Dusk: a dark fantasy novel (A Noreela novel)

by Tim Lebbon

  She seemed to remember her rotwine and drained it in one. Kosar leaned forward and refilled her glass, pouring some of the black wine for himself in the process.

  “We fought past dusk, and on into the night. The sky was clouded and the fire was out, but there are lights above the marches in Ventgoria. Some say they are wraiths, but they sparkle and spit with energy, and a wraith has none. Whatever they are, they witnessed our fight. The Monk came at me with its hungry sword, and scored hits. You’ve seen the scars on my hip, the wound on my neck. I used weapon after weapon, getting in good hits but losing them all to the Monk in the end: throwing knives; my diamond ball; a handful of stinger eggs in its face; rotdust thrown into its wounds. I even ran for a time, circling as it stumbled after me, and I managed to score seven bolts from my wristbow before I tripped and lost the Mage shitting thing in the marsh. And all the while it came at me, and all the while I was scoring hits. I was wounding it every time, Kosar. Every fucking time I went at it I’d take off a finger or push some rotdust into the wreck of its face.

  “By dawn it no longer had any eyes, but it listened for me. And my only defence through all of this—the only reason I beat that damned thing, exhausted as I was, weaponless as I became—was that it was no real swordsman. Tenacity is a fine weapon, but I could dodge, sidestep, flip, shrink myself away from its sword. It was just a matter of stamina.”

  A’Meer fell silent, took another drink of wine and looked around the tavern. It was emptying now, drunken people tripping over chairs as they left, laughing at themselves and their friends. The barman had started to glance over, obviously suggesting that it was time for them to leave as well. Kosar waited for A’Meer to finish her story, but he could not wait for very long. He was drunk and tired, and she was teasing him, whether she knew it or not.

  “And?” he said. “And?”

  “And eventually the Monk fell down. I took its head off with its own sword. That Mage shitting thing screamed as I did it, and it was still whining as I threw it out into the marches. Then I dragged the body until I found a small gas vent and dropped it in. I stayed the whole morning to watch for the next venting. There were bits of the Monk in the steam storm, small bits. I had to make sure. I was utterly exhausted, hallucinating from the exertion, and maybe … maybe I thought there was even more to them than that. Maybe sometime in the night I’d come to believe it was immortal.”

  “Why did it fight you in the first place?”

  A’Meer smiled then, leaned across the table and touched Kosar’s cheek. “Gods, I’ve missed you Kosar,” she said. “And it took you a while to ask that. Getting old, yeah? Losing it a bit up here?” She tapped his head and sat back in the chair.

  “Drink-addled,” he said. “And shocked. Imagine, my sweet A’Meer who likes it bent over a chair is a warrior, and probably the most dangerous person I know.” There was no humour in what he said; he did not feel frivolous. If anything he was drained, and tired, and perhaps a little annoyed that she had made this evening all her own.

  “The reason it fought me is why I have to ask for your help, Kosar. It fought me because I’m a Shantasi warrior, and it’s our chosen cause to bring magic back into Noreela. And you have to help me because that boy you saved, the only other survivor from Trengborne, may be what I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

  They left the tavern arm in arm. Kosar had a hangover, his inebriation driven to ground by A’Meer’s revelations. She felt light by his side, her arm thin, and he thought he could probably pick her up and fling her about his head with very little effort. Yet she was a warrior, and she had defeated a Red Monk in battle. Images mixed in his head; the Monk from Trengborne peppered with arrows, and the Monk in the Ventgoria marshes slashed and pierced by Shantasi weapons.

  The streets were busy with drunks, prostitutes and drug dealers, yet Kosar felt removed. Here people continued their small existences, busy doing the same thing day in day out, busy doing nothing. He did not resent them that, nor did he look down upon them; they had to get by the best they could, and most of them were decent folk reduced by general decline. But although he was a thief, he was a traveller also. He thought he had seen many things.

  Compared to A’Meer, he had barely left the place of his birth.

  She had been born in New Shanti, a place where few non-Shantasi visited. She had been south of Kang Kang to The Blurring. She had travelled along The Spine to its very tip, a place that many believed did not even exist. And he suspected that she had been to other, even more obscure places she had yet to tell him about.

  Kosar shook his head. “A’Meer, you amazed me so much when we were together, and you amaze me more now that we meet again.”

  “I’m sorry, Kosar. It’s not something I wanted to keep from you—truth is, it’s not something I did consciously. It’s been a part of my life for so long that I really don’t think I’m out of the ordinary. That was the first and last time I ever saw a Monk, and since then I’ve just been wandering. Never seen any sign of the magic I’m supposed to promote, and in all honesty I stopped looking long ago. It’s not like this was an obsession. The Shantasi mystics gave us talents, and much more besides.” She trailed off here, and Kosar thought, Much more besides … That’s what she can never tell me. It’s that ‘much more’ that makes her a stranger to me now.

  “But it was never an obsession.” It sounded to Kosar as if she was trying to persuade herself.

  “So now?” he asked, wincing as a gang of kids ran past carrying screeching bats. His headache had rooted itself firmly now, and the piercing screams seemed to thump inside his skull and become trapped there.

