Part 17 (2/2)

The male slayer came for them both.

She can't take two, Bon thought in a panic.

Then he saw Venden, and what he was becoming. And for a moment everything stopped, the whole of the world taking a breath to watch.

Venden was aware of the chaos around him, but he was apart from it all. It was in a world beyond his own. He grasped the heart of Aeon in one hand, and was in turn nursed by the hand of the shadow.

The shadow that rose within him, and was becoming more than he had ever believed.

Venden stepped away from the dying s.h.i.+re and reached for the remnant. He knew he did not have to press the heart to the remnant's surface too hard, and that wherever he touched would suffice. This dead G.o.d was almost whole once more, and Venden felt his own short life drawing to a close.

He had achieved much, gathering the disparate parts of this murdered, scattered deity. He had learned a lot about Skythe in the process, but he realised that had been purely for his own edification. He had been allowed. It was the fuel to his knowledge, and his knowledge was merely a means to an end. Something to drive him. A reward.

There would be thanks from Aeon, both for him and his mother. They had carried a spark of the murdered G.o.d a its mind, its soul, its memory or essence. His mother had pa.s.sed it to him. And both of their lives had led to this moment.

'I wonder how things will change,' he said, and the weight of Skythe pressed against his skull.

Someone screamed, someone else shouted. Venden touched the remnant's underside.

He felt the change commence, and there was a momentary, blazing agony that belonged to someone so alive. The agony faded, the remnant flexed around him. The heart beat like an earthquake.

His vision grew dark, and then everything was red.

Bon went to his knees, forgetting the slayers, and Leki, and Juda fleeing with an arrow through his torso. He forgot where he was and why he was here, and the trials he had pa.s.sed through since arriving. He saw only the boy he had raised coming apart, and he did not understand.

Bon Ugane felt his own wet insides ripped as his son's were opened, his own bones breaking and crumbling. He could not even scream.

Venden touched the G.o.d-shape and disintegrated before it. His hand spread on the sun-bleached, bony surface, the red stain soaking in and pulling at his arm. He was tugged closer, lifted from the ground and sucked against the shape's uneven underside. The object in his other hand blistered through the blanket and was lifted up against the shape, penetrating like a sword through flesh and disappearing inside. It left no wound, but a single stain of blood, which was quickly swamped by Venden as he ceased to be a man.

In the s.p.a.ce of a few heartbeats, Venden was sucked against the thing's underside and crushed there, his body spreading in a haze of blood and flesh. But the blood did not drip, and neither did his exposed insides fall. They spread around and over the pale shape, darkening where they touched, leaving vibrant colour behind. Blood-red, the hue of life.

Bon started moving backwards on his knees. His son was gone, become something else. He glanced across at the slayers in time to see the female slayer's head tugged back by Leki, her throat opened to the bone by her own knife, and then a blur as Leki hacked and slashed, tugging the head free of the slayer's shoulders and flinging it towards the other attacker, now shaken from his shock and advancing quickly upon Leki.

The headless slayer stood. She remained motionless, other than her left hand fisting and unfisting at her side.

I'm not seeing any of this. Bon gained his feet and backed away towards the sheer cliff. The ma.s.s of it behind him presented some false security.

At the centre of the clearing, the spread of Venden's disintegrated body animated the thing that he had claimed was a G.o.d. And what, if not a G.o.d? Bon wondered. The end of his journey suddenly felt like a beginning.

The decapitated slayer fell onto her side, a black slick gouting from her neck and steaming in the long gra.s.s. Her partner fired his pike at Leki. She dodged the shot with an incredibly quick sidestep, and the poison pod shattered against a tree. The slayer ran at her, fired an arrow from his quickly drawn bow, rolled, and then he was upon Leki, grasping her in two ma.s.sive hands and swinging her up and over his head, dropping her behind him, falling back and turning as he fell, mouth gaping to reveal the long, rotten teeth with which he would rip out her throat.

But Leki was no longer beneath him when he hit the ground. She kicked out at his head and leaped aside, slas.h.i.+ng out with his fallen comrade's knife. It sparked from a band of metal armour across his chest.

