He could not picture her face as she performed that terrible act. But he reminded himself that she was a stranger to him once again.
‘I’m rea
dy to leave,’ Leki said behind him, and Bon thought perhaps he sensed a pleading to her tone. She wants me to go with her, he thought.
Buttoning his trousers, he realised that there really was nothing more for him to do. But his aim in travelling with Leki was suddenly very clear – he would do his best to protect Aeon from the forces Leki was marshalling against it. And not only because of what he believed about it, and magic, and the Kolts. That was a surface reason, but his emotional drive was closer, and deeper.
Venden had become a part of Aeon, and perhaps there was a glimmer of his son still there.
‘I’m ready too,’ he said, returning and smiling at Leki. She smiled back. I could have loved her, he thought. But she had become too much of a stranger to love.
‘I hope you’re feeling energetic.’ Leki started running.
They skirted the lake, and on the other side Leki picked up Aeon’s trail. She jogged into a thick woodland, scarred here and there with cracked and tumbled trees. The fresh flesh of broken trunks glimmered with morning dew, and small mammals and birds congregated around these areas of destruction. They sniffed and sang.
A new day seemed to have imbued Leki with fresh confidence, and she followed Aeon’s trail unerringly through the extensive woodland, never taking the wrong direction even if some footprints were large distances apart. Bon wondered whether she was using any other arcane means to track, but he did not want to know. He followed, and for the whole morning neither of them spoke.
When the midday sun was high overhead and its heat filtered down through the heavy tree canopy, Leki stopped at a stream and filled her water bottles. Bon did the same upstream from her, glancing sidelong at her distorted reflection.
‘We’re being followed,’ she whispered.
Bon resisted the temptation to jump up and turn around.
‘Skythians. Since mid-morning.’
‘How do you know?’ he said.
‘I just do. I hear them, but I only know one word in three. Their language isn’t as I’ve been taught. It’s regressed more than we believed.’
‘Or it’s advanced,’ Bon said, believing that much more likely. ‘More than you Ald bastards know.’
‘They’re no threat,’ Leki said, but her doubt was obvious.
‘We’re following their risen god that our ancestors murdered,’ Bon said. ‘Of course they’re no threat.’
Leki did not respond, but she sat beside the stream and leaned forward, feet and hands in the flow of water. It parted and splashed around her limbs, and Bon could see the webbing between her fingers catching water as she stretched her digits. She closed her eyes.
Bon stood and stretched, casually looking back the way they had come. He could see no signs of pursuit, but he did not doubt Leki’s observation. He tried to put himself in those Skythians’ place – their murdered god risen, perhaps a surprise to them, or perhaps the manifestation of a prophecy; and two strangers following in the god’s footsteps.
‘The word is out,’ Leki said softly. Bon turned, and she was pulling herself from the stream, dragging herself through the short grass as if dreadfully weakened by her efforts. She sat up and stared at him, eyes wide. ‘They know of Aeon. All of them. All of Skythe.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘The waters are rich with the rumour.’ She stood unsteadily, wiping her hands on her coat as if they’d been dipped in something unpleasant. ‘How can word have spread so quickly?’
‘You have your methods,’ Bon said.
‘But not the Skythians. They’re regressed, less capable than the most distant Outers.’
‘Or more capable than the Ald knows. And able to hide it.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Not after all this time. They’re scratching an existence, almost animals. There’s no intelligence there any more. We’d have known.’
‘You’ve studied Skythe?’
She blinked at him softly, and he could see her thoughts turning. ‘A little.’
‘A little,’ he echoed. ‘Your Ald arrogance is …’ He shook his head, unable to verbalise his frustration, his growing hatred. ‘Can’t you admit for a moment that you might be wrong about these people?’
‘But they were all but wiped out.’
‘By you!’ Bon said. ‘But there are always survivors. Even from what you did to them. Survivors with a whole history behind them. Wise enough to keep low. Keep out of view.’
‘We should go.’ She looked past him, back the way they had come. ‘We should be careful.’
Bon followed her across the stream and deeper into the forest. He soon stopped looking behind him, because the Skythians would only be seen if they wanted to be seen. He wondered if they knew what was coming, with the Spike and Leki’s Arcanum.
He wondered if he should tell them.
