by Tim Lebbon
Fifteen machines and their riders, he thought, and how many have we lost? Two hundred? Three?
After a while the sounds of combat ceased, and the moans of the dying began.
O’GAN HAD NOT killed for thirty years. Now he stood with Krote blood on his sword. He wiped the blade on a dead Krote’s leathers, blood gathering and flowing and catching the moons, and in it he saw the reflected shadows of spartlets still flitting above their heads.
Medics and Mourners moved here and there, helping injured Shantasi where they could, slitting their throats and chanting them down where they could not. O’Gan tried to shut the chanting from his mind.
“To me!” he called, and the Shantasi turned to face him. He climbed atop a dead machine, more than aware of the symbolism of his act as he rested his sword’s point on the thing’s ruptured back. A stink rose from within, curiously sweet and unpleasant. He breathed deeply and wondered whether all dead magic stank like this.
“This was only an advance force,” he shouted. “The spartlets will spread and hopefully disrupt any more attacks from above, but the Krote ground army will be here soon. An hour, or a heartbeat, but they’ll be here.” He looked north, saw nothing moving in the deeper darkness beyond the burning machines. “We’ll form two lines of defense. The first there, behind the largest burning machine. Its fires will blind them until they’re on top of you. The second five hundred steps back. Use the dead as shields. The Krotes see a dead warrior, they won’t expect a living one to rise behind it. We have more to send against them, and I hope that the land will aid us, and the serpenthals will rise again.” He looked around at the faces before him, grim and pale, dirtied and splashed with blood. And he wondered whether they knew what he had already realized: this was suicide. They were gaining time, that was all, precious hours or heartbeats for the witch and the girl.
None of them even knew whether those two were still alive.
“I’ve led you here,” he said, his voice falling on the last word. Most of the warriors probably did not even hear him.
“At least we’re fighting!” someone shouted. A sword waved, then another. There were no cheers-they were too tired and frightened for that-but O’Gan looked out at his army, and everyone he could see in this poor light was looking back at him. Not down at the ground, or east, where temporary safety may lie: at him. He nodded and jumped down from the dead machine.
The Shantasi regrouped, arranging themselves in two defensive lines with little discussion. Whichever line they were in, they knew that they would be fighting Krotes again soon. Krotes on foot, or on machines, or maybe those flying monsters again, swooping down through the spartlets and launching arrows or fireballs or stranger weapons yet.
O’Gan went to the forward line, approaching the blazing machine that had exploded with such devastating force. He passed by dozens of Shantasi bodies without looking. He did not wish to see the burns. The warmth grew and it felt good; eased his tensed muscles, tempered his tiredness, and he shrugged so that his cloak sat easier on his shoulders. A hundred steps from the burning machine he paused, looked around and knelt down. To his left he could see warriors fading into the distance, thirty steps between them in any direction, the line ten warriors deep. Their faces were lit by the flaming construct. To his right, the same view. The Shantasi-warriors, and those untrained in battle-staggered their positions, some heading farther forward as though keen to be the first to engage the Mages’ army, others hanging back. They all faced the same direction. Their faces were sweaty and grubby, determined, and none of them had sheathed their swords. There was movement here and there where other weapons harvested from the Mol’Steria Desert were prepared, but mostly the Shantasi sat alone. Crossbows were primed, quivers fixed tightly, hair tied back so that it did not get in the way. They checked the equipment strapping across their chests and around their waists, and some took weapons from dead bodies, careful not to look at the corpses’ faces. None of them wished to see a dead brother, sister or friend.
They could pass us by, five miles away, O’Gan thought. They could avoid the fires. But he did not believe that would happen. His best hope was that they would not be able to resist the flames of battle.
He rested his sword on his knee, turning it this way and that so that it picked up the fire and reflected moonlight.
“Mystic, can you help us?” a woman said. O’Gan glanced to his left at where she lay on the ground, propped on her elbows and staring at him. She had wide eyes, and the pale skin of her face was smeared with blood from a head wound. She was no warrior. She held a single sword, and there was a pile of throwing stars by her left hand.
“I can offer you hope,” he said.
She looked down at the dead grass, averting her gaze.
“I can tell you that what we do here is important.”
“Suicide is important?”
O’Gan nodded at the burning machine. “We did well against them.”
“No we didn’t,” the woman said, but there was no anger in her voice, and no embarrassment at talking to a Mystic like this. “I can see a hundred dead even from where I lie. When their real army gets here…”
O’Gan looked at the shadowy humps scattered around them. “I can’t pretend you’re wrong,” he said, “but I can tell you that there’s meaning to all of this. There’s hope, and we’ll fight for it every second it still exists.”
“If it’s that important, why did the Elders run? Why didn’t they stay and fight? I saw them in the streets. I saw one of them dead by his own hand, and you expect me to believe there’s hope?”
O’Gan nodded, holding the woman’s gaze. She was strong, he realized, perhaps stronger than he. But equally, she saw no valor in sacrifice for an empty cause. “It’snot an empty cause,” he said quietly.
She glanced away again. “You saw those words in my mind.”
“I read them on your face.”
“So can you help us, Mystic?”
He hefted his sword. “I have this.” He nodded up at the spartlets. “We have those, and more. And perhaps the serpenthals will deign to help again.”
“Perhaps.”
He fell silent, the woman smiled and they heard thunder from the north.
O’GAN’S PLAN HAD been to hide behind the glare of the massive fire. It was a good plan, but it stole sight from the first Shantasi line. They heard the advancing army, but they could not see it. They felt the ground shaking beneath them, but as much as they squinted or shielded their eyes, they could not make out anything. The burning machine turned the dusk beyond the battlefield into midnight.
The noise grew quickly. A rumble in the distance to begin with, like the sound of a storm rolling into Hess across the waters of Sordon Sound. Lightning scratched the sky, arcing from one point on the ground to another. The rumble soon turned into a roar, and the ground thumped to its beat. It grew louder and louder, assaulting the Shantasi’s ears, vibrating through their chests, punching at them where they lay or knelt.
O’Gan gripped his sword tightly, eyes closed as he tried to judge distance. If their machines are small, then they’re almost upon us. If they are large, then perhaps they are still a mile away. He had no way of knowing. The flying machines had surprised them all, and now he feared they would be equally surprised by what came across the land.
“Flyers!” someone shouted in the distance. O’Gan glanced up and saw the illuminated bellies of several more flying things, spartlets darting in, fire glinting from metal, bluish explosions ripping spartlets apart, the huge shapes ducking and weaving and fighting their way groundward.
The roar grew louder still, and O’Gan laid his hand flat against the ground. Small stones spiked at his palm as they vibrated from the massive impacts. He closed his eyes. “They’re close,” he said.
“They’re here!” someone shouted.
O’Gan looked. Just beyond the influence of the firelight, the whole darkened horizon began to shift. More lightning sparkled from shadow to shadow, leaving blu
ish impressions on his eyes. Metal glinted, stone glowed pale and the Krote army rode in.
Several Shantasi charged the advancing army, firing arrows and flinging stars, whirling slideshocks around their heads and screaming defiance at the dark.
Suicide, O’Gan thought. He looked to the woman at his left. She smiled and stood, and he knew that he would follow.
Tim Lebbon
Dawn
Chapter 18
THE SHADES OF the Land will guide us in, Alishia thought, and at last she was beginning to understand. With understanding came a new level of hope. But there’s so much more to this. She lay there in the darkness, smelling Noreela burning above her. Sometimes she heard thunder as the Mage crashed through book stacks searching for her, and now and then the ground vibrated beneath her as it came close and went away again.
When smoke and fire started to invade the cave, she knew she had to leave. That made her sad. It felt safe down here, enclosed within the foundations of the land. Perhaps she had been lost for a while. But now the fire and heat of destruction were reaching her again, and she thought about how the flames had affected her in the woodland clearing.
The climb was daunting, but as she began she realized that she had little weight to lift. She found handholds in the stone wall, pushed herself up with her feet, and after a while spent breathing in smoke, her fingers closed around a splintered floorboard. Burning pages floated down around her. One landed on her head, but her hair did not catch on fire and she did not feel the heat.
The Shades of the Land will guide us in, she thought, but they will each need a sacrifice. Half-Life, Birth, Death… Finding her feet again, she leaned against a wall of books and listened for the thing hunting her. There was a rumble from her left, but she did not think that was caused by the Mage’s shade. Perhaps it was becoming more sly, fooling her with silence rather than seeking her through violence.
But she had felt its rage and its fear. She knew that it would not be able to remain silent for long.
ALISHIA DWELLED ON what the land had told her, and she wondered how any of this could ever come together. It had opened itself and allowed her to see so much, but in doing so it had displayed weaknesses that she had no wish to comprehend. A sacrifice, she thought, wondering what each Shade of the Land would consider a just payment to guide her inside the Womb, and why. And really, she knew, it was out of her hands. She was the delivery to be made. Whoever delivered her had far more on their shoulders than they could ever believe possible.
In the library, smelling past times being scorched from memory, she ran.
Thunder erupted behind her as a tower of books tumbled and she was almost buried, pages fluttering at her face and covers scoring her flesh. She sprawled to the ground and felt splinters enter her hands. The books pressed her down. One fell open before her and she read a few lines, but she did not wish to know.
Alishia clawed her way out from beneath the book pile, hearing and smelling some of the books erupting into flames behind her. She did not turn to see. The thing was closing on her, pushing its way through from the neighboring corridor where it had been hiding. It shattered the shelving, threw books before it, breathed on them and set them on fire. She did not look, could not afford to see. She was just a little girl. If she froze in fear then that would be the end.
Not just for me, she thought. Not only the end for me.
Another book fell before her, its pages blank and ready to be filled. And when this one burst into flames, she realized that even the future was quickly being eaten away.
With the land’s knowledge now brewing inside her, she had become much more than a librarian of the past. She had become the author of the future.
“I’m just a little girl,” she said, her vision blurring. She fell again and rolled onto her back, and she saw the thing closing down upon her, the great, consuming shadow that solidity denied and reality veered away from. The shade of a Mage, fearsome and furious. “I’m just a little girl!” Her tears cleared then, steamed away by fire, and something beat her across the face.
At first she thought it was gushes of flame, and she supposed she would burn here just like every other memory. Her head thrashed from left to right and her skin hurt, but her eyes still saw, unmelted in their sockets. The shade drew closer, a void in everything she could see and conceive. And even as she faded away and woke into the real world, she felt no triumph. She had escaped with knowledge intact. But she knew that the Mages’ ability to find her, and their determination to do so, would be stronger than ever before.
“WAKE!” HOPE SCREAMED. “Wake, wake, wake!” Each word was punctuated by a slap to Alishia’s face.
The girl could barely feel the impacts. She wondered why that was: the witch looked madder than ever, and she was not pulling her punches. Alishia tasted blood in her mouth, and another adult tooth fell out to leave a milk tooth in its place.
“I’m here,” Alishia whispered.
The witch was panting, whining, looking around her more than at Alishia. Her hair seemed to be falling out in clumps, and her tattoos were twisted together into two violent ropes, buried into the corners of her mouth and continuing down inside. Hope looked as though she was dying, but she was as strong as ever before.
“Something’s coming!” the witch said, bending and grasping Alishia’s loose dress collar. “They passed us once before…if I didn’t dream it. And now they’re looking again!”
Alishia touched Hope’s wrist, encouraging her to let go. The witch started, held her breath, stood and stepped back.
“Everything’s looking for us,” Alishia said. “Please help me.”
“Where do you go?” Hope asked, grabbing Alishia’s hands and hauling her upright.
Alishia swayed on her feet, clenching her bare toes in the snow. Balance was not an easy thing to find. “Away,” she said. “To the beating heart of the land. But I don’t think I can be a visitor there again. Next time, if there is a next time, I think I may be trapped there for good.”
“You’re talking in riddles!” Hope seemed ready to strike out again, but Alishia glanced at her and the witch shuffled away from her. What does she see in my eyes? Alishia wondered.
“Lifeis a riddle,” Alishia said. She looked around at the snow-covered hillside, mountains rising before them, the sharp rocks that seemed to recede ahead of them to form a path through chaos. She smiled at Hope, not upset when the witch did not smile back. “We need to go.”
Hope’s face crumpled. She sank to her knees, shoulders shuddering with dry tears, hands clawing at her thighs through her rough dress. No sound left her mouth, but wind whistled between nearby rocks, giving voice to her wretchedness. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t know where we’re going, or how to get there. I just don’t know…”
“I know,” Alishia said. She stepped past Hope and walked uphill a dozen steps. To her left a field of razor-sharp rocks scraped at the air, accompanied by an almost subaudible groan that crawled into Alishia’s feet and set her flesh crawling. To her right, shadows danced where they should not, turning the falling snow black. Ahead of them, the way looked safe.
“So nowyou’re leadingme?” Hope said.
Alishia frowned as the ambiguity of Hope’s purpose flashed across her mind. But she turned to the witch and nodded. “I still need your help, Hope,” she said. Birth Shade, Death Shade, Half-Life Shade, which can she be? she thought. The witch stood and came to her, loyal yet deceitful, determined but driven by her own madness and need to be the magician she had always wanted to be.
Alishia walked on, troubled and overwhelmed by her new knowledge. She hoped that when the time came for revelation-for sacrifice-whatever she carried inside would offer a guiding hand.
TREY FELT A change in the Nax carrying him south. They had passed through fledge seams and caverns, plunged into underground rivers and melted through a lake of ancient ice, emerging unscathed on the other side. All the while the Nax had been there at the edges of
his mind, awful and playful, taunting and superior. And then they became silent and serious, and he realized that they were carrying him toward something even more inconceivable.
Where are we going? he thought, hoping that they would answer. Can I take myself? Will you let me go when we arrive? He knew that they heard his thoughts-they were in his mind, cool and sharp-but there was no response. They had not spoken to him for what could have been hours, or years.
The fledge around him changed. It was a graded change, but he felt it straightaway. He had become used to being flooded with the drug, abrading his skin on the outside and soothing his muscles and mind inside. But this new fledge was sharp and cruel, pricking at his skin like a thousand sword points and forcing into his mouth as the Nax dragged him through, filling his stomach. He coughed through the drug and could not breathe, but he had not been breathing for some time now. How could he? He was buried underground.
What is this? he thought. Images started to play across his mind. They were too rapid to catch. These visions were not his own, and he could not understand their source: he was not casting his mind because the Nax would not let him. No single image stood out, because of their speed-it was as if they played on the insides of his eyelids as he blinked-but they presented a picture of things unknown, and terrible.
Kang Kang, a voice said, and the Nax had spoken to him again.
Kang Kang! Perhaps Hope and Alishia are here even now? Maybe they’re waiting for me…though what can I do for them?
Trey did not dwell on what he might have become. The Nax dragged him through the fledge foundations of the world, and he did not breathe, yet he could think and reason like the old Trey. I am Trey, he thought. I can’t be anything else.
The fledge in Kang Kang was different. It flooded into and through him and gave him those countless images from the minds of others. The Nax disliked it, but he did not understand how he could perceive their discomfort. They were not talking in his mind, nor were their nebulous bodies actually touching his. Perhaps their uneasiness was his also.