by Tim Lebbon
“Back where it fell. It’s leg is broken. The bone’s sticking out.”
“Oh damn,” Alishia said, feeling sorry for the animal. It had carried her this far this quickly, only to be left lying lame in the dark. She felt suddenly guilty, imagining what Erv would have said.
His name inspired thought. Where he lived, what he did, how he looked. Whether he spoke any strange words, knew languages she did not. Whether he could do things other people could not do.
She tried to forget the stable boy, shaking her head as if that would loosen the thought.
“We’ll have to put her down.”
Trey stood, turning slightly so that she could see his face at last. “Kill her?”
“Of course,” Alishia said. “She can’t walk. We can’t fix her leg. If we leave her where she is, she’ll be picked off by scavengers. That’s not fair. What happens in the mines if a pony is hurt?”
“We eat it,” Trey said.
He’s out of his environment, dislocated for some reason only he knows. He talks of Nax, but how do I know it’s true? He may be fleeing something else, or running toward something. Using me. Does he know the language of wind? Can he feel the land breathing beneath him?
“Oh,” Alishia said.
“They do taste very good with cave spice.”
“Not that,” Alishia said. “I must have banged my head harder than I thought. Feel a bit weird, that’s all.” Feel a bit…
She clasped one hand to her breast, squeezed tight, laughing inside.
Trey turned around, looking at the ground to prevent the sunlight touching his eyes. “I can’t do it,” he said.
“I will.” Alishia stood and took the knife from her boot, judging its length, wondering just how she was supposed to kill a horse with a six-inch blade. Through the ear? Slash its throat? Neither way would be quick, but it was a new experience, and it interested her.
She left Trey and walked down the hillside. She heard the horse before she saw it, breathing heavily and grunting as it tried in vain to gain its feet. It glared at her as she approached, eyes wide and terrified. It had been frothing at the mouth but it had dried now, brittle in the sun.
“Poor thing,” she said softly, hands held out, knife hidden along her wrist. “Poor thing, shhh.” The horse took some comfort from her tone, becoming still, panting. Alishia could feel the vibration as its heart beat frantically. Its front leg was broken and torn open, already attracting flies and a moving carpet of ants and small insects.
It took a long time for the horse to die. Alishia prevaricated long enough for the sun to rise and lift a thin mist across the plains, and when she finally decided that she should cut its throat it took her longer to work up the courage. In the end she jabbed once, hard, eyes closed, and the horse bucked and flung her away.
It screamed. She turned her back and walked away once she saw that it was bleeding to death. And although she felt sick and sad, she was also fascinated as well, enjoying this new experience of meting out death. It was as if the blow to the head had woken a part of her with little sense of squeamishness or pity, which reveled in the pure experience of slaughter.
I wonder if pain has a different sound, she thought. I wonder if death is a whole new language?
By the time she reached the fledge miner where he sat shading his eyes, the horse was dead.
“Breakfast?” she asked.
Trey looked around, glancing at her hands, evidently expecting to see her carrying chunks of fresh horse meat. “What is there?” he asked.
“I’m sure we can find something.” Alishia knew from her reading that there were grubs living beneath some of the layers of moss in these foothills, and the flesh of the pirate plant was sweet and full of nutrients, and that it was possible to lure in a flightless pheasant with a softly sung lullaby. She sent Trey to look for some grubs while she went in search of a copse of pirate plants, keeping her eyes open for pheasant all the time.
There was a cool breeze from the north, even though the sun was rising to warm her skin. Alishia kept glancing northward, not sure what she was expecting to see but conscious all the time that there was something there.
My master my queen my god.
She was still suffering from the bump to her head. Her scalp was a cool burn where the cut lay open to the air, and as she bent to slice the stem of a pirate plant she felt the cool trickle of fresh blood through her hair. And yet although it hurt, she enjoyed the pain. She had been hurt before but this time she analyzed the sensation dispassionately, relishing it, turning her head so that it ran across her scalp like water, prickling in and down to her neck where the bruising was already spreading.
