Dusk: a dark fantasy novel (A Noreela novel)

by Tim Lebbon

  There it would sit, and listen, and wait.

  11

  Lucien Malini was less than a man and more than human. His single-minded drive, his reason for being, the one true aim that informed his waking hours and haunted him when he slept, had driven him mad long ago. Madness was no hardship for his kind; indeed, most of them welcomed its inevitable grasp. It focussed the mind, excluded all outside considerations and drew everything down to a point. That point was as sharp as the tools of killing he carried, and just as deadly. And though insane, his mind was powerful and vibrant, and put to one task it pursued it doggedly. He often spent days sitting and meditating on the purpose of his life. There were times when he shed his understanding of any language, any sight that did not in some way appertain to his cause. And this guided him unerringly to his end result.

  Lucien could go without food and water for a full moon, such was his mind’s manic grasp over his body. Its dedicated train of thought, consideration, philosophising, was so powerful that it could take control of his physical self, stretching the laws that governed its use and limits and, if damage were ever great, it could steer it ever onward until death overcame even madness. He knew that it would be a grand struggle.

  This madness also bred hatred. The extremity of his dedication transformed any intellectual consideration of his cause into an all-encompassing loathing, a rich, blood-hot despising of the target. And that target was magic. His abhorrence of it was bred into him and handed down from those who had first committed themselves to its eradication. He had perpetuated and enriched that hate.

  It applied also to those who purported to carry magic. They were equally sullied, equally guilty.

  Lucien hugged his red robe around him and started down into the valley that harboured a subject of this hate, a carrier, the first true carrier for a generation. This was what he was made for. Today would be the culmination of his life.

  Soon, when he knew that the others were ready, he would move. He would enter the sprawling, degraded town of Pavisse to find Rafe Baburn.

  The Red Monks had no god. They worshipped no deity, ascribed to no doctrine, prostrated themselves at the feet of nothing. They feared magic, though that was no devil, and their dogma preached little save the expunging of this fear. They worked for the land, though the land had not asked that of them. The Monks knew that magic was the true way of things, yet still they sought its exclusion.

  If they had true enemies they were the Mages Angel and S’Hivez, who had taken magic to themselves and twisted it far past the flexing that the laws of nature were prepared to withstand. They had broken it over the rock of their own vanity. The Monks hated them with a vengeance, and they harboured no love for anyone to provide balance. Theirs was a philosophy of negativity, a religion—if it could be called such—where destruction was a high command. Seeking magic, courting its return, that was heresy, because should magic return there would always be evil to take it again. And heresy deserved the ultimate vengeance.

  During the Cataclysmic War, the Monk’s predecessors had fought alongside those desperate to save and protect Noreela. The Mages’ power had been strong, its perverted use of magic more powerful and deadly than anything the Noreelans could muster. The Monk’s ancestors—pagan priests and academics who drove the war machines, combining and communing with the great constructs as they battled the Krote hordes of the Mages’ armies—died quickly and painfully, as did their charges. For while the magic of the land drove the machines and gave them power, the Mages’ twisting of this magic gave them an edge: more power; greater strength; the transgressing of life and death itself to expand their armies at an exponential rate. When one Krote fell, two would rise in his place; his revivified physical self and his soul, the wraith captured and tortured by the Mages.

  Yet somehow, Noreela won out. The Mages were driven north, out along The Spine, until there was nowhere left to flee. The remnants of their armies commandeered ships and sailed them burning into the unknown. And then magic left the land.

  Those pagan priests that survived the fighting had seen first-hand what magic could accomplish in the hands of the Mages. They had had their own close bonds with the machines cruelly broken, and now they were adrift. Nature had betrayed their trust and faith, and their beliefs mutated into an abiding hatred. Slowly, over a few years, the survivors drew together, knowing what had to be done. Magic was gone and it must never return, not while there was even the slightest chance that the Mages could reacquire what they had once ruled, start again were they had left off.

