by Tim Lebbon
She felt proud of herself and her lineage. For generations her family had been witches and now here she was, trudging through this filthy night with the source of new magic on a horse beside her. He looked asleep, but Hope guessed he was merely composing his thoughts, staring at his hands where they held his horse’s reins, looking inward not outward. Trying to see and understand the strange new landscapes within.
What she would give to be in there with him. What she would do to have just one single look.
She glanced back at the fledge miner and the comatose woman. He was steering the horse, glancing back constantly to make sure she had not slipped sideways in the saddle. It was one of the horses Hope had traded for at the farm, and even in the cool wet night it foamed at the mouth, snorted, straggled behind. It would be dead soon. Perhaps the girl would, too.
Hope could find no trust in her heart for someone she did not know. It came from a lifetime of witchcraft. There were those who still feared a witch, but there were many more who knew for sure that she was a sham. Witches of old practised magic, curving it to their whims and letting it reform again, moulding it like so much clay. Since the Cataclysmic War, a witch was merely a shadow of her ancestors, a pretender, wallowing in past glories or hiding beneath the veneer of legend. To some, frightening in her very madness. To others, pitiful. Hope was a witch and a whore combined, with double the reason to be hated.
Hope had always been a woman on her own—ironic that she had shared her bed with so many men—and now more than ever she felt withdrawn and introverted, longing to hide from the strangers she had been thrown in with. She had never met a fledge miner topside who could be trusted. They always ended up craving their fresh drug, swindling and lying and cheating in the vain hope that they could procure some more without returning underground. They knew so little of the lands they sought to live in, their knowledge confined instead to the caves, the darkness that hid millennia of memories. This knowledge combined with their own peculiar myths—born of the constant darkness, the tremendous pressure of the world surrounding them—to make them unreliable at best, and wilfully devious at worst.
And then there was Kosar, a branded thief. He seemed strange. Though not as old as her, he was experienced and well travelled, yet almost naïve in the company of herself and A’Meer. It was as if he shunned the knowledge that he must have been witness to over his years of wandering the lands, excluding it for want of a simpler life. His fingers bled, he tore strips of cloth to cover them, and he hadn’t once asked whether Hope knew of ways to cure him. There were means—Willmott’s nemesis, treated correctly, would ease his pain and let the wounds heal and close at last—and although Hope had none with her, it would be relatively easy to find. But if he did not ask, she would not offer. She liked him the way he was. Because although thievery was no reason for her to mistrust him, his relationship with the Shantasi was.
Hope’s trust was least for this Shantasi woman who knew so much. The witch liked to believe that it was not jealousy, though there was a glimmer of that: Hope had found Rafe, yet it was A’Meer who had fought and almost died for him. And it was the warrior woman who also seemed to know more about the Mages and their ways than any of them. That did not surprise Hope, but deep inside, in the animal part of her brain where reason gave way to instinct, it angered her. It drew her closer than ever to Rafe, and if in her head there was a crude sense of ownership, then so be it.
She knew little of the Shantasi. Some claimed to know them, to have an understanding of their origins and history, but these were almost always proved wrong. Hope had heard many wild rumours, the stuff of storytime, so exaggerated and unbelievable so as to be dismissed without a second thought. Other tales were frightened whispers from men in her bed—traders, farmers, militia and mercenaries—who claimed to have learned the secrets of the Shantasi. One man she remembered well had come close to tears as he related his tale to her, his claim that he had travelled almost as far as New Shanti but then been turned back, hounded out by wraiths and spirits too violent, too real to be dead. The chase had supposedly lasted for days, and however fast or slow he had been running the spirits had always been just behind him, lashing out, not letting him rest for a minute until he entered the Mol’Steria desert. There the chase had ended, but he had kept on running. He had run so far, he said, that the bones in his toes had begun to crumble, and he lifted his feet to show her.
