The Devoured Earth (53 page)

‘You know I think about family a lot,’ Shilly went on. ‘We both do, even if you won’t admit it.’ Her smile had watery highlights but she ploughed on. ‘I remember when I thought Marmion was Lodo’s nephew. That showed me just how much it meant to be able to connect with someone that way. It’s not about feelings, Sal, and it’s not just about blood, since Kail was related to Lodo, not me. It’s about roots, the knowledge that you’re more than just floating over the world. You’re in it and part of it, and you’ll be missed when you die.’

‘That certainly sounds like us,’ Sal said, tipping the ingredients into the pot and giving it a stir. He wondered if she knew about Marmion’s death, and decided that just then might not be a good time to tell her if she didn’t.

‘It
is
us,’ she said, nodding. ‘I think I realise that now. Stuck out here, it’s been easy to forget that the world hasn’t forgotten. There’s Highson and Skender and Alcaide Braham and now all these other people we’ve met. They won’t forget us any more than we’ll forget them. I get that now.’

He added a generous pinch of spice to the mix and breathed deeply of the aromatic steam. ‘You’re going somewhere with this,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you?’

She nodded. ‘Not very far, I’m afraid. How can we make a decision like this, on everyone’s behalf, without consulting them? That’s what I ask myself. But we could spend a lifetime asking for advice and still not come to any conclusions. Some will want the realms united, some divided, and both camps will have good arguments.’

‘What do
you
think?’ Sal cut in. ‘Honestly. Right now. Don’t think about it. Just tell me.’

‘If it was just you and me, I’d say let’s join the realms. I could never take your wild talent away.’

‘And I’d want to give it to you,’ he said. ‘You deserve it.’

‘Do I?’ She didn’t look relieved that they had agreed. ‘What makes you say that?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe just that you’d be so much better at it than me.’

‘But maybe that’s why I shouldn’t have it. There’s such a thing as being too good at something.’ She busied herself finding bowls and spoons and wiping them clean. ‘Anyway, it’s not just us. It’s everyone, and the old gods, and all the chaos that would ensue. I don’t think I could live in that world. I don’t think many people could.’

‘And we don’t need wild talent at all, now Yod is dead.’

She nodded. ‘So we can safely break the realms apart, like all my other selves originally wanted.’

‘Is that what your head says, not your heart?’

‘Maybe. Can you imagine life without the Change? Without Sky Wardens and Stone Mages and weather-workers and Weavers?’

‘And no golems, either.’

‘Well, that’s one thing in its favour.’

He stirred the pot in silence for a while. ‘Do we really need to do anything at all, now? I mean, Yod is gone so it really doesn’t matter.’

‘The twins,’ she said. ‘They’re not in the Homunculus any more, and they’re not in the Void. The Goddess has them safe and together right now, but that might not last. If they go their separate ways, if they die, there’s nothing left to hold our world together.’

Sal tasted the soup, mindful of burning his tongue. ‘Yes, I’d forgotten about them.’

‘I think
we
need to make this decision, not them. It’s our world now. That’s what the glast meant, I think. That’s why this moment is so important.’

He added one last dash of salt to the pot. ‘It’s done.’

She smiled a lopsided smile and handed him her bowl. ‘Our last meal in the old world. It’d better be good.’

‘You know the odds on that. Could we change the world into one where my cooking is good?’

Her smile broadened. ‘No charm’s that powerful.’

* * * *

Halfway through the meal, Shilly saw Sal’s face twitch. He covered it up by taking a mouthful, but his expression remained wooden.

‘They’re calling you, aren’t they?’

He nodded. ‘They want to know where we are, how long we’ll be — all that.’

‘What are you saying in response?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You should let them know we’re okay.’ She swallowed a spoonful of the soup — which, in spite of their jokes and the scarcity of provisions, was the best meal she’d had in many weeks — and thought some more on the subject. ‘You can also tell them to be patient and stop bothering us.’

‘They’re just worried.’

‘Well, they’ll have to stop worrying. We’ll decide in our own time, thanks very much.’ She felt a twinge of guilt at being so brusque. The others were, after all, waiting on a Cataclysm that would, either way, destroy the world they knew. But the decision wasn’t theirs to make, and they had no right to rush her. Would they rather she tossed a coin?