Possessed with the fight, Leki and the slayer did not seem to notice the movement behind them.

But Bon did.

Using the flesh of Venden's remains, Aeon had clothed itself. But its body was thirty times larger than Venden, and his parts must have merely been a catalyst for regrowth. It expanded into being a limbs thickening, torso widening, and Bon could not look upon it. It was becoming again. His mind could not cope with the impossibility of this, nor the implications. His body could not bear the weight of its presence without going down again, slumping against the cliff, feeling wet gra.s.s around him and the comforting solidity of rock.

'Venden, what have you done?' Bon asked, and for the first time in his life he feared his son.

Milian whispered from his memory, so sad when Venden had come along, so bereft when she should have been so alive. See what he became, Bon thought, and he thought perhaps she had always known.

Aeon ripped itself from the ground and became independent. It lifted each of its limbs in turn, shaking mud and clinging plants free. Then it raised its long tail from beneath the fallen tree. Still forming, its flesh and skin tones changing as shadows pa.s.sed back and forth across the appearing body, it turned what might have been its head.

It looked at Bon, and he closed his eyes. But he could still feel the unbearable weight of its regard.

He heard Leki scream, then the thump of a body.

And then another thud, a shocking impact, and the crunching sound of someone meeting their end.

Venden was now the shadow. He was the shade in the great mind of a G.o.d, whereas before the mind of Aeon had been the shadow within him, and in his mother before him. Borne over centuries, the G.o.d had emerged from its chrysalises to find its home again, at last. It revelled in its rejuvenation.

Venden's pain was no more, because his body was no more. But there was a peculiar awareness. He retained a form of consciousness, though he was unsure of his senses, and thought perhaps the old way of seeing, and understanding, was long behind him.

Aeon rose, and Venden rose with it. He wondered how long this would be. Around Venden, circling like stars surrounding the speck of dust he might barely be, Aeon's mind was so vast that he could barely conceive of it. It extended in directions he could not even begin to comprehend a past and future, sure enough, but other ways too. Across boundaries he did not understand, and through histories his limited mind would never know.

As Venden sensed action being taken a and Aeon's great mind interacting with the world for the first time since its death a his human emotions echoed Aeon's disgust and loathing at what it saw: Dead things should stay dead.

Carried within Skythe's resurrected G.o.d, the irony of that idea was difficult to escape.

Aeon was standing straight and tall like a man, only many times taller. Its fleshed-out body resembled nothing Bon had ever witnessed before. He squinted, trying to make sense of what he saw, but there was little sense to be made. Not yet, at least. His mind recoiled, and he felt a subtle madness descend in what might have been a protective cloud.

Yes, I'll go mad, Bon said, inviting it in. I'll go mad and thank you kindly.

Aeon moved. As it lifted one limb, Bon saw the crushed remains of the male slayer squashed beneath it, the monster's slick insides spewing across the clearing as the G.o.d walked away.

Don't go! Bon thought. He reached for Aeon, standing, stumbling after it. But then it ran, and in three bounds it was as if it had never been there at all.

Complete silence. Bon had never before experienced such stillness, such solitude. No birds called, no breeze blew, no living thing made a sound. The world was frozen in the moment.

Then Leki groaned, and Bon went to her. She was warm, and that felt good. Whoever she was and whatever lies she had hidden behind, she felt good, because she was alive.

'Did you see?' Bon asked.

'I saw,' she said. He thought it was pain, but when he looked at her he realised the quiver in her voice was dread. 'I saw our doom.'

'Aeon,' Bon said. Venden, he thought.

'It's the end of us,' Leki gasped. She grasped his hand and stood, leaning against him for support. She was slick with sweat, speckled with blood from the slayer she had slaughtered. 'It's back, and there will be war.'

She's a soldier of the Spike, Bon thought, but the idea still did not seem real. 'You can't believe that,' he said. 'Aeon is ... the one G.o.d, true and real.'

Leki actually s.h.i.+vered. 'Of course it is. And it will be looking for revenge.'

Slowly, as Bon and Leki held each other up, the blood-spattered clearing came back to life.

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