The Devoured Earth

by Sean Williams

  ‘What were you doing in the Tomb?’ The man with the bad teeth and white hair pressed his face close to hers. She tried to pull away but the man behind her, the one holding the knife, wrenched her left arm so hard she thought her shoulder might dislocate. ‘Tell me!’

  She shook her head, unable to quell the tears any longer. How could everything have gone so wrong? Why hadn't she trusted her instincts? If only they hadn't gone to the tower. If only…

  The white-haired man turned and spat. Her captor pushed her savagely forward. She stumbled awkwardly on her lame leg and went down as fast and hard as a stuck steer, pain shooting through her hip. It was joined by a nasty jar to her elbow as she landed, and that set her wrenched shoulder singing with pain again. She gritted her teeth.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she hissed, anger cutting through the fear and shock. ‘Who are you people?’

  ‘We're asking the questions,’ said the man with the knife. Under other circumstances, he might have been handsome, with a broad, open face and straight jet-black hair, but he was made ugly by distrust. ‘Tell us what you were doing in the Tomb or we'll bleed you now and save Treya the trouble.’

  ‘Gee, that sounds tempting,’ she snarled back. ‘Tell this Treya of yours how glad I am I got to talk to you two idiots first. It's made my life so much easier.’

  The younger man went to kick her, but white-hair held him back. He squatted down next to her. The stench of his sewn-together skins was powerfully strong.

  ‘You need to understand something, young lady,’ he said. ‘Your life is as good as over unless you start talking. You may not realise it, but the Tomb is off-limits to everyone—and we've had the odd explorer or two through here down the years, trying to get their hands on it. They all failed, because we stopped them. They didn't get past us like you did. Maybe you brought the Death with you in order to do so. That's not going to make you popular with anyone, least of all Treya.’ He raised his ivory knife and moved it so a brittle glow of crystal-light ran across it like honey. ‘If you value your life, if you think we should value it, then you'd better give us a reason to.’

  She nodded slowly without taking her eyes off him and let her face relax into a mask of shocked acquiescence. He seemed satisfied with that, and offered her a hand to help her up. She took it, ignoring the pain of her many bruises and bumps. For a moment the present seemed to overlap the future of her tired, arthritic self, but she shrugged off that sensation too.

  ‘My cane,’ she said, looking around the cave with a pained expression. ‘I have trouble standing without it.’

  White-hair nodded, and his young friend handed it to her.

  The wooden stick wasn't the original one she had brought from Fundelry. That one had been destroyed by Skender during the flood, taking Marmion's hand with it. This one was much more recent, with carvings and charms that were still being familiarised to her touch. Nonetheless, the relief she felt at holding the stick was immense—Sal had imbued it with the same potential as the last one. For emergencies only.

  She brought it down hard on the icy floor, picturing a charm she had learned under Lodo's tuition, long ago. Greenish flame wreathed her and the cane—an illusion only, but an impressive one. Her hair writhed about her head as though filled with snakes. Her eyes glowed a brilliant red.

  White-hair fell back with his hands over his face. The younger one braved the illusion and tried to take the stick from her. She gave the illusory flames some bite, and he retreated, cursing bitterly.

  ‘If you'd asked politely, I would've told you anything you wanted,’ she said. ‘Instead you took me prisoner and threatened me, and I have no doubt you've done the same with my friends. Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you both?’

  ‘Because you can't,’ said a smooth male voice from behind her.

  She spun with the cane raised before her. The flames leapt higher. ‘Don't push me.’

  ‘Be careful, Mannie,’ called white-hair. ‘She's dangerous!’

  ‘Oh, I won't push you,’ said the new arrival, looking at no one but Shilly. He must have been standing outside the cave entrance the whole time. A tall man with big ears and strong features, he didn't flinch from her display. ‘I won't need to. Your lightshow is impressive, but I don't think you can maintain it for long.’

  She sensed white-hair moving behind her, and shifted position to put the wall at her back. That left her in a corner, but she couldn't see what other option she had. The door was blocked. She would have to talk her way out.

