Dusk n-1

by Tim Lebbon

  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 farther 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 it 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 after 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 might 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, traveled, 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 unreliable, 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 past soon. We’re still within shouting distance of Pavisse. The Monks have certainly fled the town to search for us, and we need to set off again. 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 repeated. “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, toward Kang Kang? Northwest 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 WOULDbe 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 rationalize 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 flavor 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 ri
ver, 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 burned by something now absent. Trey pushed and sent comforting 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 farther 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 touched 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 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 were 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 farther 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.

  He swept back toward Pavisse, passing through small valleys and over low hills, dipping into thickets of trees, finding a few dwellings where families huddled before the fire, hiding from the rain and dark. Some of these minds he touched on briefly, but he found nothing there to interest him. There was little to interest even themselves; they were sad, empty places, bereft of hope, concentrating instead on simple existence. None of them seemed to look farther forward than the next morning, when sheebok would need milking, fields hoeing and planting, ditches clearing, fences repairing…

  He found the freedom exhilarating, and again he wondered just how far he could project himself like this. Underground there had been miles of solid rock to temper his explorations… but he also wondered whether his horizons had been too limited. He had never been tempted to move aboveground to see what it was like, even though perhaps the ability had always been there. As a miner he had often considered journeying topside at some point in his life. But as a fledge taker, he had never been tempted to take full advantage of the opportunities it offered him, other than guilty forays past Sonda’s bedroom window. His boundaries had been too insular, he knew that now. It had taken the disaster of the Nax to open his mind.

  And then something appeared in the distance, something more powerful and less human. Trey dropped down near the ground, pulling in his exploratory senses and hiding himself as effectively as a raindrop in the storm. It would take some time for the thing to reach him, so he tasted the rain, felt it hitting the ground and splashing back up, loaded with dust. It was a summer storm, warm and welcome, but it carried taints of autumn, smells of dead leaves and bare trees. Things were changing, and even the rain swore to that.

  The thing came closer, and Trey did not have to extend himself to know what it was: a Red Monk. He sensed it in the distance, saw it, heard it, felt its horse’s hooves shake the ground. It rode slouched in its saddle as if injured, but he thought it was probably trying to track, searching for footprints stamped in mud or hoofprints etched in the loam. Trey sank down into the ground, smothering himself in earth, hiding, feeling a slight tremble around him as the horse passed by not far away. He drew himself in, making his mind less than a point, nothing to see. The Monk did not pause. He had not been sensed.

  He waited a few minutes before rising into the open once more. The rain was heavier than ever. He had to return to the cave. It was a good distance away, but the Monk would be there before daybreak.

  Trey skirted south to make sure he did not pass too close to the Monk. Its mind had seemed foul, and he had no wish to approach touching it with his own. He skimmed low through a valley, into the lake at its base, shifting past fish and other things that swam in its depths, careful not to touch them. The water was black, and deep down it had begun to freeze. There were shapes struggling against the thickening water. Trey went deeper and sensed more things, large and small, frozen solid.

  He surfaced and traveled back through the sky. At least there the rain smothered things that should not be.

  “NOT FAR,” TREYsaid. “An hour, if it rides fast.”

  “On our trail?” Kosar asked.

  “Perhaps. It was tracking something.”

  “We have to go.”

  Trey had stood and wrapped Alishia in blankets, wiping tears from her cheeks. He remembered her voice, that sad voice lost in her own mind: Has it gone, Trey? Will it come back?

  “I won’t let it come back,” he whispered, hoping that somewhere she heard his words and hoping they gave comfort.

  “What was that?” Hope asked.

  Trey glanced at the witch and shook his head, looking away. She frightened him.

  Rafe suddenly appeared by his side, standing over him and Alishia. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Did you touch her mind?”

  “Hardly. It’s been driven too deep. She’s barely herself anymore.” He glared at Rafe, blaming the farm boy and the magic he had wrought. It had terrified Alishia almost to death. This girl who had read so much and seen so little, exposed suddenly to such an event, driven mad

  …

  “Then who was she?” a voice said from back in the cave. Trey turned to see A’Meer sitting up, nursing her head with one ha
nd and her elbow with the other.

  “I don’t know,” Trey said, remembering more of his journey, more of what Alishia had been muttering in the deep parts of her mind. “But she’s afraid that something is going to come back.”

  “What could that be?” Kosar said. “I don’t know anything of the girl. Is she normal?”

  “She’s a librarian,” Trey said. “This is her first time outside Noreela City.”

  “Trickery,” Hope said. “For some reason only the girl knows, she’s feigning this sleep. Has she stolen any of your fledge, miner? Is she guiding the Monks to us, even now?”

  “No!” Trey said, fear of the witch fueling his anger. “She’s good. Something drove her from her own mind, and she’s terrified-”

  “So why has it gone now?” A’Meer asked. Everyone turned to look at her. “And where? She’s only been like this since Rafe… since he touched me. We all felt what happened then, we all know what it was, but why would that drive the girl to distraction?”

  Nobody could answer. The silence in the cave was loaded.

  “Well, it scared the shit out of me,” Kosar eventually whispered.

  “There was something inside her,” Trey said. “I saw the space it left, the scars on her mind. They were huge. ”

  “Something left her mind when it saw magic,” Hope said, staring at Rafe. “The boy did just what he claimed he couldn’t, and something fled Alishia’s mind.”

  “You sound like you blame me,” Rafe said.

  “I blame you for never believing.”

  “It’s the Mages,” A’Meer said.

  Heads turned. Nobody spoke, and the rain provided the counterpoint to their disbelief.

  “Perhaps they got wind of what was happening, knew somehow that magic was making a return. They have their spies in the land-they have ever since they left-gathering information, feeding back news, trying to ease their eviction with stories of how the land has been failing ever since. Maybe they heard that the Red Monks were on the move. They have access to things most people do not. Hope, they have your arcane knowledge, and much, much more.”