So good to be alive!
“So good to be alive,” she whispered, and then wondered whether she had already said it. She had thought it, that was for sure, but speaking it gave her a sense of deja vu that refused to go away, even when she stood and turned and walked, looked down at a small beetle crossing her boot, glanced up at a circle of skull ravens drifting on thermals a mile high, went back to where she and Trey were planning on eating their breakfast…
Trey had found several fat grubs and was trying to stop them from crawling away. The sunlight had them agitated, as if they knew what was about to come. He glanced up as Alishia approached and offered her a smile. She had a sudden, shockingly intense image of kneeling on the ground, hands fisted around clumps of moss while he rutted at her from behind, pounding his pale yellow cock into her, feeding her fledge in tiny crumbs with one hand, and grasping her breasts, her hips with the other.
Alishia stopped, wide-eyed, sat down carefully and avoided Trey’s eyes.
“Do we cook these?” he asked.
“Yes.” Where had that come from?
“I’ve seen more appetizing food hanging off the arse of a mule.”
“They’re very tasty.”
Very tasty, very tasty, just try it to see…
Alishia was a virgin. She was used to thinking about sex in the privacy of her own company, using her imagination, pleasuring only herself because the world she lived in was lacking the highlights she could imagine. Now suddenly it was a force, a powerful drive that had reared from nowhere and grasped her insides, sensitized her skin and tongue and her own secret parts to such a degree that she found it hard to sit still.
“Excuse me!” Alishia said, standing and rushing away. She shook her head to shift the thoughts and felt something loose in there. Perhaps the knock to the head really had damaged her.
Trey called but she ignored him, still trying to shake the image of their rutting from her mind. And yet, as she stepped from rock to moss to earth, the idea pleased her. And deep inside in that place where the experience sat waiting to happen, it burned to be set free.
She sat in the shadow of a huge boulder, out of sight of the fledge miner, and stared northward across the plains. As her hand stole between her thighs she could not shake the feeling that she was watching herself from afar.
“I THINK WEshould go that way,” Trey said, pointing west.
“Why?”
He shrugged, keeping his eyes downcast to avoid the sun. Yet he so wanted to look. “It just feels right,” he said. “Behind us are the mountains, and beneath them are the Nax. I don’t want to be near them-I can’t be near them! To the north is the city you’ve just left. I don’t think I could be in a city, not with so many people, and not. .. not north. That feels wrong.”
“This is your first time ever aboveground. How can anywhere be right or wrong for you?”
“I’m only saying what I feel,” Trey said, and in truth, deep down he was scared. Behind him was death and the destruction of everything he had ever known- everything -and before him, laid out like legend brought to life, the plains and mountains and a sky so huge that it must surely crush him down. The horizon to the west was wide and low and smothered with sky. How could there be so much light without scorching him, so many plants without choking the land? There was little opportunity
for darkness to hide now that the sun was climbing high.
The ghost of the death moon was hanging in the north like an echo, pale now in daylight.
“I don’t mind where we go,” Alishia said, and once again Trey thought that she was teasing him. One minute she was quiet and concerned and vulnerable, the next confident, brash, eager to move on and meet whatever was coming next.
After eating the cooked grubs-which Trey had to admit were delicious-and the stripped and kneaded pirate plant flesh, the two of them divided Alishia’s belongings between their shoulder bags and set out westward.
They walked in silence for several hours, Alishia darting on ahead now and then, looking around, splashing in streams, lifting rocks, tasting moss from upturned stones. Trey did not comment; he assumed that this was her way of traveling, navigating their position, keeping track of where they were. She had a map rolled up in her pack, and although it had looked detailed in part, there were still vast tracts left uncharted to the south, east and north, the far-flung places of Noreela that even in his dreams he could barely imagine.
