Dusk

by Tim Lebbon

  A Mage. It had to be a Mage. He had never before seen such madness, hate and bloodlust.

  It opened its mouth and hissed. As if the sound were a signal, the machine launched its counterattack.

  Balls of purple light burst up from the glowing ribs and converged on the Mage and hawk. As they flew their shape changed, from unformed fire to things with definite edges, purpose, design. They struck the hawk’s feet and chest and erupted into a scrabbling plague of scorpions. Simmering light still played around the lower ribs, and in their glow Kosar saw the scorpion’s stingers rising up and down, up and down, puncturing the thick hide of the hawk and pumping it full of venom. More of the creatures crawed quickly up and over the thing’s head, saving their venom for the Mage upon its back. And the Mage, wincing and cursing at first as the things struck, but then smiling, finally laughing, plucked them from its skin and clothing and bit off their poisoned barbs with relish.

  More light poured out from the machine, the ground shaking with each eruption, and as it impacted the hawk’s hide it flowed and manifested into more stinging, biting things. The hawk shuddered and the Mage lashed out, sending bits of shattered bodies raining back down between the ribs.

  Kosar brushed scorpion tails from his hair, spider legs from his face, and they melted into the dark. He felt helpless. The sword vibrated in his hand.

  The Mage fell from the hawk’s body and jammed between two of the ribs. At first Kosar thought it was dead, poisoned by the things magically flung at it by the machine, or perhaps bled dry by the newly formed swarm of bats that harried its head. But then it stretched out its arms and started hacking at the ribs with heavy serrated swords, and Kosar knew that this thing was unstoppable.

  It ignored the light exploding across its body, shunned the things biting and tearing and poisoning. It ignored everything but the person lying directly below it: Rafe.

  “Trey!” Kosar shouted. “It’s coming through! Your disc-sword can reach it, cut it before its free!”

  Trey nodded, looked up at the Mage, back at Kosar, fear and doubt in his eyes.

  “Trey!”

  And then the Mage was through. With a rending of metal on bone it ripped aside the ribs and fell to the ground inside the machine. Small creatures scurried from its body and flittered away into shreds of light and dark. Another purple pulse crashed into it, but the Mage grinned and it simply faded away.

  As Kosar ran at the Mage, sword ready before him, Trey lashed out. His disc-sword caught the Mage across the shoulder and split leather and skin. It fell to its knees. Kosar struck with his sword and felt the grinding hold of bone as it entered the Mage’s chest. He twisted, leaned his weight on the sword to bury it deeper, and the Mage vented a shrill scream.

  “Yes!” Trey shouted. He swung his disc-sword again and took off three of the Mage’s fingers. “Yes!”

  “No!” Hope cried.

  Kosar turned. She had thrown herself across Rafe’s body, and at fist the thief could not tell why. But then he saw the black shape thrashing in the disturbed ground, great pawlike hands lifting earth and muck and rock and throwing it aside, and the second Mage quickly emerged into the glow of the machine’s defenses.

  It laughed. It had the voice of a beautiful, carefree woman, someone who had found the love of her life.

  “Kosar!” Trey shouted, and Kosar turned into the first Mage’s fist. It had stood and thrust Trey aside, striking out at Kosar at the same time, and its fist cracked his cheekbone and toppled him easily to the ground. He dropped his sword.

  “You’re not having him!” Hope screeched.

  The female Mage snatched up the witch and threw her aside, bent down and scooped up Rafe. It ran at the wound in the machine’s side where the first hawk had struck, and as if finally realizing what was happening the machine let out an onslaught of writhing purple light. It slapped into the Mage and Rafe alike, sticking like mud to clothes, forming into blurry insects and birds, lizards and mammals—all of them biting and killing. The Mage screeched but kept on running.

  Rafe remained silent.

  “No,” Kosar said, because he knew that this would not happen. After everything, all they had been through, the power of new magic released to protect them from the Monks, A’Meer’s life sacrificed to afford them time, none of this could happen. “No!”

