by Tim Lebbon
“How could they find out?”
Hope shrugged. “Maybe they’ll catch and torture Kosar. Or perhaps their spies won’t be as obvious as you think. Shades. Wraiths. Other things.” She grinned at Trey then, a toothy grimace that made him turn back to the ruined land. The noise was a constant rumble, interspersed with occasional thumps and vibrations as something dropped. At the base of the hill, perhaps a mile distant, the collection of debris was growing taller and wider, forming a barrier between the normal ground and that beyond.
A hissing white explosion erupted way beyond the barrier, pouring skyward and losing itself in the boiling mass overhead. Trey wondered whether this was a sacred river, revered like that one beneath the Widow’s Peaks. The eruption quickly turned from white to brown as sediment was sucked up from under the bedrock. The water continued rising, bursting out from several other points and emptying itself skyward.
An hour later it began to rain, and Trey sniffed the water for any trace of fledge.
HE MUST HAVE closed his eyes. He was aware of the noises around him, and the heat of Alishia lying beside him on the dew-damped heather, but in his mind he was somewhere else. He was not sure where the other place was, but it felt safe and warm, insulated from the dangers he knew by the remoteness of memories. He could hear his mother singing softly in the darkness of their cave. He could smell Sonda’s skin and her breath as they passed each other in the home-cave, sharing a smile and averting their eyes. He could feel the faces of his fellow miners as they broke for lunch, hear their voices, wallowing in the good humor that came from facing the constant danger of the mine together. Trey was aware of his own breathing and the tickle of heather beneath his cheek, but it was only when he opened his eyes that all those feelings of safety and contentment vanished.
Hope had gone. Alishia still lay by his side, pale and warm, and he could see her eyelids flexing as she explored something unknowable in her dreams. Trey shivered and hugged himself, wishing he had fledge to touch Alishia and see if she was all right. Wishing he had fledge for himself. His heart beat fast, his breathing was shallow, and he felt certain that everything was about to change.
He stared up at the sky. The cloud was still there but it seemed to have calmed, its feathery edges being dragged close by its continuing swirling motion. Some shadows fell away and drifted down, but fewer than before, and the noise of things impacting the ground seemed less frequent. The cloud was a nothing against the darkness, a hole he could so easily fall into. There was no light below to give it any definition, and the moonlight above slid from it as though repelled by its unnaturalness.
Trey looked away, unnerved, wondering where Hope had gone.
He pulled his water canteen from his shoulder bag and poured a few drops into Alishia’s mouth. Her lips opened and her tongue protruded slightly, absorbing the moisture. Her eyes flickered open but seemed to see nothing. He leaned close and whispered her name, but there was no reaction.
Trey took one mouthful of stale water from the canteen and hid it away in his bag once more.
Still no Hope. He stood and walked a few steps along the ridge, looking down across the wide plains between them and the beginnings of Kang Kang. The ground was pale and gray, exposed rock casting back moonlight that slid beneath the cloud, and there were great swathes of shadow where darkness hid in hollows. He looked left and right along the hillside, back at the unsettling scene before him, and then he saw movement. It was like a beetle on the rough gray skin of an old pit mule, only it moved with more purpose.
Hope. She had somehow made her way through the great mountain of shattered trees and exploded rocks to start out onto the bared skeleton of Noreela. She moved carefully, glancing down at her feet yet seeming to concentrate on one single point somewhere ahead. The sky was heavy above her, still weighted with everything that should have been below, but the strange effect had ended. Trey could feel the unbearable pressure of it where he stood.
He almost called out to Hope, but realized that she was too far away. And he did not know what else could be out in the darkness, ready to home in as soon as it heard potential prey.
He rushed back to Alishia and scanned the ground around her. Hope had taken his disc-sword. Alishia stirred in her sleep and rolled onto her side, and Trey touched her to make sure she was still there.
She could have doped me, he thought. I was lying there both awake and asleep, and she could have doped me and made off with Alishia. He touched the librarian’s hair, her neck, her back, and she was sweating and shaking as her bones and flesh faded away. The old witch could have killed me.
The fact that she had left him alive brought Trey little comfort.
He managed to sling Alishia across his right shoulder and stand. He was amazed at her lightness. As he shifted her into a more comfortable position, she grunted and whispered something, but he could not make out the words. He paused, but she said no more.
“Not long,” he said. “I can move faster with you like this. And that Mage-shitting witch isn’t getting away this easily.” Whatever her motives, whatever her intent, Trey had no intention of being left alone with the responsibility for Alishia. Hope knew so much, and he knew so little.
For the first time in his life, he was afraid of the dark.
HOPE WAS WALKING on the bare skin of Noreela. There was no evidence of time here: no buildup of soil, no rotting vegetation, no animal bones or skeletons of the unfortunate victims of Kang Kang. She saw no living or dead things marring the sterile perfection of this blank slate of the land, and she could smell nothing but the tang of exposed soil. The rock beneath her feet was dry and utterly bare. And it was warm. She could feel the warmth through her shoes. It was as though Noreela were alive, and for the first time its naked body had been revealed.
