Dawn

Chapter 1

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

The evidence of scared, scattered communities lay spread out below, all of them illuminated against a 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 spy the hawk. Would they know? Would they have any inkling of what they were looking at?

She thought not. But soon that would change.

For most of the night, Lenora had been trying to avoid the Mages’ attention. She sat motionless and silent, as far back on the hawk’s tail as she could go, two short swords buried in the creature’s hide to provide precious handholds. She watched her masters with a sense of fear the likes of which she had never felt before. The Mages had changed so much. They were strangers to her now.

For the past three hundred years, Angel and S’Hivez had existed bitter and angry, given to lengthy musings on revenge. Lenora had served them and listened-their trusted lieutenant-and over time they had become shadows of themselves: mad old things who showed only occasional flashes of their former brilliance and brutality. Ensconced in their volcano retreat on Dana’Man, they had been fading away, though they had still retained a certain power. Things that once ruled a land could never lose that. But their glories had been vanishing into history, and the more time passed, the more Lenora’s impressions of them had been dictated by memory. The Mages’ power had become a self-perpetuating myth in her own mind.

Now that they had taken back their own, Lenora no longer had to rely on memory.

Angel still clasped the body of the farm boy to her chest, like a mother mourning her dead child. She had cut open his skull, then she and S’Hivez had torn into his torso, searching for something vital amongst his brains and flesh. From that moment, Lenora had felt the raw power surging from them, and they became true Mages for the first time in three hundred years. They had moved bones and organs aside, found what they sought and eaten it.

Then they had seemed to grow, though their size never changed. They remained silent, contemplative, and everything suddenly seemed to flow through rather than around them. And later, when dawn should have been ushering away the night, Angel and S’Hivez had cursed the sky.

Angel had been holding the boy’s tattered corpse ever since.

The hawk had died moments after they finished rooting through the boy’s insides, and Lenora thought they would fall. But then S’Hivez had buried his arms in the creature’s neck, delving inside just as he had probed the dead boy’s carcass, and the creature had risen again, bearing them northward.

Going away, a voice said. Lenora looked around, squinting against the wind. She had heard that voice intermittently since the fight with the Monks and machines, and she knew what it was: her dead, unnamed daughter’s shade still craving the comfort of her mother’s arms. Lenora buried her face in the hawk’s stiffening hide and cried tears tainted with anger. She lifted her head slightly and her tears were caught on the wind, blown into Noreela’s skies. She hoped they would spread and fall with the next rains, casting her sorrow across plains and valleys, mountains and lakes, where vengeance would be hers. They were a long way from Robenna, and it was falling farther behind with every heartbeat. But now that she knew she would return, the heat of revenge was growing brighter within her heart.

The people of Robenna had driven her out, poisoned her and murdered her unborn child. Given time, their descendants would pay.

“Dreaming of death and vengeance, Lenora?”

Lenora looked up into Angel’s eyes. The Mage had crawled back along the hawk’s spine and now sat astride its huge tail, her face a hand’s width from Lenora’s. She was beautiful. Whatever time had done to her, she had undone. The might of new magic flickered behind her eyes, and its potential seemed to light her from within.

Lenora tried to speak, but she was lost for words.

“Don’t worry,” Angel said. She drew closer still, until her blazing eyes encompassed the whole world. “So am I.”

“Mistress…”

“I frighten you?” Angel raised an eyebrow.

Lenora averted her eyes.

“That’s only right. Fear is good, Lenora. You remember the first time I touched you, casting out your pain and driving away death on that burning ship? You were filled with fear then also, but it was fear of the Black. I saved you from death to serve me, and you’ve done so ever since. But you’ve become casual about your fear, as S’Hivez and I have become blase about our desires. We’ve always wanted to regain magic, but maybe pain grew to suit us better. Perhaps we became too used to life as outcasts.” The Mage looked off past Lenora, back the way they had come. “Do you think that’s true, Lenora?”

“No, Mistress. You’ve always been Mages, with or without magic.”

Angel smiled, and Lenora felt a brief stab of jealousy-she was aware of how she looked with her bald head, scarred body and black teeth-but she cast it aside.

“Lenora, you need never lie to me. You’re almost one of us. You came with us out of Noreela three hundred years ago; you think the same way about this accursed place, and you want the same thing. So we’realmost the same…except you don’t have this.” She reached out and touched Lenora’s forehead.

