The Heretic Land (20 page)

They descended into the ravine and followed the river’s course, walking through flutters of strange-tasting snow. The river’s roar allowed no communication, and its noise filled Bon’s head, trying to drown other thoughts. As they descended, the roar grew greater until it became something that intruded into every sense – the taste of river water, strangely stale; a vibration to the air, the shaking ground; the smell of dead things carried on the river and the stagnant dampness of places never touched by the sun. Bon’s pain seemed to recede the deeper they went, whether because of the overwhelming effect of the river or a dispersal of the venom, he did not mind.

Some time passed. An early dusk closed over them, but it was not darkness that tracked the passage of time for Bon, but Juda’s behaviour. He stumbled several times, and then started falling over. His hands continued to wave at the air, the actions changing from grasping to punching, clasping, slashing.

Bon grabbed Leki’s arm and pulled her close. ‘We have to tie him and carry him!’ he shouted, and he could hear his own voice
again. Leki nodded and heaved off Juda’s backpack. He carried rope and tape, and as Bon took a moment to glance around, she went about binding his wrists together.

The ravine had widened considerably and the river’s violence lessened, flowing past confident and brash.
Where has he led us? What by all the false gods
is
that?

It was only a river. Only a river …

He helped Leki tie the twitching, sleeping man, and Juda’s eyes opened, white, rolled upwards.

‘Into the marshes …’ he shouted. ‘But … dangers …’

‘The air!’ Leki said.

‘Tadcat … liver oil. In my pack. A paste … leather pouch. Rub it …’ Juda gasped, clasped at the air, and then very deliberately drew two fingers slowly across his top lip.

‘I know a little about the marshes,’ Bon said. Leki glanced at him, one eyebrow raised. Bon shrugged. He knew
something
about them.

But his comment seemed to ease Juda into a more peaceful sleep, and they finished tying his wrists and ankles.

Leki rummaged in Juda’s pack and brought out several items, looking more and more concerned as she did so. One of them was a long spike, a length of gut trailing from one end. Another consisted of several glass vials melted together, fluid in some of them showing different colours depending on the angle Leki held it at.

‘What?’ Bon asked.

‘Things he shouldn’t have.’ Leki did not elaborate, but opened a small leather pouch, sniffing and nodding. She plunged two fingers inside and then smeared them beneath her nose, so that her top lip glistened with a faint pink gel. She dipped again, and Bon leaned forward to receive the paste. Lastly, she did Juda.

‘Stinks,’ Bon said.

‘Better
than being poisoned by marsh gas.’

‘You think this will make us safe?’

Leki shrugged, and looked faintly disapproving. ‘You’re the one who said you know about the marshes.’

‘Well … some.’ They left it at that. Time was moving on, dusk had settled, and they both felt the pressure of pursuit building behind them. Whatever things Leki had found in Juda’s pack, Bon knew they had to trust Juda, for now. He would ask Leki about the objects when they were safe.

The river – ice-cold, the frozen artery of this degraded, dying land – pointed the way to the gas marshes.

Juda was heavier than he looked, and they carried him in short stints. Tall, skinny, clothes flapping about his sticklimbs, Bon thought he must possess bones of steel and organs of rock. His heart, at least, was still a mystery, and Bon did not mind sharing that doubt with Leki.

‘We still don’t know why he saved us,’ he said.

‘Does kindness need a reason?’

‘Really?’ Bon frowned at Leki where she carried Juda’s legs. ‘After whatever you found in his pack, you really believe it’s just kindness?’

‘No,’ Leki admitted. She looked down at the man slung between them; his bound wrists, tied ankles. He was twitching in his sleep, and muttering things they could not yet hear. His talking would increase in volume soon. They would need to gag him.

‘He’s led us from the slayers into this place, which is even more likely to kill us,’ Bon said.

‘He’s here himself.’

‘A madman might not know fear.’

‘Hang on,’ Leki said. ‘Wait.’ She was panting. They eased Juda to the ground. ‘Just a breath.’

Bon looked
anxiously behind them, into the narrowing ravine where the river and its misty spray seemed enraged, filling the whole space. He wasn’t sure just how they’d managed to come through there.

‘This river …’ he said.

‘It’s just a river,’ Leki said. ‘I know what you’re feeling. I feel the same. But I think it’s just … picking up on the cold in the land.’

‘The cold?’

‘The frozen heart of Skythe. Maybe it’s only us amphys who sense it.’

‘Not something I’ve heard of,’ Bon said, surprised to feel a little put out. He’d thought himself an authority on Skythe, and the cold river had frightened him without his knowing why.

‘All the waters of the world are joined,’ Leki said. ‘They merge and mix and flow, and tell their stories. And the story goes that deep beneath parts of Skythe, the underground has gone from molten to frozen. The heart of the land, frozen by what happened.’

‘That sounds like something the Ald would have us believe,’ Bon said, only part serious.

‘You’d suggest that of me?’ she asked, suddenly cold herself.

‘No. No.’

‘Come on. The ravine’s ending, the gas marshes beginning. I can smell them even past this paste. You say you know something of the marshes, so it’s time to use what you know.’ Leki heaved at Juda’s legs, and Bon picked him up under the arms once more.

‘We can’t carry him far like this,’ Bon said. His poisoned hand was still swollen and its muscles and bones ached.

‘Hopefully we won’t need to.’

The river’s anger
lessened as the ravine sides fell away, flattening into the beginnings of the marshes. The gas was noxious, rotten, stinging the back of Bon’s throat. Juda had said that they could lose the slayers here because their scent would be lost amid the gaseous exhalations of the wet ground. But there was much more to the marshes than wetness, and gas. In losing the slayers, Bon began to fear they would expose themselves to dangers even more terrible.

He had not been entirely truthful when he said he knew about the marshes. Dangerous, wild places even back when Skythe had been a thriving island with commerce, art and science, they had interested him little in his readings. They were almost the same now as they had been back then – larger, perhaps, and less well fed by wandering, lost humans. And though undoubtedly the flora and fauna of Skythe had changed since the war, and was still changing now, the marshes themselves stood testament to the differing touch of time. Not timeless, but ancient. The matters of humanity held little significance for such a place.

Bon had heard rumours of the marshes’ changing geography, steam and gas geysers, and wildlife peculiarly adapted to the environment. But the detail would be for him to discover along with Leki.

The river spread into the land. In places it seemed to vent into underground routes, clouds of spray catching the last red touch of the sunset. Elsewhere it parted around islands on which grew short, craggy trees, and flowed into wide areas of water that seemed hardly to move. In these watery landscapes, bubbles rose and broke as if the ground below were breathing. The air was already tainted. Bon breathed lightly past the tadcat oils, afraid of what that taint might do, and whether he would even know.

Juda grew heavier. Leki’s face mirrored Bon’s own weariness.
But they had to move on into the vast marshland. Somewhere, soon, they would need to hide.

Their night in the gas marshes became a blur of vision and a haze of sensation. The sense of being elsewhere was overwhelming – Bon soon felt dislocated from Skythe, and from the whole of the world. Juda was a sleeping creature slung between them, Leki a stranger, and Bon even grew distant from himself. His history became an echo in another mind, and his present lacked definition and importance.

The slayers – the main reason for them venturing into the gas marshes in the first place – were very far away. Bon barely thought about those monstrous killers that whole night.

Later, he would remember their experiences there like recalling a dream from his youth. And thinking back to the few clearer moments he
could
remember – constructing them piece by piece, like writing a letter with words he barely knew – he would begin to doubt himself. Had he lived those moments, or were they simply a dream? Had he truly seen those things, and run from them, and found that place to hide? Or perhaps he and Leki had simply collapsed beneath the weight of their exhaustion, urged down into dream-haunted darkness by the noxious fumes of that place.

Bon was left wondering at reality, and how real anything might be.

And those few clear memories, like dreams given life …

As the marshes grew wide and the water sluggish, and it became impossible to define the river any more, the air was heavy with steam and gas. It was difficult to distinguish the two, and they coated Bon’s nostrils and the back of his throat with slick sourness. They paused often, lowering Juda to the damp ground and trying to catch their breath, regain strength in their straining muscles. Bon’s hand still burned. And once, standing
beneath the cover of tall trees whose multitude of roots stood proud of the ground like exposed bones, Bon rubbed at his ears. Something was making them buzz.
Wet air
, he thought,
gas nestling inside my ears.
He pressed in with his fingertips and the buzzing ceased. Seeing Leki doing the same, he realised that the sound came from outside.