Hope had smiled benignly, nodded. She knew of potions and suggestions that would imply a sense of pursuit in someone with a weak mind. It was a tale she had heard before.
But then the man had paused, stared at her, seeing her disbelief. He turned onto his stomach and showed her the wounds on his back. They were cauterised slashes, furrows in the skin from shoulders to buttocks, some deep, some barely a shading to the surface. The mark of the Shantasi spirits, he had said. He had remained lying there, and Hope had watched him sleep until daybreak.
A’Meer had too much Shantasi about her for Hope to trust her at all. She had appeared from nowhere, drawn to Rafe and his wakening gift, and without explanation she had sworn to protect him and guide him away from those who craved his destruction. Just because A’Meer and Hope both wanted Rafe protected did not mean that they were on the same side. Indeed, allegiances seemed fickle at best, there being so many aims and desires to be served. Perhaps she wanted the boy for her people. Slaves, many believed them to be, brought to Noreela thousands of years ago. Perhaps magic would serves their purposes of ultimate, long-desired revenge.
So Hope remained close to Rafe and his horse, patting the creature’s flank as if to communicate her friendliness. Soon, if things did not go to her liking, she may rely on this creature’s speed to help make their escape.
21
Jossua Elmantoz was an old man, and he had been waiting for a long, long time. So when the message came that the Nax requested an audience, confusion was his first reaction.
That was quickly replaced by fear.
Before the Cataclysmic War, the Monastery had belonged to the Mages. Now, walking slowly into its hidden depths, through shadows that had never seen daylight and into pits and caverns of permanent night, Jossua felt their influence once more.
He was the only Red Monk alive that had fought in the War. His first contact with the Mages and their armies had been not far from here, at the battle of Lake Denyah, in the Year of the Black 1913. He had been a young man then, a novice pagan priest, driven by a fervent desire to see the Mages defeated and nature return back to its true state. Young, feisty, but afraid as well. Everyone in Noreela was frightened by then. The Mages had been dabbling in the unnatural manipulation of magic for several years, and news had been coming from their keep on Lake Denyah, more terrifying news each and every day, that their workings had transgressed boundaries never meant to be touched.
Jossua was an academic, studying at his local university in Long Marrakash with a view to making the journey to Noreela City and completing his education there, prior to taking up his priesthood. The dealings of politics had rarely bothered him, their machinations crude and encumbered by emotion compared to the pureness of magic. For it was magic that Jossua had studied. Its powers, its sources, its meaning and use, the philosophy surrounding it, its effects on society and the way the land was run. And especially, its confluence with the land. Because just as air and sunlight were taken for granted, so then was magic. It was as much a part of life as breathing.
The Mages made it go wrong. They abused it. Whatever dark arts they were practising in their keep were great and terrible, too powerful and awful to be ignored. They turned magic from good to bad; from aiding everyday life, to raising the dead; from keeping the balance, to tipping the natural world onto its side. They sought to control the magic of the land for themselves, and all evidence suggested that they had succeeded. The shockwaves were felt right across the land: rivers turned poisonous, volcanoes erupted, and earthquakes roared from the depths of Kang Kang, sending things from there fleeing i
nto the wider land. The magic that had once been a part of life quickly became a means of death, and the Duke sent an army to question the Mages’ acts.
That had been the start of the Cataclysmic War. Nobody ever discovered what happened to that first army—there were no survivors to tell the tale, no eye witnesses to flee Lake Denyah and spread the word—but like a stone thrown into a pond, the first battle and defeat had repercussions throughout Noreela. Magic was twisted even more awry. Great machines turned on their users, plunged into ravines, drowned in lakes, or turned turtle and crushed their passengers. Tumblers seemed to sense the imbalance and go mad, slaughtering thousands on the slopes of mountains and in foothills across Noreela. In towns and cities machines went haywire, killing or being killed. The sensitive interactions between humanity and nature were upset. Magic changed almost overnight, and the rot set in.