* * *
It grew colder throughout that afternoon; then, when they stopped to hunt and eat, it started to snow.
They had been following Aeon’s tracks all day, but a sense of hopelessness had settled over Bon. He could see the prints, acknowledge that they were going in the right direction, but still he became convinced that Aeon would not be found unless it desired to be found. There seemed to be no direction to the routes they were following. They left the forest and climbed a steep hillside, emerging onto a ridge between two hills. Before them, a slope of shale led down into a deep, dark valley, and they followed the great slicks of fresh shale movement that Leki said marked Aeon’s progress. In the valley there were squat trees, home to angry monkeys that threw spiked nuts at the invaders, and crawling plants that seemed attracted by their body heat. After some time searching, Bon followed Leki back up another slope of shale to the ridge they had only just left. There seemed to be no purpose to the valley visit.
And that set Bon wondering as to Aeon’s purpose, and whether something so removed from humankind would even have one. Leki and the Ald feared revenge, but perhaps that was because that would be exactly what they would seek were they Aeon. Bon found contemplation of its godhood difficult; it was a physical presence, he had seen it, he could have touched it, and so it had a biology and a build that made it a creature. Yet it was so far removed from everything he had ever known that its intentions must surely be obscure to mere human consideration.
They should simply leave it alone. But it was not in humanity’s nature to do so. Anything wonderful would be subject to scrutiny. And something wonderful to one person would be horrible to another.
They crossed the ridge and made camp on a hillside sheltered from the strengthening wind, and while Leki hunted for their supper, Bon built a fire.
In the crackle of flames, he heard the voice of his son.
North and down into the cold.
Bon gasped, leaning forward and scorching his hand on the sparking embers. He jumped back. The voice had carried such weight and had come from so far that he had no doubt, from that first moment, that it had been his son communicating with him. This was no hallucination brought on by the exertions of his journey.
North and down into the cold.
Leki returned with a rabbit, throwing Bon a curious glance as he splashed water onto his hand. The burn was mild, hairs scorched into blackened nubs.
‘Knot in the wood popped,’ he said, and she started skinning and gutting her kill. She had snow settled on her eyebrows.
They ate, then Bon sat back against a tree and tried to shelter. The snow was heavier now, dulling sound and turning the night ghostly still. It settled almost immediately, the ground already cold, and soon there was a good covering. The fire spat and sizzled as heavy flakes died above it.
Bon and Leki did not speak. He could sense Leki’s frustration as she sat away from the fire on a large boulder, watching for their Skythian pursuers. There had been no sign of them all day.
I know where to go, he thought. And with that came another realisation – that Venden was of Aeon now, and Aeon was directing him. He shivered, and it was nothing to do with t
he weather.
‘I think we should go north,’ Bon said early the next morning. The snow continued, and it was now up to their ankles. It was colder than he had ever known it. Wrapped up in all the clothes he had, still Bon wished for more.
Leki seemed unconcerned about the weather; though she wore fewer layers than him she did not shiver, and neither did her face appear chilled. Bon almost asked whether it was due to her Arcanum training. But there was something in her eyes he did not like.
‘Why do you say that?’ she asked.
‘Just a thought. It seems somewhere it might go, and—’
‘But the trail was leading west, generally. Diversions here and there, like the shale valley. But west.’ She grew cold, suspicious. Maybe she could smell the lie on him. More Arcanum training, he thought, smiling softly.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Nothing,’ Bon said. ‘Everything’s sad, and sometimes the only reaction to that is to smile. I thought perhaps we … you and I …’ He shrugged. ‘And now you seem ready to kill me at a moment’s notice.’
‘I don’t want to kill you, Bon. I just want everything to work out well. Everything. So why do you want to go north?’
‘It’s just a feeling,’ he said. ‘Just an idea that … Aeon has been down for six hundred years. Now it’s back, and it might know that south is the sea, and those communities. It’ll want peace. Solitude. North is unknown to us, but perhaps not to Aeon.’ It did not sound convincing, and he could see that she did not believe him.
But she did not appear eager to torture out the truth.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said. ‘Maybe with something like this, following a hunch is better than following trails that might lead nowhere.’
‘The trails feel cold to me already.’
Leki stared at him for a moment, and Bon guessed she had felt the same. ‘Worth a try,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’ll pick up a fresher trail. But first, breakfast.’