by Tim Lebbon
“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 shit, A’Meer, I thought 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 neighbors. 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 on Hope.
RAFE RAN. ITfelt 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 anymore, 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.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 16
THEY RODE WAYabove 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 one another, 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 anymore, 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 MOVEDon to other Krotes, its rider reddened with pure rage and bloodlust. 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, ANDit could have been minutes or centuries.
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 blond 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 paralyzed 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 reveling 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 WASstill 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.
Lenora went to help, but she could not even stand. Her shoulder was a knot of agony, but when she looked at it she was surprised to see that the wound was no longer open. The agony was a memory of pain. She could no longer feel whatever the Mage had given her, but she sensed that it was inside her still, a shred of Angel’s dark magic coiled around her heart. She was glad, but petrified. She had no idea what the future would bring.
A mast collapsed, people screamed as they were trapped and burned beneath it, and then the world suddenly changed.
Those not affected by the fires cried out in unison.
Lenora screamed.
Angel, somewhere out of sight, let out a wail that cracked timber, ruptured ears and blasted seabirds from the sky, dead.
“Oh, in the name of the Black,” Lenora whispered, falling to the deck and scratching at the cracked wood. If she could have opened one of those cracks with her nails she would have gladly fallen through.
The wind that had been edging them away from Noreela died, and the dozen Krote ships bobbed helplessly in the currents. Clouds broke apart, a huge water spout formed and shattered one of the vessels to pieces, dead fish bobbed to the sea’s surface, some as small as a human’s finger, several almost as large as one of the ships. Their bodies ruptured and burst from the sudden exposure to daylight, and their insides were already rotten and rank.
Lenora thought of her daughter, and every minute that had passed since that miscarriage in sight of the Kang Kang mountains was wasted, hopeless, a travesty of existence. She cried, and the tears were bitter and hot. For a while she could barely breathe. It was as if something that had once breathed for her had suddenly been taken away.
“What?” she cried, “What?” But she was only echoing what everyone else was asking, and for that simplest of questions there was no easy answer.
The whole world shrugged and shivered, and when it stilled it was a lesser place.
MAGIC HAD WITHDRAWNitself from Noreela, leaving behind a vacuum of hopelessness and despair.
Many Krotes threw themselves overboard, giving themselves to the sea and the creatures that lived below its surface. Others drank poisons or fell on their swords. Lenora crawled across the deck, but by the time she reached the burning sail she had intended wrapping herself in, the flames had withered.
The Mages vanished from view. The next time anyone saw them was ten days later, when strong winds had carried them to an icy shore far to the north.
LENORA, SITTING ASTRIDEher hawk’s neck and remembering that distant past, still shivered at the memory of magic’s retreat. It had taken a long time for them to shake off the hopelessness that had descended across the whole of the surviving Krote fleet. And it had taken three hundred years for magic to show its face again.
This time, the Mages would have it for their own.
TREY WAS UNABLEto sleep. He was traumatized by what had happened, stunned awake by the simple conviction that none of it was possible. His mother could not be dead, Sonda could not be dead, their underground community must surely still be there, going about its business and wondering, in bars and shops and the square where the puppeteer played his plays, just where Trey Barossa had gone.
But as he watched the sun rise in the east he knew that it was true. All the pain, the suffering, the anguish was as obvious to him now as the cool dawn. The redness bleeding out between the mountains hurt his eyes and he turned his back to the sunrise to watch Alishia.
Since falling and banging her head she had turned strange. He thought she may have fractured her skull. The bump was not huge and it had hardly bled, but from that moment, after passing out for just a few minutes and then waking shouting and dancing and laughing, she had been all but comatose. Her eyes were open and her lips moved, making no sound. She sat up straight, hands on her knees, fingers flexing every now and then as if to work stiffness from the joints. But she said nothing, and she seemed unaware of his presence.
Perhaps she was like this most of the time. He did not know her, and she was a topsider, after all. Maybe this was the way she made friends.
Trey had never seen the sky before yesterday. After Alishia’s fall he had returned to her, calme
d his own panic, and then he sat and watched the sky all night. Darkness was his age-old companion, but he had never known it so deep. He had stared for hours, awed by the stars, amazed that so many dead could still show themselves as points of brilliant light. There must have been millions up there, and he scanned the sky from horizon to horizon many times, searching for his mother.
The life moon bathed the south, silvered like a smudge of hope forever promised by the sky. The death moon appeared as Trey sat watching, emerging from behind the mountains to the east as if raising itself on the souls of all those dead miners. Its pale yellow glow spilled across the landscape. He had heard about the moons so often down in the dark, where they were talked about in the same hushed tones as wide-open meadows, sunlight on skin, birds making the sky seem so high. Now that he was up here and he could see them, it all seemed so unfair. Why should he be the one who survived?
But guilt could not crush down his sense of wonder. He watched the skies change color as dawn came, bitterly awed, and when the sunlight finally touched her face, Alishia woke up.
HER HEAD ACHED. Blood had run from her scalp, caked her hair and dried on her face, and now that whole side of her head felt stiff and heavy. She flexed her jaw and turned gently, testing her neck. The skin of blood crackled as it broke.
Dawn was here, and the sunlight hurt her eyes. There were no clouds, but it was already cold, a cool breeze breathing down from the north. Alishia was in pain, yet she felt like laughing out loud.
“You came back,” she said. Trey was a silhouette against the rising sun, and she saw him nod. “Last thing I remember was the horse going mad.”
“It stumbled in the dark,” he said. “I saw the hole clear as light, but the horse either didn’t have such good eyesight, or it was more panicked than me. I thought the Nax were coming. I don’t know why the horse ran. Dumb creature.”
“They’re actually quite intelligent,” she said, trying to hold back a smile. “Where is it now?”