by Tim Lebbon
“Hope,” he whispered into her ear. “What about her? What book? Does she have it in her bag?” In the poor light, with birds fallen silent and the breeze pausing every few seconds, his whispers seemed incredibly loud.
Alishia’s eyes opened a crack and she muttered something.
“What?” Trey leaned in closer, unable to hear. He pressed his ear to her mouth, and felt it grow cool as she took in a breath to speak again.
“Hope’s book…not yet scribed…new, bad chapter…”
Trey frowned, straining to hear. But Alishia said no more.
He sat up, closed his eyes and felt a sickening punch to his stomach. Mage shit, he so needed some fledge.
“Did she speak?” Hope asked.
Trey jumped. He hadn’t heard the witch approaching, and now she was standing just a few steps away. “No,” he said. “Where have you been?”
The witch patted her pocket. “Harvesting.”
“We need to move on, Hope,” Trey said. “I don’t think she’s well.”
“Are you up to carrying her again?”
“I’ll have to be.” Trey stood and bent down for Alishia, lifting her into a sitting position. She was not as limp as she had been before, and he thought maybe she was trying to help. Her eyes were still closed, though, and her head rolled on her neck.
Hope helped him lift Alishia and then she led the way, walking ahead and looking left and right, down at the ground and up at the sky. Trey liked to think that she was watching out for dangers, but he thought it was more likely that she was searching for things she did not want him to see.
Her book speaks volumes of danger, Alishia had whispered. If only Trey understood what that meant.
HOPE FELT MOVEMENT in the deep pocket of her coat. She slapped it hard, stunning the spider into immobility once again. As soon as she found some hedgehock she’d be able to dope it, but in the meantime she was doing her best to avoid being bitten. It was a risk, but she needed to arm herself. And there was no harm in having an advantage that the fledger did not know about.
She should be able to smell hedgehock before she saw it, but her senses felt strangely numbed by the darkness.
Over the past few hours, Hope had been looking everywhere for the light of dawn. This endless twilight had started to feel heavy, squeezing her heart, crushing her lungs so that she could barely draw breath, and she was so desperate to see a sliver of dawn that she felt like running at the eastern horizon until it appeared. As a witch and a whore she had spent much of her life conducting business at night, and she had only just begun to realize how much she missed the daylight. The landscape was silenced by what had happened. It was as though Noreela was in shock at the Mages’ audacity. Several times she had to close her eyes and breathe long and deep to prevent panic from settling in.
Hope had spent so long with nobody in her life but herself. Since her mother had died decades ago, she had been on her own, a witch without magic, and anyone who did come into her life went out of it just as quickly. Following Rafe had given her a purpose, and someone else to care about. In him she had seen the possible realization of her own potential. Magic would have brought much of what was missing from her life. She had lived her whole life craving to fulfill the promise of the name “witch.” She had the ways and means, the knowledge and experience, the hexes passed down through her family line. She had an open mind, and the understanding of the land that would have allowed magic to embed itself comfortably in her life. Many others would have been scared of it, and some would have run from its influence. But in Rafe, Hope had seen her entire future.
Now he was gone, and Hope had another child to follow.
Alishia carried something different, but whatever it was had come from Rafe. Hope felt her own life drawing to a close-this darkness seemed like a precursor to her own light fading slowly away-but there was still one chance, in Alishia. And however unlikely it may be, all she had left to believe in was this girl.
The obstacles were beyond measure: the Mages, with magic twisted to their perverted use, and the Mages’ army that was undoubtedly readying to assault Noreela. And Kang Kang. But Hope had nothing left to live for. Alishia, and whatever she carried, was all that mattered to her now.
The spider in her right pocket jumped and squirmed. Hope flicked the outside of her coat and the creature fell still once again.
Hedgehock! she thought. Where’s the Mage-shitting hedgehock? She walked faster, pulling away from the fledger and Alishia, and then that familiar warm, herby smell hit her.
It was as though Fate had guided her this way.
She knelt down, plucked the shriveling leaves of the hedgehock plant and proceeded to tear them into tiny shreds.
ALISHIA’S LIBRARY WAS still burning, but she was immune to the flames. The books were not. She could smell the tang of blistering paper and warping card, and the stench of ancient inks released a smoke that she knew to be hallucinatory. But could she hallucinate when she was already in a dream? She breathed in deeply to find out, and a staircase took her down to another level. The stairs curved down to the left, spiraling beneath the library but never leaving its identity behind. Books still lined the walls, all with titles she did not, or could not, understand. Even though she could not speak many old languages, still she usually recognized them for what they were. These were all unknown to her. She took out one book at random, sat on the stone step and rested it across her thighs. It was bound in thick red card, its color still vivid even though she was sure it had been shelved here for hundreds, or thousands, of years. When she opened it, a flattened spider fell from between the pages, shattering to dust when it hit the floor. The smell of age wafted out. She turned the pages, not recognizing any of the words or the language they formed, but still distressed at the way they looked on the brittle paper.