At first, the point of contact burned. Then the sensation changed from heat to one of intense cold-a chill that would freeze air and crack rock-and Lenora’s eyes closed to accept whatever Angel was handing her.

There was one single image: the death of Noreela. Lenora viewed it at the speed of thought, north to south, east to west, passing over mountains and valleys, deserts and lakes, and everywhere finding the stain of destruction on the landscape. A city lay in ruins, buildings burned down into ruined heaps, streets strewn with smoking corpses, waterways polluted with rotting flesh. Farms and villages were equally devastated, their inhabitants laid out in neat lines and fixed to the land by wooden spikes. An army lay dead on a hillside, muddied armor already rusting beneath the blood spilled from the thousands of corpses. A great river was home to a hundred boats, all of them submerged, each of them filled to their watery brims with naked corpses.

And all the while, Noreela itself was suffering great traumas. A mountain range swam in fire, only the highest peaks still visible above the flames. On an endless plain the ground was cracked open, but instead of fire and lava rising up, the land’s innards rolled out across the grass, giant coils of molten earth and stone hardening in the twilight and venting scampering things the size of the largest hawk. The air turning to glass, the ground melting away, water bursting into flame…The whole of Noreela was in chaos, and at its center pulsed a magic grown darker than ever before.

“There, at the hub,” Angel’s voice said. “That’s us.” And Lenora saw. The fleeting visions slowed, settling toward a huge wound in the land. The wound bled. In the center of this sea of blood, floating in a boat forged from the bones of countless victims, writhed two ecstatic shadows.

The Mages, joyous with the victory of vengeance found.

Angel removed her finger from Lenora’s head.

“The future?” Lenora gasped.

“No one sees the future. I showed you what Iwant of the future: Noreela drowning in blood. And with your help, S’Hivez and I will make it so.” Angel paused, looked down at her hands, then continued. “You have no idea of thispower, Lenora! It’s like being dipped in molten metal, yet knowing you can send that heat anywhere, to do anything. S’Hivez and I have been communing with shades, and they are working for us already. I can see what’s happening in the land because the shades tell me! We know that the Monks are dead back in the valley, and the machines are still once again. We know that the Duke’s army is weak and formless in Long Marrakash. We know that night is here for Noreela, and it isour night. I can step from one side of the land to the other simply by closing my eyes.”

Lenora was speechless. The energy came off Angel in waves, and the whole of Noreela pivoted on the Mage’s every utterance.

“Our army is yours,” Angel said. “When it lands at Conbarma, you will be there to welcome it in and arm it with the greatest weapons we can make. And then you will take Noreela.”

“You’re leaving?” Lenora asked, aghast.

Angel turned to crawl back along the hawk.

“But where are you going?”

“You question me?”

“Of course not.”

Angel laughed, as if dismissing Lenora’s query and her own stern answer. But she said no more, leaving Lenora wondering what the next few days would bring.

War, for certain. More bloodshed and death than she had ever imagined. But with the Mages leaving the Krote army to its own devices, Lenora found doubt stoking her fear.

SHE SOON LOST track of time. The constant twilight was unsettling, as if some angry god had swiped the sun from existence. To begin with, Lenora had been able to keep step with time as it drifted by. But as that day passed and they flew on into the steady night, she became confused. She found herself glancing to the west, hoping to see the smudge of a bloodred sunrise, but there was only twilight. As the Mages had taken daylight from the world, so had they removed night, leaving the land perpetually in between: no sun, no stars. Only the moons remained.

The life moon was a silvery disc, low down to the horizon in the east, nervously peering above the edge of the world. The death moon, bright and dusty yellow, rode high in the north. They flew toward it, and it seemed to leak some of its sickly hue across the landscape. There were those who believed that the moons were the remains of ancient gods, banished to the skies by a mutual hatred and destined to gather as many souls as they could in an eternal competition. The life moon was losing, and the death moon was yellow with the swell of wraiths. Soon, moon-followers believed, it would burst.

Lenora had no time for such phony religions. She knew her gods, and they rode this dead beast with her. And now that the Mages were here, Noreela had no room for alternative beliefs. She was lucky; few people ever spent time with their deities of choice.

