by Tim Lebbon
As Jossua approached, the Monk’s attitude remained unaltered. The sword was still, his eyes open and dry. He was mad.
“I am the Elder Monk,” Jossua said, but the Red Monk did not seem to hear. Jossua reached out and passed his hand before the seated man’s unblinking eyes. Yet he was still alive, because Jossua could hear his ragged breathing, feel the heat flaring from him as though the red rage were fire.
Jossua clasped one of the broken blades and jerked it from the man’s flesh. He shook once, but did not utter a sound.
The Elder looked at the blade. Short, curved, snapped at the base, it looked more like a tooth than a man-made weapon. I’ve never seen a blade like this before except…
“Except on a machine.”
The man still did not blink.
“You’re dying,” Jossua said. Silence. He looked at the various wounds across the Monk’s body. The man was sitting in a darkened circle of soil where blood had leaked and dried. The robe hid much, but Jossua had no reason to reveal this Monk to the night.
“If you’re in no pain, I’ll not kill you,” he said. “Though there’s no use for you now. Do you know that? Do you see? Were you there when the Mages came and defeated us?”
The Monk remained still and silent and Jossua left him that way, a living statue looking westward as though trying to see his way back to the Monastery.
Jossua was being watched all the way. Each breath he exhaled was taken in by something else, examined by an intelligence he could not understand. His footsteps played the beat of an alien heart, and there was always something beyond the next outcropping of rock, hidden in the darkness just out of sight, concealed behind the next mountain. The land no longer felt dead, but what life existed was strange and foreboding.
Jossua had felt this way before, and not so long ago. He was in the presence of something both terrible and great. Though he was the Elder Monk, and had seen much in his long life, still he knew his place. He walked with his head bowed, and not only because he did not wish to see.
The mountains shrank into hills, the valleys grew wider, and Jossua felt the things following him move closer. Standing in a wide fields of dead yellowberry bushes, he felt the vibration through his feet that signaled the end of his time alone.
“I know you,” he said, but there was no bravery in his voice.
Only fear.
THE SCENT OF fresh fledge accompanied a movement in the ground. Fifty steps away, on the hillside that showed no sign of harboring anything but rock, a wide swathe of yellowberry bushes waved, whispering in the dusk. Then they were tugged belowground, twigs and dead leaves bursting upward as though taken in and spat out by whatever was rising.
It was the loudest noise Jossua had heard in days, and he expected the land to object. But the Nax were more of the land than anything he knew. Noreela’s heart beat in tune with their own slumbering souls, and they had been here longer than he could imagine. They were ancient as the rock, old as the mountains, and he had often wondered how complicit they were in each small step Noreela took through time. He had come to the conclusion long ago that humanity meant little to the Nax, sleeping their time away in fledge seams far below the surface of the land. Here and there were ghastly stories of miners disturbing their sleep-fledge demons, they called them-but Jossua doubted they would be disturbed if they did not desire it. Perhaps they were like the moons, existing on a different timescale to humanity, passing through life so slowly that their movements could never be properly discerned, their meanings and intentions subject to myth and legend rather than understanding.
Jossua still felt dread whenever he recalled his recent meeting with the Nax. Deep below the Monastery, time had stood still. And his question to them-had they driven the Mages out three centuries before-remained unanswered.
Now they were back.
The Elder Monk sank to his knees and bowed his head. He did not wish to see. He did not want to know. There was no true darkness aboveground, and when the Nax emerged he would see them, take in their forms while he felt himself observed and touched and smelled.
They’ve been doing that for days, he thought. Steering me and guiding me to this place for a reason I cannot begin to understand.
He listened to the sounds of tearing undergrowth lessen to nothing, and then soil and rocks tumbled into the ground. Fledge fumes drifted across the mountainside and Jossua breathed in, the drug’s fresh touch providing a brief, vivid series of images:
The Monk lying dead, head parted from her body by my sword, and in her chest the bolts from a resurrected machine; another Monk, one I never saw, walking west through The Heights on stumps instead of legs, my face in his mind and the words of defeat on his tongue; theone I left sitting against a rock, propped there still with his sword held out in front of him. Heart racing. Red rage scorching his face. Hunger and thirst closing in, blood thinning, wounds seeping, rot spreading, and he would decay to nothing whilst still staring ahead at something so terrible he can never let it go.
And then a voice answered his visions: We are the Nax.
Jossua opened his eyes.
Shadows rose before him. He could make no sense of them and for that he was glad. Their presence was a negative on the world, voids rather than shadows, places that should not be filled but were. They were so wrong that Jossua could barely see them.
Priest, the Nax said.
“Elder Monk,” Jossua whispered.
Priest…Monk. What do you learn of the Nax?
Jossua thought back to his few brief years in Long Marrakash before the Cataclysmic War, training as a priest and learning the myths and legends of the land. “I…I can’t remember,” he said.
Priest…the Nax…what do you know?
Jossua squeezed his eyes closed against the Nax, tried to hold his breath, but the tang of fledge oozed through his skin and touched his mind again. He remembered-a rapid recall that played like the pages of a turned book. “You’re fledge demons,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “Sleep in the seams of fledge. Rarely seen, never survived. Sometimes the digging machines woke you, and the machines stopped and the miners working with them vanished. Then you go deeper. The fledge preserves you. Perhaps you are the fledge.”