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ she asked, poking the end of the cane at him and making his furred collar sizzle.

  ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘Unlike my friends here, I've had some training too.’ His left hand tugged the glove off his right. With fingertips that dripped a steady stream of clear, unnatural water, he pushed the tip of the cane gently but firmly away.

  ‘That's it, Mannie,’ called the younger of her two captors with vicious glee. ‘Take her down.’

  Mannie didn't move. His stare didn't shift from hers. He just waited.

  Goddess take him, she thought. Still, it had been worth a try.

  With only a small amount of effort, she unravelled the charm and let the flames die away. Her hair and eyes returned to normal. The cane came down and touched the floor at her feet. She put both hands on top of it—to signal that they would have to physically take it from her—and leaned her weight back upon it.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mannie. ‘I'm glad that's behind us.’

  ‘Only so long as you people stop threatening me,’ she said.

  ‘We will stop,’ he said with a sharp look at the other two. ‘It's clearly not getting us anywhere—and I'm not sure the end justifies the means, anyway.’

  She thought of the man'kin and the crashed balloon, and everything that had happened in recent hours. ‘We agree on that, at least.’

  ‘Good.’ He didn't go so far as to smile, but there was a humanity in his eyes that went some way towards reassuring her. In white-hair and his young friend she had seen only fright and desperation.

  ‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘What's the Tomb to you? What does it matter who goes there and why?’

  ‘Call it a tradition,’ he said. ‘You might not believe me if I told you the details, but it's important to us. Only one person can order us to open it, and that's the Goddess herself.’

  ‘Order you to open it? So you know how to?’

  Mannie did smile, then, but if anything the warmth retreated from his eyes. ‘Don't think you'll learn that secret from us. You've tried and failed once already, and that's as far as you're going to get.’

  She thought of the giant blue crystal unfolding like a flower and the Holy Immortals stepping inside. He probably wouldn't believe her either.

  Then she remembered the woman who had knocked her down then helped her to safety aboard the balloon. Her mind baulked at accepting the truth even though she knew the woman had to be the Goddess. The only place she could have come from was inside the Tomb. There was nothing twisted about her, as there had been with the malevolent orange giant that had been Yod's servant. She seemed so vigorously alive that Shilly couldn't imagine her allied with something so devoted to death.

  As they had fled the tumultuous activity in and around the tower, before the shockwave that had knocked them out of the sky, Shilly had asked her: What happened? What did we do wrong?

  Nothing and everything. The woman's face had adopted a compassionately pained expression. But it's okay. Honestly. I'm outside where I need to be, and I've closed the Tomb safely behind us. It'll work out if we just keep along this path, right to the end.

  What path? Shilly had wanted to know. As far as she was concerned, the man'kin's plans had resulted in nothing but a hideous debacle. Her head had still ached from where the Goddess had struck her and Vehofnehu had been taut and silent at the controls of the balloon, unable to meet Shilly's gaze. Tom had just stared at the woman as though he couldn't bel
ieve his eyes. There's no path any more.

  Sure there is. Setting Gabra'il free will keep Yod busy long enough for you to work out which way to go next. That's up to you. Just you, not the others. I know you can work it out.

  Then the orange flash had lit up the sky and the air had slapped them hard, and they had lost altitude rapidly, with only one engine working and the gasbag riddled with rips and tears. There had been no time to talk. The ground had loomed up before them, and it had seemed for a moment that they would land safely on an ice shelf near the top of the crater wall. But the ice shelf had collapsed under the weight of the falling craft, and they had been falling again, bouncing and crashing off the ravine walls as they went. The sound had been awful.

  Shilly had lost consciousness for a time and woken to find Vehofnehu leaning over her. He still hadn't spoken, and he didn't break that silence when he showed her where Tom lay under a tangle of gasbag struts, his hair burned completely away and his eyes shut. For an awful moment, Shilly had feared him dead, but a pulse had still stirred in his veins and his lungs still moved. She had wept against his chest for all the terrible things that had and might yet happen.

