Dawn

Chapter 18

THE SHADES OF the Land will guide us in, Alishia thought, and at last she was beginning to understand. With understanding came a new level of hope. But there’s so much more to this. She lay there in the darkness, smelling Noreela burning above her. Sometimes she heard thunder as the Mage crashed through book stacks searching for her, and now and then the ground vibrated beneath her as it came close and went away again.

When smoke and fire started to invade the cave, she knew she had to leave. That made her sad. It felt safe down here, enclosed within the foundations of the land. Perhaps she had been lost for a while. But now the fire and heat of destruction were reaching her again, and she thought about how the flames had affected her in the woodland clearing.

The climb was daunting, but as she began she realized that she had little weight to lift. She found handholds in the stone wall, pushed herself up with her feet, and after a while spent breathing in smoke, her fingers closed around a splintered floorboard. Burning pages floated down around her. One landed on her head, but her hair did not catch on fire and she did not feel the heat.

The Shades of the Land will guide us in, she thought, but they will each need a sacrifice. Half-Life, Birth, Death… Finding her feet again, she leaned against a wall of books and listened for the thing hunting her. There was a rumble from her left, but she did not think that was caused by the Mage’s shade. Perhaps it was becoming more sly, fooling her with silence rather than seeking her through violence.

But she had felt its rage and its fear. She knew that it would not be able to remain silent for long.

ALISHIA DWELLED ON what the land had told her, and she wondered how any of this could ever come together. It had opened itself and allowed her to see so much, but in doing so it had displayed weaknesses that she had no wish to comprehend. A sacrifice, she thought, wondering what each Shade of the Land would consider a just payment to guide her inside the Womb, and why. And really, she knew, it was out of her hands. She was the delivery to be made. Whoever delivered her had far more on their shoulders than they could ever believe possible.

In the library, smelling past times being scorched from memory, she ran.

Thunder erupted behind her as a tower of books tumbled and she was almost buried, pages fluttering at her face and covers scoring her flesh. She sprawled to the ground and felt splinters enter her hands. The books pressed her down. One fell open before her and she read a few lines, but she did not wish to know.

Alishia clawed her way out from beneath the book pile, hearing and smelling some of the books erupting into flames behind her. She did not turn to see. The thing was closing on her, pushing its way through from the neighboring corridor where it had been hiding. It shattered the shelving, threw books before it, breathed on them and set them on fire. She did not look, could not afford to see. She was just a little girl. If she froze in fear then that would be the end.

Not just for me, she thought. Not only the end for me.

Another book fell before her, its pages blank and ready to be filled. And when this one burst into flames, she realized that even the future was quickly being eaten away.

With the land’s knowledge now brewing inside her, she had become much more than a librarian of the past. She had become the author of the future.

“I’m just a little girl,” she said, her vision blurring. She fell again and rolled onto her back, and she saw the thing closing down upon her, the great, consuming shadow that solidity denied and reality veered away from. The shade of a Mage, fearsome and furious. “I’m just a little girl!” Her tears cleared then, steamed away by fire, and something beat her across the face.

At first she thought it was gushes of flame, and she supposed she would burn here just like every other memory. Her head thrashed from left to right and her skin hurt, but her eyes still saw, unmelted in their sockets. The shade drew closer, a void in everything she could see and conceive. And even as she faded away and woke into the real world, she felt no triumph. She had escaped with knowledge intact. But she knew that the Mages’ ability to find her, and their determination to do so, would be stronger than ever before.

“WAKE!” HOPE SCREAMED. “Wake, wake, wake!” Each word was punctuated by a slap to Alishia’s face.

The girl could barely feel the impacts. She wondered why that was: the witch looked madder than ever, and she was not pulling her punches. Alishia tasted blood in her mouth, and another adult tooth fell out to leave a milk tooth in its place.

“I’m here,” Alishia whispered.

The witch was panting, whining, looking around her more than at Alishia. Her hair seemed to be falling out in clumps, and her tattoos were twisted together into two violent ropes, buried into the corners of her mouth and continuing down inside. Hope looked as though she was dying, but she was as strong as ever before.

“Something’s coming!” the witch said, bending and grasping Alishia’s loose dress collar. “They passed us once before…if I didn’t dream it. And now they’re looking again!”

Alishia touched Hope’s wrist, encouraging her to let go. The witch started, held her breath, stood and stepped back.

“Everything’s looking for us,” Alishia said. “Please help me.”

“Where do you go?” Hope asked, grabbing Alishia’s hands and hauling her upright.