The vision came to an abrupt end and Jossua opened his eyes, shocked. The shadows before him drew back, letting in moonlight. Jossua gasped. The Nax, he thought, unable to do anything but stare at the thing standing before him, poised above the ground in a place it was never meant to be. It dripped yellow dust, as though shedding the death moon’s light.
You know nothing of the Nax, the shadow said, and it uttered something that may have been a laugh.
Jossua tried to stand and move away, because he did not think his heart could survive this. There were other shadows on the hillside, other Nax prowling the dark and shedding the death moon’s light as soon as it touched them.
“What are you?” Jossua whispered.
We are waiting, the Nax said. You wait with us. In Kang Kang there is hope.
“The Womb of the Land?”
The Womb is protected.
“What can I do to help?”
Unprotect.
“How?”
Learn our language. And suddenly his audience was over, and the Nax had somewhere to take him.
Jossua felt something grab him around both legs. The touch was nothing he could identify. Solid and soft, sharp and blunt, it was as though the shadows had taken hold.
Will they keep me here forever? he thought, and then the shadows pulled.
He fell onto his back, reaching out behind just in time to prevent himself from being brained. Still, the breath was knocked from him, and he was dragged up the hillside toward where the Nax had emerged. They took no care over him at all: his robe was ripped from his back, undergarments snagged on rocks or spiky plants, and the jarring impacts soon caused Jossua to cry out in pain.
Monk, the Nax said, voice full of derision.
The Elder Monk clamped his mout
h shut and weathered the pain as he was dragged up the hillside. He looked up at the unnatural sky and thought of the Mages, and realized then that the Nax were acting because of what the Mages had done. Filled with mockery though they were, the fledge demons still had cause to guide Jossua here, to them.
They spoke of Kang Kang and the Womb of the Land.
They spoke of hope.
“You need me,” Jossua said, his voice shaking with the multiple impacts his body was enduring. The Nax did not respond. The pain became something else-an experience from another life, remote from him now-and as the moons vanished and true darkness took him, Jossua found a smile.
THEY TOOK HIM deep. To begin with, he felt the remnants of the yellowberry bushes scratching at his body, then there was only darkness and the impact of rock and stone. His skin and flesh were scored away. He found himself surrounded by fledge, the smooth, sandy drug soft after the sharpness of rock on his body. The Nax moved quickly, darting left and right, powering through the fledge and hauling him after them, taking him deeper and deeper. Jossua felt the weight of the world changing around him. The land above weighed down, the mass of rock sucking the blood from his body, draining him, stripping his bare wounds of loose flesh and filling him with fledge, more than was safe for a man one-tenth his age, and yet he smiled at the Nax, pleased that he felt no smile in return. They terrified him, but they needed him. In that he found comfort.
The Nax dragged Jossua until he faded from consciousness, carried away on fledge visions that made no sense to a dying man.
JOSSUA ELMANTOZ WAS over three hundred years old. He did not know how or why he had remained alive for so long, but he believed that it resulted from his purpose in life. It was his destiny to remain alive on Noreela to prevent the Mages’ return. To do this, magic had to be kept away from the people and places of Noreela.
He had never considered the possibility of failure. He was confident in his task and those who helped him: the Red Monks, mad and strong and so committed to the life they led that they thought of little else. If commitment had been a force of nature, the Red Monks would have been unstoppable.
I’m a monster, Jossua had once thought, but only once. That had been a long time ago when he was a hundred years old. I’m a monster. But perhaps it takes a monster to defeat one. And so he had continued to gather other monsters to him, converting them and making them even more monstrous than he, and the Red Monks had waited in their Monastery like a blood bubble ready to burst. Their craze and madness became their life force, a throbbing insistence that death was no easy answer, and slowly their flesh and bones and blood took on the same stubborn defiance against the Black. We’ll all be chanted down in the end, Jossua had once told the assembled Monks, and it will be the greatest death chant Noreela has ever heard.
And now here he was, his body broken and wallowing in fledge, his mind sent to see the truth of things, and the Monks’ final song was barely even a whimper. Its echoes had passed across the land without touching a blade of grass or turning a sand rat’s head. The Red Monks’ wraiths were loose and mad, awaiting their elusive rest knowing that their whole lives had led to failure.
CLOSE TO DEATH, perhaps Jossua found life for the first time.
His body lay broken and bleeding beneath the foothills of The Heights, Nax sitting about him like shadows. So many open wounds let in so much fledge that his mind soared, passing through a mile of rock with no effort at all, and when he burst out into the Mages’ dusk he reveled for a while, suddenly free of the decrepit vessel that had kept him chained to Noreela for so long. He was old and wise and mad, but with fledge driving his soul skyward he rediscovered that seed of youth, a naive curiosity that had somehow survived the centuries. For the first time in a hundred years he could remember the face of his fiancee as she cried him away to the Cataclysmic War. She had been so proud being betrothed to a novice pagan priest, and he had shunned her as he left. Perhaps he had been afraid, knowing that he would never return. Or maybe at that moment he had already found his purpose. The cruise down the River San had been like being born again, leaving behind the safety of normality and emerging into this new life of war, battles against the Krotes, everything that had followed. He wondered what had happened to his fiancee. She must have grown old thinking that he was dead. Perhaps she married, had children. And that thing she had placed in his hand, the cool metal of a brooch or other lucky charm…he had opened his hand without looking and let it sink into the water, drowning his past.
Spinning high over The Heights, Jossua tried to imagine where that charm was now. It would be buried in silt after so long, unseen from above, unknown from below. Waiting there for someone to find it again. Perhaps it would take ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, and when it was eventually discovered there would be stories built around it, tales that could never be true because there were a billion different stories in Noreela, and he did not even know the truth about himself.
He sensed something to the east, a flicker in the stillness of the night. He floated that way and drifted lower to the ground, and there he found a dead Monk, his wounds home to insects and other crawling things. The Monk’s wraith hovered over his corpse, mad and moaning and terrified of the mind that approached.
Don’t be scared, Jossua thought, and the wraith stilled. I’ve come to chant you down.
He had no idea whether it would work. But he stilled his floating mind and shut himself off from the world, and as he imagined the words of a death chant he sensed the wraith fading to Black.
HE MOVED ON, traveling farther from his body with every second that passed. He found more Monks, all of them having died on their journey toward the Monastery. Their wounds were terrible, and their tenacity impressed him. He calmed their wraiths and chanted them down. Every few minutes he opened his mind to his own body and felt the agony of gaping wounds, content in the pain because it meant that he was still alive. He had never used fledge, and he spent an occasional panicked moment thinking that he too had become a wraith craving the Black.
The Nax wanted me, he thought. They sought me; they needme. There is more to my life than this.
He went farther, passing over a gray forest where things screamed and plotted, and he rose higher than ever to avoid their touch. There were many dead Monks down there-he could sense their wraiths wailing, staining on the gray like blood splashes on ash-but he could not bring himself to tend them. He could not save everyone. Whatever mad things inhabited those woods had the Monks for themselves, and Jossua would not think of them again.
He cast backward and felt his body beneath the ground, coughing blood into the fledge seam. The Nax were still there, heartbeats so far apart that they may as well have been dead. Waiting. Guarding him. And every now and then something would reach out and touch his skin, ensuring that his heart still beat and his blood flowed.
Jossua journeyed on, and soon he sensed a concentration of confused wraiths ahead of him, every one of them a Monk. He slowed, rose higher and then smelled something that almost made him turn around and flee the way he had come.
Down there in a large depression in the land, magic had happened, and it had left a residue of itself in the ether.
Jossua moved on, gliding up a slope and emerging above the bowl in the land. And there were the machines, still and dead yet scarred with fresh scrapes and scars. They were clean of vegetation. And there were Monks, hundreds of them lying dead and dismembered across the ground. He went to them, chanting all the while and feeling their wraiths slip gratefully away to the Black.
JOSSUA CHANTED LONG and hard, and with every Monk that left the world he felt more and more alone. Am I the only one left? he thought. I was the first, many years ago. Am I now the last? The awfulness of what had happened here pressed in on him, crushing his mind to a small, defensive point that he was terrified would blink out at any moment.
I’m still alive, he thought, and he felt the Nax touching his body a hundred miles away.
I still have p
urpose. They called for him and he left, chanting down the last few wraiths as he fled.
I will not yet admit defeat.
He felt the mockery of the Nax, stroking his rent flesh and reeling in his mind as though they controlled the drug. He prayed to the Black that whatever it was they were holding him for, he would find out soon.
THE NAX TOOK him out of the ground. He did not know how long he had been down there-it could have been a hundred weak heartbeats, or perhaps it was days. They dragged him as they had on the way down, but this time they cleaned fledge from his wounds as they went. He felt a hot fluid scorching his opened flesh, his face, his hands, and when a few crumbs of fledge fell into his mouth the fluid entered there as well. It was bitter and boiling, and he spat and gagged as more flowed in. He was forced through the vein of fledge without being able to absorb any of it. The Nax wanted him with his mind attached.
My body is almost dead, he thought. What good is a body like this to them?
Monk, the Nax said, and again he could hear the amusement in their voice.
“You need me,” he said. In their silence, he found some measure of victory.
They emerged into the freshness of endless night. Jossua was dragged across the hillside, the Nax hanging on to one of his feet with a slick, warm touch. He looked up at the moons hazing the sky and wished he were up there again.
You’re a lucky Monk, the Nax said.
Lucky? Jossua thought, but the Nax said no more. Lucky? He should have been dead, but somehow they kept him alive. Flesh and skin had been scoured from his bones, his insides were open to the night and his mind was trapped once again in this ailing, weak, pathetic body. He had seen the Red Monks’ defeat and failure-he had smelled magic and sensed the Mages-and now he was lucky.
Lucky?
But the Nax would not be drawn. They paused by a stream and retreated into shadows, hidden away from the massive sky. They left Jossua out in the open. He could feel the coolness of grass beneath his back, though now it was faded and dry.