  The priests went mad. The Red Monks rose from their madness, feeding upon it and dressing themselves in its colour. They became ghosts of the Cataclysmic War, wandering the land, searching for hints of magic’s return. Vowing, with every breath they took, to put it down.

  The Monks became something of a myth, fading away into the past in the company of other truths. They hid away in their retreats, keeping watch, and if ever magic was hinted at in the land they investigated.

  These past days, the Red Monks had been sighted all across Noreela.

  A flash from the opposite hillside told Lucien that the time had come.

  He shifted his sword and signalled back, and then he saw movement as the other dozen Monks began their descent from the hills into Pavisse. They had encircled the mining town, remaining high up so that they would not be spotted, keeping to old sheebok trails and finding concealed places to await the signal to move. This was a much more co-ordinated effort than their assault on the farming village over the hills. There, Carfallo had gone in on his own instead of awaiting the arrival of his brethren. He had obviously believed that he could take the village singly—and he had—but he had also allowed escapees. Lucien and the other Monks were not concerned at the number of people that had escaped Carfallo’s fury. What they were concerned about was that one of them was Rafe Baburn. They had met at Trengborne as arranged, entered the village quickly when they saw what had happened, stepping past and through the destruction that held little surprise for them. There in the little trading square of the village, surrounded by his stiffening victims, they had found Carfallo. Lucien had sworn that he was dead, such were the profusion of arrows and bolts and swords in his body. The dust around and beneath him was blackened, as if a huge bruise were slowly spreading across the ground, and his face was pierced and parted where shafts had done their damage.

  “No Baburn,” he had whispered, and then his last bubbling gasp shook his body, rattling arrow shafts and scraping lines in the mucky dust. He had waited for their arrival before dying.

  The Red Monks had remained in the village that evening, planning their next move, confident that no one would return. And if a few brave stragglers did come back to try to bury their dead, then that was simply more blood for the Monks’ swords. For them, the colours of blood and madness were much the same.

  The Monks knew many arcane things. Their divinations and interrogative techniques went far beyond torture and threat, extending past boundaries normally reserved for dead magic or living legend. The trails they followed were always cold and covert, and this one—although they still believed that Baburn was unaware of his legacy, his destiny—was no exception. It was that very ignorance which kept him from them. They had sensed the emergence of magic, their utter hatred of its promise lending it the characteristics of an unknown colour, an impossible sound in their thoughts. But given that the boy knew nothing of the potential stirring in his head, to track it was nigh on impossible. They had to use techniques perfected by their ancestors as they spent lifetimes seeking magic. Sometime dregs were found: a witch here, with a hint of enchantment about her; a girl there, finding her monthly cycle and with it a closeness to the land, a sight she could use to predict. The Red Monks tracked them down and destroyed them all, often annihilating those around them as well. There was always a risk that the magic had spread, like the disease they believed it to be. And even if that were not the case, death was meaningless to the Monks, and easy t
o mete out.

  The skills they used were not magic, but rather forgotten talents, practises that had been mostly discarded long ago. The Monks knew the boundaries between where the laws of nature crossed and diverted, and where they were purposely bent out of shape. It was ironic that the greatest weapons they employed against the re-emergence of magic could look so much like its use to any who bore witness.

  Still, the Monks had their ways, and that night in the dead village of Trengborne they used them. It was a place rich in wraiths, the disturbed and confused souls of those so violently and recently killed, and the Monks had ways to question these. They sought them out where they hid, folded between moments and slipping madly from one moonbeam to the next, and while one Monk held them down with a mirific chant, another would seek out the mind—mad and confused, sad and raging—and question it with a Delving root. The Delving was a common plant near rivers and lakes, and its root, if picked at the exact moment between when it was sterile, and when that sterility suddenly ended, became receptive to many hidden influences and energies. It planted itself not only under the surface of the land, but beneath the plane of the world, burrowing down from true reality to where the richest, purest sustenance was to be found. Only the Monks knew this, because over the decades they had wiped out anyone else with that knowledge.

