The Heretic Land by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page A

burned.
    The sandand rock around the Engine were melted into shapes that mimicked the living. Its curved metal casings glimmered with moisture. Long limbs arced from the construct and into the beach, and it looked like an exposed organ from within some gigantic living thing.
The land has been ripped open
, Milian thought, and the idea suited the red-tinted rage of her daemon.
    Around the Engine fussed busy, frightened people in clothing she recognised as Alderian. She had seen them before on trade and cultural visits, but now they were the invaders, the aggressors. These were the real targets for her newfound rage.
    She opened her mouth, and her daemon roared.
    Those terrible memories haunting her, Milian has begun slowly flexing her limbs. Muscles in her thighs perform involuntary jumps, and her arms shift. They make a sound. It is like rock grinding against rock, and she wonders if she has been in this cave for so long that she has become a fossil. She saw fossils once when she was a child, excavating a hillside thirty miles north of her village with her school class. Her teacher showed her how to hold a trowel and explained why she must be so sensitive when she found a protruding fossil, brushing at it gently so as not to damage it. She had learned that old things demand reverence. She had still believed that when she became a holy woman, revering Aeon.
    I’m an old thing now
, she thinks, and she moves her arms again. They scrape across something until they press against the sides of her body. She might have been here for hundreds of years. The air around her has grown old and stale, like her mind.
    She wonders how she is still alive, and such musings bring the taste of brine and a chilling coolness closing all around her. She is certain that her daemon is gone, and that she is waking. Butin doing so, her memories seem to come even richer, and more horribly detailed than ever.
    She scrambled down the cliff face with three others like her – Skythians made furious, overflowing with daemon. Their rage was a physical thing, heating the air around them, cliffs echoing with their cries. The fear she saw in the Alderians around the Engine drew her on. The anticipation was delicious.
    One of the others slipped and fell, bouncing from outcroppings and dashing himself to pieces on the rocky beach below. She heard the impact and saw the splash of blood, and then he hauled himself upright and started across the sands. His left leg was broken and dragging, and a spew of blood and brains stained the back of his ragged shirt. She could hear him panting and groaning as he made for the Engine, and the daemon within him was struggling loose now, bursting from his open wounds like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Its disparate parts danced around his head like cold blue fire, whipping at the air and setting it alight. His hair burned. He rushed on, faster, and then the strangers around the Engine started firing crossbow bolts his way.
    They had come to destroy the Skythian god Aeon, but now had no idea what they faced.
    The man’s damage was great, and the bolts hit home. By the time she and the two others reached the bottom of the cliff, he was crawling across the sand with a dozen bolts embedded in his face and the lashing flames faded almost to nothing.
    Milian ran, and when she came within range of their weapons she roared, and they veered away and broke. Her daemon scream and rage held such power and strength. Feet pounded sand, blood splashed her body from the wounds she had alreadyreceived, and she could see the terror etched on the faces of the strange people around the Engine. Three of them worked on it, eight others tried to protect them.
    She was anticipating the feel of flesh parting between her hands once again when—
    The world lit up. The Engine howled like an impossible beast in pain, its limbs flexing and then rising, issuing a terrible glow that grew brighter and brighter. The ground shook. Sand made fluid by the movement