She closed the book and shelved it again, moving farther down the staircase. She thought perhaps she was going deeper into her own mind, but at least the flames were only burning above her now. They were eating away at history, but something told her that the history that really mattered to her-the stories from the past that could help her future-were stored down here. She hoped that the staircase would not act as a chimney and suck the flames down.
There was another library. This one was in a cave rather than a building, its ceiling hanging with stalactites of ancient paper that had petrified into solid carvings. She saw forms that did not bear seeing, and shapes that hinted at more terrible things she could never know. She looked up, expecting floorboards, but the roof of the cave was impossibly lined with books. The floor too, row upon row of spines facing upward, and wherever she walked she heard the crackle of old bindings breaking beneath her feet.
She knew where she was going. The book she plucked from the wall was not as old as many of the others, but its spine was worn and the pages weathered as though it had been read thousands of times. She checked inside the front cover, but there was no marking to show that it had ever been taken from the library.
“That’s because this isn’t really a library,” Alishia said, and the books seemed to lean in disapprovingly.
She sat on a pile of books leaning against one wall and opened the new volume. One Afternoon in Pavisse, it was titled, and the first page told her about a witch called Hope who had stilled a man’s heart with a long, thin knife while he was rutting with her. The witch had smiled and welcomed the gush of blood across her chest. The description of his penis shriveling within her as he died was long and detailed, the sensations lovingly rendered in words. Alishia closed her eyes and turned a few more pages, reading again, seeing how the witch had eaten a meal from a plate resting on the cooling man’s back and then carefully used her fruit knife to carve away a tattoo that covered one side of his scalp. She would paste it to one of the small windows in the basement room to dry, and later she intended to sell it for information. There was no mention of the information the witch sought. The book ended with the witch preparing to dispose of the body
.
Alishia slammed the book closed and reshelved it. We’re in danger, she thought. She never was out for us; she’s only for herself. She’ll kill us as easily as that man, and cut out anything she needs. She stood and walked to the other side of the room. She did not know which book she was looking for, but shedid seem to know the ones to discard. She ran her fingers along many spines and received a rush of sensation. She felt disgust, fear and revulsion, and mixed in with that was a brief moment of ravenous hunger. Just moments in her life, been and gone, done with now. No threat to us. But theywere a threat, she knew that, because every book in this new cavernous library told Alishia what a desperate woman Hope really was.
She plucked a book from the shelf without reading the spine. She remained standing this time, not wishing to settle down to view something from Hope’s life, but when she opened the book she realized that only the first page had been used. It was an illustration with a few notes beneath. The picture was of a spider, fat and orange, and the caption readgravemaker spider. Underneath, the words read: stilled for now, numbed with hedgehock, but a pinch of salt will wake it.
Her book speaks volumes of danger, Alishia thought. Then she said it as well, but smoke from the fire above had started to seep down the staircase, and her throat was dry and sore.
She ran back up to the main library and lost herself again amidst the towering stacks of books. There was more here that would help her, she knew, much more. All she had to do was find it.
KOSAR HAD SPENT many of his younger years traveling across Noreela, working and stealing and living his life as he wished it to be lived. He had seen many worrying, wicked and strange things, and almost all of them had happened during the day. It seemed as if the rot setting into the land gave weirdness more audacity, so that it was no longer relegated to dark places. Daylight had slowly become an alien place.
The dark had always been simply another part of Noreela. Nothing fearful hid there, because it no longer needed to.
But now the constant twilight was squirming beneath his skin, setting him on edge and starting to affect his judgment.
To begin with he was certain that he was heading east, but as more time passed his doubt began to grow. The toothed shadow of Kang Kang silhouetted against the sky had faded over the horizon to his right, yet it still felt as though he was traveling in the wrong direction. He ignored the sensation initially, looking down at the ground before him and walking on. Then he started pausing, looking back the way he had come, wondering whether his senses had become so confused that he was actually walking exactly the wrong way.
The moons offered him no clues, and all certainty was fleeing him.
When he came to a copse of trees, he examined the trunks and exposed roots, looking for moss or sun bleaching so that he could tell direction. But the trees seemed to swim in his vision, swaying as though his eyes were watering. When he wiped his sleeves across his face and looked again, the trees had changed position. They hissed and spat.
He stood and backed away, looking up into their canopies. Leaves had shriveled and already started to drop, and the exposed branches looked like skeletal fingers reaching for the moons. They waved at the sky and groaned as they rubbed together, and Kosar turned and ran.
In his panic, he tripped and banged his head. He lay dazed for a few heartbeats, rolling onto his back and looking up at the blank, black sky. No stars with which to plot his position; no sun to chart his course; just a uniform darkness, so distant and yet so heavy and close that he felt it crushing him into the soft subsoil that was the skin of Noreela itself.
“Fuck!” Kosar leapt to his feet and drew his sword. “Fuck! Fuck!” Shouting scared him-the sound was loud across this silent landscape-but it also made him feel better. The blade could do nothing against darkness, but his words could penetrate the silence. He shouted again, mixed curses and pleas, and in the distance something crashed through some trees and bushes and took flight. He saw a shadow heading up into the sky, and though he did not know what it was, it did not frighten him. It was something of Noreela, not of the dark. It was just as afraid as he.
