by Tim Lebbon
She knows so much, Hope thought. I’m due what she knows. It’s coming to me, as I’ve always known it should. She stared at the back of Alishia’s head as they walked higher into the mountains. Occasionally the girl turned and smiled at the witch, and Hope always smiled back. She could feel the tattoos flexing beneath her skin, the coolness of Kang Kang seeping up through her shoes and into her bones, the windchill penetrating her clothing in an attempt to freeze her old woman’s heart. But it had been frozen long before now, and her obsession kept her warm.
They walked across the sides of mountains, along ridges, down into valleys that held reservoirs of darkness and unknown things. Hope heard sounds from the darkness at either side of the path, growls, something chomping on something else, mournful tears. She ignored them, as did Alishia. That was Kang Kang trying to distract them from where they were going.
Then why is it also leading us? Hope kicked at the snow covering the path, finding only pebbles and stones underneath that told her nothing. Alishia paused ahead, turned around and waited, urging Hope on with a quick wave of her small hand.
“Not far,” the girl said.
Hope’s breath froze in her chest. “We’re almost there?”
“Not far,” Alishia said again. She frowned and looked at her bare feet, her large coat flapping at her shoulders as wind blew down from heights they still could not see.
“Lead on,” the witch said. Alishia nodded and started walking again. She tilted her head to the side now and then, and at first Hope thought she was trying to prevent the ice-cold breeze from entering her ear. But then the girl paused at the summit of a long ridge, tilted her head and stared skyward.
“Not far at all,” she said.
Hope did not want to disturb her. Whatever she was following, whatever led her, Alishia seemed to trust.
WALKING ALONG ONE ridge, Hope heard something high in the sky. It started as a whistling, thumping sound, like flying things slapping at the air with heavy wings. More buzzing things? She thought not. She searched for the source of the noise but saw nothing. It seemed to come from far away, but it was growing closer. Got to hide! she thought. Got to protect.
And then certainty struck her like a tumbler. “Alishia! It’s them…!”
Alishia paused and tilted her head. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she smiled.
The noise changed. Screeches underscored the thumping of wings, and then cries, and the sounds of impacts that echoed from Kang Kang’s solidity. They were still far away, but Hope sensed the change from controlled to alarmed. A splash of blue flame lit the sky briefly several miles to the southwest, spilling across the dusk like liquid fire, and for a heartbeat Hope saw many dark specks silhouetted against it. Chasing these specks were shadows that seemed even darker.
She felt the vibration of something striking the ground. More screams, more impacts, and a hundred heartbeats later the sounds faded across the hills. Hope blinked and exhaled her held breath, and it was as though nothing had even happened.
Alishia had already started walking again. Hope hurried to catch up. Whatever had flown flew no more. Hawks? she thought. Machines?
WHEN THE PATH began to fade away, Alishia feared that they were finished. Perhaps it had always been just another trick of Kang Kang, to lead them this far into the heart of the mountains and then leave them at the mercy of whatever might dwell here. She walked on anyway, determined to retain her confidence before the witch. Something rumbled higher up the mountainside, like a giant stomach contemplating food.
The snow began to clear.
A voice spoke in her mind, muttering words she did not know, and she gave those words to the air. The witch was glaring at her-she could feel her mad gaze simmering the air behind her-but Alishia carried on. Speaking the words was different from having them spoken to her, and Alishia hoped that soon she would understand.
She crested a ridge, looked down into a valley and knew exactly where those words came from.
“We’re here,” she whispered. She heard running footsteps behind her and the witch was at her side, kneeling in the thinning snow and looking down into the valley before them.
“Too soon,” Hope said. “Not where it should be!”
“Perhaps it moved…” A voice spoke once more in Alishia’s head, and this time she understood. “We can go down,” she said. “They’ll allow that, at least. But at the mouth of the Womb we have to stop and wait.”
Hope could barely talk. “Wait…for what?”
“The offerings.”
The witch was shaking her head, denying what she was seeing. But Alishia looked with a child’s eyes, and she could believe.
THE VALLEY WAS bare of snow, green, lush with vibrant grasses and shrubs, spiked here and there with clumps of trees that grew two hundred steps high, their trunks forty steps around at the base.
“I can see,” Hope muttered. “And they’re not here.”
A breeze blew across the valley and rustled its grasses, sending a wave from one side to the other. At its base a stream flowed, heading south and disappearing into the darkness of a ravine at the far end. The stream’s source lay on the valley slope below them. A hole in the ground, hooded with a slab of rock and centered in a wide splash of bright blue flowers. Alishia had never seen those flowers, but she had read of the mythical birth-blooms that midwives had once carried as a sign of their profession.
“I can see,” the witch said again. “It’s done. It’s happened; we’ve won!” She grabbed up a fistful of wet soil, pressing her fingers together until it seeped from her hands, muttering under her breath and frowning when nothing happened.
“Are you so hungry for magic?” Alishia said.
“Yes!” The witch stood and thumped the disc-sword on the ground.