  The Goddess had been missing. A single line of tracks led through the snow along the ravine, but before Shilly could suggest following them, a dozen warmly clad people had come out of nowhere, not to rescue them but to take them captive. She had been separated from the others and taken to a cave deep in the crater wall, where ice and stone coexisted and the air smelled of rotten eggs. The caves of ice, she had thought on seeing them. Tom's vision had come true. It was no comfort at all to have reached that moment, so long foreseen, when the interrogation of her had begun in earnest. She had seen the dark and hungry thing that wanted to eat them all.

  ‘Where are the others?’ she asked Mannie. ‘I want to see them before I talk to you.’

  ‘Of course you do. I would in your shoes.’ He turned on his heel and gestured for Shilly's interrogators to bring her. Their hands on her shoulders weren't gentle, but at least they were kept in check.

  She was taken out of the ice cave and along a short tunnel. Vehofnehu sat in one corner of a room at its end, watched over by two heavyset guards. He looked up at her, his long face expressionless. The Panic weren't generally good at hiding their emotions, so perhaps he had none left, she thought, and followed an instinct to cross the room and kiss him on the forehead. The natural odour of his skin was as alien to her senses as the arrangement of thumb and fingers on the hand that gripped hers in return.

  When she straightened, she saw Tom on the far side of the chamber, lying next to the door. He was still unconscious despite an apparent lack of injury. His posture was childlike, curled as he was in a loose ball. He looked utterly spent.

  The Goddess wasn't with them, but at least Tom and Vehofnehu were accounted for. That was something. The three of them had survived crash and capture, against the odds, and now only had to convince their captors not to kill them.

  ‘We were trying to save the world,’ she told Mannie. ‘You've seen the towers coming out the lake? Well, they're the vanguard of an invasion that will leave every woman, man and child in this world dead. Yod is…I don't know exactly what it is, but it's on its way and we have to stop it. There are a few of us trying in different ways.’ She wondered with a pang what Marmion's and Sal's groups were up to. Not captured too, she hoped. ‘One of us must succeed, whatever the cost.’

  ‘You're saying that if we stand in your way, we're aiding the enemy of the world.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How inconvenient for you.’ His emotionless smile returned. ‘I want you to tell me exactly what you were doing at the Tomb. No generalisations; no evasions. This is your one chance to avoid the knife that's awaited everyone else who broke our laws.’

  Shilly gripped her cane more tightly than ever. ‘What's the point if you're not going to believe me?’

  ‘I haven't said I won't believe you. Every word you say could be true—and given the last few weeks I'd be a fool not to listen to you. If in the end you still can't convince me…well, at least you'll have told someone. There's a chance your message may still get through after you're dead.’

  ‘Is that supposed to cheer me up?’

  He folded his arms across his chest. ‘Not especially, but if you care more about the world than yourself, you'll start talking.’

  She glared at him. Knowing he was right didn't make it any easier to accept this strange and dangerous duty she had been given. The seers’ plan had gone terribly wrong. The Holy Immortals were caught in the Tomb; the Goddess had stopped Shilly from using the charm and was now missing, without explanation; Sal was far away and possibly facing perils of his own.

  Just you, not the others.

  I know you can work it out.

  Feeling torn and bruised all through her mind and body, she began to talk.

  ‘All things eat; all things are eaten.

  There are no truths greater than these.’

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 8:1

  Seth inched closer to the precipice and peered down. Far below, clearly visible to the Homunculus's superb night vision, was the wreckage of the balloon. Even Highson could see it. Parts of it were still glowing, although not from fire, the twins suspected. The wreckage was almost certainly crawling with the change after the failure of the engines. Like in an old-world aeroplane crash, the fuel had to go somewhere.

  I can't make out any bodies, said Hadrian.

  Me neither.

  That's a good sign, right?

  I guess so, but where has everyone gone?

  I think I can see tracks. We should get down there if we can.

