by Tim Lebbon
He had to make a choice: step aside and let the Monk pass, pursue Rafe and the witch, make everything A’Meer had gone through pointless; or stand and fight.
The sword knew what it needed.
Breathing hard, tucking the sword under one arm, Kosar pulled down his sleeves and wrapped them around his hands, protecting the open wounds on his fingertips.
“Don’t let it pass!” A’Meer screamed, standing, drawing more weapons from her belt and a slip around her stomach.
Kosar hefted the sword and parried two blows from the Monk, three, staring all the time at its ravaged face, the exploded mess of its eyes sliding down its cheeks, the gore that ran from its mouth. He tried to remember everything he knew about fighting—all self-taught and used frequently during his earlier years of travel and robbery—and as the Monk brought back both arms to stab at him he ducked inside its fighting circle, lashed out with the sword and felt it grind against bone.
The Monk screeched and sent a splutter of blood at Kosar. He ducked and rolled, keeping a tight grip on his sword, twisting it as it slipped out of the Red Monk.
“Hey, you’re turning me on,” A’Meer said weakly, and then she darted at the Monk’s back, driving in a barbed fork.
The square was all but empty now, save for a few diehard fight fans who had weighed the risks and decided to remain. They kept to the edges, moving around so that they could get a better view of proceedings, still cheering each time a blow was landed … but now Kosar felt their allegiance polarise. As the Monk walked toward the park Kosar ran to its left side, ducked a backward sweep of its sword and hacked at its leg once, twice, three times. With each blow a cheer rose from the few spectators. Kosar smiled, hacked again.
The Monk fell towards him, its slashed cloak falling open to reveal sagging breasts. He backed away, losing his sword where it had become lodged in the thing’s thigh bone, and leapt out of the way as it hit the dirt. It growled, crawled after him, and as a bloody hand closed around his boot Kosar knew that it had fallen on purpose.
“A’Meer!” he shouted.
She came at them, right hand and forearm tucked into her shirt to shelter the bleeding wound from the Monk’s blood. She hefted a small axe in her left hand, leapt at the last moment and buried it in the Monk’s wrist.
Kosar kept crawling, the Monk’s severed hand still clasped tightly around his boot.
The crowd cheered.
A’Meer went at the Monk with the axe, aiming for its other hand as it waved its sword at her. It parried her first few blows, then slid quickly across the ground and surprised her with a stab to the ankle. She grunted and stumbled away, dropping the axe, slipping to her knees as blood flowered over the lip of her boot.
The observers fell silent.
“Hey!” Kosar was running to A’Meer, kicking the still-flexing hand from his foot, and he glanced up. A man stood in the corner of the square, waving his hands. “Hey! There’s a tumbler pit this way!”
“Tumbler,” A’Meer moaned as Kosar reached her.
“Are you all right?”
She looked up at him, and he could see veins standing out on her temples, edging their cruel fingers under her scalp. Her eyes were already bloodshot. “No,” she said.
“Oh Mage shit, A’Meer!”
“One chance,” she said. “I’ll keep it here, fend it off. You go for the tumbler. Follow the idiot who shouted, make him show you.”
“What about you, what about—”
“One death at a time, Kosar. I’ll make sure the Monk doesn’t get me. We’ll worry about what’s in my blood later.”
The Monk had gained its feet and was walking once again towards the gated entrance to the park. There were a thousand places to hide in there, but by now Kosar was sure the witch and Rafe would have reached its far side. The Monk screeched again, and from nearby something answered.
“They’re close!”
“We don’t have much time, Kosar. Go!”
He started toward the corner of the square, then glanced back at A’Meer. She was struggling to her feet. He ran back past her, ducked under the Monk’s sword and rescued his own blade from its leg, thrusting hard and sticking it in between the thing’s ribs. He pushed, toppling the Monk onto its front, and then ran. He mustered a smile for A’Meer as he passed her, and she smiled back. We’re both going to die, he thought.