“Nothing is won,” Alishia said. “If only it could be so easy. So fair. But I don’t think anything will be easy or fair ever again.”
“But it’sdaylight down there! I can see the colors of grass and flowers, and the trees, and the stream flowing into the distance…”
“And behind us?”
Hope glanced back into the darkness they had traveled through. The truth dawned. “It’s not really daylight.”
“Not really. Something from the Womb, perhaps. Or the Shades of the Land.”
Hope looked dejected, and angry. “And where are they, these Shades? Are they who you speak to when you slink off?”
Alishia shrugged and looked away, disturbed by Hope’s antagonism. “Somethingwhispers to me,” she said. From the library, she thought, but she did not want to say that aloud. It was a special place, and she did not wish it tainted. “As for the Shades…I think we’ll see them soon.”
Alishia stepped from darkness into light, but it was not as comforting as she had hoped. There was no sun heating her skin, no blue sky above. This was not daylight, but simply an absence of night. The light rose from the grasses and flowers, the trees and ragged shrubs, simmering in the air and presenting the same blank sky as the twilight that had fallen across Noreela days ago. The sense of it silenced Alishia, and even Hope fell quiet as they walked down the steep slope toward the Womb of the Land.
When they arrived, Alishia sat down amongst the birth-blooms. They smelled gorgeous. She closed her eyes to rest.
When she opened them again the Shades of the Land made themselves known at last.
ALISHIA SEEMED TO die. One moment she was there before Hope, sitting down in the long grass and flowers and sighing as she took the weight off her legs. Then she fell back to the ground with a grunt.
Hope dashed to her side, cradled the girl in her arms, shook her, breathing stale breath into her mouth in the hope that it would bring her back.
But the girl was still and limp, and when Hope pressed her head to Alishia’s chest she heard nothing inside.
SHE WAS BACK in that vast, endless library, but so much had changed. It was a silent place this time, with no tumbling book stacks or rampaging shades to ste
al away the peace. And all the flames had gone, because all the books were burned.
Alishia walked between two cliffs of shelving. She looked up, unable to see the top because of the gently drifting haze of smoke high above. Where the shelves had once been stacked with books, there was now only ash. A few pages remained here and there-the dregs of memories to yellow, crumble and finally fade away-but this place was no longer a library at all.
Alishia released one single sob and walked on.
She turned left and right, following the corridor between stacks and never once finding a whole book. Her feet kicked through drifts of ash. Some of them came up to her knees, and she wondered at the countless forgotten things around her. She could never know them, because ash cannot be read.
She realized that she was crying. A few tears dropped to the floor and darkened, sinking down and forming small pits in the ashen surface. She moved on, wiping her face because she did not wish to leave anything of herself behind.
She reached a reading area, with leather chairs and a low table piled with burnt books. She was not surprised to see a young man sitting in one of the chairs. She thought she recognized him. Someone from Noreela City, perhaps? A visitor to her library, someone she had regularly passed in the street? He smiled at her. Everything about him was familiar, yet just out of reach.
“We thought it would be easier for you if we presented ourselves like this,” the man said, and she almost knew his voice. “Please, take a seat.”
Alishia sat down, perfectly at ease. The man was quite young-perhaps the age she had been when this began-and his clothing was unremarkable. There was a constant smile on his face, but she noticed that it seemed not to touch his eyes. They were dark, and deep. She felt as though she could lose herself in there. They reminded her of that place beneath the library floor.
“I’m frightened,” she said, no longer at ease.
“Don’t be. We’re not here to hurt you.”
Alishia looked around, expecting to see more people stepping from the charred shadows.
“We’re all here,” the man said, touching his chest.
“You’re the Shades of the Land,” Alishia said, and the man nodded. “The Birth Shade,” she continued, “and the Death Shade, and the Half-Life Shade.”
Again, the man nodded. “You’re a wise young girl.”
“I’m not as young as I appear.”
“Obviously. Strange. But we accept that, because it is.” He stood and walked around the reading area, kicking casually at a pile of ash. “Human history has turned to smoke,” he said, “and there’s no future to be written. Not here. Not as things stand.”
“I’m here to change that,” Alishia said. “The Mages can’t win. There was a boy, and they took him, and now there’s me, and I have something of what he had…but not the exact same thing. I think I have a seed for something new. Something fresh.”
The man still walked, looking down at his feet. Dust rose around him as he kicked through the ash. If he kept kicking perhaps he would obscure himself completely.
“We guard the Womb,” he said. “We tend it. We are the soul of the land.”
“You have to let me in.”
“Haveto?” The man looked up. That smile, so beatific yet still not touching his eyes.
Alishia fought hard not to avert her gaze. “I’m important,” she said.
The man nodded. “Your sort are always so filled with self-importance. Always sosure that you’re the only things of worth. Noreela is so much more than the humans who live upon it, you know.”
“Like the tumblers? Nax? Evil things.”
“Differentthings.” The man sat down before Alishia once more. “There are spirits of the air; a whole world folded beneath the surface of Sordon Sound; a great, mad mind south of Kang Kang; people living much deeper than any fledge mine, so deep that they have no concept of the surface. There’sso much I could show you and tell you, if only you could take it all in.”