  Where is Rafe Baburn? they asked.

  Dead, dead, we’re all dead—

  I don’t know, help me, help me!—

  Not you again, not you, not you!

  Where is Rafe Baburn? they asked again. There was much madness in these new wraiths; anger and ire and bewilderment. But the Monks kept asking because they had all night.

  Where is Rafe Baburn?

  And eventually:

  Rafe? My Rafe, my son? Is that you? Run Rafe, run! Flee! Go to Vance, find Uncle Vance in Pavisse!

  Pavisse, the Monks said, and the root transmitted their smiles and made their emotions its own, a chemical message to spring into the ether where this wraith floated on uncertainty.

  No! the stricken wraith said, but the Monks had withdrawn, and they left it to its raving.

  They set out from Trengborne straight away, travelling through the night, following their ancient maps and finding short-cuts through the mountains which even the most experienced shepherds did not know. As they walked, they planned. Their talk was spare, and in the space of a hundred words they had agreed that their incursion into Pavisse had to be carried out with more care. Trengborne had been only hundreds of people; Pavisse had a population of tens of thousands. The Monks would not be averse to killing them all if it meant that one of them was Baburn, but practicalities forced them to think logically. Not only would it be impossible to keep everyone in the town while the slaughter progressed, but that very act would take days. And as Carfallo had demonstrated, even a Red Monk could be worn down in the end. Madness had power, but only so much. Eventually a punctured heart needed more to run on than rage, and once its blood had drained and the routes for the fury had been slashed and cut, death was all that was left.

  They needed stealth and speed. Their red robes would be seen, and some who saw may know what that meant. The word would spread. But the Monks still had surprise on their side. They were sure that the boy still did not know who he was.

  They sought Vance Baburn. If they found him, they would find the boy.

  Lucien headed down the hillside, aiming for the northern outskirts of the town where a wide sprawl of shacks and tents indicated a growing influx of refugees. From his travels over the years he had come to realise that Noreelans, though fracturing into tribal elements once more, were still finding safety in numbers. The towns grew as the regions shrank, and the Duke found himself ruling over new kingdoms and independent states instead of simply Noreela. Perhaps that was why he barely ruled at all. Lucien viewed people as another part of nature, nothing special, distinct from it only because they had such a proclivity to destroy instead of nurture. They flocked, they feared, they were terrified at what they had sewn, and yet they attempted little to right their wrongs.

  He crossed a small wooden bridge spanning a stream. The water was barely a trickle, and as he passed over it seemed to cloud. Bloodied from upstream perhaps, or maybe he was seeing an echo of what was to come. He looked up but the stream disappeared between buildings, like an artery drawing life through the dying town. Because this place was dying. Lucien had been around enough death to recognise its stench, its sights. The refugees clung onto the town’s outskirts like premature mourners, here to take what they could and then flee when the time came. The town stank of apathy: shit and rot left in the open; a miasma of stale fledge and spilled ale in the air, drifting from the many drink and drug establishments; food gone-off, bodies unwashed, and above it all the smell of burning. Lucien saw a pall of smoke hanging above the centre of Pavisse, evidence that even here the Breakers were at work, paring down the old dead machines in the hope of finding dregs of magic in their sumps, hidden away in petrified timber arteries, clasped in stone wombs never before seen, ossified by time but still potent. He would usually kill a Breaker as a matter of course, simply because of what they sought, though none that he knew of had ever found a scrap of magic. Right now his aims were higher.