Alishia swayed on her feet, clenching her bare toes in the snow. Balance was not an easy thing to find. “Away,” she said. “To the beating heart of the land. But I don’t think I can be a visitor there again. Next time, if there is a next time, I think I may be trapped there for good.”

“You’re talking in riddles!” Hope seemed ready to strike out again, but Alishia glanced at her and the witch shuffled away from her. What does she see in my eyes? Alishia wondered.

“Lifeis a riddle,” Alishia said. She looked around at the snow-covered hillside, mountains rising before them, the sharp rocks that seemed to recede ahead of them to form a path through chaos. She smiled at Hope, not upset when the witch did not smile back. “We need to go.”

Hope’s face crumpled. She sank to her knees, shoulders shuddering with dry tears, hands clawing at her thighs through her rough dress. No sound left her mouth, but wind whistled between nearby rocks, giving voice to her wretchedness. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t know where we’re going, or how to get there. I just don’t know…”

“I know,” Alishia said. She stepped past Hope and walked uphill a dozen steps. To her left a field of razor-sharp rocks scraped at the air, accompanied by an almost subaudible groan that crawled into Alishia’s feet and set her flesh crawling. To her right, shadows danced where they should not, turning the falling snow black. Ahead of them, the way looked safe.

“So nowyou’re leadingme?” Hope said.

Alishia frowned as the ambiguity of Hope’s purpose flashed across her mind. But she turned to the witch and nodded. “I still need your help, Hope,” she said. Birth Shade, Death Shade, Half-Life Shade, which can she be? she thought. The witch stood and came to her, loyal yet deceitful, determined but driven by her own madness and need to be the magician she had always wanted to be.

Alishia walked on, troubled and overwhelmed by her new knowledge. She hoped that when the time came for revelation-for sacrifice-whatever she carried inside would offer a guiding hand.

TREY FELT A change in the Nax carrying him south. They had passed through fledge seams and caverns, plunged into underground rivers and melted through a lake of ancient ice, emerging unscathed on the other side. All the while the Nax had been there at the edges of his mind, awful and playful, taunting and superior. And then they became silent and serious, and he realized that they were carrying him toward something even more inconceivable.

Where are we going? he thought, hoping that they would answer. Can I take myself? Will you let me go when we arrive? He knew that they heard his thoughts-they were in his mind, cool and sharp-but there was no response. They had not spoken to him for what could have been hours, or years.

The fledge around him changed. It was a graded change, but he felt it straightaway. He had become used to being flooded with the drug, abrading his skin on the outside and soothing his muscles and mind inside. But this new fledge was sharp and cruel, pricking at his skin like a thousand sword points and forcing into his mouth as the Nax dragged him through, filling his stomach. He coughed through the drug and could not breathe, but he had not been breathing for some time now. How could he? He was buried underground.

What is this? he thought. Images started to play across his mind. They were too rapid to catch. These visions were not his own, and he could not understand their source: he was not casting his mind because the Nax would not let him. No single image stood out, because of their speed-it was as if they played on the insides of his eyelids as he blinked-but they presented a picture of things unknown, and terrible.

Kang Kang, a voice said, and the Nax had spoken to him again.

Kang Kang! Perhaps Hope and Alishia are here even now? Maybe they’re waiting for me…though what can I do for them?

Trey did not dwell on what he might have become. The Nax dragged him through the fledge foundations of the world, and he did not breathe, yet he could think and reason like the old Trey. I am Trey, he thought. I can’t be anything else.

The fledge in Kang Kang was different. It flooded into and through him and gave him those countless images from the minds of others. The Nax disliked it, but he did not understand how he could perceive their discomfort. They were not talking in his mind, nor were their nebulous bodies actually touching his. Perhaps their uneasiness was his also.

What have I become? Trey thought once again, and they moved him on.

Sometime later, feeling the weight of the world above him lessening and the kiss of cold air against his fledge-scoured skin, Trey heard the voice of the Nax in his mind one last time.

You are there.

IN THE DISTANCE, Kosar heard the sounds of war. Fires lit the horizon, explosion of blue light boosting the glare, and a steady rumble of destruction rolled across the landscape. It reached the foothills where he waited with the Shantasi army and echoed into Kang Kang.

“They can’t last for very long,” Lucien Malini said.

“They’ll fight hard.” Kosar did not like the Red Monk at his side; did not like him speaking words so plain; did not feel comfortable knowing that their causes had converged. But the Monk seemed to have become attached, staying at Kosar’s side to protect or be protected. Kosar was hardly surprised; he had seen the way the Shantasi looked at Lucien. They’re right to hate him, he thought. And I have a right to hate him also. He glanced sideways at the Monk, surprised that he felt nothing.