They flew on, heading northward for Conbarma and the landing site for the Krote army. The Mages let nothing distract them. Noreela was a banquet spread below them, waiting to be plundered and pillaged just as they had dreamed about for three hundred years. Lenora could see larger towns now as they went farther north, splashes of illumination across the shadowed land, and twisting ribbons of light where caravans traveled the surrounding countryside. She would have so loved to land, take on one of these groups and show them the true meaning of fear. Since the battle for Conbarma, the whole land had changed, and she craved the feel of an enemy’s blood on her skin once more. But the hawk carried them on, its dead tentacles trailing behind them, gas sacs still gushing to keep them afloat, and Lenora knew that the Mages had a more encompassing revenge in mind.

There would be slaughter, and blood would be spilled. But first they had an army to welcome.

IT HAD BEEN dusk when they left the machines’ graveyard, and when they sighted the Bay of Cantrassa below them, Lenora guessed that it should be dusk again. They had been gone for almost two full days, and she hoped that her warriors had prepared Conbarma for the arrival of the Krote ships. They would be only days away, perhaps even now passing the northernmost reaches of The Spine. Time was moving on, and war was close.

As S’Hivez guided the hawk down to follow the coastline to Conbarma, Lenora found herself eager to dismount. She craved some time away from her masters. She was tired, her skin was burned by the cold wind and she felt dizzied by the power she had been close to for so long. The Mages exuded a force that sent Lenora’s tired mind into a spin. They were like holes punched in reality, so alien that even she, their servant and lieutenant, could barely endure their presence.

For a while, the voice of her daughter’s shade whispered in her mind. Lenora shook her head and Angel glanced back, the Mage’s eyes a piercing blue against the twilit sky.

“Conbarma,” S’Hivez said, the word like broken glass against skin. He spoke so rarely that Lenora had forgotten his voice.

She leaned sideways and looked down at the sea to their right. The surging waves swallowed the death moon’s yellow light and spread it like a slick of rot. To their left she saw the port of Conbarma nestled in its own natural bay. She was glad that the fires of the battle had been extinguished.

S’Hivez delved deeper into the dead hawk’s neck and brought it down, curving into a glide that would take them to Conbarma from the sea. They passed just above the waves. The hawk’s trailing tentacles skimmed the water, throwing up lines of spray, and by the time they reached the harbor there were several hawks aloft, their Krote riders armed and ready to repel an attack.

Lenora managed a smile. How their moods would change when they saw what this thing brought in!

S’Hivez landed the hawk on the harbor’s edge. He extracted his hands from its dead flesh and flicked fat and clotted blood at the ground. Lenora wondered whether he saw the symbolism in this, but she guessed not. Angel had always been the one for that.

The hawk deflated beneath them, spreading across the ground like a hunk of melting fat, and immediately its stink grew worse. Lenora glanced at the dead boy lying between the Mages. She wondered why Angel had brought him this far.

Lenora slid from the hawk, but had trouble finding her feet. Nobody came to help. She looked up, hands on her knees, cringing as her legs tingled back to life, and then she realized why. None of the Krotes were looking at her.

The Mages were kneeling side by side on the ground. Their hands were pressed to the dusty surface before them. S’Hivez seemed to be chanting, though it could have been the sound of the sea breaking against the mole. Light began to dance between their fingers. Dust rose. Stones scurried away from their hands like startled insects.

Dozens of Krotes-those with whom she had flown from Dana’Man, and fought for Conbarma two days before-gathered around, faces growing pale in the moonlight as they saw who had arrived. One or two glanced at Lenora and then away again, back to the Mages, fascination overpowering the fear.

It’s good to be scared, Lenora thought. That was what Angel had told her. The Mages had always been a formidable presence, but now they were so much more. There was something so dreadfully wrong about the exiled Shantasi and his ex-lover that Lenora found it difficult to look at them. It was as though light were repelled from their skin. She thought of the shapes she had seen in her vision: two wraiths aboard the bone boat on a sea of Noreelan blood.

The ground started to glow beneath the Mages’ hands. The last of the smaller rocks flitted away. They stung Lenora’s lower legs, but she dared not move. This was something she had to see, because she knew now what the Mages were doing: displaying their power to the Krotes. They could have landed and talked to the warriors, but discussion of the magic they now possessed was nothing compared to a demonstration.