Perhaps this was a wound. She stopped and looked around, wondering what the blood of the world would look like. Above her hung the combined mess of everything fallen from here. Yet she was not falling. This strange effect had ended. She feared that soon it would reverse itself. Like the River San, the unbelievable weight of ground and rock above her would fall. Death would be quick when it came, but there would be a dozen heartbeats when she knew it was coming, and she had no wish to discover which memories would haunt those moments.
She did not look up. This was nothing compared to what she thought she had seen farther on.
She focused on where the white shape had marred the shadows, feeling her way forward with cautious steps. Occasionally she glanced down, stepping across cracks in the ground that gushed an unpleasant heat, jumping where those cracks were larger, changing direction where they were too wide to leap. The darkness within was impenetrable, as if the ground were filled with black water to its brim. She hated the warmth that rose: it reminded her of the rank moist breath of her thousands of lovers. Every breath a sigh, every sigh an unrealized dream.
She had been sitting beside Trey and Alishia when she saw the movement on the rocky plain. She was old and her eyes were poor, but she knew instantly what she had seen. The realization hit her like a solid force, a knowledge that forbore any shred of doubt, and her path was clear. Her breath stuck in her chest as though awaiting her action. She started running down the slope of the hill, her heart beating with more power and confidence than she had felt in years.
Down to the first wellburr tree, over its shattered trunk and onward; she had quickly negotiated the hills of debris, sinking to her knees in upset soil, tripping over a tangled mess of vegetation, gashing her arm on the sharp remains of an exhumed machine.
To Hope, it was the moment upon which the future might pivot.
Every few steps she remembered that white shape, how it seemed to lift out of the ground and melt back in, lit from within and exuding light when all else was darkness.
Sleeping God, she had thought, and the very idea made her feel faint.
She went on. The incredible weight of the land above drew her gaze, yet she refused its lure. If she looked, it wo
uld fall. She kept telling herself that and, though absurd, it became the truth. If I look, it will fall.
She leapt a crack in the ground and felt a warm breath rise within her skirts.
This was the true lay of the land. The exposed surface was Noreela in its infancy, stripped down to the blank slate upon which everything had developed: flora and fauna, man and beast, god and demon, all casting their own special places and building upon the structure of rock that was the foundation of the land.
She glanced down at the rock beneath her feet, suddenly terrified that she would see some ancient message carved there. But there was only stone, smoothed from eons of weight.
There were hollows here and there, burrows stamped down or scooped out by forces unknown. Shadows sat within them, shifting as she hurried by, and she did not pause to see whether it was her skirts making that soft hissing noise as they moved across stone, or something else.
“Sleeping God,” she whispered, eyes wide in case her invocation called it back up. But the place where she had seen the movement remained as dark as everywhere else. She did not look aside for too long in case she lost her way.
The Sleeping Gods had gone to ground millennia ago, or so the stories said. They were formidable beings, demons or angels of the land that had supposedly shunned limitless power to wander the wilds, learning and teaching, creating and building but never controlling. They had taken their fill of Noreela and all it could offer and put themselves into the ground, ready to sleep eternally unless something of deep interest woke them once more. They had their worshippers and cults, and there were frequent exhortations that their time had come again. But no Sleeping Gods returned, and the cults would often wither and split to regroup again under different guises, in different places.
Since the Cataclysmic War, it was whispered that they would awake when magic returned to the land.
Hope had always doubted the veracity of that legend. When the Sleeping Gods went down thousands of years ago there had been magic, although probably none that would be recognized today. Why would the return of magic give them cause to rise from their ancient hibernation?
And yet…
There was always a chance, and chance is why Hope had given herself such a name.
She was closing on the place where she had seen the movement. She had marked the place well: deep pit of shadows on the right, a raised area of cracked rock on the left. Glancing back, she could just make out the barrier of fallen debris and the low hill beyond. From this distance she could not tell whether Trey was still there. There was no movement on the plain of rock, though she was aware of the shifting way above her. It shook the air, thrummed in her teeth, set her hair on end. If I look, it will fall.
She turned back, and for the space between heartbeats she thought the Sleeping God would be there before her, sleeping no more. She had heard a hundred descriptions of what they had looked like, and she was convinced that none of them did the Gods justice. Whatever she saw would be monumental and magnificent. It would strike at her heart with a sense of majesty, and perhaps there would be communication, an acknowledgment that she was the first living thing it had seen upon waking.
Nature going wrong will make everything right, she thought.
But there was nothing there, only the rock and shadows, and the outline of Kang Kang in the distance.
Hope slumped for a moment, confidence and optimism bled by the dusk. But then she went on, because shehad seen it-hadseen that shape lifting from the ground then sinking back down. Perhaps the weak moonlight had revealed it…but she thought that maybe it had lit itself for her.
They’re as big as hawks, descended from the Constructors of Noreela, wandering its ever-changing landscape for a million years, teaching and learning, spreading and absorbing history, looking for something beyond the understanding of mere mortals.
