by Tim Lebbon
Behind her, further along the beach, the Mages were hunkered down behind a protective cordon of Krotes. Again and again the Noreelan machines sprang from the forest, strode or slid across the dunes and down the beach. And again and again the Krote warriors drove them back, at terrible expense. Hundreds lay dead, their slippery wet bodies offering added protection against the machines. Those left alive all bore injuries, some with simple cuts and bruises, others missing limbs or holding in their insides. Several machines lay across the beach. Their former Noreelan riders were little more than smudges in the sand—when they did manage to bring a machine down, the Krotes expended their fury upon its rider—and all but one of the machines now lay still, shattered and burnt and melted by dregs of the Mage’s magic.
Because dregs was all they had left. Earlier that day Lenora had seen them rise from within the circle and direct a sustained attack of shadowy fire at an advancing machine. It had taken all their strength and concentration to bring it down, and even then their warriors had to advance to finish the job. A week earlier they had been blasting troop ships from Lake Denyah and scything down a hundred Noreelan attackers with a wave of their hand. Now, the Mages could barely summon fire. Magic had given, and so it took away.
Still Lenora fought. Her faith in the Mages was as strong as ever; it was the devious magic she no longer trusted. It was slippery. Caught by the Mages, it had refused to stay caught. And though she still felt it thrumming through her bones, Lenora was certain that something was about to change.
The sun was growing weak. The air seemed lighter than usual, less refreshing. The trees behind the beach had started to shed brown wrinkles leaves, though they had only bloomed a few weeks before. Even when this battle was over, Lenora thought, its effect will have only just begun.
Her final memory of being on the beach was of a machine rearing up before her. Its legs were shimmering, fiery things, and its rider screeched, his face red not with blood, but with rage. The machine’s legs swished this way and that, scorching Krotes into charcoal shells. The rider fired arrows and followed every one with a growl. When he glared at Lenora she was certain that she was going to die. His eyes burned so deep—
And then something struck her across the shoulder, and pain like she had never imagined took her away.
Lenora soared above and ahead of her Krote warriors. Far to the south lay Noreela, and that beach where she had fallen. Much farther south than that, nestled in the mountains east of Lake Denyah, the village of Robenna. This is where she had been born and raised so long ago, an unassuming sprawl of dwellings, shops and farms that had made its living trading fruit from natural mountain fields. She had called it home, and from there she had been driven—pelted with stones, whipped with poison-tipped sticks—for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The child was a memory now, drawn from her sickening body and taken into the Black one night in the foothills of Kang Kang, but the anger she felt at that place still simmered. Every act she had performed since then had been in the name of her dead daughter. At first she had felt only bitterness at the destruction of a life that could have meant so much. Still sick, the rage had driven her mad, and the only place she found succour and acceptance had been as a part of the Mages’ army. The bitterness had matured gradually into an all-consuming hate, tinted by the voice of her unborn daughter; laughing, crying, telling her mother how much she would have liked to live. Others told her it was madness, but Lenora was convinced that it was her daughter’s shade—her homeless soul, shorn of potential—remaining with her mother. Lost and useless. Abandoned and alone. And the only way Lenora could quieten that voice was to seek vengeance in its name.
On the day she was driven from Noreela, the voice of her unborn daughter fell silent. But Lenora had always nurtured that hate, and she had made a silent promise that, should the chance arise, Robenna would burn at her hand.
As they drifted south she wondered whether her daughter would be waiting for her on the beach.
Alishia and the fledge miner came down from the mountain slopes and headed west. She was shocked at how long they had slept—the afternoon had faded into evening by the time she screamed herself awake—and she suddenly felt unsafe remaining in the foothills. There were things in the mountains that had stalked Trey, killed his friends and family, and now as night approached she feared that they would come above ground, hunting through the dusk as they had slaughtered their way through the eternal darkness below ground. The miner had remained silent on the matter, sitting atop Alishia’s horse, bent forward and hugging its mane as he cried and sobbed through his grief. If this is what meeting a Nax did to someone, Alishia had no desire to stay close to where they might surface.
And there was something else moving her on. The thing that had reached out for her while she slept the fledge sleep. That utter darkness, a void, repulsing her and fascinating her in equal measures. Instinct tore her away and told her to flee, while her intellect demanded to know more. Her fear, remembered from the dream like a taste or a smell, had been the purest fear of her life. Knowledge from books did not impart that level of emotion. Erv had disconcerted her, and some of the things she had seen in Noreela City had sometimes made her scared to wander the streets, but she had never before been as truly frightened as in that dream.
Upon waking, the screaming still stinging her throat, she had already begun to deconstruct and analyse the fear.