The two thousand Shantasi had reached the foothills of Kang Kang just as the first sounds of battle came in from the north. Their desert creatures were all but exhausted by then, many of them dying from the huge doses of Pace beetles they had been given. The Shantasi continued on foot. Kosar and Lucien’s creature had survived, coaxed on by whispers from the Monk and Kosar’s force of will. I can’t run, he had thought, I can’t walk. I can barely crawl.

They had spread themselves out across the foothills, moving east and west to take up positions. There was no telling exactly where the Krotes would attack. But their advancing army would be seen by the Shantasi scouts hiding on the plains, and they would be warned, and by the time the Krotes reached Kang Kang, the Shantasi would be regrouped and waiting for them.

“What do we have that can fight that?” Kosar asked. A mushroom of flame and smoke rose above the horizon, spreading slowly and pushing the darkness back toward the moons. It glimmered with blue light at its furthest extreme, like controlled lightning. At this distance it was smaller than the fingernail on his thumb, but it must have been huge to be visible from so far away.

“Very little,” Lucien said. “Nothing. But the aim never was to win.”

“No,” Kosar said. “No victory today.” He thought of O’Gan Pentle and the two thousand other Shantasi they had left behind, fighting and dying in those flames. Every flash of light he saw brought death, and he wondered which rumbling explosion heralded O’Gan’s passing. He liked the Shantasi Mystic, and mourned the fact that it was war that had brought them together. “War,” he said, as though amazed that the word could be spoken. The Red Monk did not answer.

And yet Kosar also remembered what O’Gan had said to him, and the harvesting of weapons from the desert. If you live through this, thief, you’ll be able to tell your children you saw the Shantasi at war. It’s not something you or they will forget. Perhaps the Shantasi had more at their disposal than anyone had yet seen. If so, they would have a chance to reveal it soon.

The explosions on the horizon made the darkness here even more extreme. It had begun to snow, adding to their misery, and Kosar’s wounds were aching from the cold. Whatever drugs O’Gan had administered were wearing off. Perhaps when their effect had vanished altogether O’Gan would be dead, and Kosar would be receiving more wounds. His hand was stiff where a Monk had slashed it back in the machines’ graveyard, his cheek and ribs were sore and the stab wounds in his back felt as though the blades were present there again, parting mending flesh and skin. There was a warmth at the heart of him-the dregs of O’Gan’s drugs-but his extremities were cold, and soon they would be colder still.

Snow landed on his hand where it was clasped around the sword’s hilt. It did not melt. He brought it to his mouth and breathed out, licking up the resulting water and tasting the filth of his skin. “I don’t want to die,” he said, and the feeling behind the words surprised him. It was as if someone else had spoken.

Lucien looked at him, scarred face shaded by his raised hood. “Death is not the end,” he said.

Kosar snorted. “You can’t know that!”

“I’ve killed enough to know.”

“The Black? I’m sure you’ve never chanted anyone down. You kill and leave wraiths to haunt their place of death. Torture them. That’s not the end I want.”

“If the Mages win, Noreela will be no place to live for anyone or anything.”

Kosar shook his head, not wishing to talk with the Monk about such things. He and A’Meer could have conversed at length, and he would have enjoyed it. It would have made him feelbetter. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Don’t talk to me.”

“I’ll protect you as well as I can,” Lucien said.

“You? Why?”

“Because I don’t believe your part in this is fully played out.”

Kosar flipped Lucien’s hood back from his face so that he could see his eyes. They were dark and watery, reflecting flames. “Don’t you pretend with me,” Kosar said. “Not with me. Not after what you’ve done and who you’ve killed.” He lifted his sword and pressed its tip against the Monk’s throat, leaning forward so that his weight rested against the handle. One shove would break skin and send metal into flesh. He closed his eyes and imagined doing just that, but he knew it would not be the end. The Monk was strong.

“You can kill me later,” Lucien said.

Kosar opened his eyes. The Monk had not pulled away from the sword, and a drop of blood ran down his throat from where the tip had punctured his skin.

“After this is over, if we’re both still alive, you can kill me then. But now I’m needed here as much as you. One sword could be the difference between winning and losing.”

“There’s no winning!” Kosar hissed.

“I don’t mean here,” Lucien said. “I mean there.” He nodded at the mountains behind them, peaks hidden by the haze of falling snow.

Kosar lowered his sword and sat back, following Lucien’s gaze. “They must be in there by now,” he said. I hope Trey is all right, and that Hope hasn’t gone mad. I hope Alishia is still alive, and that there’s still time.

“Every second we gain them here could be the instant they change the world,” Lucien said.

