Part 32 (1/2)

'We're not touching it!' Tamma yelled.

'The Engines will touch it,' Sol said, lunging with his sword, blade skittering from the thing's hard foot. He felt hollow, bereft. Empty of every good thing. Even the memory of his family seemed to be fading, replaced with an all-consuming understanding that nothing he did, and nothing he had ever done, held any significance.

Who am I what am I why am I? It should have been a scream, but when he opened his mouth, he only gasped.

His friend was staring at him. Gallan had dropped his sword and mace and stood wide-eyed, as if a profound realisation had struck. His face looked calm and uncreased by the stress of war. Hollow man, Sol thought, and as he and Gallan locked eyes, something filled them both.

The world exploded and blew Sol backwards, sprawling in muck and blood, conscious only of the shattering violence erupting around and within him. There was no refuge from its fury, no islands in this convulsive turmoil. Something entered and wrestled with his consciousness, a twisting mad thing, ancient and abhorrent and yet suddenly rejoicing in this strange freedom.

Kolt! Sol thought as his mind was shattered, shredded, ripped apart by the invader. Sol's scream of agony was silent, because his body was paralysed by the extent and shock of the pain. Everything he was a every dream and love, habit and history a shrivelled to nothing, and witnessing the loss was awful. Sol's last full, conscious experience was seeing his whole life and self erased and replaced with something monstrous.

Sol Merry ceased to exist at that moment, leaving a travesty of what he had once been. His new present a his here and now, where existence was as interesting to him as a bug's existence to the bug a was filled with one impetus.

He picked up his dropped sword and spear and examined his surroundings. There were more who looked like him, but they were of no interest. There were other shapes p.r.o.ne on the ground, not like him, but these also held no interest. And there were two more shapes huddled together around something that burned and shone like the sun.

Sol flinched from the glow and started running, raging, as an instinct he did not understand took him south.

Bon kept his eyes squeezed tightly shut against the rage. He could feel Leki pressed against him, the fragment of the heart of Aeon blazing between them, her breath warm against his cheek, her heartbeat welcome against his chest, and he so hoped that she was keeping her eyes closed as well. Whatever was happening, neither of them should see it.

The explosion had been incredibly violent, and all but silent. Bon had felt himself compressed and then pushed across the ground, sliding through mud and blood with Leki clasped against him. They had come to rest against a pile of Skythian bodies.

I smell blood and fear and something unknown, Bon had thought, and the storm raged. He heard the subtle rustle and clink of other bodies striking the ground, clothing and weapons knocking together. The air seemed to writhe and flex around them, whipping back and forth as if indecisive about which way to blow, scouring his skin.

He kept his eyes closed and felt Leki's hand squeeze his shoulder, and the pressure remained as she found comfort in the contact. Was that the end of Aeon? he thought, and he could almost not bear to look. But the thing between them kept them warm and safe, and Venden's words rang with him, spoken in the voice of his beautiful young son before he had grown up and away. Whatever you hear, whatever you sense ... close your eyes.

Bon almost opened his eyes. Leki seemed to sense his inclination, because she pulled him tighter, closer, and pressed her mouth against his ear.

'No,' she said. 'I want to see as much as you, but no. We do what Aeon told us.' She kissed him below the ear, a desperate, hard kiss. 'A few more moments of ignorance might be all we have.'

So they hugged close, and though the object Venden had handed Bon was pressed between their stomachs, it did not come between them. Bon kissed Leki on the side of the face, the eye, and then a full kiss against her lips, sharing pa.s.sion and need and pleased to feel them both returned.

'I should have helped you,' he said, meaning what he had seen between her and her husband.

'I could have helped myself, if I'd needed to. Besides, Sol would have killed you, and I would have never forgiven myself.'

'I should have helped you.'

'You have helped me.' Leki's tears touched his cheek.

The sense of the world being turned upside down and inside out settled, and in its place was a dreadful, foreboding silence. Something is watching us, Bon thought, and the skin on his arms and the back of his neck p.r.i.c.kled.