  The Mage reached the broken ribs and launched itself out into the dark, open air, Rafe clasped to its chest. More light delved after them from the machine, and dozens of creatures fell, sputtering away into nothing like sparks from a campfire.

  “Rafe!” Hope screamed.

  Kosar sat up just as the male Mage ran past him. He kicked out but missed its ankles, and it sprinted on. It was waving its hands around its head, batting away a cloud of fluttering things formed of light that were sizzling and sparking across its skin. Screaming, it too jumped from the machine and out into darkness.

  Behind Hope’s wails and Trey’s wretched shouts, Kosar listened for the Mages’ falling screams. But he heard nothing. The only sound now was the whimper of their own hopelessness, and the soft, dejected ticking of the heated machine cooling down around them.

  LENORA RODE AIR currents far below the flying machine. Her hawk was mortally wounded, but she kept it alive with a combination of promises whispered into its ears and pain delivered through her buried sword. The promises were of more pain, not deliverance. The hawk was a creature of instincts, and pain would always be its driver.

  Angel’s hawk had already tumbled past her, dead, after she had forced it to bury itself in the machine’s underbelly. The other hawk was still up there somewhere, though she could no longer see its shape around the machine. It was dark down here, and the coolness of the night air stroked the open wounds on Lenora’s body.

  It did not take long for Angel to come to her.

  Lenora saw the plummeting shape and edged her hawk beneath it, catching Angel and the boy she carried in two of its great webbed tentacles. Seconds later S’Hivez struck the hawk’s back just behind Lenora, sending the creature into its final, fatal dive.

  But there was no despair, no fear, no sense that doom was upon them. Because Angel held the boy across her lap like a newborn child, stroking his forehead, waiting for his eyes to open and lifting his hair with one long fingernail as if deciding where to cut. When Rafe’s eyes did open, Angel drew a knife and sawed off the top of his head. She buried her tongue in the boy’s exposed brain.

  Mother! a voice said in Lenora’s mind, and there was recognition in that shade at last.

  And in the Mage’s ancient eyes, Lenora saw the knowledge that they had won.

  Chapter 27

  THEY DRIFTED THROUGH the night. A sliver of the life moon and the glorious death moon shone down on the battered machine, both mocking. Stars speckled the sky and added their luminescence. The machine hummed quietly beneath them, shivering occasionally as if damaged or cold. They headed south. Perhaps there was purpose, but more likely it was simply drifting, an aimlessness brought on by sudden, unexpected, impossible defeat.

  The Mages had Rafe. The Mages had magic.

  Kosar lay back with his eyes closed, thinking of that first day when the Monk had ridden into their village. Back then he had had no idea of the greater workings of things, and even now he understood so little. Everything they thought they knew was supposition, any decisions they had made based upon uncertain thoughts and Rafe’s occasional, mostly unhelpful ideas. Really, he wondered how any of them had ever believed that they stood a chance at all.

  A’Meer had been confident and passionate about her cause. Poor, dead A’Meer. Kosar had loved her—he’d always known that really—but it was strange how it took her death to reveal within him the true strength of that love. There was a hole inside, a blackness darker than this night, and it had little to do with Rafe’s capture.

  “What now?” he said quietly. Neither Trey nor Hope answered him. Alishia had fallen back to sleep, though color had bled back into her cheeks now, and
in the darkness she seemed to smile. They had checked her over after the attack. She was growing physically smaller, younger, regressing into some sort of unnatural childhood, though none of them questioned how far this would go. Just more strangeness to live with. And in truth, only Trey really cared.

  More time passed, and the machine bore them ever southward. They would reach Kang Kang soon, Kosar knew, but that did not concern him. He had been there before, and it would be no more dangerous than anywhere else now that the Mages had returned.