Kosar backed away from the trees and headed across the landscape again, wiping a dribble of blood from his temple. He touched it to the sword to sate the metal and resheathed it. It was A’Meer’s sword. It had seen some blood at his hand, but not much, and he wondered at its history. She had told him it was her father’s before her, but that was all. She had kept so much truth from him.
Going to New Shanti suddenly seemed a comforting idea. There he would see many more Shantasi, and he had no doubt that they would remind him of A’Meer. He remembered her pressing against him in a stranger’s house as a Red Monk passed by outside, the heat of her flesh on his, the fear transmitted through her body and breath. She was a warrior, but she found it easy to rely on me.
He walked on. He wondered whether those strange trees had been turned that way by the Mages’ twisting of the new magic, or whether they were simply another factor of the land’s long decline. Or perhaps Kang Kang could affect the land even this far out. It was not a good place. He was shamefully pleased that he was not going there, but he pitied Trey, who had become as near to a friend as Kosar had ever had.
And Hope. The witch, the whore, someone Kosar had never trusted. She was going with them.
Hess was maybe a hundred miles from here. At a push he could walk it in two days-if there were no interruptions along the way-or he could try to find a village or farm and steal a horse. He touched his fingertips together, winced at the ever-present pain and wondered whether his stealing days were over.
SOMETIME LATER, KOSAR realized that he was being followed.
He did not stop or glance back; the feeling was so intense that he did not want to give away the fact that he knew. He sped up slightly, but could hear nothing in pursuit. And yet his blind sense prickled: the hairs on his neck stood up and his balls tingled. His sword was a comfortable weight on his belt rather than an annoyance. It’s tasted Monk blood, he thought, but the idea of a Red Monk following him was not one he wished to entertain.
The landscape was becoming more hilly, bringing the horizon closer and providing more valleys and dips in which the darkness could hide. Moonlight still gave the land a monotone splash of weak illumination, but great lakes of darkness lay here and there, as though the light was not heavy enough to penetrate that deeply. There could be anything on the floors of these valleys. Perhaps they had been this dark for a long, long time. Where he could, Kosar decided to keep to the hills.
He climbed a long, slow incline, panting with the effort and realizing how hungry he was. He had a water pouch that was half full, but he had not thought about food for a while. He would have to stop soon and set some snares, maybe see if he could find some berries or roots to strip and eat. But the plants were dying. Leaves were shriveling and drying, and when he passed a clump of common black bushes there was an unpleasant odor underlying everything, as though the ground itself was slowly going to rot. Maybe this is how it will end, he thought. Maybe the land will just fade away and die. It may take a year, but the Mages have been waiting three centuries for this. Less effort for them. And a weakening land would never fight back.
There was a sound behind him, a distant thud like something dropping to the ground. Kosar paused, head tilted to pick up anything else. He realized that anyone or anything watching would now know that he had heard them, but the pretense could do him no good. Perhaps whatever it was would not reveal itself.
Kosar held on to the sword and felt comforted at the way it fit his hand.
He carried on walking, reaching the top of the hill in one final hard climb. He was sweating and panting now, shaking with the exertion, but stopping for a rest would help bring his follower closer. He could smell rotting plants again, and to his left he saw the outline of a huge old machine rusting into the ground. Yellow moonlight from the death moon bathed its interior and made it more defined than anything Kosar had seen since darkne
ss fell. He had often heard it said that the death moon favored the dead with its light.
He turned around and stared down the hill he had just climbed. For a few seconds he saw the shape way down the slope, struggling upward like a huge beetle. Then whoever or whatever it was must have seen him silhouetted against the moonlit sky, because the shadow grew still and merged with the ground.
“Come on!” Kosar shouted. “Don’t be a coward!”Should be running, not shouting, he thought, but terror had brought out a new bravery. If he was to confront whatever this was, he’d rather do it now than have it follow him at a distance. “Comeon!” But the shadow remained hidden.
He looked across at the machine and considered hiding within its rusted embrace. But then he thought of those old machines rising to fight in the graveyard, the flesh and blood flowing to them from out of nowhere, and quickly moved on.
HE FOUND THE village in a fold in the land. The landscape dipped and rose, and it was maybe a quarter of a day after leaving the hilltop machine that he first saw the faint glow in the distance, all that time aware that someone or something was on his tail, fearing attack from behind and equally afraid of what might lay before him. The darkness was bleeding the strength from him, much as it was killing the plants.
At first he thought it was moonlight reflecting from a huge lake-the life moon had risen higher now, pale, wan and defiant-but as he drew closer across a ridge he realized that it was light rising from a deep wound in the land. A crevasse or a crater, carved into the bedrock by particularly violent waters. He had never been to this part of Noreela before-New Shanti and its environs were generally not high on a wanderer’s list of destinations-and he tried to envisage a map of the area. The darkness still confused him. The Mol’Steria Desert should lie to the north, Sordon Sound to the northeast, and as far as he could recall, there should not have been a river anywhere near here. And yet Kang Kang still lay to the south, hidden by a horizon brought closer by the dusk. Perhaps in the strange years since the Cataclysmic War, one of its rivers had broken out from underground and torn the land.