Kosar climbed the shelf of rock they had been sheltering behind and looked northward. To the east and west he could see Shantasi doing the same thing. Snow muffled the air and aided the semidarkness, but he could still make out their shapes, slung with weapons and glinting here and there when another explosion rose above the horizon, rumbling in many seconds later and making snowflakes dance off the ground.

Everything felt so hopeless.

O’GAN PENTLE, along with hundreds of Shantasi, charged the Krote machines attacking by land. Even before the two sides met, the air was filled with flying metals and streaking arcs of fireballs, and here and there jets of some mysterious liquid that melted whatever it touched: metal, rock, flesh and bone. The Shantasi returned fire, using Pace to dart left and right, confusing the Krotes and scoring many hits. Once a Krote was killed, his or her mount became confused, but still remained dangerous. Many Shantasi were run down by rogue machines.

The first line of charging Shantasi met the first wave of Krotes, and the fight turned to chaos.

Shantasi used Pace to dart behind the machines. Some bore bows and slideshocks, others leapt at machines and tried to scramble up their sides, knives clasped between their teeth or swords brandished in one hand. Most of them were shrugged off and trampled beneath metal or stone feet. Others gained the machines’ backs, only to be shot down by the Krote riders.

One group of warriors unleashed a storm of flies from fat pouches on their belts. The flies remained close together, buzzing low to the ground until they encountered the staggered stone legs of one fighting machine. They rose, shifting in fluid sheets as the Krote waved his arms about his head. The cloud expanded and the individual creatures seemed to blur, and O’Gan fell flat to the ground and covered his head with his arms as the Shantasi fired several burning arrows into the swarm. There was a soft hiss and then a deafening explosion, and when O’Gan looked up the Krote had been blown to shreds. His machine slumped to the ground, limbs waving, broken legs clawing uselessly at the cauterized ground. Black specks drifted down beside it, dead flies or flesh turned to ash.

O’Gan stood and surveyed the battle. It’s all about time, he thought. He glanced up and saw another flying machine spinning out of control as spartlets harried at its rider. We can never defeat them, but we can holdthem.

Something burst from the ground to his left, a sound louder than anything else on the battlefield, its impact harsher. O’Gan flinched away. A machine bore down on him, a white spidery thing with a dozen whips lashing at the air and fire belching from vents along its sides. He raised his sword, ready to parry the first of those deadly whips, screaming in defiance and certain that every second he lived on could give magic that extra chance it needed.

The machine was a dozen steps away when it was struck in the side. It slipped, scoring furrows in the soil with its braced legs, and the thing that had come up from the ground launched into a frenzied attack.

Serpenthal! It was the largest sand demon O’Gan had ever seen, easily the height and width of six men, and its many separate parts worked as one as it attacked the machine. Whips were torn away, the construct’s body was ruptured and it gushed a foul black fluid as its rider was plucked from its back. The serpenthal crushed the Krote like an insect and dropped his remains into the mess of his dying machine.

The Krotes’ advance had been slowed. Machines still streaked for the huge blaze beyond which a thousand Shantasi waited, but many others were involved in vicious fighting. They cut down warriors with fire and fluid and arrows and discs, and the cries of the dying came from all around.

Another serpenthal appeared from the east and joined in the fray, setting upon a bulky machine and ignoring the hail of molten rock pumped at it from the machine’s nostrils. Another, and another, and O’Gan had never heard of so many sand demons being seen at the same time. It made the battlefield a stranger place than ever.

Several Shantasi ran past him, one of them grimacing as he tried to pull an arrow from his chest, and set upon a machine. It was small and rounded, running on stone wheels that flickered with blue fire. The Krote sitting astride its thin neck turned toward the charging Shantasi, firing a slew of arrows and bolts that took down three before the others reached the machine. They attacked, and O’Gan went to their aid.

He darted left and right as he went, using his Pace in the hope that the Krote would almost lose sight of him. O’Gan felt the drain on his strength every time he used Pace, and he knew that this would be a shorter fight than he had wished for. But it’s a braver suicide than many Mystics chose.

By the time he reached the machine, the other Shantasi were dead at its feet. He glanced briefly at the battle raging all around: a serpenthal in a frenzy a hundred steps away; a Shantasi warrior releasing a toxic pallid wolf against one machine; Krotes slaughtering anything that crossed their path. A group of Shantasi dead lay to the north, and in the heat of a blazing machine O’Gan was sure he saw movement in their limbs, a flicker in their eyes.

And then he faced the machine and its grinning Krote rider, and he smiled back as he raised his sword.

