The Heretic Land (35 page)

‘Tracking Aeon?’

‘Yes. What else is there to do?’

What else
, Bon thought, because he did not know. They had banished him to Skythe with the sense that his aimless life was not moving on, but ending. No hope of progress, no thought to better himself or make good out of bad. Too weak even to consider killing himself, his future had stretched out as an unknown land that he had no desire to explore. Then Leki, and Juda saving him from the slayers, and whispers of Venden, and suddenly he was a new man.

Now, everything had changed once more. Venden was dead. That confused Bon, because his son had been dead to him for years. Their brief reunion had yielded nothing to sate the grief, and Bon was waiting for the mourning to strike in once more, as hard as it had been picking at him since Venden’s disappearance. He’d had no opportunity to know his son.

‘What else?’ Bon said. He turned his back on Leki and walked into the bushes to piss. This morning she was not the woman she had been to him yesterday. Perhaps today he would meet her anew.

And Aeon was abroad, striding somewhere across the Skythian landscape with its aims obscure, its intentions unknown. That terrified him, but excited him as well. Like a ghost from the past, Aeon had returned to haunt the Ald and every lie they had ever told against it.

As he pissed, Bon thought of Leki’s comment that she
would have shot him yesterday. If he’d interrupted her strange racking, she would have pulled Juda’s pistol and fired at him. He could not picture her face as she performed that terrible act. But he reminded himself that she was a stranger to him once again.

‘I’m ready to leave,’ Leki said behind him, and Bon thought perhaps he sensed a pleading to her tone.
She wants me to go with her
, he thought.

Buttoning his trousers, he realised that there really was nothing more for him to do. But his aim in travelling with Leki was suddenly very clear – he would do his best to protect Aeon from the forces Leki was marshalling against it. And not only because of what he believed about it, and magic, and the Kolts. That was a surface reason, but his emotional drive was closer, and deeper.

Venden had become a part of Aeon, and perhaps there was a glimmer of his son still there.

‘I’m ready too,’ he said, returning and smiling at Leki. She smiled back.
I could have loved her
, he thought. But she had become too much of a stranger to love.

‘I hope you’re feeling energetic.’ Leki started running.

They skirted the lake, and on the other side Leki picked up Aeon’s trail. She jogged into a thick woodland, scarred here and there with cracked and tumbled trees. The fresh flesh of broken trunks glimmered with morning dew, and small mammals and birds congregated around these areas of destruction. They sniffed and sang.

A new day seemed to have imbued Leki with fresh confidence, and she followed Aeon’s trail unerringly through the extensive woodland, never taking the wrong direction even if some footprints were large distances apart. Bon wondered whether she was using any other arcane means to track, but
he did not want to know. He followed, and for the whole morning neither of them spoke.

When the midday sun was high overhead and its heat filtered down through the heavy tree canopy, Leki stopped at a stream and filled her water bottles. Bon did the same upstream from her, glancing sidelong at her distorted reflection.

‘We’re being followed,’ she whispered.

Bon resisted the temptation to jump up and turn around.

‘Skythians. Since mid-morning.’

‘How do you know?’ he said.

‘I just do. I hear them, but I only know one word in three. Their language isn’t as I’ve been taught. It’s regressed more than we believed.’

‘Or it’s advanced,’ Bon said, believing that much more likely. ‘More than you Ald bastards know.’

‘They’re no threat,’ Leki said, but her doubt was obvious.

‘We’re following their risen god that our ancestors murdered,’ Bon said. ‘Of course they’re no threat.’

Leki did not respond, but she sat beside the stream and leaned forward, feet and hands in the flow of water. It parted and splashed around her limbs, and Bon could see the webbing between her fingers catching water as she stretched her digits. She closed her eyes.

Bon stood and stretched, casually looking back the way they had come. He could see no signs of pursuit, but he did not doubt Leki’s observation. He tried to put himself in those Skythians’ place – their murdered god risen, perhaps a surprise to them, or perhaps the manifestation of a prophecy; and two strangers following in the god’s footsteps.