  “Now we have to find the boy,” she said. “But back to my place first. We can spend a while there, make plans. And catch up.”

  “I think I’ve done enough catching up for one night,” Kosar said.

  “I wasn’t planning on talking.” A’Meer’s voice contained none of the flippancy he had come to know, none of the mischievous glee. It was low, urgent and very serious, as if she knew that tonight may be the last of its kind. She wanted one more fling with normality before things changed forever.

  They walked through the busy streets until they reached A’Meer’s home, a ground floor flat in a block of three. A whore lived directly above her, A’Meer said, and the third flat appeared empty. No one ever came, no one ever left. Windows were covered day and night. Another mystery in a town that cared little for them.

  Inside the flat they heard A’Meer’s neighbour going about her business. The floors were thin—only a layer of timber boards and whatever covering the whore chose to put down—and Kosar tried to ignore the sounds as A’Meer prepared him a warm drink. As he sat and drank, listening to the sated couple mumbling above them, A’Meer rooted beneath her bed and dragged out a big leather bag. She opened it up and began laying out weapons. Kosar knew some of them, and others he recognised from her description of the fight with the Red Monk. These were blades that had been slicked with a Monk’s blood. Here was a slideshock that had been buried in its neck. Each weapon was wrapped in oilcloth, and they were all clean and greased. Beside them she laid a selection of sheathes and scabbards, equally well maintained. And beside them, other things that looked like nothing he had seen before.

  A’Meer came to him suddenly. She straddled him on his chair and kissed him, fiercely and passionately, as if it were the last kiss either of them would ever know. Within a few seconds they were ripping at each other’s clothes, revealing themselves to each other for the first time in several years. The familiarity was there, they both remembered what the other liked, and when A’Meer sank onto him Kosar saw the scar across her throat, put there by the Monk.

  As they made love Kosar glanced across at the weapons and other fighting paraphernalia arrayed across her bed. The newfound knowledge added a chill and a thrill to the sex.

  They left A’Meer’s flat just before dawn. It had taken her a while to dress and strap on the web of leather and fur belts, straps and
pockets she needed to carry all of her weapons. She looked even slighter when she had finished. And in her deep, soulful eyes, Kosar saw something akin to fear.

  “I’m leaving,” she said, staring around the room. “I’ve been here for years, and now I’m leaving. We first made love in this room, Kosar, many moons ago. I’ve been settled here longer than anywhere in my life, other than Hess. I have friends in this place. Pavisse is a shit-heap, but some of the people aren’t bad. Some of them, believe it or not, want to make things better. Though most of them have forgotten how.”

  “You’ll be back,” Kosar said, but as A’Meer offered a weak smile he knew how hollow that sounded.

  “Curse it, I haven’t worn this stuff for ages”, she said, shrugging her shoulders to settle the gear better across her shoulders and hips. “I feel different already. Bastard things chafe and rub. And last night has worn me out. But there’s always a time to move on. The Monks will have followed him here, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “We can’t let them find him. There’s a sick irony in the Monks’ existence, because their reasons are so justified. Nobody wants magic back in the hands of the Mages, if they’re even still alive. But madness informs the Monks’ methods, and all they can do is destroy. There’s no reasoning in them. This lad sounds more innocent than any of us.”

  “They won’t know he has an uncle here. They won’t know where he lives.”

  “Don’t you believe it. They have their ways, their methods. Come on, show me where you took him.”

  A’Meer shut the door on her rooms without once looking back.

  At this late hour the streets outside were quiet. A few drunks lay in the gutters or huddled in doorways, and there may have been more in other places hidden by darkness. The life-moon was hidden by clouds, the death-moon pale, and the only light in the streets came from weak oil lamps in windows and on hooks outside taverns and drug dens. There were a handful of people walking the streets, because in a town like Pavisse there is plenty of business carried out only at night. Some of them walked past Kosar and A’Meer without looking up, while others, perhaps catching sight of A’Meer in the ghostly light, hurried on or changed direction altogether.

  Kosar saw shapes flitting through shadows without traversing the lit spaces in between. Wraiths. They were there in the daytime too, but sunlight negated them.

  At the junction of two streets there was a band of militia smoking fledge pipes. They were muttering to each other, moving on the spot to keep warm. There were six of them, the dregs of law-keeping in Pavisse, many of them more criminal than some of those they sought to catch. Kosar knew that these men ran protection rackets, whoring houses and drug circles, and although they provided something of a ceiling above which crime was not allowed to stretch, it was a sad irony that they initiated much of it. They would have questions for the two of them, especially A’Meer. Fighters and mercenaries were not wholly uncommon, although their existence was grudgingly accepted rather than welcomed. But a fighter moving through the streets by night … yes, they would have questions.

  Kosar and A’Meer back-tracked and found an alternate route around the militia. It meant crossing the river, but they stole a small rowing boat and paddled over silently, the water tarry across the bow. The river smelled much fresher by night than it did in the day, as if darkness could bleed it of refuse, shit and the stink of animal corpses thrown in from sheebok farms up in the mountains. Unseen things made splashes but nothing troubled them, and they reached the far shore in a few minutes.

