by Tim Lebbon
It’s her.
She attacked me. She’s dangerous, and mad!
I know, Trey. She tried to calm him, mentally stroking his brow. She’s mad, but she always wanted what we need.
What’s happening?
I’m waiting to go in, but I don’t know when. But if we have time, I think everything will be all right. That’s what it’s down to now: time.
Time, Trey said, and his voice drifted away.
He withdrew from her mind and smiled again, reaching out for Alishia’s hand. She squeezed, and he was cool.
The things lowered him to the ground and moved away, fluttering across the grass, climbing the slopes and merging back into the dusk beyond the valley. Against her better judgment Alishia watched them, and it was only as they passed from light to dusk that she perceived their true form.
She shivered, and Trey squeezed her hand again.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he said, voice hoarse and dry. His teeth were yellow, his tongue sat in his mouth like a fist of fledge and his eyes closed as he rested back on the ground.
Alishia knelt by his side and touched his face, turning him to her. “Trey.”
He opened his eyes again and looked at her. “Another hillside, and this time I’ve found you. You really are just a little girl.”
“I am,” she said, her voice tinged with an age of unrealized wisdom. “Trey, can you cast? Can you travel? Can you tell me what’s happening in Noreela?”
He sighed. “Now that they’ve gone, I think I can do anything. I’m more fledge now than man.” His head tilted back, and Alishia let him rest.
She put her hand on his chest and looked down his naked body. So strong, she thought. Perhaps I would have known him. And then his heart started beating faster than should have been possible, and his eyelids were rolling as he went away.
HOPE TRIED TO approach Trey, but Alishia kept her away with a simple look. You’ve harmed him once, that look said, how dare you come to him again?
The witch walked toward the entrance to the Womb of the Land, squatting and staring into the impenetrable darkness. Her thinning hair drifted around her brows now and then, as though stirred by a breath from the cave.
It was only a few minutes later that Trey woke, sitting up and crying out, his good hand reaching out to the darkness as if to ward it off. “They’re coming!” he shouted.
“Trey!” Alishia tried to calm him, but wherever she touched he flinched away, never meeting her eyes, staring into a distance she had no wish to see.
“They’re on their way!” he said again. “They know, they’re searching for this place, circling Kang Kang andsearching. ”
“The Mages?”
“Yes, them. ” He looked at Alishia then, his yellow eyes filled with tears. “Not long, Alishia,” he said.
She put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him to the ground, and she felt his heart slowing as she sat beside him. “There’s water here, and food,” she said, touching his lips.
“I need neither.” His breath smelled of caves and fledge.
“What else did you see?”
“So much. But all fragmentary. I traveled, and I saw so much. All of it bad, Alishia. Noreela awash with blood. People dead, and living, and many in between. A war. Men and women fighting machines and dying, and…other things fighting as well. For the machines or against them, I couldn’t tell. Some things I can’t see.” He frowned and closed his eyes, trying to remember or forget. “But I sawthem. I don’t know how near or far, but they’re above Kang Kang and coming this way. Every heartbeat brings them closer, and theyknew I was seeing them. Theyknew !”
“By hawk?”
“A flying thing. Like a hawk but so much bigger.” Trey’s heart was slowing even more, and Alishia moved her hand on his chest, trying to rediscover its beat.
“I can’t get into the Womb, not yet. There are Shades guarding it.”
“The Shades of the Land?”
“How do you know?”
“You have such an innocent mind. Like Rafe. I slipped in, just for a moment, and saw.”
“Then you know what the Shades ask for. They want us to suffer. They say that way, we’ll find our soul.”
“I’m an offering,” he said.
“It’s the Half-Life Shade that wants you, Trey. You’re all fledge now, and…” His heartbeat had reduced to a few per minute, weak flutterings as though a bird were trapped in his chest.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that one. Another. Take me down.”
Alishia dragged him down the hillside. He moved through the grass easily, as though fledge smoothed the way. Every time he exhaled, a haze of the drug blurred his features. Another, he had said. The Birth Shade? Was he changing into something else? Was it too much to believe that Trey was becoming much more of the fledge than any fledge miner had ever imagined?
Alishia stared hard at him, but he was still all there.
He could never be a Nax, she thought.
At the mouth of the cave Hope scuttled away, as though afraid of this naked yellow man. Alishia glared at her, then sat beside Trey, resting her hand on his chest once more.
“I should have died days ago,” he whispered without opening his eyes. “This wound runs deep, touches the heart of me. And then theytook me deep. The Nax saved me for this, but even so much fledge can’t hold me back forever.”
“What do you mean?” Alishia was crying now, because sheknew what Trey meant, and she was about to lose her newest, greatest friend. There was no sign of movement in the cave mouth, but an awareness grew in there, as though it were an eye suddenly opening to the world.
Something came closer.
“I hope I can help,” Trey said. “There’s so much more to Noreela, Alishia. I saw times from before time! The Nax showed me, and I don’t know why.”
“Because memories are important,” she said, thinking of the library and the burning pages falling around her like dying butterflies.
“Even though they can’t last?”
“Especially then.”
Trey closed his eyes and smiled. “I remember you,” he said. Alishia felt one final flutter in his chest, and then his heart was still.
“Trey,” she whispered, to speak his name one more time. This moment was how she wanted to remember him: brave and wise. And this final page of his life was new and fresh, untouched by the scourge of the Mages.
She cried. Her tears fell on his yellow skin and washed nothing away.
“He’s dead?” Hope said. She stood behind Alishia, her shape casting no shadow across the prone fledger.
“Yes,” Alishia said.
Hope started to say something but turned away, and Alishia sensed her retreating across the hillside.
The librarian sat with the dead miner for some time, never taking her hand from his chest. She did not feel him cooling. She sensed no change. The only difference was that his chest was still, not rising and falling, and the smell of fledge began to grow stale without his breath to renew it.
An hour after Trey died, the Womb of the Land changed. The Death Shade came, making the cave mouth darker than ever with its presence. It rose from the depths, becoming denser with every moment that passed, and Alishia remained with Trey instead of moving away. She feared it, but she was the reason it had come.
There was increased movement in the small valley. The grass began waving with no sign of a breeze, and several trees that dotted the hillsides flexed their branches as if stretching after a long sleep. Alishia saw Hope crouch down in fear as a cloud of green leaves sailed past her head, several of them becoming entangled in her wild hair. The witch thrashed at the leaves, cursing and screaming.
“Come and take him,” Alishia said. The cave suddenly seemed closer than it had before. Or perhaps it had grown.
There was no great unveiling, no giant Shade emerging. Trey simply rose a handbreadth from the ground and flowed toward the opening into the land. His hands and feet dipped to brush thr
ough the waving grasses, but Alishia had the sense that the Shade was taking him with caution and love. He passed into the cave. The Death Shade swallowed him, and Alishia’s final image of Trey was his pale yellow skin obscured from sight forever.
“Back below where you belong,” she said. Then she stood and walked away, her bones aching, heart fit to break.
Tim Lebbon
Dawn
Chapter 20
I HAD NO WISH to ever be close to you again, Flage said. He had risen from the depths of the tumbler, and Jossua Elmantoz had sensed him coming. Jossua was blind and deaf and dumb, but this new sense of unbeing gave him greater sight than ever before. Much that he saw was loneliness. As the first Red Monk, he was used to that, but it had never quite felt like this. This was a solitude of the soul that he could barely stand, a sense of abandonment by not only other people and beings, but the land itself. He felt so far removed from everything he had believed in that he struggled to keep hold of his own mind. He imagined his life as a book and he kept reading it, again and again, so many times that he lost count. Every time it finished he started again, realizing that the true end was yet to be written.
I’m dead, but not finished, he kept thinking, and then Flage rose up.
Not dead, Flage said. Not like me. Your wraith and your shade are still together.
I don’t understand…
And were you meant to? Monk! All you understand is murder and death.
You know so little, Flage. What were you? A farmer?
A rover.
I’ve killed rovers.
I’m sure you have, Flage said. He moved away, his voice growing faint, and Jossua called out to him.
I’m so alone!
Flage laughed. We’d have you, if the tumbler mind asked. But it doesn’t ask. It doesn’t really want you, either.
Why?
There are reasons. I don’t understand them, but I know them. Enough to tell you that you won’t be here for very much longer. We’re almost somewhere.
Where?
Somewhere. Now leave me be, Monk. I hope you’re cold out here. I hope you’re lonely. Flage left, still talking as his voice faded to nothing. I hope you find all the pain you’ve given…
Jossua sensed the vastness of unknown space surrounding him, and he could still feel the impact of his broken body on the ground as the tumbler rolled onward. But he was alone once more.
Almost somewhere, he thought. But nothing came to tell him where.
KOSAR AND LUCIEN had joined a small group of Shantasi on a wide, flat rock. Most of them remained standing, still clasping their weapons, looking north at the strange battle out on the plains. Several more huge explosions had lit the scene. Most were true fire, but a couple of them gushed cool blue flame at the sky, like a fountain of ice rising from broken machines. The battle was a mile distant, but the fires provided enough light to make out individual combatants, both machine and tumbler.
A few minutes ago, one of the machines had disappeared within a swirling, twisting shadow, and Kosar had heard several of the Shantasi saySerpenthal. “The one you killed must have been a baby,” he said to Lucien. He was sure the Monk’s complexion paled.
They continued watching, but though many fires marked the demise of machines, still there was a growing awareness that the rolling forms of the tumblers were becoming fewer. They’re all fighting, one Shantasi said. They’re dying, another answered. Kosar guessed that both were correct. The tumblers were fighting and dying, and although every second gained would help Alishia and the others, the Krotes would be on them very soon.
“What else can Noreela throw at them?” Lucien asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The tumblers. The serpenthals. What else? The land seems to be helping itself.”
Kosar nodded, watching another giant flower of fire rise from the darkened landscape. Another machine dies, he thought, but the idea brought little comfort. “When we were traveling with Rafe, the magic helped us.”
“At the machines’ graveyard.”
“Then, and before. Alishia isn’t the same, but perhaps that help will be there again when we need it most.”
“You’re relying on that?” the Monk said.
Kosar shook his head, not looking at Lucien. “We can’t rely on anything but our willingness to fight.” He looked around at the Shantasi warriors, their commanders organizing them into smaller platoons and spreading across the hillsides in readiness. A hundred Shantasi started down toward the plain, ready to spring an ambush on the first machines that approached. “Going to their deaths,” he said, “and we don’t even know what’s happening in Kang Kang. We’re fighting for a sliver of hope, and we’ll die for it.”
“Better that than die for nothing.”
Yes, Kosar thought. A’Meer died under your sword for what you’re ready to fight for now.
“Something’s coming,” a Shantasi said. It was O’Lam, the big woman who had first tried to shoot Kosar and Lucien from the desert beast.
“Machines?” Kosar asked.
“Don’t think so. Mage shit, this dusk is so fucking annoying.”
Kosar smiled. A’Meer would have spoken that way.
“Something coming toward us from the battle. Slow. Perhaps Krotes on foot, or something else.”
“Krotes on foot we can fight,” Kosar said. He squinted, still unable to see anything.
O’Lam looked at him and smiled, stroking her cheek with the tip of her sword. “Krotes on foot make me wet.” She laughed, and Kosar laughed with her. Yes, just like A’Meer!
“Whatever it is, it’ll be here soon,” Kosar said. “Who knows what else the Mages have made to come at us?” O’Lam did not answer, and Kosar guessed she was probably going over the same possibilities in her own mind.
“Perhaps the damage is already done,” Lucien said.
