The Devoured Earth (15 page)

‘I have one last question for you,’ asked Kail of Tatenen. ‘You say you tamed the Old Ones, that you bind them here.’ The tall man’s crown caught the weak sunlight as he nodded. ‘If you’re their jailer, why are you so keen to set them free?’

‘Because while they are chained, I am chained. My existence is tied to theirs. I could be free too, one day.’

Kail nodded his understanding.

The sound of Pukje’s transformation came from behind them, followed by a single sweep of massive wings.

‘Ready when you are,’ said the strange creature.

Sal went to Highson who had finished going through his belongings and now sat staring at his pack with a confused expression.

‘There’s nothing missing,’ he said. ‘What could they have taken?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sal said, more bluntly than he intended. ‘But we have to get moving. I want to get out of here before they change their minds.’

Highson nodded and stood, slipping his pack over his shoulders and tightening the straps. ‘Yes, you’re right. Maybe they’re just playing with us. Maybe they didn’t take anything at all.’

Sal didn’t believe that for a second, but he kept his opinion to himself.

When they went to mount Pukje’s wrinkled, muscular back, Sal noted that Tatenen had disappeared; no point in sticking around, he thought, once the job was done. Still, Sal felt vaguely offended that Tatenen, who wanted him to do so much in the name of those he represented, couldn’t be bothered to at least wish Sal good luck. He figured he would need it.

Once they were all aboard, Pukje ran to the edge of the ancient plateau and leapt off into space. As his mighty wings caught the wind and swept them out across the icy peaks, Sal looked behind him and realised for the first time that the plateau wasn’t part of the mountains at all. It hung unsupported in the air above a steep valley, a single chunk of jagged rock literally ripped out of its own time. The underside of the strange island tapered to a ragged point, like a giant top. Sal imagined it wobbling and tipping as the energy sustaining it began to run out.

Then Pukje was rising, gaining altitude slowly but inexorably with each flap. Their flight wasn’t as vigorous and bone-jarring as the first had been, but Sal still found it hard to concentrate on anything more than making sure he didn’t fall off, clinging desperately despite his rapidly cramping fingers.

A ripple through the Change told him that Kail was trying to contact Marmion. It came several times, striving to get the attention of someone far away and possibly hidden through many hundreds of metres of mountain.

‘I
can’t reach him,’
the tracker eventually admitted to Sal, speaking through the same medium he was using to reach out for his superior. ‘
Do you want to have a go, Sal
?’

’Okay
.’ Sal agreed readily enough, even though he wasn’t certain he could maintain the focus required. Neither did he have any intention of doing exactly as Kail had done. Marmion could be incapacitated or worse. That would explain his silence as readily as the stone separating them.

‘
Skender
?’ he called instead, focussing on the mnemonics with all the will he could spare. ‘
Skender, if you can hear me, just say so
.’

From immeasurably far away came a faint affirmative.

‘
We’re on our way to you. Me, and Kail and Highson. We might have found a way to deal with Yod. Expect us in, um, hang on
…’ He broke off his mental communication to shout a question at Pukje. ‘How long?’ The wind snatched at his words but he hoped the strange creature could hear them. ‘How long until we get there?’

The steady flapping rhythm paused and the broad head twisted back at him. ‘An hour,’ Pukje bellowed.

‘
Expect us in an hour
,’ he relayed to Skender. ‘
Is everything okay there?’

For a moment nothing came. Then a confused signal that might have been an attempt at words rose up out of the background potential.

‘
I can’t quite make you out
,’ Sal told him, straining as best he could to hear more clearly.

‘…
attack… man’kin
...
towers
…’

‘The man’kin are attacking towers?’

‘…
balloon
…’ With one last garbled squawk, Skender reached the limit of his strength.

‘
Don’t worry
,’ Sal sent, trying his best to sound reassuring. ‘
We’ll be there soon and can help you out then, if you need it
.’

A faint echo of farewell came out of the ether, then there was nothing but silence.