The man who had shouted about the tumbler headed off before Kosar could reach him, trotting along a street, turning left, right, bringing them quickly to a high fenced compound, a fighting ring for a tumbler. Kosar had been to a contest once or twice but it had not entertained him. However willing the combatants, the sight of them impaled on the giant rolling thing, the thorns and barbs taking out their foolish eyes and hearts, had done nothing for him.
You red freak, he thought. Escape from this!
“Where’s the gate?” he asked.
“Here!” The man pointed along the fence, and Kosar saw the look on his face for the first time. He was more than excited; he was turned on.
“How do I aim this thing?”
“You can’t. Once it’s out there’s little you can do but run.”
“Great.”
Kosar shook his hands free of the stretched sleeves. He drew his knife and hacked at the gate’s wooden hinges, breaking one, hearing the scream of the Red Monk from the square behind him, seeing movement as the tumbler shifted slightly in its bed of moss. It was taller that him, though certainly not the biggest he had ever seen; they were twice this size on the foothills of Kang Kang. It wore evidence of many kills. Bones were hugged to its hide by barbed hooks, some of them still retaining fleshy scraps, the tatters of clothes, jewellery. As Kosar forced the second hinge the tumbler flexed, shifted, and then rolled with startling speed at the gate. The gate smashed open and he ducked behind it, gasping as it swung wide and pinned him against the fence. The tumbler rolled straight down the street, bouncing from wall to wall, the sound almost musical; the rustle of vegetation on stone, bones on dust, barbs scraping walls and offering a rhythm to its escape.
Kosar heaved the gate away and ran after the tumbler. Something screeched up ahead. It was not A’Meer’s voice, and it sounded too strong to belong to the injured Red Monk.
“A’Meer!” he screamed, trying to shout above the grind and rattle of the tumbler. “It’s coming!”
He reached the square in time to see the tumbler roll across its first victim. A Red Monk, just emerging into the square from an alley a few buildings along, became instantly impaled on its hide. The Monk screamed, and the tumbler paused to roll back, forward, and back again, working barbs through its victim until they held it firm. The Monk shouted again, hacking at itself, determined to cut itself free even if that meant evisceration.
A’Meer was where Kosar had left her, hobbling in a circle around the other mad Monk, launching throwing knives at its face and chest. The thing was hardly moving now, though it still stood and roared and spat blood at her, perhaps its final effective weapon.
The tumbler rolled in a small circle, still crushing down the Monk it had trapped … and then it paused.
“A’Meer, run!”
The tumbler accelerated across the square. It hit the wounded Monk a heartbeat later, smashing it down into the dust in a rain of blood, continuing on until it struck the wall to one side of the park gates. It pulled back and rolled again, crushing into the wall, pressing its prey deeper onto and into itself.
A’Meer had hobbled to a doorway, and she glanced across at Kosar. He waved her over but she seemed to be waiting, holding back, watching the tumbler. It rolled away again, trundling across the square. She hopped down from the doorway and retrieved Kosar’s sword from where it was ground into the bloody dust. Then she started backing away from the tumbler, moving from door to door, following a woman who had been watching the battle as she too tried to slip away.
Kosar met A’Meer at the corner of the square.
“A’Meer!” he said. “Mage sh
it, A’Meer, I though you’d be dead.”
“It was only a splash,” she said. “Only a …” Her white skin had grown livid as blood pooled beneath its surface. Veins stood proud on her forehead and cheeks, her eyes were flowered with bursting vessels, and her nose leaked blood, but still she held out the sword to him. “It was my father’s.”
“We have to get away from here,” Kosar said. He took the sword and sheathed it. Blood-caked dust fell from the scabbard. “The other Monks are heading this way. Most of Pavisse must have heard.” He quickly unwrapped the sodden strips of cloth from his fingers and discarded them, fearful that some of the Monk’s blood may have splashed there. He felt fine so far. No burning in his veins. No hint of death approaching, at least not from within.
“Rafe?”