  Within a hundred steps of leaving the river, with dawn bleeding across the mountaintops to the east, A’Meer paused and raised her hand. Kosar bumped into her and held her arms, his thief’s scarring finding succour on her cool bare skin. He could hear nothing untoward, see nothing, smell nothing unusual. A’Meer did not move for a few long moments, but then she started backing up, forcing Kosar back as well. The two of them kept moving like that until they came to a house doorway, where A’Meer fumbled with the handle, drew something from her belt, knelt and popped open the lock in the matter of a dozen agitated heartbeats.

  She opened the door and hustled Kosar into a stranger’s house. It was only after she closed and locked the door behind her that she spoke, pressing her mouth to his ear so that it was more a breath than a word, unmistakable from a sleeper’s sigh.

  Monk.

  Kosar backed away from the door but A’Meer held him fast. He saw her sense. They were in an unknown room, whose confines and layout were uncertain in the dark, and any movement could tip a table and send its contents tumbling to the floor.

  He glanced down at A’Meer just as she looked up at him, and her eyes reflected weak lamplight from the street outside. They were wide and terrified. He put his arm around her shoulder and his hand on her chest. He could feel her heart racing as if trying to outdistance the moment. She shivered, her skin slicked with a cool sweat, and she pressed up close.

  They heard a noise outside. Footsteps, slow and methodical, but with no attempt at concealment. The Red Monk passed by the house, paused and carried on along the street, and then A’Meer began to shiver even more. She was shaking her head, breathing heavily, and two of her blades clanged together.

  Kosar held her tight and buried his face in her neck, whispering inanities to calm her, warming her cold skin with his breath. She clasped his hands where they held her, pulled him tighter, and he realised with sudden shock that he had let her tale cloud his judgement. She was a Shantasi warrior, a trained fighter, but that did not mean that she was unafraid. In fact he suspected it gave her more to fear. And those things she had not told him, could never tell him … perhaps they were even worse.

  “It’s gone,” he whispered in her ear. “We should go too.”

  She turned and held him tight so that they did not need to talk above a whisper. “It came from the direction we’re taking. They may have the boy already. He may be dead!”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  A’Meer let go of Kosar, knelt and unlocked the door.

  They were out in the night again, hurrying along streets, through alleys and across courtyards to put distance between themselves and the Red Monk. Kosar had come to know Pavisse well during his short stay here several years before, so now he navigated easily in dawn’s early light, picking out landmarks and listening for familiar sounds. They followed the course of the river for a while before turning into the heart of the town, heading for the hidden districts. The name was a misnomer—everyone knew the places were there, just as most who knew of them stayed away—but they were much more than slums and home for criminals and outcasts. The hidden districts held hidden knowledge. In that respect at least their name held water.

  That’s where he’ll be if anyone has him, Kosar thought. That’s where I’d take him to keep him safe. The journey to Rafe’s uncle’s house had already taken on a doomed feel, perhaps initiated by the Monk’s appearance. If the boy was indeed as important as A’Meer suggested, the idea that he may still be there with his relative seemed naïve. Rafe’s very existence had brought Red Monks to Pavisse, and his potential had urged one of Kosar’s best friends to revert to her warrior birthright. Rafe could hold the future of the land in his hands, or its eventual downfall. He had rapidly turned from a simple farming boy into someone both great and terrible.

  Kosar steered around the outskirts of the hidden districts, and even here there were many old machines incorporated into buildings and street constructions, lending themselves as a skeleton around which Pavisse had grown and petrified since the Cataclysmic War. He saw one that he recalled from his previous time here, a great hollowed globe smashed in several places like a skull cleaved by an axe. It was buried deep in the rocky ground so that only half of its circumference protruded. It had once been used as a shelter by those who had no homes, and as he passed by Kosar smelled the familiar stenches of fledge, rotwine and waste.

  Daylight was bringing the streets to life. A
’Meer hurried along behind him, and when Kosar glanced back he saw that she was self-conscious of her new appearance. She looked utterly formidable, and the hint of mystery that had always surrounded the Shantasi added to the effect. And yet she was uncomfortable with her new apparel. He wondered just how intense her training in Hess had been, how long ago … and how much of it she would recall after so long.

  They arrived at Rafe’s uncle’s house, a straw- and mud-walled building with an old iron fire pit in a lean-to on one side. It looked unused, and Kosar guessed that the boy’s uncle had not shod a horse in many dozens of moons.

  “It’s quiet,” A’Meer said.

  They stood in the shadow of a building opposite, trying to make out whether there was anything to trouble them in or around Vance’s house.

  “It’s early. Maybe they’re still sleeping.”

  “No … the whole place is quiet. Pavisse is waking up, but not here. Listen.”

  Kosar listened. In the distance he made out an occasional shout, traders urging their mules to the best selling pitches. Blackbirds and honey doves chattered across rooftops, vying for space much the same as the traders, and here and there a skull raven sat on its own, other birds too wary to settle nearby. A pack of dogs ran along the neighbouring street, the subject of their pursuit letting out a solitary panicked squeal. Window blinds crashed open, people coughed and spat the night from their lungs. Wheels whispered along the dusty streets.