Sal relayed the fragmentary information to Kail and Highson, who responded with worries that echoed his own. The suggestion that man’kin were connected to whatever was going on at the top of the mountain only made Sal more worried, not less. Shilly might be with them, voluntarily or against her will. Sal didn’t want her caught up in any action that he might be forced to take.

He tried to keep his worries contained as Pukje flew on. There was no point in talking to the others, even though he would have loved to compare their experiences of the Ogdoad with his own. He simply wasn’t able to maintain his attention. Instead he watched the landscape change the higher they flew. Dusk turned to dark in eerie slow motion around him. Crystalline stars came out in sprays across half the sky, untainted by the moon, and with almost imperceptible slowness the vast bulk of the mountains to the east began to fall away, so the stellar vistas could be viewed in that direction too. Sal hadn’t realised just how used he had become to being able to see only half the sky. The immensity of the heavenly dome made him dizzy.

He thought of Vehofnehu, the Panic empyricist who had disappeared with the glast-infected Kemp shortly before the Swarm’s attack on Milang. What would he have made of the view above him? Would he have seen the events unfolding on top of the mountains? Would he have seen Pukje and the Old Ones intercepting Shilly’s would-be rescuers as they lagged behind the man’kin? And what would he have seen coming next, in the whorls and curlicues that defied Sal’s vaguest interpretation?

The east gained a horizon — an impossibly jagged, perfectly black line that looked like nothing earthly or natural to Sal’s eyes. Pukje spiralled in a broad, rising arc, following invisible updraughts or using sheer strength to gain altitude until they were roughly level with that line. Then he changed pace and began to fly horizontally. Sal could feel Pukje’s massive lungs labouring to suck in enough of the cold, thin air. Even Sal was gasping at such an extreme altitude. The stars felt so close that he imagined Pukje could rise just a little higher and they would fly amongst them. Part of him wished they could, rather than face the uncertainty ahead.

Pukje said something he didn’t quite catch, beyond the words ‘prove’, ‘betray you’ and ‘easier way’.

‘What?’ Sal shouted, feeling a renewal of his earlier fear that Pukje’s motives were far from pure.

‘I said, this should prove something to you. If I was going to betray you, there must have been an easier way.’

Sal managed a laugh. Weak starlight and growing proximity turned the jagged line into a wall of fearsome mountaintops marching across their path. Pukje would just miss them, judging by their current trajectory, although it was hard to measure distances at that hour and in such unfamiliar surroundings.

At times it seemed as though Sal could reach out and touch the approaching wall, while at other times it seemed to be at the very edge of the universe.

Then, suddenly, Pukje was flapping amongst the peaks themselves, following angular valleys across the top of the wall that lay in their path. Sal couldn’t guess what lay on its far side and tried to prepare himself for anything. He didn’t know if the balloon had come this way or followed a different route entirely.

And he couldn’t assume their ride would be a safe one, not after Skender’s mysterious message.

Pukje surmounted a ridge of ice and snow that looked big enough to bury Milang. The mountains became higher behind than those ahead. Only slightly at first, but the transformation was fundamental; they had made it. They were on the far side.

Pukje’s flight began to angle downwards. He flapped less often and began to breathe more easily.

‘Where are Shilly and the others?’ Sal asked, taking advantage of the opportunity to talk.

‘Not far from here,’ Pukje replied. ‘I’ll take you over the area, and then —’

A blast of bright orange light cut him off. The flash of light was so bright that Sal could see everything at the summit of the mountains as though lit by full daylight. Only the colour was wrong, casting the sides of the massive crater he saw in colours of fire and molten metal, while the lake at the centre shone a burnished bronze. Just for an instant, everything was gold and red, even Pukje’s moss-green hide.

Then the orange light went out, and Sal was effectively blind: the after-image was much brighter than the starlight. All he could see were the imprinted images of the crater and its contents. He could clearly see in the oval of the crater the bright speck that had been the source of the light. It seemed to be hanging directly over the lake’s centre.

Pukje twisted in midair and began to flap vigorously in the opposite direction. Sal clung tight in alarm, wondering what the sudden urgency was. Then a wall of air hit them, rushing outwards from the centre of the lake and striking Pukje from behind with all the force of an avalanche. They tumbled as helplessly as a hawk in a hurricane. A roaring sound filled the night. Sal could barely hear himself shouting to Highson and Kail — and himself — to hang on.