  Myth, legend, stories to tell children by the camp light, old tales carved onto story-walls in the bigger towns and cities . . . and terrifying though the stories were, they were always safely harbored in history, cosseted away, buried as surely as the million that had died in that Cataclysmic War so long ago.

  Myths were not supposed to return. Legends were never meant to come back to life.

  Hope cried quietly in the night, her tears forming strange shapes on her tattoos, but Kosar felt in no mood to comfort her.

  Trey sat next to Alishia, staring down at her but seeing something else entirely. Kosar could sense the pain and loss in the miner’s yellowed eyes.

  Kosar stood slowly and walked to the edge of the machine, stretching up to look over the membrane between ribs, wondering whether anything had already begun down below.

  The land was lost. The Mages had the fledgling magic in their hands, and whatever they did to Rafe to gain control of it—and that didn’t bear thinking about, not at all—it surely would not take long. Perhaps down was up already, and black was white, and life could easily swap places with death. With three centuries to plot their return, the Mages must surely know how revenge would be most effectively wrought.

  “What now?” Kosar said again.

  “Now Noreela ends,” Trey said. “Everything that happened no longer matters. I almost envy my family and friends, dead down there from the Nax. At least they died at home. And here I am, a miner, flying toward my death high above the surface I never should have seen.”

  “This can’t be it,” Kosar said, but he knew the childlike naïveté of his words. “Hopeless,” he muttered.

  “There’s something about her,” Hope said.

  Kosar turned and saw the witch standing above Alishia. Her face was stern, molded by sorrow and anger. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean apart from the obvious, the fact that she’s a girl instead of a woman now. However impossible that is, there’s something else. She’s not as ill as she was. She’s looking better. Less asleep. And for a while down there . . . just for a while . . . she was awake.”

  “Meaning what?” Trey asked. He leaned in close across Alishia as if to protect her from the witch.

  Hope stepped back. “We’re going somewhere,” she said. “Have neither of you thought of what’s happening here? The machine is still flying. Magic is still guiding us. Thief, you saw the machines in the valley falling still as soon as we left, their use ended. This flying machine . . . magic must know that it still has its use.”

  “I don’t care,” Trey said. “We couldn’t keep the boy from the Mages, and the four of us will never get him back. That’s for certain.”

  Hope looked at Kosar and smiled, shrugged. The expression did not sit well on her face and he turned away, perturbed. Was that hope he had seen there? Greed? Rage? He could not tell. Her tattoos had hidden her true feelings, as always, and she was as much an enigma to him now as ever.

  “No matter,” Hope said. “Time will tell. We’ll be in Kang Kang soon.”

  Their conversation ended there, and each of them withdrew into their own thoughts. Kosar sat back against a rib and nursed his wounded hand and bleeding fingers. He licked the blood from his fingertips, bearing the brief pain before the soothing sensation overcame them, just for a time. A’Meer had been able to soothe that pain. Sweet, mysterious A’Meer.

  He drifted to sleep reliving images from the past, but time treated them differently. He fought the Monk in the village instead of hiding away. He refused to help A’Meer and fled north to the Cantrass Plains. Rafe drowned crossing the San, their journey ended by the wretched faults in nature, not by those that had caused those faults in the first place. And each dream fed into the next with the same sense of incompletion.

  WHEN KOSAR WOKE up it was still dark. He saw Trey and Hope standing at the far edge of the machine, staring out through the tattered hole in the ribs.

  “How long have I been asleep?” he said. “Feels like hours.”

  “It was,” Trey said. “Ten, eleven hours.”

  “It should be dawn.” Kosar looked out through the ribs and saw the dark ridges of Kang Kang to the south, their pinnacles biting at the moonlit sky. Then east, out toward New Shanti, where the sun was not.

  “It should be,” Hope said, “but it isn’t. No sun today, Kosar. There’ll be no sun today.”

  He shook his head, not understanding. Above the eastern horizon there was only a sad smudge, like the memory of life reflected in a pale corpse’s eyes. The rest of the sky was the same sickly hue, redolent of the death moon at its brightest. Kosar held up his hand—he could see the shape, but no real color. He could feel the moonlight on his skin, but there was no warmth.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Mages have made their first move,” Hope said. “What are we, any of us, without daylight?”

  THE MACHINE, BORNE by magic, drifted south, edging closer to the peaks of darkest Kang Kang. While Kosar, Hope and Trey watched for a dawn that would not arrive, Alishia slept behind them.

  And she dreamed.

  Such dark, fearsome dreams.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tim Lebbon lives in South Wales with his wife and two children. His books include Face, The Nature of Balance, Changing of Faces, Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark), Dead Man’s Hand, Pieces of Hate, Fears Unnamed, White and Other Tales of Ruin, Desolation and Berserk. Future publications include Hellboy: Unnatural Selection from Simon & Schuster, and more books with Cemetery Dance, Leisure, Night Shade Books and Necessary Evil Press, among others. He has won two British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Tombstone Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. Several of his novels and novellas are currently under option.

  Visit Tim’s website at www.timlebbon.net.

  Visit the dedicated website for Dusk and Dawn at www.noreela.com.

  ALSO BY TIM LEBBON

  NOVELS

  Mesmer

  The Nature of Balance

  Hush (with Gavin Williams)

  Face

  Until She Sleeps

  Desolation

  Berserk

  NOVELLAS

  White

  Naming of Parts

  Changing of Faces

  Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark)

  Dead Man’s Hand

  Pieces of Hate

  COLLECTIONS

  Faith in the Flesh

  As the Sun Goes Down

  White and Other Tales of Ruin

  Fears Unnamed

  Be sure not to miss

  the stunning sequel to DUSK

  DAWN

  by Tim Lebbon

  Coming in Spring 2007

  Here’s a special preview. . . .

  DAWN

  Coming in Spring 2007

  FLYING HIGH ABOVE Noreela, it was easy to believe that the world had ended again.

  The evidence of scattered, scared communities lay spread out below: small villages, a few larger towns, all of them lighting fires against the darkness that should not be. Ten thousand faces would be searching for the sun but seeing only this unnatural dusk, and Lenora wondered what they would think were they to see the hawk. Would they know? Would they have any inkling of who or what they were looking at?

  Probably not. But soon that would change.

  For most of the night Lenora had been trying to hide from the two Mages. She sat motionless and silent, as far back
on the hawk’s tail as she could go without falling off, two short swords buried deep in the creature’s hide to provide precious handholds, and watched her masters with a sense of fear the likes of which she had never felt before. The Mages had changed so much, and they were strangers to her now.

  For the past three hundred years Angel and S’Hivez had been bitter, angry and mad, given to lengthy musings on revenge and what it would mean to them. Lenora had served them and listened—their trusted lieutenant—but over time they had become shadows of themselves, bitter old things who showed only occasional flashes of their former brilliance and brutality. Ensconced in their mountain retreat on Dana’Man, they had been fading away, though they had still retained a certain power; things that had once ruled a land could never lose that. And Lenora had still feared them—the mad, sometimes beautiful Angel most of all. But their glories had been fading into the past, and the more time passed, the more her memories of them had been dictated by what they said rather than what she remembered. She had let the Mages’ power become a self-serving myth in her own mind, rather than preserving it as a rich memory. Time staled everything.

  But now the Mages had made Time their own once more, and they were making fresh memories that Lenora would keep forever.

  Angel still clasped the body of the farm boy to her chest, like a mother mourning her dead child. She had sawn off the top of his skull and eaten his brain, sharing it with her old lover S’Hivez, and then together they had opened the boy and sought something more nebulous within his flesh. From that moment, Lenora had felt the raw power surging from them, and they were true Mages for the first time in three hundred years. They had searched, moving bones and organs aside, and somewhere in there they had found what they were looking for.