She had heard many stories, all of them different, all of them spouted by people who swore that they told the truth. One man, lying naked on her bed while she prepared him a stew of calming herbs, told her he knew someone who had seen a Sleeping God.
A cave in the Widow’s Peaks, and the God was down there, the size of ten men but with a mind so much larger, reaching much farther. It made its own darkness. My friend thought it was asleep. He touched it. He wanted some of its power for himself, thought he could just take it away. It drove him mad. He came out raging and he was never the same man again.
If he came out raging, Hope had said, how can you believe anything he said? The man glared at her, his whore, and she said no more.
Hope was close to where she had seen the shape rise and fall. It had curled out of the ground, like the spine of a sea creature parting the waters in the Bay of Cantrassa. The broken rocks to the left, the lake of darkness to the right…yes, she was almost there.
The size of a mountain, one book had said, their eyes lakes in the land, their minds beyond and above what we can know or understand. The Sleeping Gods once walked Noreela and harvested its forests, ate of its fields and meadows, preparing the land for their descendants. We are born of the Sleeping Gods, and like concerned parents they still keep one ear to our collective voice, one eye on our progress.
They would have come back by now if that were true, Hope thought. Three hundred years or three days ago, they would have come back. She slowed, her feet dragging on the bare stone, suddenly terrified of what she would find. She had heard so many legends of the Sleeping Gods, read so many stories. Lay there sweating while sailors from The Spine or Breakers from The Heights fucked her and whispered what they knew. None of them really knew anything, but she let them talk nonetheless, seeking evidence between the lines of their lies. Since the Cataclysmic War the folklore had become more diverse and myth-based than ever before. People read so little nowadays, and as Noreela regressed, so distances between places increased. Noreelans traveled less, and stories had farther to go. Each whisper changed a name or a place. Every telling exaggerated one part of the Sleeping Gods’ myth, and forgot another. They had existed, but beyond that nothing was certain.
They went down because they were shamed by Noreela…
They await better times…
They will awake upon the breaking of the Black…
Hope had everything to fear and little to gain, yet still she went on. Would a Sleeping God help her? Would it even recognize her as something other than an insect to be crushed beneath its heel?
She thought so. They were little more than myth now, but in many stories lay a common vein of hope. They were the good of the land gone to sleep, the promise of a better future, and their most devout followers believed that their return would cure all wrongs. They were hope personified, and she had always known their name.
She walked on, and fifty steps later, as she came to the rent in the land where she had seen the shape rise and fall, the boiling soup of Noreela swirling high above finally parted. Life and death moons streamed down, and she saw what filled the hole.
Hope fell.
TREY WAS STRUGGLING. Light though she was, Alishia lay awkwardly across his shoulder, her bony hip grinding into his neck. A couple of hundred steps from their makeshift camp he came to the first obstacle: a mass of undergrowth, tangled and stinking of something dead. He lifted his feet higher, tramped through the fallen plants, left hand held out for balance.
He was beginning to panic. Hope was leaving him. Much as he disliked the witch, he could not face this journey without her. She knew so much about the land, what had changed and what might happen next. Much of what she said could well be made up, but her confidence in this knowledge comforted him. Besides, he was a stranger up here.
He looked up and saw the mass of risen ground. It was so unnatural and wrong; it grumbled and groaned like a great creature woken from some ancient slumber.
Alishia mumbled and he almost tripped, stumbling a few steps to regain his balance. He found that he’d been holding his breath. He was doing that a lot lately, because breathing seemed to feed the f
ledge rage burning inside. His skin felt tight, his throat constricted, his mind pressurized and fit to explode.
He sucked in air and tasted nothing.
Trey could see Hope. She was a tiny shape beyond the barrier of fallen debris, hurrying across the silvered base-rock of Noreela. Caves down there? Trey thought. Fissures in the land? Fledge? But now he could smell nothing, only a curious neutral scent to the air, as though it were all new.
His mind wandered, drawn away partly by panic but mostly by the fledge rage. Imagination tore him sideways while he forged on ahead, and he saw flashes of red, shades of white and the unmistakable smear of blood spreading across the land.
A dream, not a vision.
Alishia muttered something about books of blood, as if she could see what he imagined.
Just a dream. No fledge, no traveling. Just a dream.
He climbed the trunk of the huge fallen wellburr tree, smelling its exposed roots. Then he tackled the mound of debris, slipping and stumbling, clawing at the ground with his free hand, finally sliding down the other side with Alishia still slung over his shoulder.
His leather shoes slapped onto the bare rock, footfalls heavy with Alishia’s extra weight. Behind him lay the chaos of what had once made up this land, fallen and smashed and broken, and ahead lay virgin ground, and Hope. She seemed to have paused, standing there like a frozen shadow. And then her shadow was illuminated as combined moonlight finally made its way through the debris and dust above.
Trey saw the glint of metal as she unsheathed his disc-sword.
And then Hope the witch fell forward and vanished from the world.
Trey fell to his knees and dropped Alishia to the ground. The fledge rage twisted his insides and churned his heart as his mind sought refuge somewhere deep and dark.