“The witch took him through the park. She said she’d tell us where to find them.”
A’Meer’s eyelids were fluttering, and when she coughed she brought up blood. “She may have slayer antidote,” she whispered. “Hey, done two Monks now. Getting good at this.”
The tumbler was roaming the square, rebounding from walls and the park gates, pausing every now and then when one of the Monks cried out. It would rest on them, shifting position like a dog making a comfortable place to lie, and then roll on. Its movements were slower and more ponderous, as if it was sated for now. It left bloody prints on the ground, and soon it looked as if a hundred battles had been fought there, not just one.
Kosar bent down and let A’Meer fall across his right shoulder. She was heavier than she looked—perhaps because she still carried much of her weaponry, even though she’d left a good portion of it in the Monk—but Kosar headed off quickly, fear driving him on, thumping his heart and pounding his legs as he ran. He bore right and they passed from street to alley to courtyard, heading across the hidden districts to the other side of the park. Many people watched them pass, and a few pointed and nudged their neighbours. There they are, fighting a red demon I tell you! Amazing that even one of them survived.
Kosar knew that they had to leave Pavisse. There was no point in searching for Rafe Baburn now; the witch had taken him away, and for whatever reasons she coveted him, she wanted to keep him safe. She would take him out of town and head north or east, away from Pavisse and Trengborne. If Hope kept her promise she would get a message to them somehow, although Kosar had no notion of how she would achieve this. If they could escape Pavisse, if they were not caught by Monks or militia, if A’Meer did not die and leave him floundering through this on his own … they were still back at the beginning. Rafe was as distant now as he had been before they left A’Meer’s home.
Everything depended upon Hope.
Rafe ran. It felt as though they had been running forever. Out of the square and away from the thief and the warrior woman, through the streets with the panicking hordes, Hope pulling him into an open doorway when the crowds ahead of them parted around a rushing figure clad in red. It swung its sword from side to side as if hacking its way through a jungle. Most people moved aside in time; a few did not. Rafe thought of Trengborne again, and his parents, and Hope need not have placed her hand over his mouth to keep him silent.
Although the witch was old it was Rafe who tired first. The last couple of days had been exhausting, physically and mentally, and the voices were bringing him down. The incessant whispering in his mind, as if there were things scheming in there that were apart from him, presences that used him as a channel to their own ends. He knew that this was wrong—there was nothing inside but him, his own wounded soul—and yet that frightened him more. It frightened him because it meant that perhaps the witch was right.
The voices spoke in images, like a dream trying to make itself known, and although some of the smells and sounds and tastes they gave him were familiar, combined they were an enigma. Perhaps they marked him out and made him special. But as yet they were doing little to really help.
Upon reaching the outskirts of the town they slowed to a fast walk. Hope paused at a stall now and then—bought some food, bartered for some warm clothing—but they never stopped for long. Because there were more of those things after them, those things that kept coming when they were shot and stabbed and beaten and knocked down, and even after they’d been bitten by a slayer spider they kept coming …
At the edge of Pavisse, beyond the final rough human encampment at a place where nothing ahead of them was man-made, Hope stopped at last. She looked at Rafe and smiled, and her tattoos smiled as well.
“It’s dangerous out there,” she said, nodding the way they had to go. “People don’t travel that much any more, and mostly for good reason. Things are changing. I’ve heard lots of gossip and myth, son, but if even a small part of it is true … well, it’s dangerous out there.”
“Worse than back in the town?”
She looked at him for a long time, so long that he thought something had happened to her. Maybe she’d fallen into some witchy sleep. But she was merely looking, and in her eyes he saw wonder.
“You know those things were coming for you, don’t you Rafe?”
“I suppose I do.”
“And you know why. I’ve told you why.”
He did not want to answer that, but he found himself nodding. The voices, he thought. Because the land talks to me. It talks, and the Red Monks think that the Mages will hear.
“I have to keep you safe,” she said.
“What about the thief?”
