The Devoured Earth (16 page)

That was the part she had problems with. Bad enough that she was stealing from her friends and allies, leaving them stranded on the edge of a deadly lake without their balloon, but the reason for doing it relied on far too many it’s and maybes. ‘How do you know the charm my future self created will do what you want it to?’

‘It has to, otherwise why would you have sent it to yourself?’

‘But we don’t really know what it’s for.’

Vehofnehu shook his head. ‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll know when it’s working.’

She wanted to ask:
What if I
can’t
get it working? What if I do, but it backfires on us? What if something we can’t possibly anticipate goes wrong? What if the mistake we make today means that Yod wins and everyone dies?

She pictured the balloon being swatted from the air as dark tentacles rose up out of the lake. She wondered if that was why the balloon had crashed in the first place, and wished that Vehofnehu would let Tom call Marmion to at least ask what had happened. But the empyricist forbade any communication with the wardens for fear that they might interfere with his plans. As far as Vehofnehu was concerned, Marmion knew nothing about the Tomb and would only get in the way if he found out.

She felt uneasy about that, too.

‘We’re making a new future,’ the empyricist said in reassurance. The bulk of his attention was focussed along the spyglass and the view of the shore it gave him. ‘We’re victims of fate no longer. The man’kin know how to move through many possible futures. With their help we can navigate to the one we need. Don’t you see, Shilly? Success is guaranteed. Yod can’t possibly win now we’re here.’

Shilly didn’t feel reassured at all. They were a handful against a creature that ate entire worlds.

‘Go rest,’ he told her. ‘You don’t have to sleep. We know what we have to do now. I’ll call you when it’s time to leave.’

She nodded and backed away from their vantage point on the lip of the giant crater.

Slightly downhill was a ledge where the Holy Immortals gathered, their greenish glow well out of sight of anyone looking up from below. They had stopped singing on reaching the top of the ridge and Shilly certainly didn’t wish to hear the potent sadness of that song again. Tom sat among the Holy Immortals, trying to make himself understood via the letter tiles. One of them — a man — reciprocated, but the tiles spelt only gibberish and they soon gave up in frustration.

On the edge of the group, the glast sat on a stone, observing. Its pose was rigid, its expression determined. Green accents flickered across its glassy features.

Shilly opened up a bedroll and lay on it with her back to the gathering. She felt she should be preparing for the confrontation with Yod, trying to piece together the fragments of her future self’s charm, but she wondered what difference it would make if she tried or not. She would work it out when the time came. Wasn’t that the point of having the man’kin present? They could choose the future where inspiration struck and she saved the day.

Instead of freedom, she felt only a heavy despair settling over her. It weighed her down, pressed her firmly into the stone. She imagined herself sinking into the mountain and disappearing forever, leaving all her problems behind. The thought was an alluring one, and hard on its heels came sleep, no less black at first than the inside of a mountain, and no less unsatisfying.

* * * *

‘You’re not paying attention.’

Shilly was on her hands and knees in the underground cavern, working on the finer details of her charm. It was closer to completion than it had been the last time the younger Shilly had visited. Almost all of the complex pattern was fixed in place. Nearby, Bartholomew laboured painstakingly to secure her most recent work against the ravages of time. The question of what would happen to him when the charm was finished passed fleetingly through her mind, as it often had in recent weeks. She suppressed it. More important things demanded her attention.

‘Do you hear me, girl? I said you’re not paying attention.’

The tingling at the back of Shilly’s neck returned, stronger than before. Her younger self hadn’t gone yet, as Shilly had feared she might.

‘This bit here pins down some of the finer details of the map we’re helping to build. Not a literal map, of course; you wouldn’t need a charm this complex for that. A metaphorical map — and we both know that metaphors have power, don’t we? Give a thing a name and you grant it shape. Grant it shape and you make it real. That’s all I’m doing, really. Before, there was nothing; soon, in your world, there’ll be this. It’ll make the difference, I hope.’

She placed the blunt wooden trowel she had been working with back into the pouch at her hip and produced another tool, one for finer work. Delicately and without hurrying, she added intricate details to the broad lines she had etched into the sand. She could feel the flow of the charm and the potential it yearned for in every stroke. The tool seemed lighter than a hair as her right hand moved surely and smoothly.

This is my duty
, she told herself,
nothing else
. It wasn’t to worry about the village nearby, which she had found deathly silent and stinking of rotting flesh two days earlier when she had gone for her weekly trek. Stunned and shocked, she had limped from stall to stall, past dwellings she had visited many times in the past. She recognised faces, even twisted and swollen in death: Mentzel the baker; Smerdoni the weather-worker; Doust the vet; and others. She had known them all well, even if she would never have counted them as friends. Those survivors, the people in the village, had been her sole human associates for many, many years.

The only sounds in the town had been her footsteps and the tapping of her cane. When she’d heard sobbing, she’d thought for one wild moment that someone might have survived, but it turned out to be her own grief echoing back at her. She hadn’t realised she was crying aloud. With useless tears streaming down her cheeks, she had gathered what supplies she could carry from people who would need it no longer and hurried home.

It wasn’t her duty to worry about where the next meal would come from, once those few supplies ran out.

‘Yod kills,’ she told her younger self, ‘make no mistake about that. It holds us in no regard at all, except as food or the means of getting more food. In the early days, after it broke loose from the mountains, there were those who tried to curry favour with it, hoping to avoid destruction by keeping its appetite sated. And for a while, such treachery did seem to work. But Yod turned on them all one by one; every conniving, vicious scheme came to nothing in the end.
Nothing
. Yod spares no one. You need to know that, I think. This isn’t a game.’

Shilly felt a flash of resentment that didn’t come from herself. It was weird having two minds in the one head. She didn’t know how the twins had managed it for so long — and that thought prompted her to wonder what had happened to them. The last she had seen of them, they had been fleeing with one of Yod’s tentacles at their backs. For a long time she had assumed them dead, but one dusk a year or two later she had glimpsed their distinctive four-armed silhouette against the pink sky, on a rocky outcrop. She had called to them, but they hadn’t answered her. A moment later, they had leapt down from the outcrop and disappeared. She hadn’t encountered them since.

‘Everyone’s dead,’ she sighed. ‘Everyone who matters, anyway.’ A familiar, throat-filling grief rose up in her. The part of her that had always known where Sal was still ached, as useless and scarred as Marmion’s truncated wrist had been. She hadn’t been with him, but she had felt him die the very instant it had happened. Despite everything that had happened since, it remained the worst moment of her life — the moment, she sometimes thought, when her life had actually ended, leaving her trapped in this grisly limbo until Yod got around to finishing what it had started.

‘When I’m gone, at least you’ll remember me,’ she told her distant junior. ‘And maybe you too, eh, Bartholomew?’

The little man’kin looked briefly up at her, then returned to its work. It had spoken only twice in the twenty years they’d been companions, once to tell her its name, the second time to explain to her about the first visitation from her past, back when contact had been fragmentary, inconclusive experiences for both sides. The man’kin were close conspirators in her plan, since they could see all times as one, in series and in parallel. They helped design the charm to link her with her younger self; they had, before their own near-extermination, helped her hide from Yod’s all-scouring glare. That protection was fading now, but the fact that she remained gave her hope that it retained some efficacy.

‘They’ve told you what they want of you, I presume. Or maybe they haven’t. I’m never entirely sure where I fit into your world-line.’ Talking to her younger self helped settle her emotions. Not all of the memories were hopeless. ‘The proximity of the realms is what’s allowing Yod back into the world. The Void kept it at a distance for a while, and it’s still not entirely across that gap, thanks to the Tomb. It’s hovering on the brink, gathering its strength. If we can open the Void wider than it ever was, it’ll become a gulf, a bottomless pit, from which Yod could never escape. That pit can then be sealed shut forever by extinguishing the Flame. The Third Realm was always the flaw in the original plan: while the world-tree continues to give Yod possibilities it can explore, there will always be a way out for it, one day. The only way to be rid of it forever is to cut the realms off from each other and kill the world-tree, like severing an infected limb to spare the rest of the body. That sounds pretty drastic, and it is, but it need not be disastrous. Humans will survive, just as we’ve survived other Cataclysms. We’re a resilient, adaptable lot, and given a chance we will prevail.