LENORA RODE THROUGH the battle, buffeted by the screams of the dying and the sound of arrows whipping through the air. The darkness was lit by burning machines and bodies. The air stank of fear and blood. An arrow glanced from a knot of scar tissue on her neck and she laughed, realizing that she felt more at home here than she had for a very long time.

A Shantasi tried to climb onto her machine, and Lenora let him think he had succeeded before turning around and burying her sword in his shoulder. “Meet my machine,” she said, and a dozen mouths opened in the side of her construct, biting into the dying Shantasi as he slid from its back.

Two eyes on the side of her machine stared up at her, pleading, blinking, and she turned away. Haunt me, will you, boy? she thought. Well, no need. I’m already haunted.

Ducianne rode alongside, grinning from ear to ear. “This is the life, eh, Lenora? This is the life we’ve always meant to live!”

“This is only their advance,” Lenora shouted. “The rest will be hiding past that fire to the south.”

“Shall we send the dead against them?”

Lenora looked back at the huge machines bringing up the rear, their cages alive with thousands of dead Noreelans. “Not yet,” she said. “There’ll be much more than this.”

“Do you think so? Do you think the Shantasi have more to throw at us?”

Lenora glanced left at where a huge shadow fought with a machine. The two seemed evenly matched. It was a dark, twisting thing that seemed to part and merge again with every movement. She turned to Ducianne and shrugged. “Whether they do or not, we’re adding to our army all the time.”

The shade was with them somewhere, flowing back and forth across the corpse-strewn battlefield. Lenora had already seen several dead stand and begin walking south.

“This is the life!” Ducianne shouted again, riding toward a small group of Shantasi.

Lenora drove south, keen to take the fight onward. She passed by several dead Krotes and many dead Shantasi, and it was already apparent who was winning this battle. It had started a few hundred heartbeats ago, and the end was in sight.

I see through you, her daughter’s shade whispered. I feel through you, and I hate what I feel.

“You don’t knowhow to feel,” Lenora said, but she regretted her words as soon as they were out.

You teach me everything you know.

“Ifeel.”

For the dead? For the dying?

“Enemy dead, enemy dying!” Lenora launched a hail of blades from her machine, cutting down two Shantasi and the big yellow wolf strung between them. The creature’s blood boiled in the air and sizzled as it struck the ground.

I want my mother, the shade said.

“I am your mother.”

You’re so different from the mother you could have been…Its voice faded, though no distance grew. Lenora felt it sitting in her mind, watching, feeling, and her scream could have been rage, or anguish.

THE BATTLE ENDED quickly. The Shantasi First Army had been determined and vicious, and the Krote machines cut down dozens at a time. Near the end many Krotes dismounted and took on the remaining warriors themselves, enjoying the chance for true swordplay. Fights went on for some time, the Shantasi already filled with the knowledge that they were the final few left alive. Lenora respected their tenacity; none of them dropped their swords and submitted to their fate. They all fought hard and died hard, and one or two even defeated one Krote opponent before being taken down by the next.

By the time the last Shantasi was killed, the transport machines were harvesting the first of the new living dead and dropping them into their cages.

Lenora ordered a brief halt, wanting to take stock of the fight and see how badly her force had been damaged. Ducianne rode back and forth gathering reports, and Lenora slipped from her machine and knelt on the ground, eyes closed.

“Leave me alone,” she said to her daughter’s shade. “For a while, please leave me alone. There’s work to do here, and then I’ll come for you.” But the shade only retreated to brood silently deep within her mind.

“Mistress, we’ve lost thirty machines and fifty warriors. And all the flyers are gone.”

Lenora looked up to her friend. Ducianne was frowning through a crust of drying blood. She knew that something was wrong. “That’s not too bad,” Lenora said. “Gather everyone here. We push for Kang Kang in an hour.”

“Are you hurting, Lenora?”

Strange way to ask, Lenora thought. Hurting, not hurt. She stood and shook her head, sheathing her sword and stretching. Her old joints clicked, several new wounds cooling as blood clotted them shut. “I’m old, Ducianne, you forget that. I’m not a youngster like you.”

Ducianne nodded and rode away. Lenora knew that her friend was not comfortable with Lenora’s unnatural age, how it could be or who had allowed it.

Lenora stretched again and turned to her machine. It watched her, and was that condemnation she saw in those blank eyes, or merely the reflection of her own? “Your night is far from over,” she said. She turned south and walked a few hundred steps in that direction, leaving the hustle of the Krotes behind and facing the true darkness of Kang Kang. That’s no place to be, she thought, and a shimmer of fear passed through her. She was surprised, and pleased. Fear showed that she was truly ready to face whatever they found once they entered that range of mountains. No place at all.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn