by Tim Lebbon
“How much more do you have?” Kosar asked.
O’Lam did not turn to him. “Some,” she said.
Kosar shook his head. “It’s hopeless. We’re fighting magic with swords and burning flies.”
“No, we’re fighting what the Mages can make of magic. They keep it to themselves, selfish. Don’t give their army true access. That was their downfall three hundred years ago, and perhaps they’ll do the same now.”
“Perhaps?”
O’Lam shrugged. “We’ll soon see.”
Several Mourners that had come with the Shantasi army started chanting, approaching perilously close to shambling corpses and doing their best to send them down into the Black. Some succeeded; others did not. Kosar saw at least one Mourner fall, in need of chanting down himself.
When the first of the dead reached them, Kosar and Lucien stood their ground. They stayed close together in case they were rushed, and Kosar hefted the sword A’Meer had given him, sad that it would be tainted by flesh corrupted with bad magic.
“Every death for you,” he said, kissing the blade.
A man came at him, ragged and dirty and bearing a terrible dry gash across his throat. As he lunged, Kosar realized just how badly the man stank. He must have been dead for some time.
Kosar dodged aside and lashed out, lodging his sword in the man’s ribs. The man fell, turning as he did so, and the blade slipped from Kosar’s hand. He went for the sword but the man struck out. He caught Kosar across the arm and raked his nails down to his hands, ripping through the thief’s brands. Kosar screamed.
Lucien darted in and cleaved the man’s skull in two, hacking at the twitching body until it could move no more. He stood on the dead man’s back and tugged Kosar’s sword free, handing it back to the thief.
Kosar nodded his thanks and stared past the Monk. “Behind you,” he said. The Monk turned and went to work.
It was a short, vicious fight, but not very bloody. The little blood that did leak from these enemies was thick and black with corruption. Kosar recognized many of them as northerners, and from their clothing-well made, colorful-he guessed that some were from Noreela City itself. And what of that city now?
A few of them were from the Shantasi’s First Army, freshly dead and risen again. At least in death they seemed to have lost their Pace, so although the fight was a mental challenge beyond anything the Shantasi thought they would have to face, they still had the better of their dead friends.
Don’t let me see O’Gan, Kosar thought, over and over again. Please don’t let me see him. Not me, not him.
Kosar grew tired very quickly. His old wounds hurt, and he received several new ones to add to the pain. He kept a tight hold on his sword, and several times he and Lucien found themselves fighting back to back. The dead Shantasi seemed to aim for them, as though targeting the Red Monk’s cloak, and Kosar found himself fighting men and women who had been on his side a few hours earlier. Freshly dead, still they possessed ease of movement and strength in their limbs, and they retained much of their fighting skill. But they were far slower than before. He maintained his concentration and tried to keep his fear at bay, and soon the pile of body parts before him was as high as his knee.
And it moved. Torsos flexed, limbs twitched. He nudged Lucien and moved sideways, finding fresh ground.
The Monk fought hard, and even though Kosar heard him take several wounds, they barely slowed him.
He was almost starting to feel confident about the fight when he heard the first cry rise up: “The Krotes are here, the Krotes-” The voice was silenced. Dashing away from the dead attacking him, looking down the hill, Kosar saw a sight that seemed to still the blood leaking from his wounds.
The hillside was alive with machines, and awash with dying Shantasi.
ALISHIA FOUND HOPE shivering beneath a tree two hundred steps from the Womb of the Land. The old witch was staring at the ground, eyes wide, hands clasped together at her chest, her hair still bearing a few windblown leaves. She glanced up at Alishia’s approach, and then down again.
“Trey’s been taken in,” Alishia said.
Hope held her breath. “Inside there?” She looked along the hillside at the cave.
“He’s part of my misery,” the girl said. “Misery is humanity.”
“Then it’s time to go inside! See what’s to be done. I’ll go with you and-”
“You will never go in there with me,” Alishia said quietly, and even though she spoke with a little girl’s voice, the witch recoiled in fear.
“I brought you all this way,” Hope said.
Alishia shook her head. “I can’t argue with you. I don’t have the energy.”
“But I-”
“What’s that?” Alishia held up her hand and stilled Hope with a glance. She had heard something, a rumble from far away or a whisper from closer by. Perhaps the Nax were still out there, trailing around the lip of the valley.
“I hear nothing,” Hope said.
Alishia let out her held breath and breathed in again, and as she did so the sky shook. A single, thunderous explosion thumped down into the valley, invisible but for the shock wave that preceded it. Grass flattened, trees cracked, soil and stones jumped as if pushed from below, and Alishia felt her eardrums and eyeballs squeezed. She fell onto her side with a groan and tried to bring her hands to her ears, but her arms would not work.
“In the name of the Black, not again,” Hope said. Her voice was pure fear. Alishia followed her gaze up the hillside.
A giant flying machine sat on the valley ridge, its grotesque head and the tips of its wings protruding from the darkness. It edged forward, as though testing the strange light in the valley. When it found that the light did not hurt, it launched, flexing its wings, stepping from the valley edge and gliding down just above the hillside. Upon its back sat two figures, humanoid yet so much larger in Alishia’s eyes.
“It’sthem!” she said.
“They have magic,” Hope whispered, and Alishia was disturbed by the awe in her voice. What would the witch do? she thought. What would she give up for a touch of what they have?
The machine lifted higher above the ground and drifted across the valley, flapping its huge wings once to lift it over the clump of trees beneath which Alishia and Hope sheltered. Alishia closed her eyes as the thing passed them by. Though there was no sun to block out, still its shadow touched them.
“They’ll find us in minutes,” Alishia said. “They’ll take me and kill me.”
“Then bring it up!” Hope said. “Let the magic in you find itself! Give me something to fight them with and I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”
“If I could touch the magic, don’t you think I’d have done so before now?”
“To protect yourself from me?” Hope said, leaning closer.
Alishia shook her head. “You may be mad, but I’m not sure you’ll ever be a danger to your one and only hope.”
Another explosion came, thumping through the valley and shaking leaves from the trees above their heads. Alishia and Hope rolled on the ground, clasping their ears, squeezing their eyes shut, trying their best not to shout in pain. Perhaps that was what the Mages were trying to do: flush them out.
Alishia pressed her face into the ground and groaned.
The flying machine came again, flapping its wings this time and moving much faster across the valley. Its wing tips scored the ground. Daggers of blue light leapt from its sides and rear, piercing the ground and sending up geysers of soil and molten rock. More fear, more pain, to make Alishia and Hope flee their precarious hiding place.
“Don’t move!” Alishia said. Hope lay beside her, hands pressed to her face. Blood seeped between her fingers.
The machine landed close to the Womb of the Land, its settling surprisingly gentle for something so large. Its wings rested down and touched the ground, taking on its contours and imperfections as they molded themselves to rocks, trees and dips. The Mages stood and walked down the wing c
losest to the Womb. Neither of them took their eyes from the cave. They carried no weapons, but Alishia knew that they needed none. As Hope said, they had magic.
“Now we’ll never get in there!” Hope whispered. Her nose was bleeding, and a dribble of blood leaked from her left eye. Her tattoos had turned red, as if echoed below the skin by burst veins.
“Neither will they,” Alishia said. But the witch is right. With them there, I can never get inside. And something…
“Alishia,” Hope said, and for the first time the librarian heard a gentleness to the witch’s voice. “You’re growing younger.”
“I know,” Alishia said, but even then she knew what the witch meant. She was regressing faster. Drifting back through the years of her youth, breasts shrunken to hints of themselves, stomach bulging with a little girl’s fat, eyes wide, teeth small, and in her mind everything she had learned of the land over the past few days seemed to be growing larger and more intricate with every breath she took. “Hope, I think I’ll have to be there soon.”
Hope crawled closer, and the witch seemed to be growing. “I could go,” Hope said. “I could offer myself to them. Pretend to help. Say I know where you are. Maybe they’ll touch me, give me something of what they have in exchange.”
“You can’t.”
Hope was looking at the ground close to her face, frowning, her eyes flitting left and right as she turned over whatever dark thoughts she had.
“Hope, that’s not the way,” Alishia said.
The witch looked at her. “You’re afraid for me, or of me?”
“Both.”
Hope nodded and looked along the hillside at the resting machine. “Perhaps you’re right to be,” she said.
The Mages were approaching the entrance to the cave now, and they appeared to be holding hands. Where their skin touched, a pale blue light danced, streaking up their arms and tangling with their hair. There was no companionship or affection apparent in their touch; they did not look at each other. And as they came within a few steps of the cave, the light between them started to grow.
“They’re going to seal the cave,” Alishia said. She closed her eyes and thought of Trey being taken inside, and even with everything she had learned she had no idea what was within that place. A simple cave, perhaps. Or something far more.
“Something’s coming out.” Hope touched her hand.
The darkness of the cave mouth was expanding, extruding into the weird light of its valley. Its edges were vague, the shape constantly changing, but it grew as it came, as though all the darkness from beneath the ground were forcing upward. As it projected farther, the shadow split in two.
The Mages took one step back and then lifted their clasped hands in unison, ejecting a splash of blue light that struck the two shapes where they were still joined at the ground.
The land vibrated with the impact. For the briefest instant, the two shadows were lit from the inside, and Alishia did not understand what she saw. How light could reveal deeper darkness, she did not know. For the moment they were lit-surprised by the blast of magical light, perhaps, or simply absorbing it as best they could-the Half-Life Shade and the Birth Shade seemed larger than everything else. They dwarfed the valley, made a mockery of the expanse of Kang Kang, and they drove Alishia’s newfound knowledge of things down to a speck of inexperience. For a moment they were everything, and then the magical light faded and the Shades fell upon the Mages.
“Come on,” Alishia said. “We can’t stay here. We have to move closer to the Womb, and when the chance comes I can go inside.”
“But the offerings,” Hope said.
“Maybe I can slip by without them knowing.” But Alishia knew how foolish this idea was. The two remaining Shades might be fighting the Mages, but their prime purpose was defending the Womb of the Land. It was Noreela’s potential, as were they. I’m the offering for the Birth Shade, she thought. I can think of nothing else. Yet the Half-Life Shade? Hope? How can she be that? She’s an old witch without magic, but she’s very much alive.
