The Devoured Earth (44 page)

‘That’s Yod?’ asked Hadrian.

‘It took the shape of a pyramid in the Second Realm,’ said Seth. Both twins, imprisoned in the walls of the Tomb, were craning upwards at the sight. ‘But the tentacles are the same.’

‘It takes many shapes,’ the Goddess said, ‘depending on circumstance and desire.’

‘What will it look like when we put it in the Homunculus?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. First we have to lure it down here. That means rejoining the world-line and, for some of us at least, leaving the Tomb. Marmion, Highson and Kelloman — you’ll be among them. Not you Skender, or Sal and Shilly, or me. We need to stay in here.’

The mention of Skender’s name surprised him. ‘Why not me?’

‘I have a purpose for you later,’ said the Goddess. ‘Those outside will be bait.’

‘In so many words.’ Kail didn’t flinch from the truth.

‘This isn’t a time for niceties. The glast will wait in here until we get a clear response. Remember, the tentacles work by reflex not conscious will, so they will home in on life but shy away from anything threatening. The timing is going to be critical.’

‘Can we trust that thing?’ asked Heuve, scowling in the glast’s direction. ‘I haven’t exactly heard it volunteering to help us.’

‘I trust it,’ said Sal. ‘If we ask it, it’ll help.’

‘Would you stake your life on that?’

‘Yes. If I was allowed to.’

‘Now, don’t be grumpy about that, Sal’, said the Goddess. ‘You’ve been a hero once already today.’

The lake’s surface began to move and Yod stirred into hideous life. Its tentacles undulated across the sky like long black pennants. A strange groaning noise came from the air.

‘Tell Marmion and Kelloman what they need to know,’ the Goddess told Highson. ‘Then we’ll set the trap.’

Sal’s father nodded. ‘All right.’ He put a hand on each of Marmion’s and Kelloman’s shoulders. Their eyes took on a look of distant focus. ‘Here’s the charm. You apply it like this.’

‘That seems rather crude,’ said Kelloman disdainfully. ‘Shouldn’t it be like this?’

‘
The Roslin Codex
specifically states that that won’t work. You have to do it the hard way in order to make it stick. However, there does exist a short cut, one I found in a later text…’

While the three men conferred via the Change over the subtleties of forcing Yod into the Homunculus, Skender shifted Chu to a comfortable position and silently wished there was something more he could do. He felt impotent and left out, and had felt so ever since Chu had knocked him unconscious to keep him from joining her on her suicide mission. Things might have been much worse had she not done that — certainly one of them would have ended up dead, for the golem only needed a single body — but that was little comfort.

He almost jumped as the Goddess herself squatted down next to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Keep an eye on things for me, Skender. Someone needs to do that. Let me know if you see anything unusual.’

‘Okay.’ Skender didn’t know how to feel about being directly addressed by a woman worshipped in absentia for a thousand years. ‘I’ll do that.’

‘Thank you.’

She stood and waved a hand at a section of the blue crystal wall. It folded back on itself in a complicated geometrical fashion, letting in bitterly cold air and a smell of rotting fish. The groaning noise became louder.

Marmion, Highson and Kelloman finished their conference. The one-handed warden stepped into the exit, holding the piece of black parchment between his fingers.

‘Who’s coming with us?’ Marmion called behind him. ‘No blame to anyone who wishes to stay here. This is one order I won’t issue.’

Lidia Delfine stepped forward, shrugging her bodyguard’s hand off her arm. ‘I’ll do my part,’ she said. ‘Heuve, you don’t have to.’

‘My place is beside you, Eminence.’

Griel also volunteered, his leather armour creaking.

‘I’ll not let a human stand in the path of danger while a Panic falls behind,’ he said with good spirits.

Kail joined them, along with the Ice Eater called Orma. Marmion ordered Rosevear back when he tried to stand with them.

‘The injured will need you more than we will,’ Marmion said. ‘Thank you,’ he told those who had gathered by the door. ‘I’ll feel safer with you behind me.’

The glast came forward, issuing a soft hiss from its fleshless mouth.

‘Not yet,’ said Marmion, waving his one good hand at it. ‘Wait until I call. Will you do that for us? Will you come when I call?’ He spoke loudly, as though to someone hard of hearing.