Lenora stepped back several paces. Her heart fluttered a few beats, and the many wounds on her exposed skin tingled with something approaching excitement. This is when we see, she thought. This is when they really show us what they can do.

The Mages began to stand, hands maintaining contact with the ground as though stuck there, then slowly they straightened their backs, raising their arms and bringing part of the ground with them. Each hand was lifting a column of fluid stone. The ground vibrated. Rock growled and crumbled, and strange rainbows shimmered in the dust. Angel laughed, and S’Hivez’s muttering became louder, the words revealing themselves as something less complex than a spell. It’s all coming back, he said, again and again.

Lenora could feel heat from the molten rock, and she saw other Krotes stepping back as their skin stretched and reddened. The Mages began to mold it and, between them, something took shape. Sharp edges appeared from nowhere; curves hardened; a globe of rock rose up on thin stony stilts. Angel laughed again, and Lenora shivered.

The Mages backed away from each other, allowing the thing room to grow. More rock flowed from the ground, urged on by a simple gesture from S’Hivez, and they molded this around the form, thickening the trunk and lengthening the limbs. They added more, and then S’Hivez stepped back and lowered his hands.

He looks tired, Lenora thought. They have their magic, but they’re not used to using it. S’Hivez looked at her through the heat haze, and she saw the black pits of his eyes. He scowled. She looked away, skin crawling, scalp tightening as if the old wound there were about to reopen. A thought came, and she could do nothing to hold it back: He can hear me.

“Lenora!” Angel called. “A present for you, and it will be ready soon.” She pointed at the sea and a huge geyser rose, glinting silver and yellow from the moons’ contrasting light. Krotes scattered as the water fell into a wave, tumbling across the ground until it broke around the glowing sculpture.

The stone hissed as its framework was suddenly cooled. And as the steam died away, Angel appeared by Lenora’s side. She leaned in close, her breath hot. “It’s yours,” she whispered. “Your machine, your ride, and soon I’ll give it life.” She turned away and surveyed the assembled Krotes. “You’llall have one! Machines of war, for you to do what you’ve trained for: take Noreela. Soon the ships will be here, and your fellow Krotes will follow you east and south and west. I name every one of you here a captain, and Lenora is your mistress. You answer to her, and she will answer to us. And the rewards at the end of this war will be beyond imagining.” She turned back to Lenora. “I’m giving you my army,” she said. “Use it well. I know your intentions, Lenora. I know your aims.” She came close so that only Lenora could hear what she said. “I know what you hear and what speaks to you, but ignore that calling until you’ve fulfilled your purpose. You’re herefor me, andbecause of me.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Lenora whispered. Not long to wait, she thought. And she hoped that the shade of her dead child could hear the promise in those words.

“And now, life for your machine.” Angel walked to the fallen hawk with the dead boy still on its back. She laughed. “Oh, S’Hivez, evenyou must appreciate the symbolism of this!”

The Mage laid one hand on the hawk and the other on the dead farm boy’s arm. Beneath her hands, the flesh of both began to shimmer and ripple, and soon the stench of cooking meat once again permeated the air. She moved back slowly, melted flesh flowing like thick honey, then she swiveled and thrust her hands at the sculpture.

Flesh flew. Blood misted the air as if blown by a sudden gust of wind. Bones cracked and ruptured, impacting the rock, delving inside and crackling as they fused back together. The flesh of the boy and the hawk melded and filled the fighting machine, flooding hollows within its rocky construct, then building layer upon layer around its outside. Blood greased its joints. The dead hawk shrank as more of its flesh was scoured away. The boy’s corpse was no more.

Angel lowered her hands and stepped back. Lenora saw that she was panting slightly, her shoulders stooped a little too much, and she wondered again at how much this new magic was draining the Mages. But then Angel looked at her, and behind her smile Lenora saw a strength she had never witnessed before. Not just physical strength-Angel had always been strong-but a strength of purpose. There was no doubt in Angel, and no fear. She was unstoppable.

“Here it is,” Angel said. She pointed back at the machine. “And here you are.”

Lenora fell to her knees. She clasped her hands to her head and pressed, trying to squeeze out the thing she felt inside. She was intimately aware of the strange life that had just been created, and even as she felt Angel’s calming touch and heard her soothing words, she knew that this was something never meant to be.