They ducked down beside Juda and looked up. Noticing the sound made it louder, and also gave the previous silence more weight. Gas made no sound when it drifted, and water sat quietly with no ravine to power along.

Leki leaned across Juda and clasped Bon’s shoulder, other hand pressed to her lips. Then she pointed up through the sparse tree canopy. He looked, and Bon’s first thought was that fumes had reached his brain and he was passing out. He blinked several times, but the shifting dark blots were still there.

Above the trees. Flitting back and forth, drifting, searching. Hunting. Buzzing.

‘Are they
wasps
?’ Leki whispered.

Bon nodded, because he had already recognised their sleek bodies, pale yellow and black markings, and the blur of wings keeping them aloft. The buzzing sounded angry and loud, yet they moved with an easy grace. They owned the air.

‘What in Fade do they
eat
to get that big?’ Leki whispered. She was still leaning across Juda, maintaining the contact. Her hand on Bon’s shoulder squeezed. It was warm.

Juda muttered and then shouted, and Bon’s heart sank.
We forgot to gag him!
Leki stared at him wide-eyed, panicked into stillness. The wasps’ buzzing changed in pitch, but Bon did not look up, could not, as he bunched up the front of Juda’s jacket and shoved it into the sleeping, nightmaring man’s foam-flecked mouth.

The wasps came then, drifting down through the branches like
unnatural windfalls. Bon sensed them drawing closer. He heard their drone increasing in volume and changing pitch, and he was the focus of their attention. He could feel them against the back of his head and neck, as surely as if their wings were already caressing there. He looked up from the writhing man to Leki, but she only had eyes for the wasps.

He has a pistol
, Bon thought, going to root through Juda’s clothing to find the weapon he had seen him bearing more than once. But he was already out of time.

A wasp drifted down before him. It was even larger than he had at first thought – the size of a newborn child, body heavy and bristled, wings tearing the air, buzz almost as loud as the river had been in the ravine, breeze lifting the hair from his forehead. It moved back and forth before him. Up and down. As if attempting to hypnotise him, yet so inhuman. Another fell slowly behind it, turning, looking around as if watching for dangers, though Bon had no idea what could be a danger to these things.

They carried a smell with them.
Rain on a summer day
, Bon thought, and each time he inhaled he caught a memory flash of his wife walking by the river in Sefton Breaks, Venden laughing and running before them.

He looked across at Leki, and she seemed rapt. There was no fear on her face. Ten, twelve, fifteen wasps hung in the air around them. The creatures hung in the air around them and temporarily stole fear of the slayers.

Bon could see stings glistening at the blunt tips of their abdomens. The stings were as long as his finger, and even if their poison did not prove fatal, the stabbing might.

Are they going to kill us?
he wanted to ask, but Leki was smiling. He wondered what memories she was living, and what scent she gained from these beasts.

The wasps might have been there for heartbeats or days, but then
they started to drift away. Interest sated, perhaps. Or maybe the fleshy, bloody humans would simply not make much of a meal. Leki watched them go. Bon watched her, trying to define the strange expression on her face. It might have been nostalgia, or loss, or a species of both.

They rested for a while, not speaking. Juda struggled in his sleep. Marsh fumes hazed the air.

One memory faded, melting away into quiet confusion while another rose, slaughtering it with the promise of terror …

They crossed the marsh on stepping stones of dryish land, trying to avoid the sucking depths that might pull them down to viscous darkness, feet permanently wet, looking for somewhere safe in case the slayers could still track them this far, still catch their scent through the masking odours of the marsh gas and mysterious darkness. A steam geyser exploded barely a hundred steps to their right. It blasted at the sky and ripped it open, gushing a shower of hot mud, water and steam into the night sky. It spattered down around them, speckles of muck scorching their exposed skin where they hunkered down and held their hands over their heads. Bon felt it splash heavily and wet across his back, scorching skin through his jacket and shirt where he lay protecting Juda from the downfall.