Dusk: a dark fantasy novel (A Noreela novel)

by Tim Lebbon

  The birds parted immediately, some darting south toward the Bay of Cantrassa, others heading east to the neighbouring island of Bethwitch thirty miles distant. The theory had always been that if the doves never made it directly to Noreela, the message would be carried back along The Spine by the communities living there. Now, close to death and near to warriors of the dreaded and despised Mages, Jayke wondered at his people’s naïveté. So much more could have been done, surely? So many more precautions?

  Hawks swooped down, plunging through the clouds of small white birds and spilling them to the ground. Dozens fluttered and fell, twitching as they hit earth and rock, feathers exploding from smashed wings and burst bodies.

  “All of them!” one of the Krotes commanded. It sounded like the gentle-voiced warrior from the roof. “Every single one!” The hawks swooped down and another dozen doves were shattered in mid-air. Some of the Krote riders took pleasure in the target practise, skewering birds with well-placed arrows. One of the hawks seemed to be in a feeding frenzy, following a small flock of doves, snapping at them, showering bloodied white remnants to the ground.

  A Krote appeared before the open screens, short, thick sword drawn. The metal caught sunlight, and Jayke was glad for the brief spear of pain the reflection drove into his eye.

  “Dove stew tonight,” the Krote said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “How erudite.” The Krote stepped inside, trying to tread softly. “This place stinks of shit!”

  “Fuck you.”

  “So you said.” She leaned forward and slashed Jayke’s throat.

  “Did you catch them all?” Lenora asked.

  “We think so, Sir.”

  “You think so?” She swiped quickly at the corpse’s ear and strung it on a chain around her waist. There were others dried and desiccated there, many others, of all shapes, sizes and colours. But this was the first Noreelan ear to ever grace her belt.

  “Sir, I’m positive.”

  “Good. Then we still have surprise on our side. Get ready to move out!” The Krote hurried away and Lenora looked around her. And here we are, she thought. This is where is ended three hundred years ago, and this is where it begins again today. She stroked the wet ear on her belt, and smiled.

  “I’m home,” she said. And a long-lost voice echoed her words: You’re home.

  20

  Rafe Baburn was tired. He sat in the cave mouth and watched the witch out in the rain, her arms outstretched as she communed with the skull ravens. The downpour was tremendous, and yet Hope seemed unconcerned. One raven had its beak pressed hard against her temple. They looked like one merged creature.

  Rafe’s eyelids drooped again, the rainfall soporific, his limbs and shoulders aching, his eyes stinging from exhaustion. Whatever he had done the night before had drained him. He felt hollowed out, distanced from everything—the danger, his parents’ deaths, these people around him—and even the voices and whispers had grown quiet. The Shantasi warrior who had been prepared to die to save Rafe’s life—her skin slashed and torn, her ankle shattered, her face a mask of drying, poisoned blood—was slumped further back in the cave. Kosar the thief sat watching over her, dripping water into her mouth. She moaned in her sleep and sometimes cried out, but the noise of the storm drowned her voice. She was unconscious. The poison had gone from her system. She bled only good blood now. Rafe had cured her.

  The touch had not been his own. The surge of something through his arm and hand had risen up from somewhere so deep inside that it was beyond him. There had been a stench as the poison was drawn from her system and scorched by the fresh air, the smell of something rank dying on the breeze, and Rafe had fallen away from the injured Shantasi, vomiting. The witch had caught him and lowered him to the ground, so gently. Like a glass sculpture.

  He remembered little since then, other than occasional glimpses of moonlight and the sensation of being carried through the night. There had been whispers around him, amazed muttering, tones of disbelief and faith, anger and relief, pain and epiphany. He had felt as if he was being carried out and away from his old life at last, and transported toward something new and wondrous. Sometime in the night the rain had come, and they had found the cave. Since then it had been quiet.

  Rafe supposed that, like him, his companions were trying to come to terms with what had happened.

  Hope shook the last skull raven from her shoulder. It screeched as it flew off, merging quickly with the night, mocking her with one last cry. She cursed, stooping to pick up one of the raven’s feathers from the mud. It was smooth and silky. The moonlight caught its perfect edge and it glinted like a knife. The witch put it to her nose and inhaled, but it revealed nothing more.

  “Piss and vomit!” she hissed. Perhaps it was the rain, but she could not commune with the ravens. They had taken her invitation willingly enough, sat on her shoulders and outstretched arms, but they were taking, not giving. She had felt the feathery touch of their own senses inside her mind as they pressed themselves to her, their seeking of secrets, but unlike the day before she could not read them. It was not something she had done often, but she knew the methods and the risks. There should have been no reason why it could not work again. Look for the Red Monks, she had tried to convey, but they had not listened. They were closed to her now.

  Hope trudged back to where the others sat. It was more a hollow than a cave, a natural depression in the hillside sheltered by an overhanging shelf of rock, but it kept them hidden from the storm and prying eyes. The night was dark, the moons peering intermittently from behind low-lying clouds, and they dared not risk lighting a fire. The Red Monks were likely still searching for them, and they all needed a night’s rest to recover from their exertions.

  There he is, Hope thought, smiling at Rafe. He sat awake just beneath the overhang, water pouring from the rocks above and splashing down at his feet. There’s my precious boy. He smiled back weakly, his eyes as fluid and confused as the stormy sky. Hope reached out to touch his head but then walked by, awed, afraid, confused about what the signs meant. From their first meeting she had believed in Rafe, but after last night—after he had touched the Shantasi and drawn out the Slayer spider’s poison—her belief had expanded into fear. She was a witch, had been her whole life, but this boy’s single touch made a mockery of anything she had achieved. Being a witch in a time without magic consisted mainly of knowing things, shocking people with arcane secrets, frightening them if necessary with the forgotten qualities of nature and paths of the mind, and sometimes fooling them with exquisitely simple deceptions. For her, knowledge was power.

  Rafe’s demonstration was the opposite, and infinitely more daunting because of that. He was a young boy, confused and shocked, and though he displayed such power he seemed to have no knowledge of it at all. It terrified him.

  The boy stared into the night as if searching for answers, and Hope wanted to have him all for herself.

  She walked further back into the cave to where the others were trying to get some sleep. All of them were awake. All but the girl, Alishia, whose strange display had disturbed them all. The fledger sat with her head in his lap, stroking her hair, trying to whisper some life back into her eyes. They were open and staring and so vacant, as if reflecting the darkness from outside rather than showing the hollowness of herself.

  “How is she?” Hope asked.

  The fledger looked up. “She knew so much. Now she’s nothing.”

  “It scared us all in different ways,” she said, thinking of her own ecstatic thrill as she had watched Rafe laying his hands on the Shantasi.

  “It didn’t frighten me,” the fledger said. His comment was loaded, but Hope let if go. What else has he seen and known? she wondered.

  She turned to Kosar the thief. He was tending A’Meer, using a damp cloth to wash clotted blood from her face, neck and scalp. She had some terrible wounds, but the pain had been drawn away along with the poison, and she had stitched several of her cuts together herself soon afte
r they had entered the cave. Her sleep now was from pure exhaustion.

  “I can’t talk to them,” she said. “The ravens. It was fine yesterday, but now they’re unreachable. I can’t shake the idea that they’re laughing at me even as I try to commune. I feel them rooting around in my head, and I wonder what they see, but they fly away and cry to the rain.”

  “I wouldn’t trust them anyway,” Kosar said. “It’s unnatural. They might just lead us into a Red Monk’s trap.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Kosar dabbed at A’Meer’s chin, washing away dried blood to reveal the pale skin beneath.

  “There could be dozens of them out there,” Hope said, “and they may be anywhere.” She sat on one of the saddles they had brought in out of the rain, trying to see through the curtain of dirty water that marked the cave entrance. If only she was the rain, all-seeing and innocent.

  “I could see,” Trey Barossa said from across the cave. The downpour suddenly seemed to increase in ferocity, and a flash of lightning lit the plains for the briefest instant.

  “I’ve heard about you fledgers,” Hope said. “I’ve met a few, and all of them addicts. All of them lost. They claim second sight, but all they see when they’re on their trips are their own deaths coming two steps closer.”

  “I’m an addict of fledge as much as you are of false magic,” Trey said. Alishia stirred and moaned. Hope glanced at the girl and looked away quickly: her eyes were wide open, staring across at the cave wall as if seeing something too terrible to bear.

  “Careful what you say, boy,” the witch said. But there was no threat in her voice, not really, and the comment faded away. Circumstances had brought them together, and they had all witnessed something remarkable, something that still echoed in their thoughts. Hope was certain that they had observed the end of the old world and the beginning of the new.

  “I can see,” Trey said again. “I have fresh fledge. The drug people take topside is old, travelled, stored. It’s tainted by exposure to the air. Taking old fledge is like eating rotten meat instead of fresh, and about as good for you. That’s why topsiders look down on fledgers; the ones you see up here are slowly poisoning themselves,”

  “How far could you see?” Kosar asked.

  Trey looked uncomfortable at this, so much so that Hope wondered just what he had seen on his last trip. He shrugged. “I’m not sure. And I’m not sure whether I could see something specific, or just anything that’s there. If the Monks are still out there I might miss them entirely and see a sheebok in the Widow’s Peaks.”

  “If it’s that reliable, it’s likely to mislead as much as help,” Hope said.

  “It sounds more reliable than the skull ravens,” Kosar said. “And the night will be passed soon. We’re still within shouting distance of Pavisse. The Monks have certainly fled the town to search for us, and we’ll need to set off again soon. A’Meer will have to be tied in her saddle, and if Trey and Alishia are coming with us—“

  “Why should they?” Hope asked.

  Kosar raised his eyebrows.

  “Why should they?” she continued. “They know nothing of Rafe.”

  “I know what I saw last night,” Trey said. “And I know what seeing that did to Alishia. I owe her a lot. She saved me …”

  “You’ll put yourself in danger if you come with us,” Hope said. “There are Red Monks chasing us, do you know what a Red Monk can do? Do you have any idea what they are?” And besides, she thought, why should we share the boy with you? Why share him with anyone?

  “I’ve seen worse,” the fledge miner said.

  Hope scoffed, but Kosar spoke up.

  “If he really has second sight with fledge, then he can help us, Hope. And if he’s willing to help, I’m more than willing to let him come along. I’m just a damn thief, I don’t know what’s going on here. We need all the help we can get.”

  “Help us get caught,” Hope muttered.

  Kosar stood, gently laying A’Meer’s head on a bundle of blankets. He approached Hope, wiping the Shantasi’s blood from his hands. “Where would you go?” he asked. “Which way, come daybreak? South, towards Kang Kang? North west to Long Marrakash, hoping that the Duke might be there, might be able to protect us from the Monks?”

  “I don’t know,” Hope admitted. “But now we have him! He can protect us.”

  Rafe looked back at the raised voices. He hugged his blanket closer around him and stared out at the rain once again.

  “He’s more scared than all of us,” Kosar whispered. “We all know what we think we saw last night—”

  “Magic!”

  “That’s what we thought we saw, yes. But even Rafe is scared of that, and everything else happening around him. He may have driven the poison from A’Meer’s veins, but I don’t think he can help us yet. I think we still need to be helping him. If he has a gift, access to magic, whatever, it’s something that’s breaking him up. His parents were slaughtered before his eyes. You know that, Hope.”

  “They weren’t even his real parents,” she said. She grimaced and glanced at the fledger. “Can you do it now?”

  “Yes.” He reached across to his shoulder bag without letting Alishia slip from his lap. “Care to join me?” he asked.

  “I think not.” Hope sat down opposite Trey and watched him draw a chunk of fledge from his bag. “I’ll just sit and watch.”

  The Nax would be waiting. He would take fledge, drift out from himself and the cave, search across the hillsides and through the shallow valleys for the Red Monks … and he would find the Nax. Touch their minds. Discover the truth: that it was him they sought, always him.

  But that was craziness, brought on by the terrible few days gone by and the situation he now found himself in: sheltering from rain—which he had never seen before—with people he should have never known. And in his lap, twitching and mumbling incoherently, the stranger who had saved his life. For her more than anything Trey tried to rationalise his fears of the Nax, apply logic instead of terror, and he took his first bite of fledge.

  He tasted the staleness of its outer coating. The air had touched it and its decline had begun, but he chewed past this mustiness and found the sweet dry warmth at its heart. The flavour reminded him immediately of home, bringing back sudden memories of his mother’s cooking, the ribald laughter of fledge miners as they took a food break, chanting from the cave floor. Lufero with his puppet show, Sonda smiling at him and glancing away again, always glancing away. Trey let the sensations flood in. The sound of the downpour outside the cave changed into the roar of the underground river, coming from and going to nowhere he would ever know. The tang of the rain was the cool tint of spray from the river, so far underground. And the weight of Alishia’s head resting on his legs, the warmth of her body across his thighs, was the dream of Sonda, his dream that had never had the chance to come true.

  He was doing this to help, but he was also trying to escape. The truths he had seen over the past days were far too awful to bear. Perhaps he was fleeing to where Alishia already dwelled. He hoped that he would find his way back.

  As the fledge began to take effect, Trey allowed his mind to wander. It strained at the edges of consciousness at first, still bound to his body as the drug filtered into his veins, a free spirit eager to move on and away. The fledge slowly dissolved the ties that bound him to flesh and bone and blood, and finally he peeled off, glancing back only once as he drifted away.

  Alishia seemed to be watching him. Her eyes were wide and terrified, sparkling with minute movement, and her mouth was open in a wet scream she could not utter. He reached out and tried to touch her mind … and recoiled.

  So tattered, so torn, so abused! Her mind was there, and she knew that he was there too, she knew because insight was all she had left. Her apparatus of consciousness had been slashed and shattered, the psychic bridges that were used to cross from pure spirituality to thought burnt by something now absent. Trey pushed and sent co
mforting thoughts on ahead, trying to calm Alishia wherever she may have hidden away. Her mind was a deep, wide, expansive place, much more so than any he had seen before, and the light of her existence was like a candle in the great night sky; small, spluttering, and all but invisible.

  He pushed further and crossed chasms. She saved me, he thought. He passed through gulfs that would have driven him mad, had he looked or extended his senses to feel them. She saved me.

  And then he found Alishia, cowering behind the remnants of her own intellect.

  Is it gone? Is it gone? Am I alone? Will it come back?

  Alishia, it’s me.

  Has it gone? It’s foul, it smells, it hurts, has it gone? Will it come back?

  Alishia, Rafe is a good person, he gave out no harm. He has magic in him, real magic!

  Not him, it. It. Has it gone? Its hurts so much, it burns where it touch me and kills me, kills parts I never knew I had. Has it gone, Trey? Will it come back? Will it?

  Alishia …

  But he was losing her, she was dispersing and fleeing and hiding again, deeper down than he could ever go. She sounded like a little girl, afraid of the dark and being swallowed by it.

  Trey pulled back, reigning in his senses until he was out of her mind and a mere observer again. He saw his own body slumped against the side of the cave, Alishia twitching on his lap, and at least now her eyes were closed.

  Perhaps his presence had brought some measure of comfort.

  Or maybe now she was dying.

  Trey moved away quickly and passed by Rafe, resisting the temptation to reach out. He was terrified of what he would find in a mind such as his. The boy stared out into the rain, stretching out his hand now and then to touch the curtain of water dripping down across the cave entrance, testing it, piercing it as if it was a shield between two realities.

  Trey moved on, out of the cave and up into the crying sky. He felt an immediate sense of freedom as space grew around him, and as he spun and swooped way above the ground he pushed out his perception, comforted to find that there were no minds nearby. Not human, at least. Skull-ravens sat chattering in trees further up the slope, silenced by his touch. A herd of mountain goats munched wet grass. Nestled against a collapse of boulders far up the hillside, a tumbler quivered and shook in the rain, and Trey steered clear of its multiple captured minds. They were all screaming, and he had no desire to find out why.