“I can!”
He shook his head. “You’re still too human.”
“But it’s the whole of Noreela under threat from the Mages! You’ve guided and protected me this far…haven’t you?”
The man inclined his head but did not reply.
“Why bring me this far and then-”
“Surely the witch brought you?”
“She brought me, and sometimes I brought her. But I think she’s taken with her lust for magic.”
The man touched his chin and stroked it, as though unused to having skin. “You’ve been through this place,” he said, indicating the silent, dead library around them. “You’ve read the language of the land, and you read it well. You’re intelligent. You know what we need.”
“Sacrifice.”
The man laughed out loud, shaking his head. His eyes were still dark. “Offerings, Alishia. Or keys. You have been helped, now help us. Not a sacrifice. We’re Shades, not gods. You see so much black and white, with no shades in between. There is no true darkness or light.”
“The Mages. There’s nothing other than evil in them.”
“They’re human. They were normal people, once. One was a Shantasi Mystic; the other became his lover.”
“Why are you doing this?” Alishia asked. She felt tears threatening, and she bit her lip to hold them back. She had no wish to show weakness before this…soul. I’m talking to the land itself, and I’m speaking its language, and I’m too proud to cry for Noreela.
“Because things are so different. The Womb has birthed many times before, but it has never been seeded from outside. We have never let anythingin. Yet events roll, and new things happen, and new magic will arise from this. Anevolved magic. And we are responsible. We’re the soul of the land, after all.”
“But why the offerings? Why can’t you just help me?” The first tear slipped from Alishia’s left eye.
The man watched the tear trace a path through the grime on Alishia’s cheek. She felt his gaze upon her, touching her skin, and the pressure of his presence was too great to bear. She started to shake, and he backed away, merging into the shadows between two blackened book stacks. He became little more than a shadow himself.
“Because of that tear,” he said. “Because humans suffer. And in suffering, you may at last find your soul.”
And then he was gone, and Alishia was left alone in her void of burnt memories.
HOPE SAT BENEATH the false daylight and held the dead girl on her lap. The valley containing the Womb of the Land was silent compared to the rest of Kang Kang. Gone were the grinding of rocks, the hushing of shadows rubbing together, the breath of the wind and the calls or cries of things killing or being killed. An occasional breeze stirred the long grass and sent waves across the slopes, but it was virtually silent. Even the shifting grass chose not to whisper. The only definable sound in this strange valley was the sobbing of an old woman.
If she truly had seen the Mages passing them by back there in Kang Kang, then they had not yet found this place. She didn’t know whether that was even important anymore.
She had been to see the entrance to the Womb of the Land. It was unremarkable; a cave, a small stream running from it. She had carried Alishia in her arms, and even thirty steps away she knew that she would not be able to enter. The shadows in there were too solid. She threw a stone and it disappeared inside, but she heard no echoes. She dipped her toes in the stream. But she would not drink of that water.
So she had moved away again, sat back down, and now she waited for what would happen next.
Alishia moved. Hope held her breath, grasped the girl tighter and looked down. The girl’s face was still slack and pale, mouth hanging slightly open, but one of her eyelids had raised to reveal the dark half-moon of her pupil. Her eye turned, centered on Hope. Her lips twitched. Another adult tooth fell from her mouth, and a single tear left her eye. It ran a clear path down the girl’s dirty cheek.
“You’re alive!” the witch said. She hugged the girl to her, breathing
in Alishia’s breath and looking around to see if the world looked any different. But we’re here! she thought. We’re at the Womb of the Land. Surely everything will change now? Surely the magic will come back and everything will be better? But the very idea of that felt impossible. How could anything really be better, ever again? The witch felt the power of the girl in her arms, radiating out in waves now that she had returned, but Hope herself was still a false witch without charms or tricks. She was the last of her line, destined to die cold and alone. Even if Alishia fulfilled whatever vague destiny she had discovered, Hope would be no part of it.
She remembered rising from the pit of the dead Sleeping God and lashing out at Trey. A moment of violence, a flash of red in her mind, and since then she had cast it deep, not wishing to dwell on the fate of the fledge miner. Out of every bad thing she had done in her life, that act had damned her forever.
“Do what you came here to do!” Hope said. Even though her voice was low, still it sounded loud in this narrow valley. “Do it! We’re here, we’re at the Womb, it’s over there behind us and I cansee the darkness inside.”
“We wait,” Alishia whispered. “We can’t get inside until…”
“Until what?”
“I’ll know when.” Alishia tried to sit up in Hope’s arms but the witch held her tight.
“It’s right there!” Hope said. But she looked into the cave mouth thirty steps away, and its darkness suddenly seemed more solid than any of the rocks surrounding it.
“Be content with waiting and they’ll let us,” Alishia said.
“The Shades of the Land?”
“Yes, them.”
Hope helped Alishia sit up in her lap, and for a while she knew what it would have been like to have a child of her own.