The Heretic Land (52 page)

Stunned, numbed, he leaned against the cave wall and watched the colours of destruction dancing at the entrance.

After a small rest he set off again.

He walked through that day, and found the first dead Kolt just before nightfall. It wore a Spike uniform and was pricked in several places with heavy arrows, but these were not the cause of its demise. It was a thin, wasted thing, limbs and torso shrivelled, face drawn, eyes sunken and picked out by birds or insects. Its mouth hung open in an endless exhalation of rage, and Bon would not draw too close. It was dead, but still exuded malevolence. He passed it by and moved on quickly, glancing back several times while the body was still in view to make sure it had not moved.

He discovered several more dead Kolts, all in a similar state. Each was on its own, all had fallen in their drive southward, and many still clasped the weapons with which they had done so much killing. It was not the explosions that had ended these corrupted things, nor the many wounds they carried. They had simply burned out and withered away.

From the land of
the dead, as he came close to the coast he began to meet the living. They were always Skythian, cowed and shy and terrified. He tried not to bother them, but he was hungry and thirsty, and they seemed adept at surviving in this changing land. He humbly accepted help from one small family, but felt no compulsion to remain with them. He was Alderian, however his heart might speak otherwise. Alderia was this land’s great abuser, and when they did not kill him, he shed a tear of shame.

This land, so abused six centuries before, had been subjected to another calamity that must surely mean its end. A disaster initiated once again by the people of Alderia. When Bon’s tears had dried, the shame remained, a constant presence inside. He knew he would never be able to reach in and tear it out, and he was glad for that. Someone had to take responsibility.

At the coast, little remained of the scattered communities. A tsunami had swept in from the sea and reclaimed the beaches and much of the low-lying ground inland. Everything was changed. Countless people were dead. He met few survivors, and those he did meet – all Skythian – were heading west, away from the great cataclysm that was still visible as a boiling tower of flame along the shore. Massive clouds of steam glowed from the chaos within.

From the north, the thunder of ice and the fading heat of another great explosion.

Bon followed the survivors.

Three days later he found a cave. It was a mile inland, sheltered from the sea breeze by a lip of rock, and it had once been home to others. There was a fire pit close to the entrance, and inside he discovered blankets and a sleeping roll, a blunted sword, some clothing and a few basic cooking implements. They were of Alderian origin, and Bon wondered who had lived here, and what perceived crime they had committed to deserve expulsion to Skythe.

Maybe they were alive; perhaps
they were dead. Either way, all that remained of them here were a few roughly painted scenes on the walls deeper in the cave. They were of a man and a woman and two small children. Bon thought they were a girl and a boy, and the images made him sad. They gave evidence of an adult desperate to record his family, lest it fade from memory.

He wandered the area, gathering wood for a fire and considering what he might eat. He was not a hunter – not yet anyway – and he could find no fruit trees, so that evening he would likely go hungry. But by the time the fire was roaring, deeper in the cave he found fat grubs emerging as the heat filtered through to them, and he cooked them wrapped in heavy leaves. They were bland but filling.

From the north came the constant thunder of change. A grinding, cracking sound, as ice rose and then flowed.
It’ll erase everything
, Bon thought. And he decided, as he bedded down, that might be no bad thing.

Dawn broke, Bon rose; during the night he had decided to stay. He was alone again, cast adrift with memories of extraordinary people, and the incredible things they had done.

Venturing back into the cave to view those old images afresh, he thought perhaps he might begin to paint. He hoped that if anyone ever discovered his images painted onto a cave wall, they might become wise.

Pursuing, pursued, as Juda worked his way south he began to understand.

He was guided by something
inside that was not wholly him. This presence sat deep and quiet, yet asserted its influence. It was larger than him, and Juda fled and followed because he had no choice. To contradict was not permitted. This presence had calmed his dreams and given him proper sleep for the first time in his life, and for that he owed it a measure of loyalty.

There was little to the landscape here that he recognised, and he was several miles out to sea before he realised he had even passed the coast. The ice he walked over was thick and jagged, and when he came across a deep ice ravine and heard water surging and withdrawing deep down, he knew that he travelled over the ocean. He had left Skythe behind.

‘What will I find on Alderia?’ he asked the leaden sky. It had ceased snowing, but the threat of more snow was still heavy.

The presence inside did not reply, but he could sense something of its mood. Here was patience, an ancient contemplation of time as a means to an end. Here was fury at actions that had been taken against it, and pride in the way it had escaped that intended fate. Here was madness.

Juda shivered, but the shadow inside warmed him. It came forward, brief and powerful, to give him a glimpse of what it was, and what he had become … and he was awash with more magic than he had ever dreamed of.
I am everything I always sought, and all that I wanted to be
. Yet he had never felt so wretched. The immense and dreadful half-formed mind hid within his own, and he found hints of the truth. Perhaps it was letting him see this, perhaps not. But once seen he could not unknow.

His time in that old broken Engine had been centuries beyond counting, not days. Hidden away and protected, he had been a vessel for the hiding thing after its full re-emergence into the world had been sabotaged and halted. And now that ages had passed, and Alderia had moved on to whatever fraught future its false gods might have inspired, he was walking across the frozen sea to visit.

Juda carried the seed
of Crex Wry. He would find someone, or something, in which to plant it. And then the people of the world would cower in fear of new rumours of old gods.

Tim Lebbon
is a critically
acclaimed, award-winning
author
of fantasy and horror novels and also writes screenplays. He has won the British Fantasy Society Award four times for his novellas and novel-length works and the Bram Stoker Award for his short fiction. His
New York Times
bestselling novelisation of the movie
30 Days of Night
also won him a Scribe Award. Tim writes full-time and lives in Monmouthshire.

Find out more about Tim Lebbon and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at
www.orbitbooks.net

Have you always
known that you
wanted to be a writer?

I’ve always known that I wanted to write. But it wasn’t until my late teens that I even entertained the idea of being a
writer
.

I’ve written stories since I could hold a pencil, and before that I probably told them. Analysing why that’s the case is something I no longer do … not because I’m afraid of questioning the urge to tell stories, but because there’s no easy answer. My grandmother always had a saying about why people are like they are: ‘It’s the way their parents put their hat on.’ That might partly be the case here, because my folks always encouraged me to read from a very early age, and one of the first TV programmes I ever remember watching was
Doctor Who
. I always loved using my imagination, and stretching it, and that meant that I naturally loved telling stories. I did so all through my teens, starting dozens of novels, finishing a few. And then it struck me that because I loved doing this so much, maybe it’s what I could do for a living. That took
some time to achieve, but the efforts to get there are a large part of the reward.

But I also believe that people are wired a certain way notwithstanding any outside influences. Some people are born sports-people, or scientists, and some are born with a driving urge to tell stories.

You’ve now written two fantasy novels for Orbit. How does
Echo City
compare to
The Heretic Land
, and do they address similar themes?

The theme that runs through both novels is how religions and beliefs affect society, sometimes for good, sometimes bad. Both involve societies in decline. Both follow groups of people who might be able to save the day. But there are also big differences …

In
Echo City
, most of the action takes place in or below the city of the title. It’s a very, very big place, but still I wanted the sense of confinement to be claustrophobic and unsettling. The idea that a civilisation could believe that their city was the whole world I found fascinating – similar to flat-earthers, or even people who believe we are a unique, inhabited island in a dead universe (I don’t believe that at all …). Of course, most of my characters suspected that there was more beyond the toxic desert surrounding the city, even though recorded history denied this. And it is these people who confront the unknown with courage and open-mindedness. Oh, and there’s also a big monster approaching the city from way, way down, where its oldest histories lie …

In
The Heretic Land
, it’s a very big world in which events unfold, with wide tracts of virtually uninhabited land, all of it ringing
with a sad history. There’s not that sense of physical enclosure, although there are still blinkered beliefs and unwillingness to entertain wider, more startling possibilities … but not within my heroes, of course. They’re the ones who see the light, and who struggle to keep it shining.

Although I’m perhaps better known as a horror writer,
The Heretic Land
is actually my sixth fantasy novel. They’re all dark and grim, and I think my fantasy writing will always be informed by my horror-writing background. Fairies? Unicorns? If I
do
ever use them, they’ll definitely have their dark sides.

Did the idea for
The Heretic Land
come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?

Very few of my books come to me fully realised. That’s a huge part of the enjoyment of writing for me – if I knew the whole story before I’d even written the first sentence, I wouldn’t get nearly as much enjoyment out of writing. Often at the end of the book my writing speeds up, because I’m keen to get to the end to see what happens! That was the case with
The Heretic Land
as much as anything I’d written. I’ve always been interested in the idea of sleeping and/or fallen gods (an idea I explored before in my novel
Fallen
). And I’m fascinated with the perception of gods, and the idea – so beautifully articulated by Arthur C. Clarke – that a being sufficiently advanced might be viewed as a god. I wanted to explore that idea, and the world of
The Heretic Land
built up around that. But it’s as much about humanity’s use and misuse of religion, as it is about the subjects of such beliefs.

What advantages and
disadvantages do you see in using fantasy as the vehicle for your stories?

The main reason I love fantasy could be viewed as both – because I get to create whole new worlds! Some might find this daunting, and often it is. But it’s also one of the most enjoyable elements of writing a fantasy novel for me. I have, quite literally, a blank canvas. And although I also know that my novel is going to feature very human characters, and landscapes that are at least partially recognisable, I also know that I’ll be able to create whole new races, flora, fauna, societies, religions, politics … while at the same time commenting on our own.

And the thing is, I think the fantasy world is always so integral to the story I’m trying to tell that it would be impossible to tell it in any other way.

Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?

There are many, and I’m sure any writer would tell you the same. But when asked this question, I always mention three particular writers from different parts of my life.

When I was pre-teen I read all the Adventure books by Willard Price, and I guess these gave me my love of adventure stories.

In my teens (and still to a large extent now), Stephen King was the main man. I sometimes go through difficult phases with my reading (maybe it’s a middle-age thing), where I find it very hard to get into a book. But with King, I always know that once I pick up one of his novels, I’ll be hooked.

In my mid-twenties I started reading Arthur Machen. Machen was a turn-of-the-century writer of esoteric, supernatural fiction
who told some wonderful, chilling tales of wonder and terror.