The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  When he woke up, the air was smoky and close but surprisingly cool, much as it had been in the dream. Someone had loosened his clothing, making it easier to breathe. His cheek rested on a furry, animal-smelling surface that, when he opened his eyes, turned out to be some sort of skin. Three fist-sized crystalline lanterns cast a still, sterile light across rough-hewn ceilings and walls. The chamber was one of several linked by broad circular portals much taller than him. On the walls and in some of the portals hung ornate decorations of woven multicoloured cloth. He wondered if they were charms of some kind, even though the patterns rang no bells with his extensive memory.

  A deep black silhouette drifted across his vision. ‘If your eyes are open,’ said the twins in unison, ‘then you must be awake. That's an improvement.’

  Skender groaned and lifted his head. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘The shelter, in the caves. Orma took us here after you blacked out.’

  ‘How—?’

  ‘We carried you. Don't worry. We won't tell Chu.’

  Skender flushed. He had a bad enough reputation as it was, always tripping over or freezing up in a crisis. But he supposed he had done better than usual by giving Chu time to reach safety in the caves before passing out.

  ‘Rosevear went with Orma and Marmion to find them,’ the twins explained when he asked about the others. ‘You seemed like you might recover after a bit of a snooze.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Did they leave? Not long. How you tell time down here is a mystery. They'll be a while, anyway. Orma said he'd take the back tunnels, to be safe.’

  Skender rested his head on the fur and let his eyes drift shut again. He felt so tired, but he didn't want to lie around uselessly while everyone else did the work.

  ‘We've met some more survivors,’ the twins told him. ‘They're actual Ice Eaters, straight out of Marmion's story.’

  ‘Really? They're not just something to frighten kids with?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Tell me about them. What are they like?’

  ‘If you open your eyes all the way,’ said a new voice, ‘you'll see one.’

  His eyelids flickered. Sitting opposite him, where the twins had been a moment ago, a woman of middle years squatted on her knees with her broad, strong hands crossed in front of her. She wore skins with fur poking out of the collar and sleeves, and her face was handsomely lined. Long grey hair hung in a dense plait as far as her waist over a loose shawl of knitted string and thread that draped from her shoulders. It wouldn't provide much warmth, Skender thought. A sign of rank, then.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, sitting up so quickly his head spun, ‘I didn't know you were there.’

  ‘Clearly.’ A cautious smile danced across her features. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Yes. Mostly.’

  ‘Good. Orma told me what you did to save your friends. You're smarter than you look.’ Again the smile came and went. ‘I can offer you some tea, Skender, if you'd like.’

  ‘I would like,’ he said, sensing that she was taking the measure of him, bit by bit. ‘You know my name. What's yours?’

  ‘People call me Treya.’

  ‘Is that what I should call you?’

  She nodded. ‘If you like.’ From a nearby hearth she produced a kettle and poured him a small bowl of dark-coloured tea. ‘I don't come from the same village as poor Orma. No one else survived there, apart from him. I come from the east, from further around the lake. The Death visited my home during the daylight hours, so we had some warning. Not enough, though. Out of one hundred people, only three survived. If I hadn't been dragged away, I probably would've died too.’ Her expression was deeply funereal. No trace of a smile now.

  ‘Did you lose someone close to you?’ Skender asked, warming his bare hands on the bowl.

  ‘In a village of that size,’ she said, ‘everyone is close to everyone.’ With a smooth economical gesture, she brushed at imaginary dust on her lap.

  ‘I'm sorry,’ Skender said. ‘I really am.’

  ‘We are used to hardship. Our lands are unforgiving and the sun cold. The Song of Sorrow is a familiar tune to our ears. But we endure, and we continue to endure, despite the creatures you call devels. They roam the mountains freely, as you have discovered to your detriment. We are too few to keep them in check, as we used to.’

  ‘If there's anything I can do—’

  ‘Your strange friend here tells me that you've come to fight the Death. You Sky Wardens and Stone Mages and foresters and Panic—and maybe other things, about which we know little. I ask that you let us help you, to honour those who have fallen.’