That reminded her of Mawson influencing the roll of a dice, and she shivered, wondering how far the man’kin would go to preserve their own futures.

But then she thought of the Angel trapped in the rubble and the way it had protested that it didn’t want to be rescued.
The Angel will not die
, Mawson had said,
even if its life here ends
.

How nice, she thought, to be so sanguine about the possibility of death, of ending… of change.

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked Sal, feeling suddenly bone-weary of the situation. The thought of tossing a coin was perversely tempting. ‘How are we going to resolve this?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, pushing his soup away unfinished. He looked pale in the light of the glowstones. They had both lost colour in the mountains, although her skin remained much darker than his. ‘But we can’t just sit here forever. We have to do something.’

‘Give me a suggestion and I’ll happily consider it.’

‘I’m not the one with the brains,’ he said with sudden irritability. ‘I’m just the grunt, remember?’

‘Great. You’re giving up — just like that.’

‘What do you mean, “just like that”? I’ve been thinking about this as hard as you have been.’

‘Really? I don’t see any other versions of you weighing in with anything useful. At least mine were trying to help.’

‘And a fat lot of good they were too, unless you count nightmares and obsessive visions as useful contributions.’

‘They died trying to save us.’ Her throat locked up, and the anger that had been rising to a crescendo suddenly collapsed into grief. ‘They died, all of them. And so did you, Sal. So did you.’

‘Hey, I’m sorry.’ He came around the table, his face a picture of worry, and put his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry. Don’t cry.’

She wasn’t going to cry. All her tears were gone. But she pressed her face into him anyway and breathed deeply of his smell: salty and masculine and everything she imagined when she thought of home.

The light of the glowstones changed colour from a warm yellow to a cold, crystal blue.

She looked up, blinking with surprise, and saw four people standing in the workshop where there had been none before.
Three
, she corrected herself. One wasn’t a person at all.

‘I knew you were here,’ said the Goddess. The bright spark of the Flame hung weightlessly in the air, between her and the glast. The twins stood to her right and behind her, side by side like watchful uncles. ‘I also knew you’d be finding this difficult. We’ve come to offer our advice.’

‘To make the decision for us, you mean,’ said Shilly with a flash of irritation.

‘No. I’ve already decided my future, and it makes no difference to me what you do with yours.’ The short woman with the hazel eyes and long, brown-grey hair tilted her head and smiled. ‘I mean that in a purely pragmatic sense. Of course it does matter to me what you do, or I wouldn’t be here now. But I’m not going to force you into anything. I can’t, anyway.’

‘What about you?’ Shilly asked the glast, which still looked exactly — and unnervingly — like the old Kemp but had at least donned a robe to cover its nakedness. ‘What’s
your
agenda?’

‘I wish to convey a possibility,’ it said, ‘and I wish to tell you why I have stayed in this world when I could easily find another to live in, somewhere else in the universe.’

‘Could you really do that?’ asked Sal.

‘At any time.’ The glast stated the fact bluntly, without smugness, and Shilly found herself believing it without question. ‘Like Yod, I was born between worlds and am constrained to none. I live where I choose.’

‘Tell us, then,’ she said. ‘What makes
us
so lucky?’

‘Because I like it here.’ The glast ignored her dig and answered her question matter-of-factly. ‘This world is rich and complex. The interplay between its fundamental forces is benign to life, but not
too
benign, either. A struggle remains within and between species that ensures one does not dominate too much. Yod would have upset that balance, and that is why I intervened. I intervene again because I fear that it is about to be disturbed once more, even if for the best of reasons. I will not stop you from making a decision I do not think is right, but I will leave if it doesn’t suit me. I would rather not. As I said, I like it here.’

‘So what’s your point?’ Shilly pressed. ‘Say what you’re going to say and leave us to it.’

‘I like it here,’ the glast repeated for the third time, ‘
just the way it
i
s.’

Those five words hit Shilly with the force of a physical blow. She felt her spine straighten and her eyes widen. Her hands gripped the table.