“Meaning?” Kosar asked. He was aware that the Shantasi warrior was paying attention to the Monk too, her face pale and grim.
“The Mages are here. This Krote army had traveled the length of Noreela. Who’s to say what has happened? Perhaps there’s not much of Noreela left.”
“Are you always so fucking upbeat, Monk?” O’Lam said.
Lucien did not answer, and Kosar looked at the fires and explosions in the distance. There was a huge conflagration to the east, and it seemed to be growing all the time. Tumblers being burned, perhaps. Or something else. He knew little, standing here in the foothills of a place where no one should go, ready to fight a foe no one had ever seen. Please, in the name of the Black, I hope you’re going to do something soon, Alishia.
But right then the prospect of success, of victory, of this endless dusk giving way to daylight, seemed so very far away.
A FEW MINUTES later, they discovered what was coming toward them from the battlefield. Refugees. They watched them stagger across the dying land, and as they came closer Kosar could see their vacant expression, eyes wiped clean by whatever terrible things they had seen.
Many of them carried weapons.
“Where do they come from?” Kosar asked. “No villages out there, not this close to Kang Kang. And they don’t look in very good shape.”
“Perhaps the Krotes brought them,” O’Lam said. “Prisoners who escaped when the tumblers attacked.”
“We should go to help them,” Kosar said, but O’Lam touched his arm.
“No. They’ll reach our front line soon. Then we’ll see how much help they need.”
They watched the shapes climbing the slope, walking on at a steady pace. And it was only as they reached the first Shantasi line that Kosar realized what was so strange. They all walked alone.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Something’s wrong!”
The refugees reached the Shantasi and the attack began.
The first warriors were taken by surprise, and three fell beneath the weight of the attackers. Several more fought back, using swords and slideshocks on the firs
t group of refugees, cutting them down and then backing away before the main body of people reached them.
The men and women they had cut down stood again-minus arms, slashed across the chest, one of them missing his head above his mouth-and continued their relentless walk.
“What in the fucking Black is that?” O’Lam said.
Kosar could only stare. The dead walked on, and it took him several more seconds to realize that the refugees wereall dead, cursed back to life and driven on as fodder to weaken the enemy. “This is only the first,” he said. “There’ll be much worse than this.”
“You’ve seen the Mages before, haven’t you?” O’Lam said. “I heard you talking with Mystic O’Gan.”
Kosar nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen them.”
“What were they like?”
“In all the world, friend, that’s the one thing you never want to know.”
The fighting had begun in earnest now, and the walking dead were starting to make their way up the hillside. There were hundreds of them, perhaps as many as a thousand, and those not immediately engaged marched on until they found an enemy to fight. There was no apparent strategy or method to their attack, but their power lay in their numbers and senselessness. If they lost one arm, they would heft a sword with another. Kosar saw a woman lose her left leg to a Shantasi throwing disc. She pulled herself upright and hopped forward once again. It would have been amusing were it not so grotesque, and he was pleased when the same warrior took off her other leg with a slideshock.
The woman fell and started pulling herself along the ground.
Many of the dead quickly lost their weapons, dropped from senseless fingers or left lodged between an unfortunate Shantasi’s bones. Yet still they came on, overpowering warriors by numbers alone. The dead did not move very quickly. They could walk but not run, turn but not leap, and the Shantasi had the advantage of Pace. But the dead were also difficult to keep down, and one mistake would cost a warrior dear.
One group of Shantasi retreated a hundred steps and hunkered down, taking bags from their shoulders, lifting flaps and directing a dark cloud of something at the walking dead. From this distance Kosar could not make out what the cloud consisted of-flies, gas? But when one of the Shantasi fired a burning arrow into its midst, the effect was staggering. The air lit up, a fireball that swallowed many of the dead and expanded dangerously close to the Shantasi lines. When the flames receded, many of the dead had fallen, burning into the ground. They still moved. Fanning the flames of their own demise.