Age of War

Chapter 42

Jonis’s memories were fragmented and confusing. She felt as if she’d lived a dozen different lives and there were snippets of ancient events in her head that were more vivid than any dream. Standing in the ruins of Omega, she’d barely known who she was, and when she finally escaped the lure of those long-dead visions, she was convinced that months had passed. But it was another trick that strange place was playing on her, and she’d caught up with Tayne, Huldane and the others just two days later. She’d gabbled at them incoherently attempting to explain what she’d discovered, just trying to impart some of the sense of wonder she’d experienced as the history of her people was laid out before her. She’d expected suspicion, scepticism, even condescension – what else could someone who claimed to have spoken to the disembodied spirit of a man many leagues distant be but dangerously insane? – but after the things they’d all shared in Omega, her companions were ready to believe almost anything. And they understood well enough when she emphasised how vital it was they get back to Atlas and stop Saffrey. An Atlantis under his rule, she’d explained breathlessly, would slide back into the darkness of ignorance. He was part of a vast conspiracy, perhaps more than a thousand years old, that had robbed them of their history. If he sat the throne as Emperor, the truth of Omega, that the coming catastrophe was of their own making and that the Cyclopes were the cause of it, would be buried forever in the name of stability. And Atlantis too would be buried, under a grinding ocean of deadly ice, all the wonder Saffrey and his kind wanted to preserve irretrievably lost.

She didn’t think any of them except Huldane had really believed her. It had all sounded so ridiculous when she said it out loud, but they needed little encouragement to press on back to their home city. Whatever the reasons, a war was coming, and these were soldiers. If they returned and found Atlas already reduced to ashes, their comrades lying dead, their homes destroyed, they’d never forgive themselves. Or her. Surprisingly, it had been Huldane, the foreigner, who’d spurred them on though. He was tireless, striding ahead of the group, always with a smile and a jest, but with a fierce light in his eyes all the same. Jonis had watched him carefully. After the battle against the hyen-a-khan and his strange tales around their meagre fire he seemed a changed man. She knew how Omega and the dark magic soaked into its stones could confuse the mind. Huldane, it seemed, was more susceptible than the Atlasians, but it seemed no bad thing as his strength encouraged the others and they looked to him as if he really were a hero from some legend, Ragnar Wolfsbane reborn.

Just over a day’s ride from Atlas – happily they’d been able to recover their horses from the village where they’d left them, despite Jonis’s private fear that they might find they’d been sold on or even eaten – she had spoken to Tayne as she’d relieved her watch in the dead of night. “I’m worried about Huldane. He’s changed.”

“We all have,” Tayne had told her, “it was that place. Omega.”

Jonis had had to admit she was right. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting to find, but she could hardly say she was disappointed with the revelation. Concerned, shocked, terrified maybe, but certainly the quest had proved worth the cost, heavy though it was. Her mind returned to those solemn cairns of rubble in The Circle, and the men and women who’d never see Atlas again. “I’m sorry for everything that happened,” she’d felt obliged to say.

“It wasn’t your doing.”

“But still…if not for me…your soldiers…”

“They gave their lives to Atlantis a long time ago, Jonis. They knew the risks. And, from what you’ve told us, their deaths won’t be in vain. They might even save us all in the long run.”

It had been a comforting thought, but the closer they came to Atlas, the more the wonder and strangeness of the last few weeks seemed to evaporate. As they came across towns huddling in the foothills of the Titans, they saw the same deprivation as before, but now the settlements were swollen with newcomers. Families carrying all their worldly goods on rickety carts, crowded into rude hovels. They were refugees, and they all knew where they were fleeing from. The snow they’d encountered on the mountains didn’t abate either. Jonis had never seen the ground blanketed like this so far south. It was disconcerting. Had it gotten so bad already? Perhaps, in Atlas, things had already escalated and the Cyclopes had been unleashed. Was she too late? Was this the beginning of the end? She couldn’t know, and all the folk running from the siege they quizzed couldn’t give them any information. All they said was that, when they left, the enemy was bearing down on them. Most had only the vaguest idea what the war was about and who led the attackers. To them it was just a war that threatened their homes and the lives of their families. Without any discussion, the party increased their pace after that.