Take care, Angel whispered in her mind, you’re strong, Lenora, and this is feeble and weak-a machine, a tool for you to command and use. It lives like an animal down a hole, not like you, not like a proud Krote come to conquer and claim. Its half-life is less than a hawk’s shit, but you are linked to it now by this touch. And Angel withdrew from her mind, leaving that link in place.

Lenora took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She was looking directly at the machine where it stood awaiting her touch. She sensed its unnatural shade drawing back in fear.

The machine moved.

The Krotes gathered across the harbor gasped. This is the first time they’ve seen magic, Lenora thought. She was the only one here, other than the Mages, who had been alive during the Cataclysmic War. These other Krotes were fifth- or sixth-generation descendants of those who had fled Noreela, tall or short, dark-skinned or light, the blood flowing in their veins merged with that of the many tribes they had found on Dana’Man and its satellite islands. They were fighters, warriors, true to the Mages and faithful in their pledges. But they had only ever heard of magic, never seen it. Nevertouched it.

Lenora looked around at her captains and saw their fear, and realized that this was a defining moment in the history of the land. Everything had changed when the Mages caught the boy, took his magic and stripped his soul, and now that change was about to envelop the whole of Noreela. What she did now would dictate her own part in that change, and what would follow.

Lenora walked forward, approaching what she perceived to be the front of this machine. As she drew closer she saw that it had the semblance of a face. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, the machine was staring at her.

It had several eyes, placed at various points around its bulbous head. Two of them were looking at her. It was too dark to see their color, but she knew that they were not the eyes of a hawk. She lifted her chin and glared back.

The machine lowered itself, stone underside settling on the ground, and Lenora climbed onto its back. It stank of something more elemental than scorched flesh. It smelled, Lenora realized, of magic.

She sat astride the machine’s back and rested her hands on two bony protuberances on either side of its head. Stand, she thought, and the machine raised itself on several stone legs. It shivered beneath her, the vibrations traveling up her thighs and into her stomach. It gave a strange sexual quality to her fear, tingling her skin and causing her old wounds to ache as if craving the knife, the blade, the arrow once again. Walk, she thought, and the machine took its first hesitant steps. She could feel its inner workings throbbing beneath her: no heartbeat, but something that felt like a fire being stoked; no breathing, but gasps as gas was blown out and air sucked in. Turn, and the machine paused at the edge of the harbor, a step away from tumbling into the sea, and rotated to face her Krotes.

The Mages watched. Even S’Hivez seemed to be smiling.

Lenora sensed the power at work beneath her. This was not just a thing of stone and flesh and blood, it was also imbued with the Mages’ magic, awash with a deadly potential that she had yet to realize. The possibilities were thrilling. Fire, she thought, and a ball of flame formed from one of the machine’s mouths. She held it there, its roaring echoed by the gasps from the assembled warriors. Then she turned the machine and flung the fire far out to sea. It seemed to burn even as it sank, and for a few seconds the whole harbor’s surface was illuminated from beneath.

My gods, she thought, what have you created?

Lenora turned the machine and stood on its back, and from there she could see right across Conbarma’s waterfront. Every surviving Krote-almost fifty of them-and the Mages were watching her. She felt the power in that, and smiled.

Angel smiled back.

“There’s work to be done!” Lenora said. “More machines to be built, more preparations to make. The sun has fled, and the twilight it’s left behind will be filled with the death cries of Noreela. This is your time: the time you’ve lived for from the moment you became Krotes.” She paused, looked down at the head of the machine with its mad eyes and slavering mouths. “I once saw the northern shores of Noreela awash with blood, and that memory has always been bitter, because the blood was my own. Now it’s time to stain the land again, this time with its own blood. Noreela will fall; there’s no doubt of that. It’s the manner of that fall I look forward to seeing.”

More fire, she thought, and the machine formed several balls of flame and sent them to hover above the heads of the Krotes.

The warriors cheered, the fire reflected in their eyes. Lenora walked the thing among them, letting them reach out and touch its cool stone and cooler flesh. The fires faded, but in the twilight they all became familiar with this thing that would help them win the war.

Lenora smiled at Angel and S’Hivez, and she saw that they were pleased.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn