The Heretic Land by Tim Lebbon Page B

spines to the remnant’s underside, standing there with the shape arching above him and slicing the darkening sky in two, there was an immediate attraction that tugged the thing from his hands.
    The world turned over. Venden fell, fingers digging into the soil, terrified that he was aboutto fall off. His heart thudded against his chest, and he squeezed his eyes closed, thinking,
This is what I was always meant to do
. After a pause he rolled onto his back and looked up, and the remnant was more complete.
    The object had melded to the arched underside, spines now bent and connected to the remnant as though they had never been apart. Venden stood and stretched up to see, but there was no sign of any connection, no join. The two had become one, and when he reached up and touched the object it felt no different from the remnant.
    It was as if they had never been separate, yet, until Venden, they had been forty miles apart.
    ‘And there are more,’ he said, looking at the five other objects around the clearing. Each had a story of his finding them – guided by the presence that resided within him, shown and told where to go. Scattered across Skythe, they had been brought together again by his hands.
    One of them resembled a network of petrified veins, almost the size of his torso. It looked delicate, yet when he had recovered it from a deep pool beneath a waterfall he had felt the strength inherent in its structure. It was something that belonged inside. He had not applied pressure, but knew that, if he had done so, the object would have resisted, perhaps even pushed back. It had lain in the grass beside the remnant for three moons, and now he picked it up to see where it might belong.
    This time he was still clasping the thing when it hauled itself against the foot of the remnant close to the upended tree, and though the mountains seemed to shrug, he retained his balance. Part of the remnant for a moment, he felt none of the upset. It was as if it was keeping him safe.
    When Venden picked up the boxy, bony shape he had discovered in theruin of a Skythian lakeside town, he thought that his actions resembled something like building. But as this shape also moulded itself around the remnant’s underside, he let go and fell back, acknowledging what he had somehow known all along: that he was not building something new.
    This was reconstruction.

Chapter 5
seed
    Milian Mu sensesthe sun and moon shifting around her, as if she is central to their existence, and the passage of time is an ambiguous thing. Her breathing fills the cave in rhythm with the tide, and then faster, and faster still as the smell of the sea comes in and the sense of movement fills her torso. Her blood flows, her nerves jangle.
    She shifts to a kneeling position, one hand splayed against the cave floor, shelled things falling from her body as she flexes and twists them away. Some of them she picks up and puts to her mouth, sucking out the slick insides and swallowing without chewing. The taste is neutral, but she can feel their goodness spreading through her insides.
    Some time later, Milian Mu manages to walk around the cave. Motionless for a long time, her body has lost touch with the world, and being a moving part of it once again is like being reintroduced to a former lover.
    She tries to speak. Her voice is a croak, and the shard she carries of her old god Aeon gives comfort. It does not speak, but exudes an understanding that all will be well.
    Later, when thetide is low, she enters the water at one edge of the cave and starts making her way outside.
    The sea welcomes her in with cold arms. She breathes in the water and panics for a moment, but the shard rises and calms her, urging her on. Those memories of a long, long journey across the bottom of the sea come again – passing through murky depths, and hiding from dark things down there – but they feel more distant now, moved further back in time by her return to life. So she pulls herself past the low