Part 8 (1/2)

Without Juda, the slayers would have butchered him if he'd even reached that beach. Without Leki, Bon might well have let them.

Bon looked back the way they had come. The river whispered behind them, splas.h.i.+ng now and then as sharp fish leaped at the sky. Beyond, the hillside they had descended looked innocuous enough. But when he looked up to the ridge and tried to spot where they had crossed, he could not escape the idea that there was constant movement up there. He squinted and s.h.i.+elded his eyes, even though the cloud cover reduced the sun to a smudge. The movement was too far away to focus on, and too uncertain to trust. It was as if the hillside was breathing, or shrugging, or trying to s.h.i.+ft closer or further away. He might be seeing slayers reaching the summit and hurrying after them, or he might not.

And then the fear of those slayers struck him again, the terror rich and heavy. He'd seen that terrible murder on the beach, but now he projected it onto himself, and the sheer unfairness of it was staggering, the taking of his life when that right should only be his. Until recently to Bon, death would have meant the end of the pain of loss, but now it was the end of hope. Because sheltering behind the grief from his dead wife and missing, probably murdered, son, there had always been a glint of hope that he might continue into the future.

Coming here, meeting Leki, had exposed it.

He turned and sprinted after Leki, and as he caught up with her Juda was waving to them from beside a mound of tumbled stones.

'Here!' Juda said. 'We can rest here, for a while. There's things for you to see. And someone I have to meet.'

'But we have to run!' Bon said.

'Yes,' Juda agreed. 'But I must see someone.'

'Who is it?' Leki asked.

Juda looked away, scratching at his cheek. 'Just ... a man.' He chuckled. 'We can't get where we're going without his directions, but ... he'll see no one but me. I'll be back soon.' He left them there, ducking away between the mounds and quickly disappearing into the landscape.

'What's wrong with him?' Leki asked, then when she turned to Bon her eyes opened wide. 'What's wrong with you?'

'I'm afraid,' Bon said. His honesty made him naked. Leki only paused for a moment, then came to him and squeezed his shoulder.

'We're in Juda's hands,' she said. 'Let's take a look around.'

'Maybe he's running on his own,' Bon said. They knew Juda hardly at all, and could trust him even less. 'They might be closer than we think, and he could have ...'

'He wouldn't have brought us this far if he was going to give us up,' Leki said. 'Besides, I'm starting to think we mean more to Juda than he's letting on. I don't think he rescued us out of sheer benevolence.'

'Aren't you afraid?' Bon asked. Weakness had always haunted him, whether or not others saw him in it.

'Down to the tips of my toes,' Leki said. She blinked, and her amphy's clear film swept across her eyes.

They moved past the mound of stones, and as they did so Bon made out a vague order to them. They were fallen, but the mound's base maintained a regular shape, and some of those stones not smothered by moss or purple shrubs exhibited square corners, and even some faded sigils. History swamped this place.

'A door,' Leki said, pointing. Past a huge fallen tree, beyond a copse where a flock of birds seemed to be weaving back and forth between branches in an endless spiral, stood another old building, its roof and one wall collapsed. The doorway was swathed in creeping plants, but some of them were withered and dry, while others were green and lush.

'We should wait for Juda,' he said. 'Ready to run.'

'He said there was stuff we'd like to see,' Leki said. 'And we'll hear him come back. We can't go any further without him, and he won't be long. Come on. Let's see if anyone's in.'

Juda did not have to travel far in order to try and feed his addiction.

He had left his last dreg of magic behind and, ever since, a chill had set in him, a hollowness of loss which he knew he must fill soon, or die. Magic was his heartbeat, his breath. It had become his life.

Away from Bon and Leki, he leaned against a fallen Skythe building and took in several shuddering breaths. Talking to them about magic had gone some way to holding back the grief, but the deep emptiness was growing. Unless he filled it soon, he did not think he could maintain his fragile hold.

I've been just holding on for years, he thought. The promise of a big find had always driven him on, and now there was something about Bon and Leki that hinted at greater things to come. They smelled different, and Bon especially had depths that might hold secrets even he did not know. His name on the list of deportees marked for execution, and his crimes, had cried out at Juda.

And here, he hoped to find out more.

He moved away from the other two, a.s.sembling his pistol as he went and loading the pressurised steam valve. He would need the weapon if and when the slayers caught up with them, but it would likely do little good. Here was where it might benefit him more. If there were fresh rumours and whispers amongst the Skythians, he needed to hear them.

He had become adept at recognising the gathering places of those wild, sometimes mutated Skythians left alive. They maintained a whispered communication with each other, stories spanning miles, rumours drifting with the winds, as if somewhere deep down they were trying to regain their former glory. He suspected this information exchange was instinctive rather than intentional, and sometimes it had been of use to him. But though the Skythians knew what was happening across their damaged isle, in Juda's regard they were weak things, ill-suited to existence in the place they had once thrived. Time moved on, and he had no pity for them. Like any addict, his empathy had been suppressed by his cravings.

