The Heretic Land by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online

air around her had curved, steering them away. She heard the cries and smelled the fear of those inside, and that drew her on like a fly to raw meat. Inside, a heavy sword swung at her from shadows to the left of the entrance. The weapon was wielded by a tall, terrified man. She grabbed and broke both, merging them together in a wet sculpture of metal and flesh. A flurry of movement in the shadows, a startling illumination, and three burning hay bales came at her. She kicked them backwhere they had come from, and the stench of burning hair filled the farmhouse.
    ‘Aeon save us, Aeon help us!’ someone pleaded to Skythe’s known and loving god, and though Milian could hear the words she did not know them. Her mind was fried and detached. She ran through the smoke and flames and stomped on the burning woman, crushing her skull, taking pleasure from killing the wretch beneath her feet rather than from putting her out of her misery.
    Misery was
her
currency, and madness her means of delivery.
    There were seven of them hidden in three rooms, and Milian took them all apart. Blades came at her and she broke or dodged them, thrown punches were caught and fists crushed, a haze of poison spray swept across her eyes and was blinked away by the mad daemon inside her. It took heartbeats, and then the screaming ended and she could feed again. She dug for the livers, because she liked them best.
    Afterwards, she left the farmstead and ran on, down towards the sea fifty miles distant where fishing villages would provide more game. Instinct urged her this way. The need to kill, and feed. The daemon that had entered her was stronger than ever now, and becoming used to the fit of her body. It had its own agenda. It
revelled
in this newfound freedom.
    To her left and right she saw occasional shapes bounding across the moonlit landscape. Blood hazed the air behind them. They were like her, Skythians giving home to daemons, and the only things she was not driven to kill.
    She had murdered more than thirty people since dusk, and the night had only just begun.
    Later, standing on the shore with the village ablaze behind her, still her hunger was not sated. Her stomach was distended with all she had eaten; liver, so rich. Her teeth were clottedwith the flesh of many bodies, and the daemon inside her thrummed in its eagerness for more.
    Wet cold dark alone
, she thought, and a wave crashed in around her feet. Several sand runners came in with it, claws held high as they surfed the water and then started busily scouring the sand for burrowing, fleshy things to eat. In their enthusiasm they brushed against her bare legs, shrivelled, and died.
    Further along the coast she smelled people still living, and she turned that way.
    The blazing village cast her shadow across the sea, and more of her kind – normal, loving Skythians changed by events into killing things – trailed after her. Some of them were burning. These walked until they fell, and even then she could feel their daemons raging on, darkening the land without shadow.
    From the ridge of the next spur of land protruding into the sea, on a scree of fallen rocks at the foot of the cliff, she saw one of the fabled Engines set into the land. She had heard the rumours about Alderians sailing towards some of the more remote southern beaches. She had heard whispers of the Engines, Alderian constructs supposedly sent to destroy the Skythian god Aeon. No one had believed that the Engines could be real.
Alderia is our friend
, people had said of the continent four hundred miles to the south, and that had been true for so long.
Why would they turn against us and the truth of Aeon? Would they
truly
be foolish enough to build Engines that could conjure
magic
?
    But that had been before Aeon’s manifestation into a physical presence. The Alderia’s Fade religion could not be touched. Perhaps they feared Aeon, which could.
    The thing within Milian raged, damping down such sane contemplations. Her hunger