‘The word is out,’ Leki said softly. Bon turned, and she was pulling herself from the stream, dragging herself through the short grass as if dreadfully weakened by her efforts. She sat up
and stared at him, eyes wide. ‘They know of Aeon. All of them. All of Skythe.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘The waters are rich with the rumour.’ She stood unsteadily, wiping her hands on her coat as if they’d been dipped in something unpleasant. ‘How can word have spread so quickly?’

‘You have your methods,’ Bon said.

‘But not the Skythians. They’re regressed, less capable than the most distant Outers.’

‘Or more capable than the Ald knows. And able to hide it.’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Not after all this time. They’re scratching an existence, almost animals. There’s no
intelligence
there any more. We’d have known.’

‘You’ve studied Skythe?’

She blinked at him softly, and he could see her thoughts turning. ‘A little.’

‘A little,’ he echoed. ‘Your Ald arrogance is …’ He shook his head, unable to verbalise his frustration, his growing hatred. ‘Can’t you admit for a moment that you might be wrong about these people?’

‘But they were all but wiped out.’

‘By
you
!’ Bon said. ‘But there are always survivors. Even from what you did to them. Survivors with a whole history behind them. Wise enough to keep low. Keep out of view.’

‘We should go.’ She looked past him, back the way they had come. ‘We should be careful.’

Bon followed her across the stream and deeper into the forest. He soon stopped looking behind him, because the Skythians would only be seen if they wanted to be seen. He wondered if they knew what was coming, with the Spike and Leki’s Arcanum.

He wondered if he should tell them.

* * *

It grew colder
throughout that afternoon; then, when they stopped to hunt and eat, it started to snow.

They had been following Aeon’s tracks all day, but a sense of hopelessness had settled over Bon. He could see the prints, acknowledge that they were going in the right direction, but still he became convinced that Aeon would not be found unless it desired to be found. There seemed to be no direction to the routes they were following. They left the forest and climbed a steep hillside, emerging onto a ridge between two hills. Before them, a slope of shale led down into a deep, dark valley, and they followed the great slicks of fresh shale movement that Leki said marked Aeon’s progress. In the valley there were squat trees, home to angry monkeys that threw spiked nuts at the invaders, and crawling plants that seemed attracted by their body heat. After some time searching, Bon followed Leki back up another slope of shale to the ridge they had only just left. There seemed to be no purpose to the valley visit.

And that set Bon wondering as to Aeon’s purpose, and whether something so removed from humankind would even have one. Leki and the Ald feared revenge, but perhaps that was because that would be exactly what
they
would seek were they Aeon. Bon found contemplation of its godhood difficult; it was a physical presence, he had seen it, he could have touched it, and so it had a biology and a build that made it a creature. Yet it was so far removed from everything he had ever known that its intentions must surely be obscure to mere human consideration.

They should simply leave it alone. But it was not in humanity’s nature to do so. Anything wonderful would be subject to scrutiny. And something wonderful to one person would be horrible to another.

They crossed the ridge and made camp on a hillside sheltered from the
strengthening wind, and while Leki hunted for their supper, Bon built a fire.

In the crackle of flames, he heard the voice of his son.

North and down into the cold.

Bon gasped, leaning forward and scorching his hand on the sparking embers. He jumped back. The voice had carried such weight and had come from so far that he had no doubt, from that first moment, that it had been his son communicating with him. This was no hallucination brought on by the exertions of his journey.

North and down into the cold.

Leki returned with a rabbit, throwing Bon a curious glance as he splashed water onto his hand. The burn was mild, hairs scorched into blackened nubs.

‘Knot in the wood popped,’ he said, and she started skinning and gutting her kill. She had snow settled on her eyebrows.

They ate, then Bon sat back against a tree and tried to shelter. The snow was heavier now, dulling sound and turning the night ghostly still. It settled almost immediately, the ground already cold, and soon there was a good covering. The fire spat and sizzled as heavy flakes died above it.

Bon and Leki did not speak. He could sense Leki’s frustration as she sat away from the fire on a large boulder, watching for their Skythian pursuers. There had been no sign of them all day.

