by Tim Lebbon
“How bad?” A’Meer asked. When Kosar did not answer she let go of his hands and sat back in her chair. “Bad enough that we need a bottle of rotwine to talk about it?”
“Get two,” Kosar said without smiling.
“Oh, Mage shit.” A’Meer rose and went to the bar. She exchanged a few words with the barman, slapped him on the back and then returned to the table with two bottles filled with black rotwine. “I’ve got the evening off,” she said.
Kosar nodded, popped the lid on one of the bottles and filled the glasses A’Meer had brought. “A’Meer,” he said, lifting his glass and seeing how the fluid seemed to swallow the light, “I think things are about to change.”
7
It did not feel the cold. It had only a vague sense of things, a concept of shape and size and direction that was barely enough to guide it on its way, abstract ideas of how things were supposed to be as opposed to observations of how they actually were. Its whole world was its own, contained within its potential mind where a slew of instincts were all that existed; no experience, no history, nothing to shape this shade any more than nature had already done. The faults were already there, not planted by outside intervention. There are mistakes even in nature.
It did not know that it was a mistake. It was perfect. It had been told so by its god, and that god had sent it on its way, launched it from endless waiting out into the world with an aim in mind. It could find itself a home, the god said, somewhere to settle and spread, let its potential filter down into flesh and bone, heart and desire, mind and body. And then—the hardest part—it would leave this home and return.
It was all instinct, and the instinct was to never go back. But one of the knots in its makeup made it, so its god said, better than perfect. It made it exquisite. It gave this shade, this empty space of potential mind, soul, spirit, experience and existence, something of a life already.
It was loyal to its god.
It travelled quickly, seeking out whispers echoing through the spaces surrounding it. Ideas, words, visions it had been told to watch for. The whispers had silenced already, but the shade knew the direction, even if distance was something as yet vague. It travelled beneath the surface of the world, behind the plane where true life existed, and though the temptation was to immerse itself in this reality—the draw was huge, the power great, the shade’s potential aching to be let in—it knew to wait. It had its instructions. So it traversed spaces where there had never been anything, passing by others similar to itself as they waited patiently for life. They did not notice its passing, though in its wake they were scrutinised one more time for any imperfections. There were none; their creation was thorough. This shifting shade was an oddity, an echo of something not there, and something not noticed cannot be forgotten.
Its imperfections dipped it into the world on occasion, and the sudden shock of life flung it out instantly:
a brief instant of cold as it hits a field of white, things darting away in terror, the white solidifying and becoming clear in its path;
more cold, subsumed in fluid, life swarming and seeding and ending around it, life as small as a piece of nothing or large as the mind of its god, and all of it shocked at the shade’s brief arrival;
something more solid, rich in the history of life though holding little, only sleeping things, even older than its god and so much more unknowable.
The shade withdrew with something akin to fear. It was its first true emotion, and it was quite apt.
Time passed, though the shade did not know time. The places it skirted became warmer, the oceans more full of life, the sky lighter and more loaded with living things. Nothing saw it—there was nothing to sense—but the mood of wrongness at its passing sent a pod of blade whales on course for a distant beach, a giant hawk into sea-bound freefall, and the crew of a fishing boat into a murderous madness.
It moved on, listening for more whispers to carry back to its god.
8
Hope’s tattoos seemed to reflect her mood. They emphasised the set of her face and now, as she spoke sadly of what was passed, they drew down the corners of her mouth, painted themselves as deep creases around her eyes. They made her look very old.
The boy had not yet given her a satisfactory answer. Hers was the only one that made any sort of sense, crazy and terrifying though it may be. There were other ways she could check, but she was too terrified. If she looked and saw and it was true … then everything was ending. Ending, and beginning again.
This was the moment she had been living for.
“But I’m only a farm boy,” Rafe said yet again, as if his insistence would make it so.
Hope shook her head in frustration, her spiked hair snapping at the air. “You’re impossible, that’s what you are!” She stood and went to pour them both some more water. Rafe was not sure quite what she meant.
He wanted to curl up and sleep. He may be in this strange place with this strange woman, but he was exhausted, physically and mentally, and sleep lured him as a welcome retreat. He might dream of his parents, but then he might not. And he hoped that if he did dream, then for a while they would still be alive. A million good memories awaited him in sleep.
“How do you explain what you’re hearing?” Hope asked yet again.
“I don’t know what I’m hearing! Just … things. Whispers. Words I don’t know. Other things.”
“What other things?” She gave him a glass of water. She’d asked him already, but she looked determined.
“Hope, I don’t know, I’ve told you. It’s like … have you ever tried to explain a dream? A really strange dream, one that makes perfect sense to you when you’re in it but once it’s over and you’re awake you can’t put it into words, can’t make sense, even to yourself?”
Hope stared at him, nodding.
“That’s what I hear. Stuff I can’t explain. But I don’t even understand it when I’m hearing it.”
“What you’re hearing,” Hope said, “is an ages-old language. Few alive now have spoken it, or if they have then only to themselves. It’s the language of the land, Rafe. It’s the language of magic.”
“But what does that mean?” She had told him that several times now, old languages and words no longer spoken. But it made no sense. It did nothing to distract his mind from his parents’ deaths, nor explain them. He needed sleep.
Hope sighed, looked down at her hands. They twisted around each other as if trying to wring something out. She was a whore, she had told him. These hands had done a lot.
“I’m older than I look, Rafe,” she said. “I’m a witch. I have ways and means to keep myself young.” She waved around at her room, adorned as it was with plants and roots and dead things hanging from the walls, shelves lined with old books, opaque containers scattered across every available surface, their contents hidden away. “And all my life I’ve been waiting for you.
“You must know of the magic, the old ways Noreela used to live before the Cataclysmic War? Better times. The world was at peace with itself, and as we took from nature, so it gave. All that was stolen away by the bastard Mages because of their greed and avarice, their pride in thinking they could usurp nature and make the world their own. And now, because of them, there’s no peace in the world, and the more we take the more the land dies.”
“My parents always told me there was more myth than truth in those stories.”
“Lots of myth, to be sure!” Hope agreed, laughing with little humour. “But lots of truth as well. Stories that big have plenty of both. You’ve not travelled the land, you’ve not seen how much it’s changing.”
“You’ve been waiting for me?” Rafe asked, his voice weak and vulnerable.
“My family have always been witches, Rafe, even before the Cataclysmic War. Back then, my grandmother’s grandmother’s mother used magic to help her heal, help her look after people. And since nature has taken magic back, my ancestors and I have used herbs and spices and potions, those things nature has left us with. And I�
��ve always, always believed that nature would forgive us one day. There’s a prophecy, uttered by a few, believed by fewer: it says that magic will come back, and it’ll be reborn in a child.”
“I’m not a child.”
“You’re an innocent. And your origins …?”
Rafe sipped the water and thought about the voices and sounds he sometimes heard, the way they seemed to know him so well, even though he could not understand them. And he thought of the day his parents had told him about when they found him, abandoned and alone on the hillside. “I know what you’re saying,” he said. “At least, I think so. I’m not sure. I’m so confused. I’m just a farm boy!”
“There are ways to know for sure,” Hope said, suddenly standing from her chair and reaching for Rafe.
He sat up and shuffled back on the bed. “What do you mean?”
“Your parents weren’t your blood parents, were they?” Hope stood with her arms outstretched, as if ready to catch him from a fall.
How does she know that? “How do you know?”
“Because they can’t have been.”
“Why?”
Hope came to him, smiling, but there was something behind the smile he did not like. Something old, and desperate.
“I can show you,” she said. “We can look together. You’re tired, Rafe. Look … watch … haven’t you ever wondered?” Hope reached for his shirt and he did not have the energy to draw back. He felt her sharp nails scratch at his stomach as she lifted his shirt, higher, and then she gasped and stared down at his stomach. “Haven’t you ever wondered?”
“What?” His voice came in from a distance. He felt so sleepy.
“You have no naval,” Hope whispered. “It’s true. It’s you.” She looked at Rafe, and then smiled.
Something whispered to him, and Hope’s lips were not moving. He smelled fresh grass in a wide, sun-kissed meadow, even though outside this room he could hear the sounds of hidden Pavisse going about its bleak business.
“You tired, farm boy?”
Rafe nodded, vision blurring as the room rocked him from side to side, and he could taste fresh mountain air taking the sting of Pavisse from his tongue.
Hope was whispering, but he no longer understood. He was listening to something else, something that welcomed him down into deep sleep with words beyond understanding. Behind it, comforting memories awaited him.
Hope took the glass of water from the sleeping boy’s hand and emptied it into the drain. She was careful to wash the glass several times before replacing it on a shelf. A few sewer rats will be giddied this afternoon, she thought.
She sat for a while and watched the boy sleeping, staring at his bared stomach. Poor soul, he had been through so much, seeing his parents and friends slaughtered like that. He deserved a rest. Already his eyelids were twitching as he took brief respite from the ills of the world.
Hope was afraid. She had spent her life waiting for magic’s return. She called herself a witch, but one thing she had always craved was to actually live the life. She wanted to heal with magic, not herbs. She wanted to treat madness with a touch of her fingers and a few cooed words, not a mug of GG’s honey which invariably would not work. And over the years, she had been searching.
Now, she had found Rafe.
There had been hundreds of men in her bed, but few of them had she ever let sleep. They’d come in here drunk or lonely, had sex with her and then paid with talk: where they had been on their travels; who they had met; what they had seen. She had asked them whether they ever heard rumours from Kang Kang, and all but a few refused to even talk of that place. You think I’d ever go there? they would say. You think I’m mad? I don’t even listen to talk of the place, let alone think on it. Other things, too. She would extract her payment through idle rumour, travellers’ gossip, whispers beneath the wind. It suited most of her customers fine, and many of them returned day after day, year after year. Sometimes, they had new tales to divulge. She was always searching for knowledge, picking through the lives of those sex-sated men for hidden truths and realities that would make no sense singly, yet considered as a whole might one day tell her what she had wanted to hear for so long: that magic was back in the land.
The boy mumbled in his sleep and Hope strained to listen, but he was talking Noreelan, nothing more.
She was breathing heavily, trying not to build her hopes on this lost lad’s fate. The world was getting harsher, and a slaughter in an insignificant little farming village was hardly news. But here she was now, staring at the living proof.
And now she knew: the whispers her mother and grandmother had carried down from their own ancestors, magicians and charlatans both, were all true. They were words she had never heard again, not all the times she had questioned those men, and she had begun to suspect that they were ideas open only to the women of the land. It was a female concept, after all. No man had an inkling of what the birth of a miracle could mean.
He’s heard the language of the land. He hears the whispers, he feels the movement of rivers through the soles of his feet, the breath of the world brushing against his skin. Don’t tease yourself, Hope! It isn’t so hard to believe.
She stood and turned away from Rafe, hearing him mumble again in his sleep. This time she could not make out the words.
Facing the walls of her little room, she took in everything that made her what she was today: a pretender; a charlatan; a profaner of magic. She had no magic yet she called herself ‘witch’, and some foolish people even went in fear of her. Old fears must run as deep as blood, she thought, and deeper than history. Here were a hundred spices and herbs and drugs known to anyone, and a few others unknown. Tumblespit, hedgehock, rutard, Duke’s Folly, stale fledge from several distinct regions, grass dew, hedge dew, rock dew, Willmott’s nemesis, GG’s honey. A small earthpoison tree grew in the corner of her room, fed with the blood of rats. A selection of jars contained bodies and body parts from many creatures of Noreela, most known, some very rare, one or two little more than myth. There were lotions and potions whose uses even Hope had little concept of, handed down as they were from her mother, unopened all these years. Some of these jars had become opaque with time, and Hope had no idea what grew within.
And yet … no magic. Only tricks and turns, deceptions and delight in ruse. She could mix and match well after all these years, curing with products of the land and, if required, creating ills as well. She did a fair trade in her medicines, and earned even more from the occasional, more unpleasant commission. The sex, though, the whoring, that was where her true pay originated. The gathering of knowledge, the search for a hint that magic had returned and things were about to change.
And now here was a boy asleep in her room, a boy that had apparently escaped the endless wrath of a Red Monk. A boy who heard unknown voices, felt unknowable sensations deep in his naïve farmer’s mind. He could explain none of it, yet his exposed stomach explained it all.
Breathing heavily, Hope knelt before Rafe and started to undo his belt. He grumbled a little in his sleep and whispered something she did not understand. Her excitement grew. Words of old! she thought. She slipped his trousers down slowly, glancing at the pale limp cock.
He had no naval.
There could be other explanations. She had missed it, perhaps, or a trick was being played, a complex deception for the amusement of some of her regular customers, those of whom she always asked her questions, again and again as if they would suddenly remember.
But she looked again.
He has no naval!
“Mage shit, it’s really here.” The tattoos on Hope’s face were in flux, shifting and moving as her emotions swayed from fear to elation, delight to terror. Here was the living future, and the dead past. This boy was more myth than reality, a story so rare that she had never heard it told other than by her own mother and grandmother. Magic is destined to return, they had said, and it will be in a child unbirthed, offspring of the womb of the land in darkest Kang Kang. She had n
ever truly understood what that meant, but now she was faced with the myth in the flesh.
For a few seconds Hope held her breath, terrified that Rafe would simply disappear. She had realised the impossibility of his being here; perhaps that knowledge would drive him away. But he remained, squirming on the bed and frowning as he tried to make sense of some deeply hidden dream, a recurring voice in his head that must be trying so hard to make itself known.
Hope held his cock and squeezed slightly, feeling it grow hard in her hand, the incredible heat as his blood coursed through his body, driven by the turmoil of his dreams and drawn to this point. When it was fully hard she stood and raised her skirts. She could take him inside her, have his seed, and what would that make her? A part of things? More than just a witch without magic, a fool mixing herbs and chanting mock hope back at herself? She waited for long seconds, poised, staring down at the boy’s face and seeing conflict etched there in his skin. Her own tattoos itched as she fought her own private battle.
She did not know what would happen, what she would gain, if she took him now. But she knew what she would lose: his trust.
She covered him up with a smooth furbat-skin blanket.
“Sleep easy,” she said. “Get what rest you can. Listen to the voices, but don’t let them frighten you.”
She looked at the paraphernalia of her life once again—all suddenly redundant like so much medicine pumped into a dead person’s veins—and then sat back to watch Rafe sleep.
9
It did not take long for Alishia to decide to leave Noreela City.
With the library gone, she no longer had a job. She had saved a good hoard of tellans over the past few years, but in a city like Noreela she could not live on them forever. And besides, there was little for her there now. Her books were gone, burned to ash by the old madman, and it was as if their destruction had brought her back to the present. She began to see just how bad things were. Before, she had seen the city on her walks to and from the library, and that was all. Now, aimless and wandering, she had more of a chance to register what she saw, to actually be a part of things instead of being lost in the histories of her books. She felt vulnerable and alone. She felt unprotected. Erv, the stable lad, had become even more threatening, sensing her vulnerability and perhaps intending to prey upon it given the first opportunity.