‘That’s where you and the Goddess come in. Only
she
can permanently quash the Flame; only
you
can design the charm to keep the realms apart. We need both of you to get this thing done, once and for all.’

Disbelief and alarm came back to her from her other self. That this explanation from her older self clearly differed from the one Vehofnehu had given her had increased the younger Shilly’s doubt.

‘No, listen. It has to be this way. We in this and other worlds haven’t exactly been sitting on our hands all these years, you know. We explored every option, and changing the face of the world is the only one that stands a chance. The ultimate Cataclysm, with no possibility of turning back. Your Earth will become one lonely bubble floating through the devachan. Yod will tumble away into nothing; it deserves nothing less. And perhaps we deserve it too, for dropping our guard and giving it a toehold. Parasites don’t overwhelm us with force and batter us into submission; they find our weaknesses and exploit them. If we hadn’t been weak, if we hadn’t forgotten —’

The chisel in her right hand slipped and carved a discordant line in the sand. She cursed her carelessness and told herself to calm down. Her hands were shaking. She hadn’t realised just how tightly every muscle in her body was clenched.

No time
, she thought.
No time! And still so much left to say
.

Then a strange thing happened. The pattern before her moved, taking on a life of its own. Lines shifted and spun; curls tightened and relaxed. She felt dizzy, and tried to stand up, which she eventually, slowly, managed to do.

When she had reached her full height, she was no longer in the stuffy cave, but standing on top of a ridge at night-time with icy air cutting right through her. Gone was the sound of Bartholomew’s patient brushwork. In its place were the howling wind and voices she couldn’t immediately identify. Some of the words were clear — someone nearby was asking if she was all right — but others weren’t. She remembered the twins trying to describe what their world had been like when the Second Realm had been relatively distant; people had spoken different
languages
and failed to understand each other most of the time. That was what this sounded like — except this particular
language
was one she had heard before…

She whipped around and saw a huddle of green-glowing people conversing in strange, backward speech. Her heart leapt to her throat.

‘This isn’t supposed to be happening,’ said the Shilly whose eyes and mind she was seeing through, ‘is it?’

No
, she wanted to say.
No, it isn’t
. But she didn’t want to fight it. Quite the opposite. If she was when she thought she was, on the ridge
before
the assault on the towers, with the Holy Immortals and the man’kin, there was still time. She could save Sal if she moved quickly enough. She could change things.

A familiar and much-missed face loomed in front of her. Tom, all bones and height, still not quite a man and, in her world, doomed never to become one. He was trying to tell her something, but his words vanished in a roaring sound. She wanted to take him in her arms and hold him tight. An urge to weep rose up in her, as chokingly powerful as the hope that made her want to push him aside and start running.

Pain flared, dragging herself out of her younger, firmer body and back to where she belonged. The warmth of the glowstones dangling by their slender threads seemed pallid after the Holy Immortals’ verdant light; the air stank and hung close around her; her knees and back ached, and when she looked down at her hands she saw that her right hand had plunged the tip of the chisel into the palm of her left, drawing blood that dripped in a steady stream into the pattern.

She wept as she hadn’t wept for years, for the way things had been and might have been, for the way things were in her world and for the sorry end she had come to. This wasn’t what she had dreamed of that night on the ridge. She had been afraid, yes, but afraid of letting everyone down, of a quick ending, of one last catastrophe then nothing: not this lingering, pathetic struggle to survive as Yod savoured every last morsel, taking its time to devour the Earth.