Alishia darted from cover and moved low across the hillside. She sensed Hope following her, and for once she took heart from that. Perhaps the witch really did have goodness at the heart of her, hidden away by decades of bitterness.
The two Shades danced in the air above the Mages, hiding the sorcerers from view much of the time. Their darkness pulsed and changed, spurts of shadow spinning out and turning like a whirlpool, sucking in the light and expanding some more. Fingers of darkness probed the air. Others dipped down to the ground far from the fight, searching cracks and dips, stealing behind rocks, and Alishia was certain that the Shades were seeking her out.
She ducked behind a fallen tree and held her breath, closed her eyes, expecting the human manifestation of the Shades to speak to her again. He remained silent.
Hope dropped down beside her. “I can’t see them anymore!” she said. “Maybe they’re defeated. Maybe the Shades have crushed them down!”
“I can’t believe it would ever be that easy,” Alishia said. Another jarring explosion agreed with her, thudding up into her hip and shoulder and shaking her insides.
“Mage shit!” More blood spurted from Hope’s nose. Her left eye had become totally bloodshot, turning this way and that as though fascinated with this new take on the world.
“Come on,” Alishia said, readying to stand again. The witch grabbed her arm and held on tightly.
“Don’t run blind, Alishia,” she said. “You don’t know what’s happening, or what to do when you get there. Wait.”
“For what?”
Hope shook her head, exasperated. “Don’t you think the land will provide? Those Nax arrived with Trey, and that was far from coincidence.”
“No one pretends to know the Nax,” the girl said. Her own voice fascinated her-so young, so full of wisdom.
“And yet they intervene,” Hope said.
“And you?” Alishia said. “When you cut Trey down, did you think you were serving the land?”
Hope shook her head. “Only my own madness.”
Something screamed. The sound began deep, rising so high that Alishia thought her skull would break. The fallen tree they were resting against shook and split along its length, spitting a shower of dead beetles and wood slugs down onto Alishia’s head and shoulders. She bit her lip to prevent herself from crying out. The beetles were light as a breath, their clear wings spread from their resting position on their backs as though they had tried to fly from death.
“The fight’s moving,” Hope said, looking over the top of the cracked trunk.
Alishia shook her head and brushed at her shoulders as she knelt beside the witch. The dead creatures fell apart at her touch. Like old, dry books caught in a fire.
The Mages had retreated back to their machine, and were now standing on its back fending off the two Shades of the Land. The Shades attacked from either side, flashes of darkness darting out like negative lightning. The Mages held handfuls of blue light, and every time the Shades came at them they used the sickly illumination to cauterize the darkness into a light ash. The air around them was thick with it, and it had begun to coat the machine around their feet like a layer of fresh snow.
The Shades moved like mountains, and the Mages fought back.
One of the Shades changed tactics. Instead of attacking the Mages, it assaulted their machine, melting across the ground and sending tendrils of shadow beneath the construct, then expanding again, lifting the machine up. It pumped more of itself under the machine, shrugging off the thing’s defenses: fireballs faded, arrows passed through and molten metal spattered on the hillside and steamed back to solid.
The Mages almost lost their footing. The female jumped and landed again, screaming a curse as she unleashed a stream of blue fire directly between her feet into the machine.
It exploded. Whether or not the Mage had intended this, the effect was devastating. The machine’s shell came apart under a ball of fire, chunks of metal and st
one, flesh and bone spinning up and out into the air, streaming blue flame and smoke behind them. The two Mages went with it, visible for the first couple of seconds but then engulfed as their clothes and hair ignited. The ground beneath the machine erupted as though pushed from below, and soil and rock were powered out sideways.
Alishia and Hope ducked as the first of the debris struck the other side of the fallen tree, sending timber splinters carving over their heads. A wave of heat stole their breath, and the fringes on Alishia’s dress began to smoke. Hope patted at them, hissing as the skin of her palms blistered.
The roar of the explosion rumbled back and forth across the valley.
Alishia looked again. Hope grabbed at her but she shook the witch off. “I have to see where they went!” she said.
The entire slope below the Womb of the Land was ablaze. Green grass was black, lush trees were bare trunks, their leaves fluttering through the air, smoking and bursting alight when the heat finally dried them to nothing. The small stream had vanished, steamed away to nothing.
A ball of smoke and fire boiled into the sky. The construct was in pieces across the valley. Some of them burned, others seemed to be melting into the ground, disintegrating into their constituent parts of flesh, stone, metal and other material. Alishia scanned the ground around the site of the blast, hoping against hope that she would see the Mages burned to a crisp: charred bones cracked and coming apart just as their monstrous machine broke down into nothing.
The Shades had vanished. The Womb of the Land was as dark as ever, shunning the blazing fires that should be lighting its insides. I’ll be there soon, Alishia thought, and she hoped that they heard.
Something shifted before her, less than thirty steps away. At first she thought it was part of the machine, warping and cracking under the tremendous heat, but then it stood.