The glast nodded once.

‘Thank you too.’ Marmion smoothed the front of his robe. Without any further ceremony, he stepped outside.

Kelloman followed, his host body pale and tight-lipped, the golden Homunculus gripped tightly in one hand. The rest came in ones and twos, forming a small, lost-looking group on the top of the tower wall. With thudding footsteps, the Angel joined them, but still they looked helpless against the vast creature floating high in the sky above.

The people remaining inside the Tomb exchanged glances. Sal looked frustrated and worried, a younger version of his father.

‘I should be out there with them,’ he said. ‘I might be able to help.’

‘No.’ The Goddess stood firm. ‘You can’t fight Yod using the Change — not in its present form, anyway — and there’s no protection you can offer the others, no matter how badly they might need it.’

Shilly took his hand, but he wouldn’t be soothed. Skender sympathised. Watching the group outside take a position a few metres from the Tomb, with Kelloman and Marmion a little further away, was like watching a man on a trapdoor with a noose around his neck. Marmion, with his one remaining hand, tugged the sock off his stump and waved the truncated limb as though returning circulation to the missing fingers.

‘Here it comes,’ said Seth from his position inside the Tomb wall.

Skender looked up, feeling guilty that he hadn’t been as vigilant as the Goddess had asked him to be. He didn’t see what Seth was referring to until it came between the Tomb and the glowing patch of cloud the sun was hiding behind.

A single elongated streamer of black curled away from the rest and with unhurried deadly grace stretched down to investigate.

* * * *

The curving lip of the tower’s uppermost edge was broad and level enough for six people to stand with arms outstretched. It had seemed much thinner from a distance. Stepping out onto it, Kail shivered, wondering what on Earth had made him volunteer to attract the attention of a vastly hungry god. He possessed nothing but the clothes on his back and the pouch around his neck — and his wits, he supposed, although he had come to think that they might have been scrambled, either by the fall from Pukje’s neck, or perhaps even earlier. For the first time in his life, he wondered if he might have a death wish. In the past, he had noticed a certain bitterness in his temperament or an occasional unwillingness to live as others did — but that, surely, wasn’t the same thing. To die was a definite act. To go on living, whether one was happy about it or not, required only that one did nothing definite at all.

He reached for the pouch as he had many times in the previous days, holding it for luck or comfort. Through his gloves he felt the same tiny vibration he had noted before.

The fragment of the Caduceus was buzzing for attention. That was how it seemed to him, at that moment — as if a tiny creature was trapped inside the pouch and doing all it could to attract his notice. Absurd, of course, but a seductive thought, once he’d acknowledged it.

The note from Vania that he had carried for years was the first thing he saw when he opened the pouch. He didn’t need to read it; the words were burned in his mind.
This could have been your home
. It wasn’t signed, for she had known that he would recognise her writing. He had found it tucked into his bedroll the night after he had left her village, and part of him, unjustly, had been angry at her for interfering with his kit. More angry at that than at the rebuke in the note, or at himself for leaving her, and he had almost turned back to confront her. Within a day the scales had tipped the opposite way; his dreamed-of return would have been to apologise and ask her forgiveness. But he had kept to the road, plodding ever forward to the next destination, the next person or thing to be tracked. He followed; that was his job. It wasn’t up to him to take the lead.

And here he was, hoping to save the world and perhaps himself as well.

How did dying fit into that plan, he wondered. What possible redemption had he planned for himself in this life, if the Goddess and the twins and their strange talk of Third Realms and world-trees and the like were to be believed?

He didn’t know, but as he took off his gloves and reached into the pouch to take out the letter, his fingers brushed the fragment wrapped within, and a chimerical shock ran down his entire body.

‘Kail? Kail! Is that you?’

The voice exploded through him, one he had only overheard in a dusty ruin half a world away but recognised instantly.

‘
You’ve rumbled me, Abi Van Haasteren
,’ he replied, sending his message through the Caduceus fragment, finding it easier than he had expected. The Surveyor must have been seeking the missing piece with considerable will to open such a clear link from such a great distance, ‘
but I’m afraid this isn’t a good time to give my confession
.’

‘
It’s not a confession I’m after, you fool
,’ she snapped. ‘
It’s your senses. Now, clear your mind. I know you can do this because you let Sal in Laure
.’

‘
Wait
—’ His protest was completely subsumed by the force of the woman’s directive. Not just hers, he sensed, even as he was tossed helplessly into the sudden unfamiliarity of his own skull. There were others Taking behind her, in a vast network the like of which he had never experienced before. He felt dozens of Stone Mages watching through her and in turn through him. And behind them were Sky Wardens and bloodletters and foresters, and people with no clearly recognisable discipline. Somewhere — perhaps everywhere, all across the Earth — a vast crowd had gathered to see the unfolding events through his eyes.

‘
That’s it
.’ Abi Van Haasteren’s tone didn’t lose an iota of its urgency, but she at least attempted to reassure him. ‘
I’m sorry to be so rough. We’ve been trying to get your attention for days now
.’

Even as he felt his eyes tugged upwards, to a thread of blackness descending to kill him, he couldn’t repress the need to know ‘
Why
?’

‘The seers have gone blind. All of them. The only vision they’re receiving now is of the mountains, where you just happen to be. We know you’re there because Marmion and Kelloman have both asked for help in the last day. No one believed them, thinking the problem’s source had to lie closer to home. We didn’t realise then that everyone had the same problem, not just wardens and mages. Marmion and Kelloman stopped asking, but people remembered once the news started to spread. And then the seers started seeing again. The mountains. The end of our world. A new Cataclysm, or something just as bad. We need to know what’s going on.’

‘
Well, now you see
.’ He couldn’t help sounding churlish. ‘
You’re just in time to watch us die
.’

‘
That thing up in the sky
—
what is it
?’

‘The thing that’s going to kill us. Now get out of my head and let me get out of its way.’

The surveyor retreated, and the mob behind her went as well. He found himself back in control of his body and in full possession of his senses. Noises hit him first — the sound of shouting and the strange complaint of the sky as it bore the presence of Yod. The black tentacle had been joined by two more. All three angled in from different directions and would strike at different times.

He withdrew his hand from the pouch and let himself be jostled into a group with the others. There was nothing else he could do. To his right loomed the glowing shape of the Goddess’s Tomb. Inside he glimpsed the indistinct shapes of those who had remained behind, either by choice or at the Goddess’s instructions. Marmion stood on his left, gripping Highson’s parchment with his hands, both real and ghostly. Further along the wall waited Kelloman, one fist clutching the raw golden Homunculus, his incongruously young head turned up to the sky.

The first tentacle would arrive in seconds, and it was headed right for Kail and the others. Lidia Delfine and Heuve reached for each other’s hands and clasped tight. Griel growled low and wordlessly. A sharp smell of urine came from Orma, but the young Ice Eater held his ground. Kail took his shoulder in one hand.

Then suddenly the glast was among them, its glassy darkness reflecting the half-light of the cloudy day. Yod’s deadly tentacle changed course in an instant, curling around them to pass over Marmion’s head. The bald warden ducked automatically, taken off-guard, and Kelloman tensed, ready to run, but the ‘head’ of the tentacle swept harmlessly down the side of the tower. Its tail licked half-heartedly at the huddle protected by the glast, but did no more than threaten.

‘This one!’ called Marmion to Kelloman, pointing at the next tentacle on its way. His words barely carried through the thin, cold air. ‘Stand fast and do as Highson told us. It should pass by us both!’

A cry of alarm came from the Tomb as the men acting as bait readied themselves. Kail glanced away to see a small shape scurrying across the tower wall with ears and slender tail upraised.

‘Catch it!’ Skender cried. ‘Don’t let it go to him!’

Kail realised then what had happened. The bilby had escaped from the Tomb and was running to its master. Kail lunged at it as it went by him, but it easily evaded his clumsy grab. Marmion missed it, too.

‘Wretched thing,’ Kelloman cursed as both the bilby and the tentacle converged on him.

‘Ignore it,’ Marmion warned him. ‘Ignore it!’

The tentacle came along the top of the tower wall, flying a metre above the naked stone. It would pass by Kelloman first, then Marmion, then be turned away by the glast before it reached Kail and the others.