The shockwave passed them by and they fell into its turbulent wake. Pukje regained control and pulled out of a dive that moments later would have seen them smack headfirst into the crater wall. A hand gripped Sal’s leg with powerful force, and when he reached down to see who it belonged to he found Highson, his father, clinging on with eyes tightly shut.

Pukje levelled out. Sal groped across his leathery back for Kail, but the place where the tracker had been was empty. Alarmed, Sal reached further, stretching out across Pukje’s heaving flank and straining to catch a glimpse of even the faintest glitter of starlight off pack or clasp.

‘Kail!’ he called. ‘Kail, can you hear me?’

Pukje twisted his flexible neck and fixed Sal with one great eye. Slowly, and with no possibility of misunderstanding, Pukje shook his head.

Sal forced himself to accept the truth — that Habryn Kail had fallen from Pukje’s back during the terrible moments following the flash, and was gone forever.

* * * *

THE TOMB

‘
The First Realm of matter, the Second Realm of

will, the Third Realm of fate
—
what happened

to these facets of human life while the Goddess

slept? Matter and will existed side by side,

companions but not wedded; fate was infinitely

malleable until the Flame burned again.’

A SCRIBE’S BOOK OF QUESTIONS

hilly watched with impotent horror as ghostly black tentacles swarmed out of the roiling surface of the lake and swept across the churned-up shore, seeking anything living, anything at all. Through the spyglass she had identified Skender and the Homunculus walking with Marmion and Rosevear through the small town some distance from the crashed balloon. Their movement seemed to have attracted the thing inside the lake, and they had barely escaped with their lives.

Now the members of the expedition who had remained behind to repair the balloon were fleeing from a similar attack with the help of spectacular Change-working on someone’s part. She clearly discerned Griel and Chu among the fleeing figures. The tentacles were not things of material substance — they passed through buildings and balloon as easily as air — but they had a profound effect on the living. The remaining Panic balloonist lagged behind to finish a last-minute chore. Barely had she laid down her wrench when a sinuous black worm, thicker than her own body was tall, lunged out of the gondola and passed right through her. She dropped lifeless to the ground and the tentacle moved on, seeking new prey.

Shilly’s hands shook as she watched her friends and former companions run for their lives. She was reasonably certain that Sal wasn’t among them, but that didn’t stop her worrying.

‘What is it?’ she asked Vehofnehu. ‘What is that thing?’

‘It’s Yod,’ replied the Panic empyricist, reaching for the spyglass. ‘Part of it, anyway. That’s what we’ve come to stop.’

From high above, the drama taking place on the lake’s shore looked irrelevant, unimportant, but Shilly knew from her visions of the future that that single death she had witnessed could be the first of uncountable numbers. All life on Earth would be extinguished if Yod found the strength to leave the lake and assume its throne in the sky.

Shilly felt as heavy as lead as she contemplated what lay before them. The lake’s surface looked furred, it was rippling so violently, and out in the middle, where the three tower-like structures poked out of the water, the turbulence was particularly strong. Occasionally, dark shapes moved half-seen in the depths, sending low surges back and forth. White breakers lapped against the shore in a sinister parody of the sea.

‘How do you intend to do this?’ she asked Vehofnehu. The more she thought about the plan, the more slippery the plan became.

‘In a little while,’ said Vehofnehu, ‘when the others are safe, the man’kin will make their way down to the balloon. They’ll finish the repairs and make it airworthy. They’re not the best pilots, and they’re heavy to boot, but they can fly well enough to get up here and collect the rest of us. We’ll take the balloon out over the lake to the Tomb of the Goddess, which is where we need to be. At the moment, the Tomb is all that’s keeping Yod at bay — and only just, as you can see. It’s acting like a plug between the Void and this world, keeping Yod confined to the lake and its surrounds. Once we open the Tomb, we’ll have to act fast to wake the Goddess and finish the job.’