She was poor company. Sometimes she displayed pity and sorrow, but mostly she fueled her own apparently bottomless desire for knowledge and sensation. She had told him that she was a librarian. Trey had seen books, although not many, and he could not comprehend someone spending their life in a building virtually made of them. She had tried to communicate to him how the worlds she knew were alive in books, but Trey did not understand. Here was the world, and they were in it. Reality was doing its best to blind him with its brashness, terrify him with its size and light and multitudinous variations.
He tried walking with his eyes closed for long periods, but after the first few falls he gave up. Besides, the sun still found its way through. He wondered if he would ever see total darkness again.
For most of the day they walked across the plains with no real destination in mind. Then late in the afternoon Alishia stopped and waited for Trey to catch up, glancing back at him, smiling, her eyes sparkling with exhilaration.
“Swallow hole,” she said. “See there?” She pointed, although Trey had already seen. How could he not?
Sometimes in the rivers belowground, at places where they slowed and pondered in wide caverns before moving on once again, there were whirlpools; spinning sinkholes opening beneath the river and sucking its waters deeper, deeper into the earth to places no man or fledger had ever been. He had never seen one but he had heard of them, sitting wide-eyed and fascinated as his father told him tales of how these whirlpools could swallow a man whole, and how sometimes they did. These men were still sinking, his father had said, still spinning, drowned now but their journey downward never-ending, the water keeping their corpses fresh for discovery by whatever waited at the bottom.
This swallow hole was like one of those whirlpools, except that it existed in rock.
“I’ve read about these,” Alishia said. “They started happening after magic fled. There was only one recorded in the first hundred years, but in the past few decades they’ve been happening all over. Flushing away all the badness left behind, some say. Maybe they’ll eventually join up to suck the whole of Noreela away.”
It was a mile distant but easily visible. Even Trey, new to the surface and ignorant of many of its features, knew that it did not belong here. It looked unreal and incongruous. And it sounded like a long, endless growl.
The ground stirred slowly around the hole, traveling in a lazy, decreasing circle, clumps of grass and rock and the waving arms of shrubs and trees turning and tumbling as they were drawn in. The air above it shimmered. Trey tried to picture the caves and passageways in the ground below, the places where this hole vented, but like the whirlpools in the underground rivers and lakes, he could not imagine it having an end. Not in this world, at least.
“It must have just started,” Alishia said.
“Will it spread? Should we run?”
Alishia shook her head. “They’re always quite small. It’s probably a hole the size of your fist. Nobody knows where they go, but you can find traces of old ones sometimes, like deep throats at the base of a crater. If we wait here long enough, perhaps we can go and take a look.”
The sight dizzied Trey; so much landscape still and peaceable, and this patch of it moving slowly at the edges, faster farther in, blurred into nothing at the very center. A big bird flew quickly overhead, dipped down at the disturbed earth to look for worms and insects and was sucked in, leaving floating feathers in its wake.
“What was that?” Trey asked, aghast.
“Moor hawk,” Alishia said wondrously. “I’ve never seen one before!”
“Well, you won’t see that one again.”
“I wonder if it’s still whole,” she said, and the idea disturbed Trey into silence.
They sat and watched the swallow hole slowly consume everything within its reach. Plants and soil spat themselves skyward with the pressure, only to be caught again by the hole’s influence and pulled down into its maw. And then the clays and rocks below the soil, the noise of their demise echoing across and vibrating through the land, grinding and smashing together, crushing, throwing up dust and shards that were similarly caught and sucked down. A rainbow formed briefly overhead as the air itself started to move, moisture condensing and darkening the spinning ground, small clouds forming high above and spiraling downward. Air breezed past Alishia and Trey, insects and birds fluttering uselessly against their fate. It was as if the hole was trying to suck in the sky.
At the end, with the ground around it stripped to the bedrock and air still condensing in an endless spiral from above, the hole whistled itself into oblivion. It was a hiss of gushing air that Trey recognized from the mines-sometimes breezes would come from and go to nowhere, sources and destinations both mysteries-and it gave him a shiver to realize that these things may be the cause. The hole’s final breath could even now be exploring the underworld, fingering through passageways and caverns untrodden by humanity, blowing dust against things ancient, unknown and unknowable, passing by sleeping or waking Nax, eventually even reaching the stiff body of his dead mother and querying her demise.