  Skender covered his uncertainty by sipping from his tea. The steam made him blink. ‘Have you asked Marmion? Sky Warden Eisak Marmion, I mean; he was one of the ones who came here with me. He's our leader.’

  ‘I did ask,’ Treya said. Her eyes were as hard as flint. ‘I'm not sure he trusts me. He wouldn't tell me what he had planned.’

  Skender could see how Marmion might have given her the wrong impression. He didn't take on new allies lightly.

  ‘Maybe he doesn't have a plan yet,’ he said. ‘I'll ask him when he comes back.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Treya nodded, and stood smoothly. ‘Whatever you do, if it doesn't succeed, my people are certain to die.’

  She was gone before he could respond, striding out of the chamber with a rustle of leather and skins. He watched her go, feeling as though he'd been hit by something large and fast-moving. Treya unnerved him, although he couldn't put his finger on why. She looked at him as though he was a problem to be solved.

  The fact that, if their mission didn't succeed, everyone would die didn't cheer him up even slightly. And he still didn't know how Chu was faring, far away through this labyrinth of caves.

  The twins were watching him closely, an oddly bulbous shadow perched on a rough cushion in one corner. The light of the crystals barely seemed to touch them.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We were just wondering,’ Hadrian said, ‘whether it would have been easier to know our world was ending in advance than just have it happen to us out of nowhere.’

  That put Skender's problems in stark perspective. Before him were two people who had already lost, not just a village and a few friends, but an entire world. It was hard to imagine what that world must have been like. In talking to the twins during their long ascent, Skender had learned more about that world than anyone had from The Book of Towers. He could see how that world had evolved into the present world after the dramatic rupture of the near-Cataclysm, a thousand years or more ago. But the deaths of so many billions of people he could not imagine. His mind and heart automatically rejected that notion as too awful, and therefore untrue.

  Yet in the twins’ heavy gaze, Skender saw a weight of grief and knowledge greater than any he could bear. That discouraged any scepticism he might occasionally indulge.

  ‘Who did you lose?’ he asked them.

  The twins froze inside their artificial body. Skender almost regretted asking the question, but he knew that the only way to get the twins to talk sometimes was to confront them directly.

  Still, it took them a long time to answer, and Skender waited out that time with a growing uneasiness, utterly unable to fathom what was going on in the Homunculus's deep black head.

  Where to start? asked Hadrian with a bitter laugh, and Seth knew exactly what his brother meant. Still, he was the first to try.

  ‘Her name was Ellis Quick. We met her in a place called Vienna. She—’

  He stopped there. Talking about her prompted a hot feeling of shame and resentment. Reminiscing with Skender about those times brought back memories he would rather have left dormant, memories mulled over too many times already and pushed to the back of their entwined minds to rot.

  Surprisingly it was Hadrian who voiced the truth. ‘She loved us both, I think, but we fought over her. We were idiots. That was when Yod made its move while the three of us were separ
ated. Seth and I caught up with her again in different places, different ways—or thought we had.’ Hadrian shuddered; his memory of being attacked by the draci in Ellis's corpse flooded them both with revulsion. ‘But she was betrayed too, in the end. By herself—her true self. She was actually one of the Sisters of the Flame, the guardians of the entrance to the Third Realm. She had been reborn in order to be closer to us, to be part of the Cataclysm as it happened. She showed us a glimpse of this future, the one we went into the Void for. Then she let us go.’

  Seth remembered that much perfectly well.

  Will we see you again? he had asked her.

  That's what Hadrian asked me in Sweden, she had said instead of answering. I'm as decided now as I was then. The Flame had flared, signalling the opening of the gateway and the coming of the end. To the two of them, she had said: Boys, I set you both free.

  Free? Seth thought now with no small sense of irony. They had spent a millennium pondering what had happened in Sheol, until their memories had become little more than motor reflexes, twitching uselessly in response to stimuli that no longer existed. The revelation that Ellis had been much more than she appeared to be had been as much a shock to her as to them, but that didn't ease the vague feeling that she had betrayed them. Used them. And to what end? To delay the inevitable? She had told them nothing about how to get rid of Yod. She had left them beached at the end of their long journey, as helpless as stranded whales with nothing left to do but flounder and die in a hostile, alien world. If she'd only given them a hint, a single clue regarding what to do next…

  ‘We don't know what happened to her,’ he and his brother said in unison. ‘She escaped the destruction of Sheol, though. We're pretty sure of that, but what happened after that, we can't say. We were stuck in the Void.’

  ‘Did you say “Sheol”?’ asked Skender.

  The twins nodded.

  ‘There's no mention of any Ellis Quick in The Book of Towers,’ Skender explained, ‘but something called Sheol does appear. It's referenced in some of the oldest fragments, and comes up again later after a discussion concerning legends and stories handed down after the Cataclysm.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Hadrian. ‘Who wrote them?’

  ‘The earliest fragments were written by a man known only as “the Sinner”.’

  ‘Why was he called that?’

  Skender shrugged. ‘He was a murderer or something. I don't really know. No one does. But his stories are the ones that most closely match your memories, so I'm inclined to think that he knew what he was talking about.’

  ‘What does he say about Sheol?’

  ‘Uh. Let's see.’ Skender thought for a moment. ‘That it was broken in the final days of the old world, and rebuilt in the form of a tomb.’

  ‘A tomb for whom?’

  ‘The Goddess, I guess. Scholars have looked for this Tomb for centuries and never found it, so most think it nothing but another legend. Like the Goddess herself.’

  A strange feeling began to stir in Seth's chest. ‘What does the Sinner say about her? This Goddess of yours.’

  ‘Heaps. He calls her his “redeemer” and claims that she charged him personally to write down her message: “You must take it to the world in my name,” he wrote, “and deliver the ones I love from oblivion.” She helped put the world back together after the Cataclysm, you see, so without her and her message, there might have been none of her people left for you to save, now.

  ‘In fact, she had something to say about the future, now I think of it. “The sleepers will one day awake, and the world will know of them.” Do you think that might be you? You were kind of asleep, I suppose. “Who can know what might be undone when the quick returns for the dead?”’

  ‘That's an odd turn of phrase,’ said Hadrian thoughtfully, and Seth knew what was clicking into place in his brother's mind.

  The Sinner, said Seth. Ron Synett.

  Of course. And Ellis is the Goddess.

  Does that make us the ones she loves?

  The possibility reverberated through the Homunculus like a shockwave.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Skender.

  ‘We're idiots,’ the twins said together. ‘Idiots. You and us and everyone who ever wrote this stuff off as a legend. Everything happened just as he said. And that means everything's going to happen just the way she said.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ellis—and she's no more a Goddess than we are.’

  Skender's eyes opened wide. ‘Our Lady of the Eye, the Mistress of the Veil, the Three in One—’ His voice was hushed.‘” The world will not forget the deeds of She Who Walked the Earth, nor of those who walked with Her: Shathra the Angel, who saved Her from the ceaseless champing teeth of the Underworld; Xolotl the Penitent and Quetzalcoatl the Slave who both died, each at the side of the other, during the Dissolution of the Swarm; the ghosts Anath and Megaira, who whispered advice in Her sleep; and the unnamed murderer She forgave, and whose words She blessed.”’

  ‘He said this?’ asked the twins, jointly reeling from so many familiar names. Xol and his brother: dead. Ellis's two mystical sisters: ghosts. Ron Synett: a redeemed prophet from the other end of time. ‘This so-called Sinner?’

  Skender nodded.

  My god, whispered Hadrian directly into Seth's mind.

  Wrong gender, little brother. He felt lightheaded. Ellis did leave us instructions, after all. We've just been too stupid to listen to them.