“The thief and his Shantasi? Well, I did give my word. And I suppose we could always do with someone who knows how to use a sword. Don’t worry, I’ll get word to them, if they’re still alive. Which I doubt.”
“How will you do that?”
The witch stared across the plains at the horizon shivering in heat haze. “First, you have to help me find a skull raven.”
They set off away from Pavisse and into the wilds. A steady breeze brought cooler air from the north. It seemed to quieten the voices in Rafe’s head, but they were not calm. They were waiting.
16
They rode way above the clouds, seeing nothing of the world below, and yet Lenora knew that they were moving in the right direction. It was growing steadily warmer, for a start. And the hate in her heart was swelling at the smell of Noreela.
The hawks mostly floated, needing only an occasional sweep of their webbed tentacles or a blast from their gas sacs to remain afloat. The Krotes sat in their saddles, ate, slept, called to each other, stared up at the dark blue sky or down at the tops of the cloud cover. Occasionally the clouds parted to reveal more of the same; sea, and more sea, but now without the white speckles of ice floes. That meant that with every second they flew, Noreela was closer.
Lenora listened for her almost-daughter. The thought of that voice sounding again scared her, because it had been three hundred years, and that was too long for a mother and daughter to stay apart. And yet it excited her too. While the voice of the shade could never be the same, it would only encourage her in the fighting that was to come. She would serve the Mages as well as she had for centuries, and when the time came, she would serve herself. Robenna may well not even be there any more, but if it was then the descendants of those who had driven her out would be living there. She would enjoy her moment of revenge.
As her hawk drifted onward, Lenora caught a glimpse of the sea between the clouds far below, and she remembered the last time her foot had touched Noreelan soil.
The machine moved on to other Krotes, its rider reddened with pure rage and blood-lust. He had left Lenora for dead and she thought perhaps he was right. She fell back, batting at the fire that ate into her shoulder and neck, and the sea welcomed her in as she faded away from the world.
She kicked. Her feet touched the beach, pushing her back.
Mother, said the shade that would have been her daughter. And then it faded away.
She kicked again, but her feet touched nothing.
Time passed, and it could have been minutes or centuries.<
br />
Lenora awoke with a new awareness of the world. She could smell cooking flesh, but also the taint of time on the breeze. She could taste blood in her mouth, her own and others, but she could also taste the craving for retribution, a bitter tang like the infection from a rotting tooth. She saw the rigging of a huge ship above her, reaching for the sky with sails and ropes that even now were bursting into flame; and then a familiar face leaning in close, smiling, her utter beauty complemented by the blood spattered on her face and the gore hanging like ringlets in her tangled blonde hair.
Angel.
Lenora gasped and tried to pull back, but she was lying flat on the deck. Angel looked away from her for a few seconds, her eyes darting here and there, fiercely intelligent and plainly mad. Lenora took several deep breaths before the Mage looked back down at her.
“You’re hurting,” the Mage said. Her voice was smooth, yet deep with darkest knowledge. Snakes of shadow twisted around her head, out of her eyes, into her mouth, tails of dark magic exuded from her mind and inhaled once again.
Lenora could not speak.
“You fought bravely, and your hate remains rich. I’ll save you from death and make you better. And if we have a future, you will be a part of it.”
Lenora tried to speak, but the pain from her burning shoulder seemed to have paralysed her throat and mouth. She could do nothing as Angel leaned down and kissed her. She felt something sliding down her throat—truly alien, malformed, and yet revelling in its existence—and her fresh awareness took a massive leap outward.
As she passed into unconsciousness Lenora saw Angel stand above her and move away. And for an instant, it felt as though she knew everything.
The ship was still on fire when she next awoke. Someone had dragged her to the edge of the deck and leaned her unceremoniously against the gunwale, and burning timbers and sheets of flaming sails drifted down around her. Somebody screamed, someone else shouted, and a snake of Krotes stood across the deck, passing buckets to and fro in an attempt to douse the flames.