‘No,’ she said. Wrenching her gaze from the glast to the Goddess, she asked, ‘Could we do that?’

‘It’s your charm,’ said the Goddess. ‘You can do whatever you want with it.’

‘Do what?’ asked Sal. He stood stiffly at her side, radiating confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The third option,’ said one of the twins. Hadrian, Shilly guessed. ‘There’s always a third option, if you look hard enough.’

‘It’s the magic number,’ said the other twin, with more bitterness in his voice. ‘Three, not two.’

Now Shilly felt like
she
was missing out on something, but she shrugged that aside for the moment.

‘Don’t you see, Sal?’ she said, looking up at him. ‘We’re not limited to one or the other. There’s a middle ground, one we didn’t see because it’s right under our noses.
We don’t change anything
. We keep it exactly as it is. But we don’t let it stay that way just because that’s the way the twins made it. We
make
it stay that way. We take what happened by accident and make it permanent.’

‘Our improvisation,’ said Hadrian.

‘Your decision,’ said the Goddess.

‘Just the way I like it,’ added the glast.

* * * *

Sal felt his face turning red as understanding dawned. It was an interesting solution to the problem. He could see that now he
could
see it. He simply wished he’d thought of it earlier and saved them the agony of indecision.

But would it really save them anything? Did having a third option make things easier or harder still?

‘By uniting or separating the realms,’ the glast said, ‘you are in effect levelling the playing field. This is Kemp’s metaphor. But life doesn’t care about fairness. It thrives on randomness, variations, uncertainty. That’s why this world is so rich with possibilities. That’s why I believe it should remain unchanged — in order to maintain its mutability, as revealed by the process you call the Change.’

‘You’re saying,’ Sal said, ‘that we should use Shilly’s charm to keep the realms just the way they are. Side by side; neither completely joined nor completely separate.’

‘
Could
, not should,’ said the Goddess with a nod. ‘The realms are like soap bubbles. They can float separately through the air. They can meet and become one bigger bubble. Sometimes they simply touch. Such conjunctions are rare —’ The glast nodded at this. ‘— but they do occur. And sometimes the worlds within are stronger for it. Have you heard of hybrid vigour? It’s where two species are bred together to create a new one containing all the strengths of its parents. That’s what this world could be like, permanently. If you so wish.’

‘I could do it,’ said Shilly. ‘I can see how the charm could be remade to maintain the world as it is. It’d be tricky, but I could do it.’

‘Is this what you want?’ asked Sal, feeling dizzy at the sudden turn of events.

‘It’s not just up to me, Sal. We have to agree, whatever we decide to do.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes. I need you to put the charm into effect.’

Sal ran a hand across his face. He didn’t know why he was resisting what seemed on the surface to be a perfect solution. Maybe because it was
too
perfect. Maybe because Shilly should have thought of it first. The Goddess claimed not to care what they decided, but he couldn’t believe it was that simple. At least the glast was upfront about what it wanted.

‘Nothing would change,’ he mused aloud. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘There would still be Stone Mages and Sky Wardens and man’kin — and golems, yes, and all that lot. Everything would keep going just as it has for the last thousand years. There’d be no Cataclysm. No lives would be lost.’ She looked up at him with shining eyes. ‘Don’t you see how simple it is?’

‘Yes, I see that.’ But there was something missing, something nibbling at his unconscious. He thought aloud: ‘You told me,’ he said to the Goddess, ‘that I have my wild talent because of this critical juncture. In the world-line next door, you said, the realms are joined. Some of that has leaked over into this world-line, into me, and that’s why I got stronger the closer to this moment we came, when all the various world-lines are closest together. But if we don’t join the realms, and this world-line drifts away from the others, what’ll happen then? The juncture will be behind us. Behind
me.’

‘You will lose your talent, yes,’ the Goddess said. ‘I won’t hide that from you. It’ll take time. Years, probably — as many years as you’ve had the talent already, at least — but the end result will be the same. It will be gone, and all that’ll remain is your natural ability.’

‘Do I have any?’ he asked her, conscious of Shilly watching him closely.