  The look of Pavisse also marked it as a place waiting to die. These encampments on the outskirts bled it out across the valley floor, but as he approached the town proper it was difficult to tell where the shantytown ended and Pavisse proper began. The buildings changed gradually, progressing from tents to wooden shacks, and then onto dwellings with stone walls and reed roofs. But the degradation was wholescale. Gardens lay dead and sterile, pools of dust where he saw skull ravens bathing and plotting. Windows were mostly glassless, covered with swathes of sheebok fur to keep out the light and the stares of prying eyes. Graffiti adorned many walls facing out onto the main streets, sigils and codes marking the turf of one street gang or another. But even that was old and worn down by the sun. The gangs were still there, perhaps, but less zealous now, members more concerned with their own personal survival than that of their mob.

  Lucien passed a small street market where traders sold fruit and vegetables on the verge of wrinkling into rot. There were craft stalls and a furbat drainer milking his restrained creatures of rhellim, stroking the fluid into individual vials that would sell for more than most of the fruit on any neighbouring stall. This trader looked well-fed, well-travelled and relatively affluent. Lucien spotted a platinum ring on his finger, a metal only mined and worked on the Cantrass Plains three hundred miles to the north-east. A few of the sellers called to Lucien as he passed by, inviting him to sample their wares, but others fell silent at the sight of his weapons. He walked on without glancing their way, but he felt their eyes on his back. Maybe they had heard stories. Perhaps one or two had even seen a Red Monk before, knew what he sought, why he was here. If so they would do well to pack their stalls and leave.

  His brethren would be infiltrating Pavisse now, pushing in from twelve different directions, opening their ears and eyes, trying to find any trace of Baburn or his uncle. He felt his sword hanging light at his belt, waiting to be fed and gorged again. He hoped that he would be the one to find the boy.

  Lucien sniffed, but there was no magic in the air.

  He passed by an old machine, a hollow oval the size of a man whose use could only be guessed at. It had been incorporated into a building, framing the main doorway with its textured and ridged surface. There were stumps of hardened veins protruding from its top edge. As ever, Lucien was amazed at how casually people treated miracles. If this thing suddenly came to life it would scare most people to death. Perhaps it was a hole-maker, punching shafts into the ground a mile deep with energies gathered in its hollow centre. Or maybe it was a break healer, raising and lowering itself around a wounded body and knitting bones, patching torn flesh. Whatever, now it was a doorway into a whorehouse. Its ancient and inexplicable use granted it no favours. Lucien’s hatred of magic was
fed by what humankind had tried to achieve with it. The Mages had been the worst by far, yes, but all people were like that at heart. Those two had simply had the face to forcefully seek what they desired.

  “That’s a Red Monk!” he heard someone whisper behind him, and he did not turn around. It had been the grizzled old coal miner lounging in a chair outside the whorehouse; Lucien had heard him cough as he approached, and now he knew his voice as he whispered again. “Mean bastards, they are!” Whoever the old man was trying to impress did not reply.

  He came to a tavern, peopled mainly with drunken militia being tattooed by a harem of Cantrass Angels. Approaching the bar, Lucien heard the scrape of metal on stone behind him. He turned slowly and peered out from within his robe’s hood, spotting the militiaman who had moved. A Cantrass Angel was scoring a Ventgoria Dragon into his leg, substituting its customary steamy breath with a mythological burst of fire. The man’s eyes were unfocussed and bloodshot with alcohol, and he looked away immediately, slipping back into his chair.

  Lucien turned to the barman, alert to any possible movement behind him, and asked his question. “I’m looking for Vance Baburn to conclude a business deal.”

  “Never heard of him,” the barman said, and he was telling the truth. Lucien could see the sparkle of fear in his eyes; perhaps he thought these drunken and stoned militia could help him, should the need arise.

  Lucien turned away and left the tavern, hearing blustery mutterings behind him as the men revealed how they could have taken him, had they so wished.

  The streets were becoming busier the further into Pavisse he went. More impromptu street markets had sprung up, and their sellers seemed to be doing brisk trade, the produce richer and fresher than that sold on the outskirts. The traders nearer the river had their choice of the fresh wares, while those dealing on the outskirts probably brought their own produce in overland.