'It's horrible,' Leki whispered, because she felt it as well.

The fragment of Aeon's heart was cooling between them. Bon s.h.i.+fted slightly to touch it, and Leki clasped his arms as if he were moving away.

'I think now,' he said. His voice quivered. The fear was terrible. What would he find remaining of Aeon? And what was staring at them?

Bon opened his eyes.

They had come to rest against several dead Skythians, whose sightless eyes watched what happened. Perhaps they were the more fortunate ones.

He looked around the dawn-lit battlefield. It was taking on colour with the sun, and the predominant hue was red. The ground was sucking in the blood, the snow wet with it. Fires were still crackling, and beyond them he saw the body of Aeon.

It moved, casual and slow as ever. Alive!

But then, to his right, between where they lay and the river bridge still piled with bodies, he saw what had become of everyone else.

'Bon,' Leki whispered, because she had seen as well. 'Are they ...? Can they really be ...?'

'I've been so wrong,' Bon said. 'It wasn't Aeon's demise that made them, but Aeon itself. Aeon made the Kolts.'

The Kolts were standing, grabbing weapons, and all of them had changed, Spike and Skythian alike. They wore the same clothes and were the same shape, but were no longer the same people. They did not fight. Faces filled with hate, eyes with fury, skin glowing with red rage, mouths grimacing and teeth begging the feel of weak skin and wet flesh, the Kolts scanned the battlefield once, and then ran away towards the south. There was no organisation here, and no orders being called. These things had been born, and would live and die, alone.

One purpose. One aim.

'They're going to kill everything,' Bon said.

'What about us?'

Bon touched the object between them, cooling now. And he watched Leki, ready to hold her again should she crumple and descend into grief. He had seen her husband, changed from the soldier he had been to the mindless, driven killer Aeon had made him. Walking dead, Sol was gone from a man to a monster.

'Why?' Leki asked. But already Bon was trying to see what might happen next.

Father, Venden said in his mind. Bon gasped, and Leki looked at him.

'He's talking to me,' Bon whispered.

One last request of you both.

Bon looked past the battlefield and beyond the fires at Aeon, virtually motionless in the pristine snow. 'It's not over,' he said.

Leki clasped his hand. 'Then whatever comes, we do it together.'

Sol Merry ran, seeking something to kill. Others ran around him, but not with him. A woman with a bandage around her neck, a tall man. Some looked alike, others were shorter and wilder, different. But only on the outside. On the inside they were all the same, and the proof of that was not long in coming.

They came across the group hiding on the leeward side of a small hill. Twenty adults and thirty children, they quickly fell beneath sword and spear. Sol slashed and stabbed, the daemon within relis.h.i.+ng the blood that bathed him and the gore that splashed in the snow at his feet. He felt the sting of weapons striking him and merely brushed others away, not even blinking as his arm snapped the arrow shafts, his roar bent swords a his fury exerted a terrible weight, but the ability was no surprise. He turned and went after the attacker, but she had already been taken down by two others like him.

Sol heard the screaming, the pleading. He mimicked the sound, his voice surprisingly high, and it rose into a bloodthirsty scream as he thrust his sword deep into a woman's chest. He ducked a sword and fisted the swordsman in the face, then turned to gut him. Kneeling, hacking through the hot remains, Sol picked out the choicest morsel and pressed it to his mouth. His eyes rolled as he bit the slippery liver in half.

The rage was hot, the daemon on fire. It thrummed through him, pulsing in his toes and fingers, head and knees, stomach and back, and he painted it across the landscape in blood.

The slaughter was soon over, and Sol and the others ran on. Kolts! he heard some of their victims shouting. He knew the word and felt its comfortable fit. He nurtured the killing and the rage, along with the daemon settled within him. Running south, he soon lost sight of anyone else like him. But sometimes, from left or right, he heard an occasional shout of surprise, and a scream, and then silence as another Kolt made a kill.

His mind was red, and nothing else. A blind purpose drove him on.

Chapter 21.