I know where to go
, he thought. And with that came another realisation – that Venden was of Aeon now, and Aeon was directing him. He shivered, and it was nothing to do with the weather.

‘I think we should go north,’ Bon said early the next morning. The snow continued, and it was now up to their ankles. It was colder than
he had ever known it. Wrapped up in all the clothes he had, still Bon wished for more.

Leki seemed unconcerned about the weather; though she wore fewer layers than him she did not shiver, and neither did her face appear chilled. Bon almost asked whether it was due to her Arcanum training. But there was something in her eyes he did not like.

‘Why do you say that?’ she asked.

‘Just a thought. It seems somewhere it might go, and—’

‘But the trail was leading west, generally. Diversions here and there, like the shale valley. But west.’ She grew cold, suspicious. Maybe she could smell the lie on him.
More Arcanum training
, he thought, smiling softly.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing,’ Bon said. ‘Everything’s sad, and sometimes the only reaction to that is to smile. I thought perhaps we … you and I …’ He shrugged. ‘And now you seem ready to kill me at a moment’s notice.’

‘I don’t want to kill you, Bon. I just want everything to work out well. Everything. So why do you want to go north?’

‘It’s just a feeling,’ he said. ‘Just an idea that … Aeon has been down for six hundred years. Now it’s back, and it might know that south is the sea, and those communities. It’ll want peace. Solitude. North is unknown to us, but perhaps not to Aeon.’ It did not sound convincing, and he could see that she did not believe him.

But she did not appear eager to torture out the truth.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said. ‘Maybe with something like this, following a hunch is better than following trails that might lead nowhere.’

‘The trails feel cold to me already.’

Leki stared at him for a moment, and Bon guessed she had felt the same. ‘Worth a try,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’ll pick up a fresher trail.
But first, breakfast.’

Bon nodded and smiled. ‘I’m going for some privacy.’ He turned and stomped away through the snow. The heavy flakes floated like bird down in the motionless air. They were fat and wet, and clung to his clothes, hair and eyelashes. He was swimming through snow. Even though the sun was a smudge above the eastern horizon, visibility was low, and just out of sight there could have been anything.
They could be watching me even now
, he thought. Though he had not been scared of Skythians up to now, he found the idea disconcerting. Their god had returned. What that might do to a people, he could not know.

He retraced his footprints back to their camp, even though they were already half obliterated, and paused to watch Leki. He liked the way she moved. He found grace in her, and certainty, and even behind her Arcanum training she was still her own person.

Now she was on her knees, and Bon could see the steam valves planted in a square in the snow.

He was across the clearing in four bounds, and he kicked the shoot dust tube from her hands. It scattered dust in lazy spirals as it flipped into the snow, disappearing when it struck the ground. The dust confused the air for a moment – full of snow, open to sunlight. Then the blanket of flakes obscured where it had ever been.

Bon turned to Leki, but she was not there.
Splashed with shoot dust?
he thought, and then he was shoved in the centre of his back, head snapping back, falling forward onto his chest beside the square of steam valves. He grunted and rolled, kicking up and back blindly and feeling his right foot connect with something soft.

Leki grunted. He looked for her, trying to distinguish movement behind the waves of snow.
A shadow shifted to his right, and then Leki darted in from the left, so fast that he could barely track her movements.

Got to twist and roll and stand up before one of us
—

Leki sat astride his chest and pushed him down, pressing something cold and sharp against his throat. She stared down at him, lips tight. She did not even seem to be breathing hard. The knife at his throat shifted, and he felt a trickle of warmth down his neck.

‘So kill me,’ Bon said. Leki’s hair hung around her face, and snow fell past her head, into his eyes. She looked like some daemon out of a child’s story book.

For a moment, Bon thought she would do just that. And why not? For all the claims that she had no wish to harm him, she was Arcanum, and loyal to the Ald. Whatever her personal beliefs – and she claimed atheism, though he had his doubts – she had her masters to think of, and obey. And he was obstructing her purpose. Preventing her from sending her message, in which she would have told the approaching Spike army to head north.