“Are we going to see?” he said eventually.
“No. It’s too uncertain. We’ll skirt around it.” Alishia’s initial excitement seemed to have faded to a mild interest, tempered by her realization of how dangerous this thing could be.
“It’ll be dark soon.”
She nodded. “We need to camp as far away from here as we can. Maybe it hasn’t quite finished.”
They headed south to pass by the swallow hole, finding evidence of its presence as they moved farther away: uprooted trees; shredded shrubs; areas of stripped ground where the bedrock peered through. Two hours later, with the sun setting ahead of them and the life moon a waning silver against its more sinister sister, they spied a fire in the distance.
“Someone else on the plains?” Trey asked nervously. Alishia was the only topsider he had met and strange as she was, at least she had grown familiar. And besides, he owed her for saving his life. But to face others?
“Yes,” she said. “People. We should go to them. They’ll have food and water, and I’m sure they’d trade some for a crumb of your fledge.”
“How can we be sure that they’re friendly?”
Alishia was silent for a long while, staring across the darkening plains at the winking light. “We can’t be sure,” she said. “But there’s a part of me that craves company right now. That swallow hole
… I’ve read about them, but actually seeing something like that, something that is proof of the land changing, winding down and giving out on us… I want to be with other people. I need to talk. And besides, they may know a lot more than we do.”
“About what?”
“Magic.” So saying, Alishia strode off, heading for the fire, shrugging her backpack higher.
Trey held back. Alishia’s comments about the swallow hole and what it meant had made him think of th
e Nax mind he had touched on so briefly and terribly. Something had been wrong in there, an understanding that things were amiss and that it had to wake to take action.
And now Alishia was talking of magic.
He could only follow, but the nervousness that had informed Trey’s thoughts since Alishia had found him on the hillside pressed in stronger than ever. Given a target, it flowered into something greater.
He shrugged off his shoulder bag, grabbed a thumb of fledge and began to chew as he followed Alishia toward the light.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 17
THEY STOPPED RUNNINGseveral miles beyond Pavisse. The fear was still with Rafe-the image of that demon coming at him, spitting blood, empty eye sockets seeing far more than they should, smelling the taint of something that even Rafe was still barely admitting to-but his body was failing. He could not run forever, however terrified he was. His legs were cramping, he had a stitch in his side that almost bent him double and Hope the witch had finally stopped trying to drag him. Now even she was struggling.
“There,” she said, pointing. At the foot of a gentle slope sat a huddle of buildings, smoke rising lazily from a fire before being caught and blown away by the northerly breeze. “We’ll get some horses.”
“A farm won’t just give us horses,” Rafe gasped. He was bent over, hands on his knees, legs shaking and threatening to spill him to the ground. For the hundredth time he looked behind them, fearing a flash of red in the distance.
“I’ll buy them,” she said. “Farm folk are always open to secrets.”
The farm was small, suffering as much as any from poor yield by the land. Its outbuildings were in disrepair, one of them leaning over so much that its timber columns had snapped, little more than habit preventing it from tumbling to the ground. There were several other open sheds and barns, all of them bleached by the sun and none of them full. Produce must be rare, such were the denuded stocks. From inside one of the smaller buildings came screeches and screams, rats fighting over some unfortunate victim. The farmhouse itself, a long, low, single-story affair, was adorned with animal heads in varying states of decomposition. Most of them were old, little more than bare skulls hanging on to shreds of leathery skin. But one or two were relatively new, blood dried but still evident in trails down the wall, eyes glassy where they had not been pecked out by birds. It was an old practice, displaying the heads of slaughtered predators, but it showed that life on this farm was not easy. There were at least forty heads nailed to the wall beneath the eaves: giant rats; the slab-shaped head of a ground snake; a sabre-toothed dog, its teeth painted bright red; and other creatures, some of which Rafe did not even recognize.