As a child she had nightmares when she was ill. She could never explain them to herself, let alone to others, although thinking about them still disturbed her even now. There had been a sense of space so huge that it belittled her and her existence, made her less than a gasp in a storm. She stood on a hill and the space closed in around her. Nothingness itself took on a weight and a pressure, grinding her down even though she was nothing, taking her away from the centre of things so that she regarded herself as meaningless, an insignificant pollutant in the purity of void. As she grew older she tried to ally this space, this endless, pressing void, with the experience she lacked. A whole world sat around her and she had seen nothing of it. But however much she suspected this, in truth she knew that it was not the case. Her knowledge may be second hand, but that was no reason for her to fear the world.
The thing that had reached out in her fledge dream provoked the same sense of fear as those sickening childhood dreams, but now it was much more real. Because even now, awake, Alishia was terrified.
Something beyond her experience had intruded into her sleep. She was horribly certain that had she not screamed herself awake, it would have come closer, until it finally touched her for real.
Trey sat huddled on the horse, shielding his face from the fading daylight as if he could make his own cave, take himself back below ground. Alishia heard him crying from time to time, but after her first couple of attempts to comfort him she decided to leave him be. She had read that the best way to temper grief was by letting it run its course.
If he had noticed that a small amount of his fledge was missing, he said nothing. Neither did he mention her screams as she had come awake. Maybe he thought she always slept with nightmares.
Alishia held her horse’s reins and led it down out of the foothills. She glanced back from time to time and saw shadows hiding on the slopes, huddled beneath rocky overhangs or sitting comfortably in cave entrances. But the setting sun was keeping them at bay, bathing the hillsides in its rich golden light, blurring the mountains’ sharpness as it struck a cloud bank far to the west and turned slowly pink. She walked faster, conscious that night was coming and keen to find somewhere suitable to camp on the plains below.
Noreela City was out of sight now, hidden behind the hips of the first mountain, even its glow no longer marking its location as dusk settled comfortably across the land. For the first time in her life she could not look around and see something of the city. She did not miss its excesses, cruelties, corruption, carelessness, murders, the screams at night or the cries in the day as another dose of skewed justice was me
ted out. And yet she did miss the city itself. It had always been her home, however distasteful it had become. Memories both good and bad stood out sharply as she increased the distance between herself and the city.
Intruding into her recollections, shadows crept around her.
She dwelled a little on the library she had been charged with keeping and maintaining. There had been little added to it during her time there, save for the occasional traveller leaving roughly-copied tomes for her to catalogue and lose amidst the ancient stacks. A whole building filled with more knowledge that one person could ever hope to attain. That place had been wondrous, and its loss hit her more keenly now that she had left the city than when it had burned down. Even then the evidence of it had remained, carbonised stacks of old paper and dead knowledge leaning drunkenly in the smoke, soaked to mulch with water and awaiting their final demise. Now, it was only memory. But at least it was a memory true to her, something she had experienced first-hand, revelled in, smelled and touched and tasted, the library air redolent of a million different stories.
Alishia thought of the broken book the old man had carried out, and as she approached a huge boulder light was stolen from beneath it and a shadow watched her pass. She steered the horse to one side and slipped the knife from her thigh, feeling foolish with the petty weight of metal in her hand. The shadow remained in place, and if it had eyes they did not blink. She glanced back a few times, and as it receded behind her the rock seemed to merge with the shadow, being swallowed or swallowing the darkness itself. It remained in place, brooding, threatening to expand and follow her down.
The hillside was flattening out slowly onto the plains, punctured here and there by deep holes, old surface workings or perhaps the homes of some unknown creatures long-since vanished. Each hole offered a new shadow to seep beneath the ferns, spreading dark fingers where light no longer fell.
Alishia glanced up at Trey. He was still in some sort of fugue, sitting up now but with his eyes closed, lolling in the saddle as if he would fall off at any moment. He had never ridden a horse, he had said, but his long legs made it easy for him to grip its sides and remain in the saddle. She wished he would talk to her. She felt even more alone than she had upon leaving the city.
She thought of the old man who she was sure had burnt down her library, and the shadows closed in again. There had been something about him, a niggling memory deep in her mind, but she could not dig down to it. His manner, his age, his language, his attire … they all stirred a memory of something she had read, something she knew. Her eyes drooped and she strolled along the aisles of the library, running her fingers along book spines and recognising every one, the names and titles and obscure publishing houses all known to her. She pulled out one book entitled The Quest for Retribution, a hate-filled tome that had been written soon after the Cataclysmic War. It called for an expedition northward to ensure that the Mages were properly accounted for, tied down, killed. It had been popular in its day, but it was one of a slew of reactionary literature that had flooded Noreela at the exact time that it needed optimism, not vengeance. Yet that had been a rich time in the literature of the land, and the sudden slurring of conventions and ideals, edging even the most creative and intellectual of writers to more radical outlooks, had been the start of the fall. People should have seen it, Alishia had always thought. They should have noticed that society was in a decline by the way the arts strove to refocus direction, diverting away from the more philosophical and cerebral explorations to those ruled more by animal instinct: conflict; survival; vengeance.