The reaction of most of the population was one of astonishment and bewilderment. It was as if they had woken one morning to find the sky turned green, or their legs transformed into tree trunks. A law of nature they had lived by for the entirety of recorded history had suddenly been transgressed. Their lives would never be the same again.
Back then, easy communication across Noreela was a fact of life. Machines would carry words and meaning from Long Marrakash to Noreela City in a matters of minutes, delivering it without echo or skewed meaning to the ear of those for whom it was intended. Even after magic changed this ability persisted; much of the fall was gradual, not sudden, marked by many catastrophic events that caught the imagination. News had travelled fast—the Mages in the west, experimenting, corrupting, powerful, trying to make a part of nature their very own—and the reaction was immediate. A peoples’ army had formed out of the frightened masses, and they had marched on the Mages’ keep with the remnants of the Duke’s forces.
Jossua had no hesitation in volunteering. His parents and fiancé had travelled to Noreela City with him and cried him away to battle. His fiancé had hugged him and placed something in the palm of his hand, then walked away along the dock. She had not turned to look back, not once. Jossua kept his fist closed until their transport boat started swimming in long, powerful strokes down the river towards Lake Denyah. The sun rose behind them, lighting the boat’s wake into flame-tipped ripples. The silver birch trees on either side of the river were aflame as well, holding and reflecting the red dawn, glittering with the fires of life. It could have been metal in his hand—it had felt cold at first, although now the heat of his blood had warmed it—or perhaps it was some other token, of what he did not know. Closing his eyes, Jossua opened his hand over the side of the boat. He was sure he heard a tiny splash as the gift fell into the river.
On the cruise down from San they heard news of defeat after defeat. The Duke’s second army had reached the Mages’ keep and laid siege, but even their powerful war machines were no match for the Mages’ altered powers. They did not want to believe. Jossua’s travelling companions were shopkeepers and teachers, farmers and money-lenders, men and women of title, thrilled with the chance of adventure at first, but frightened now, regretting their hasty decision as weapons were placed in their hands. Maybe the tales were distorted in the telling, they said. But several hours before they reached Lake Denyah, just before dawn of the following day, they could see the glow in the sky as the land burned.
Even now, after so many years to dwell on those events, Jossua could only recall fragments of the weeks following that river cruise. He could remember the beauty of the surroundings as they moved from the river into the inland sea that was Lake Denyah: the hills on either side clothed in purple, pink and red heathers; the sun behind them, its heat warming his neck as if reaching out a pleading hand; the waters themselves, churned by the passing of so many boats of war and yet never upset for long. He could remember the faces of those around him, people he had come to know quickly as fear brought them together. Back then they had seemed determined to win, but upon reflection he knew that their expressions had been of uniform resignation. They could all see the glow of conflict and destruction ahead. Perhaps with the promise of death so close, determination and acceptance were the same animal.
Once they landed and launched into battle his memory became even more vague. Weeks of his life were all but missing, trampled down into the bloody mud, consumed by the monstrous things the Mages had made and driven at the offending army. A few stark memories had imprinted themselves deep, like dreams still so fresh that he sometimes wondered whether he had survived through that hell only the day before, not three centuries ago.
He remembered his first steps on the shores of Lake Denyah. Jumping from the boat his feet sank into the mud and he froze there, unable to move. Water lapped at his ankles and people fell all around him, their outlines spiky with arrows as if already scratched from reality. The smell of dead fish was rich in the air, their silvery shapes piled several deep along the beach, gills frozen open as if trying to scream. Further up the shore, banked against the dawn sun, huge war machines disgorged thousands of arrows and sharpened discs. They were ugly things, not graceful and smooth like machines had once been. Their extremes were distorted with gushing tumours, their metal limbs rusted, stony protrusions cracked as if from a century of frost. But they were dreadfully powerful. The magic powering these hideous machines must have been driven mad, and now it had been offered an outlet to vent that madness.
He heard the hiss of arrows and discs cutting through the air, the thudding as they impacted flesh, the harder thunks as skulls were pierced and spines severed. Ahead of him, one of his friends was pinned to the air by a dozen arrows. When the woman turned slowly and stared at Jossua where he was stuck in the mud, another slew of arrows hit her from behind and tore her apart. He had remembered and forgotten her features a thousand times since then, as if recollection could do the same as a clutch of arrows.
Then there was the sea of wounded gathered in a small valley away from the main fight. There were thousands there, dozens expiring each minute. The Mages’ unnatural machines and Krote soldiers used an unidentified poison, and even when the injured could be brought out, they were simply laid down to die. No food, no water, no comfort; that was all spared for those not yet doomed. Jossua made several trips with wounded people on his back. They screamed when they died. Their hands clawed at the air for help that would never come. Over the days that valley became a landscape of frozen, stiffened corpses; no flies or carrion, a still tableau of corrupted flesh and poison still effective in death.
He saw a dead dog. Someone must have brought their pet with them and lost it as soon as the hellish fighting began. It was a mongrel, clean and cared for. There was no sign of injury on its body, and its face was not contorted with the pain of a poisoned death. It hunkered beneath a tree, huddled between exposed roots, cold, stiff. There was a calmness to the scene, an oasis in the storm of battle. He wondered what had killed it. He never found out.
And then a memory of the Mages and a thousand Krotes bursting from their keep. Unnatural light exploded in pockets across the battlefield, spitting fiery balls that consumed flesh and metal alike. Their monstrous war machines shook the blood-soaked battlefield as if it were a blanket laid across the earth, sending the people’s army tumbling and leaving them defenceless against the Krotes’ tainted swords and spears. A brief roar of victory had gone up at the sight of the Mages leaving their fortress, but it quickly died as the Krotes went about their work. Strange things roamed the battlefield: machines with a screaming blood-lust all their own; shadows that may have been wraiths; fiery balls of magic, bright and yet somehow unclean. And the death dealt that day was as diverse as the lives it took away. The Mages themselves … Jossua saw them sat astride flying things that shit fireballs and pissed poison across the besieging hordes … He saw them …
Much later, he rode a machine into battle. The people had regrouped and magic itself had somehow fought back, offering a final limited burst of pure power and denying the Mages’ control on
e last time. The tide had turned and Jossua was a warrior now, the memory of his former life smothered by weeks of battle and rage. The machine marched on giant flaming legs, graceful and deadly, and he and his squadron harried at the fleeing Mage army’s flanks. Men fell beneath his ride’s molten feet, their charred corpses sometimes carried along for several miles and providing a cushioned footfall for its rapid sprint. Jossua howled. He felt his face burning with the fury, and even people from his own side moved to let him through. He was a berserker; invincible, unbeatable. When he killed a Krote he drank his or her blood. And he fed well.
His final, abiding memory of that long time of war and death was sitting on the shores of the island in The Spine that would become known as Mage’s Bane. His machine lay dead and already rotting behind him, its purpose fulfilled. Magic had withdrawn itself earlier that day, and hundreds had instantly fallen on their swords, sighing as they died. The sense of hopelessness and catastrophe was enormous, and everything suddenly seemed very different. It felt as though any purpose in existence had suddenly gone. A flower he found growing on the beach was rotten, the sun was weak and oily on his skin, a bird drifted down into the sea and did not resurface. The sense of victory and hope he had felt at finally driving the Mages away was brief, because their defeat brought Noreela no victory. All it brought was the sudden absence of magic, and the sense that all good things had come to an end.
Around him, sprouting from the sand like sapling trees and bobbing gently in the waves, were ten thousand torn bodies. Noreelans and Krotes were equalled in death. Here and there were survivors, all of them as silent as he. They stood amongst the monuments of the dead. And in the distance, still visible as a haze on the horizon, the Mages’ burning ships showed their tails as they fled Noreela forever.