  It looks pretty steep. And the walls are ice, not stone.

  We've fallen further before.

  But what about Highson and Pukje? I don't think flying down is an option.

  Seth glanced at their two companions. Highson stood not far away, craning his neck to see into the ravine. Pukje was still in dragon form, sniffing like a dog at the black scar left by the balloon. They had some climbing gear in Highson's pack, but the bulk of the equipment had been lost with Kail, and the only rope still hung like a collar around Pukje's neck.

  Pukje's stomach rumbled noisily as they stood under the starry sky, waiting for someone to make a decision.

  ‘If you leave it much longer,’ said Pukje, ‘I'm not going to be able to fly you out of here. This form burns a lot of energy and I'm running low as it is. Unless one of you has a sheep or goat handy that I can snack on, I suggest you get moving.’

  ‘We'll go,’ said Seth. ‘You two wait here. We're pretty sure no one's down there, so all we need to do is make sure of that, and then we can move on.’

  Highson nodded. He didn't look entirely happy with the solution, but he didn't argue either.

  ‘If you find any supplies…’ Pukje said.

  ‘Don't worry. We'll be back shortly with anything edible we can carry.’

  The winged beast huffed and dipped his head. The rumbling, if anything, grew louder.

  The twins chose a section of ravine wall that looked the least destabilised after the partial collapse of its ice ceiling. The ice was jagged and offered plenty of handholds, especially for someone with four hands and four feet. They had never been particularly good at rock climbing in their former life, beyond the occasional experiment in a gym, but even at night and under icy, slippery conditions, they made good speed.

  When they were halfway down, however, they froze. A strange sound echoed up the ravine, growing louder with every second. It sounded like a horse galloping, but a horse as heavy as an elephant and with a marked limp. Seth leaned out from the icy wall and craned the Homunculus's neck to see below. They stayed completely still as the source of the noise came closer.

  A peculiar shape issued from the narrow end of the ravine: a giant man'kin with three legs, a tapering head and a conical tail. It lumbered towards the wreckage, its heavy footsteps on
ly partially muffled by the snow. A humanoid shape sat astride its back, and for a moment Seth thought they were looking at another Homunculus. Its skin was perfectly black, apart from its tattoos, and there was a certain glassy sheen to it. Seth had heard sufficient descriptions in the previous days to guess the identity of both creatures.

  The Angel and the glast were abroad together. As pairings went it was odd and unexpected, but very little surprised the twins these days. They watched as the pair neared the wreckage, fully expecting them to gallop by, unconcerned about the fate of ordinary people. Instead the Angel slowed and came to a halt by the crumpled gondola.

  The glast made a sound like a boiler hissing. Hadrian's jaw clamped shut. Seth, who had been about to call out a greeting, quickly swallowed the urge. The hiss echoed horribly down the ravine, meeting and combining with itself until it sounded like a dozen of the creatures were down there, not one. Above, neither Highson nor Pukje drew attention to themselves, although Seth was certain they were watching. There was something decidedly sinister about the glast and the Angel's sudden appearance.

  The glast dismounted from the Angel's high back and strode fluidly to the wreckage. Red heat slid off it like water, making it shine. The Angel pointed at a patch of wreckage with its blunt snout, and the glast looked in that direction. It nodded once, then rummaged among the bent and charred struts of the gasbag. With impressive strength, it snapped off one of the struts and weighed it in its hands. Satisfied, it walked to the patch of wreckage the Angel had indicated and swung the makeshift club high above its head.

  Seth strained to see. The club came down once with a solid crack, then a second time. It was too dark to see what the glast was hitting, but it definitely wasn't flesh. A third time the club swung. A fourth.

  Something tumbled into the snow, and the glast nodded in satisfaction. Throwing the club away, it rummaged through the debris then straightened with something roughly football-shaped in its hands. The Angel nodded too, and came around so the glast could mount again. With the object tucked securely under one arm, the glast climbed onto the back of its strange mount.