  The look of shock drained from Skender's face and was replaced by a growing sense of alarm. His eyes took on an unfocussed look that the twins had learned to recognise. Skender was receiving a message from someone through the Change.

  ‘What is it?’ they asked him. ‘What's going on?’

  The young mage blinked. ‘That was Marmion. We have to get moving.’

  ‘Why? Is it Yod?’

  ‘No. It's something else entirely. He's found the others, but they can't come here. The balloon's under attack. If it's destroyed, we may never get home!’

  ‘The Gods claimed that nothing preceded them.

  That was but one of their many lies.’

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 12:44

  There was no possible way to talk, clutching as he was to Pukje's leathery back while the winged imp flew up the endless mountainside; barely did Sal open his mouth when the furious, icy wind snatched the breath right out of it. Each crack of the powerful wings sounded like a drumbeat. Muscles as large as tree-trunks flexed and writhed down Pukje's spine, shaking Sal from side to side. He concentrated on staying put.

  At brief moments during their long flight, Pukje glided with wings taut and outstretched, the tension vibrating through him as he skimmed the turbulent air, tipping unpredictably from side to side. Then, Sal would open his eyes a crack and look at the landscape around them. Mountains, always mountains, with occasional glimpses of the clouds below—although sometimes it was hard to separate the two. Snow and ice became increasingly common the higher they ascended, until every vista seemed a bizarre construction of random lines drawn jaggedly against white. They had come so far so quickly he could barely believe it. After so many days struggling like ants, they now soared higher than any bird.

  Looking behind him, Sal could see Highson and Kail stretched flat like him against Pukje's flexing spine, gripping folds of dry, wrinkled skin and tied with safety lines to a cable fixed by Kail around the creature's flexible neck. Apart from that small precaution, they were completely at the mercy of their bizarre guide. Sal had no doubt that Pukje could shake them off at any point during their ascent and there would be nothing he could do to avoid it. He had tried probing the creature using the Change, but Pukje was utterly impervious to him. Every overture slipped away like a needle across glass.

  After a small eternity, the pitch and rhythm of Pukje's flight changed. His wings cupped the air with short, rapid flaps and his body tipped from horizontal to nearly vertical. Sal snatched a glimpse of the mighty tail whipping back and forth behi
nd them, acting as a counterweight to steady the creature's slowing flight. Below, almost within reach of Pukje's clutching talons, naked earth slid into view, startlingly brown against the snowy backdrop.

  They landed with a rolling thud. Pukje took three momentum-absorbing steps, then stopped. Highson's groan was clearly audible against the sound of the creature's mighty lungs bellowing in and out. Kail rolled over and tugged at the rope around his waist. Sal relished the relative stillness and the surety of the ground beneath them. Every patch of exposed skin was numb from exposure to the cold. His fingers were cramped into claws, and his arms ached. He didn't feel ready yet to test his legs.

  The best he could manage was to raise his head and assess his surroundings.

  They had landed on a plateau—so it appeared at first—that somehow remained clear of ice and snow. Angular brown stone lay naked under the sky, radiating age and something more, something Sal couldn't immediately define. The air felt different over this patch of land: more potent, perhaps. Full of a strange kind of potential that had nothing to do with the Change, but which he recognised instantly, although it puzzled him. Wide cracks spread across the plateau, as though long ago it had been shaken by a powerful earthquake.

  ‘Why have we stopped here?’ he asked, forcing himself to sit up on Pukje's shoulders. There was no sign of Shilly or anyone else nearby. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘You don't know?’ The sound of Pukje's reedy voice had initially seemed at odds with his new bulk, but at close quarters Sal could feel deeper resonances booming out of his massive barrel chest. ‘This is the closest thing to home you'll ever have—you and all those like you.’

  ‘Home?’ He took another look. The dry brown stone did remind him of some of the borderlands he had travelled with his father a lifetime ago, but he had certainly never been anywhere near the mountains before. That, he would have remembered. ‘I don't know what you're talking about. You said you were taking us on a short cut to Shilly.’