Juda stalked. He went beyond the ruined village, glancing back frequently to make sure Bon and Leki could not see him, and found a trail. He paused and sniffed the air. Closed his eyes. Regerran blood pulsed through his nose, his sense of smell greater than most, and he moved off to the left, skirting around a hillock and then slipping down into a shallow ravine. A stream flowed along its bottom, heading left towards the river. In the stream squatted a lone Skythian male. The water washed around his ankles. He stared along the ravine towards the river, his purpose hidden.

Juda looked around quickly, scanning the ravine's sides in case there were others hidden away in small caves or lying in the fading light. But he was alone. He lifted the pistol and fired. The shot struck the Skythian's left shoulder low down, and he fell forward, splas.h.i.+ng face first into the stream.

Juda grunted in satisfaction and reloaded the pistol as he approached the twitching figure. New metal shot, new steam valve, and when he was three steps from the whining man he pocketed the pistol, drew a knife and knelt beside him.

Though his left arm was useless, the man had just managed to turn his face out of the water to catch a breath. Blood flowed with the stream. His hair was long and clotted with mud, his skin pocked with disease, left eye cloudy with cataract. He was trying to speak in their strange language, but the water garbled his words. Juda slid the knife between his ribs and leaned all his weight on it, and it was like putting a beast out of its misery. The man squealed, and then slumped down. His final breaths escaped in a series of b.l.o.o.d.y bubbles, which Juda watched disappear downstream.

Heart hammering, he looked back out of the shallow ravine towards the ruins, but no one was watching, no one knew. I can't leave them alone for too long, he thought. But this part was always over quickly.

Knowing that what he did here was redolent of Wrench Arc behaviour a and still trying to deny to himself that he was one of them a Juda took the fleet clinger from the seam of his boot. Long, thin, incredibly hard and sharp, he had bought it from a Broker in New Kotrugam just days before leaving on his journey north. Used mainly by Spike interrogators and investigators, they resembled weapons, but were in reality sensitive devices designed to snag the final, fleeting thoughts of someone dying. Often those thoughts were random and useless. The trick to using the fleet clingers successfully was to feed the right impetus to the dying person.

He plunged the object into the man's ear and pushed it into his brain. Then he connected the trailing nark-gut lead to the top end, held his breath and pushed the needle on the lead's other end into his own neck. He gasped as the cool metal slid home, the pain immediately simmering to white-hot. But he did not have time to hurt.

Juda leaned over the stinking, dying man and whispered into his ear, muttering the Old Skythian word for magic over and over, and soon ...

He had done this five times before, without success. But this time he found something. This Skythian knew nothing of the magic Juda craved to quieten his soul, but he did know of other things, more incredible and valuable than any Juda had ever hoped to find.

In his confused, dying thoughts, the man held rumours of Aeon's resurrection, and whispers of the strange young Alderian who was bringing it about.

Venden Ugane ...

As Juda fell back and tugged the needle from his neck in a spray of blood, he uttered a mad, high laugh at what might come next.

Chapter 7.

heartbeats On previous journeys to search for and retrieve objects a.s.sociated with the remnant, Venden had taken a whole day to prepare. The location would be a blur in his mind. The distance obscure, like tomorrow seen through a heat-haze. Since the first journey when he had discovered the cart upended at the foot of a small waterfall, he had taken it with him as much as possible, only leaving it behind when the terrain grew too uneven, the journey too long. But this time something pressed him to go alone and unhindered. He had the old clothes he was wearing, some food and water, two knives, some meagre camping equipment, a flint, and cooking implements he had fas.h.i.+oned from shreds of something melted. He had often wondered what they had been before. Perhaps he ate food with deformed cogs from the heart of an ancient Engine.

He readied himself to leave before midday, and then stood close to the remnant, waiting for something else. It will show me where exactly to find the heart, how to retrieve it, how to transport it back here, he thought. But the remnant was silent and still, and he sensed a deep weariness cradling it against the cold, wet ground.

'I'll find the heart of you,' he said. There was no response. 'I'll bring you back.' Silence filled the clearing, seeming to steal the sound of movement from the orange spiders and the rustle of leaves on some of the withered trees to the north. Venden wondered where those sounds had gone, and whether anyone else would hear them.

He reached out to touch the remnant, but was repelled. He frowned, but the closer he moved, the further away the shape seemed. It did not s.h.i.+ft or flex, but its altered shape was beyond him.

'I only want to touch you,' he said, but his plea was swallowed by the silence.

So Venden left the clearing, looking behind at the things he had brought back, which, together, went to make up Aeon. The reconstructed G.o.d looked more innocuous the further he walked, and by the time it pa.s.sed out of sight, hidden behind a screen of low trees, he could believe that it was a dead thing that had been there for six centuries. Its bone was dulled and unreflective, giving back nothing of its surroundings. A fine camouflage, he thought, but it also left him feeling bereft. He might as well have seen himself fading into nothing.

'I am not nothing,' Venden said as he walked. 'And Aeon chose me.' The hollow place inside him seemed to churn with potential, and then settled once more.