Alishia stumbled on a rock and went to her knees, calling out in surprise. She looked around quickly, startled and shocked. The sun had fallen and darkness had come out of the ground, closing in all around her, giving shadows more depth and potential than ever. Something was watching her from out there; she could feel its attention upon her. A thought floated away leaving only the stale taste of itself behind. Something about the library, and the Mages, and anger. She shook her head, wondering whether she was suffering from a fledge hangover.
“You fell,” Trey said from his mount.
“You’re awake!” Alishia was embarrassed at the delight in her voice, but relief soon smothered the embarrassment. It was dark, there was something out there in the night, and now she was no longer alone.
“I have been for a while. I’ve been thinking. I’ve lost so much, and I really don’t know what to do now.”
“We have to find a place to camp,” Alishia said. “It’s too dark to keep moving, there are holes and crevasses to trip us. And besides, I need to light a fire. There’s something stalking me.” Not stalking us, Alishia thought. Me. It was a strange way to state her fear, but it seemed entirely apt.
“What is it?” Trey asked. His eyes were wide open now that the sun had gone down, and Alishia saw him stare in wonder at clouds silvered and smudged by starlight.
“I don’t know. Something. I had a crumb of your fledge. I hope you don’t mind, but I was curious and … I wonder if it may be because of that. Maybe I’m imagining things.”
“You had fledge?” Trey asked. Alishia found his tone disturbing, and she stepped away. Here was a stranger she had found on a mountainside, alone with her in the dark. Her knife felt even more ineffectual than ever.
“Only a little.”
“What do you sense?”
“I don’t know. Something in the shadows.”
“Nax,” Trey said, so softly that Alishia was not sure he had actually spoken at all. The horse whinnied as if in response. “It’s the Nax,” he said again. “They’ve come, now that it’s night they’ve come up! Nothing left for them down there. They’ve come up to put right what woke them in the first place!” He was raving now, fear given voice, and in the deepening darkness his shout was louder than ever.
“I haven’t seen anything,” Alishia said, not entirely sure if that was true.
Perhaps the fledge miner’s fear translated to the horse. Or maybe the horse itself sensed something then, the watchful thing Alishia had known in her dreams and which she now sensed in the surrounding shadows. Whatever the cause, the result was inevitable. The horse bolted. Alishia ran after them, mindful of the uneven ground and the holes she had seen, but desperate not to lose her horse, and with it the saddle bags and all her belongings. Trey fell and rolled across the ground, and the horse ran on, galloping into the night until it was little more than a shadow itself.
Alishia shouted in frustration. And then she heard the sickening sound of breaking bones, something big hit the ground, and the horse called out in agony.
She tripped and struck her head on a rock. She was sure, even as pain took sensation away into unconsciousness, that she had tripped over nothing but shadow.
The shade rediscovered the mind down in the real world, still possessed of dregs of the freedom that had attracted the shade so much. It hovered for a while, noticing the passing of time purely via the changing of the mind it focussed upon. The mind soared and dreamed and travelled in a rich vein of knowledge, opening itself up more than any the shade had yet encountered. It had been drawn back here by that openness, and the fact that such simplicity would surely be receptive to any signs of magic, hints that things were not quite as they had been. And it was this that the shade’s god sought.
Again and again, skimming beyond the world, dipping in on occasion to gain experience and feel the slick shock of existence, the shade tried to tap into the mind. It offered itself first, giving the mind something to focus on, but it must have frightened it away instead. It had no way to lure—it was essentially nothing but future memory, so what could it possibly offer a mind of such magnitude?—and so instead it had to inveigle its way inside. It would use its pure, untempered instinct for life, the one sense that its god had perpetuated and encouraged and which nature, by judging it as an imperfect example of its sort, had sought to take away. And this life had the god at its centre. The shade put ideas of its god into the mind’s way, letti
ng it stumble and trip and absorb, drawing it up out of the real world until it began to soar again, questing knowledge. Still it veered away from the shade, afraid of its blankness, but the shade persisted, planting more ideas, steering the mind, hovering and struggling to find a crack through which it would penetrate to become corporeal at last.
That crack came unbeckoned.
The mind suddenly exploded up and out of the real world, a maelstrom of confused emotions blended with pain and surprise. The shade backed away and let the mind soar, expand, open itself out until it settled once again just beyond the boundaries of unreality. There it dreamed and revelled once again in its knowledge. But there was something ever-present—a worry, a fear, a dread—that the shade could work on.
It approached, dipped down and found itself sharing.
The mind recoiled. The shade rejoiced. It spread itself and was instantly dizzied by the sensations and emotions therein. There was pain and the taste of grass and mud, the sound of distant shouting and the sense of a heartbeat, fast and irregular, grasped in an icy fist of fear. It opened its mouth and shouted, felt the thing it had become shouting along with it, raising a voice that echoed back again and again. It could smell heather and blood, feel something sharp pressing into its face and something soft and cool next to that, tickling its mouth.