Dawn

Chapter 10

A THOUSAND MORE Krotes had arrived, and now it was time to march.

Ducianne left first, followed by her force of three hundred Krotes. Several flew, most walked, some crawled like snakes. They gathered at the western outskirts of Conbarma and then wound out across the plains, Ducianne at the column’s head, standing on her stone-slabbed machine and whipping her bladed hair from side to side. Lenora sat on her own machine and watched them go. Bring me the Duke’s head, she had told Ducianne. I’m for Noreela City. Meet me on the way, or meet me there, in which case I’ll have already taken it.

And so the real war to take Noreela began. Lenora felt a thrill of history running through and around her; she was the hub of its stories and pathways. Things were closing in on her, and moving out. The past was ending at the tip of her sword, and the future would be built upon her actions. There would be stories and songs written about her, and her name would be uttered in awe. This stinking world had existed in a state of stagnation for three hundred years. The next few days would see more change than any Noreelan had experienced in their lifetime.

Lenora fingered the ears strung from her belt. She knew most of them by touch. Here was the Krote who had come at her a century before, determined to usurp her as the Mages’ most trusted warrior: Lenora had gutted him and sliced off his ear while he was bleeding to death in the snow.

And here, the large bristly ear from a wild creature they had found on one of the hundreds of small islands east of Dana’Man. It had lived in a commune of sorts, with roughly built homes, some attempts at crop growing and a range of basic weaponry. But it was more beast than human-not a race that could be incorporated into the Krote army-and Lenora and her fellow warriors had set about slaughtering its tribe for food and skins.

She ran her fingers farther along the belt, each dried and shriveled ear inspiring memories more powerfully than any smell or sound. Lenora was a creature of violence, and the feel of the knotted edges where she had slashed these ears from her victims set her heart racing. A woman from one of the tribes living in the glaciers of Dana’Man, a creature from the far northern shores of that damned place, a young girl who had come at her with a knife after Lenora had slaughtered her parents…

And then at the front of her belt, closest to the knot that held the leather tight, the still-soft ear of the watcher on Land’s End. He had been the first Noreelan to die at a Krote’s hand since the end of the Cataclysmic War. Lenora had killed him. That had felt good, and the ear belonged on her belt more than any other.

Soon there would be many more.

Her blood was up, and her dedication to the Mages made her proud. That distant voice may come and go, yet she had a land to subdue before she could pay it heed.

Lenora closed her eyes and banished her unborn daughter’s shade deep in her mind. Its time would come, but later. Much later.

Now there was blood to spill.

THEY RODE SOUTH and passed through the cultivated fields surrounding Conbarma. Dusky light revealed diseased crops and trees, too far gone to have turned this way since the Mages cursed away the daylight. Lenora rode her machine along a rough dirt track between stone walls, but other Krotes rode across fields and through sparse hedges, kicking up the stink of rot from the ground. This was a crop that would never have been harvested. Lenora leaned down and plucked the fat head of a grass crop she could not identify. It was slick with decay, its yellow seedlings turned black and damp.

The fields soon gave way to wilder ground: the Cantrass Plains. Lenora had been here before. At some point in the next day she would cross the path she had taken three hundred years before, fleeing Lake Denyah with the Mages and retreating across Noreela to the foot of The Spine. She wondered whether she would know that place when she came to it, whether it would give her the sensation of having come full circle through life. Before, she had been running away. This time, she was on the offensive.

Lenora stood on the back of her machine and gave the order to increase speed. She was amazed and awestruck at the sight behind her. She had eight hundred Krotes with her, and for as far as she could see the landscape was alive with machines of all shapes and designs. The Krotes rode as if they had been born into this. Some had fashioned reins from rope or leather, preferring to stand as their rides loped across the landscape. Others sat back, sharpening weapons, checking quivers, greasing slideshocks, packing throwing stars, testing crossbows, or familiarizing themselves with their machines’ various weaponry. Fires exploded here and there when engines billowed gas. Some of them growled, as though already a part of the fight, and others darted about as if stalking something.

Moonlight sheened their way. They leapt over tumbled stone walls, skirted around trees, crashed through hedges, and Lenora could see the shadows of flying machines against the darkened sky. She wondered whether they could fly high enough to find the sun, but it was a treacherous thought, as though she was denying the Mages’ power.

The sun has gone, she thought. There’s no reasoning to that. It’s gone because Angel and S’Hivez wish it so, and they are the most powerful things in the world. Let the creatures of Kang Kang rise against them, let New Shanti unite in a final stand, let the Sleeping Gods rise. The Mages have magic, and its power is dictated only by the limits of their minds.

Lenora’s machine vaulted a fallen tree, but she did not even need to brace her legs. The ride was as smooth as floating on water.

THEY WERE MOVING fast, and several hours after leaving Conbarma they encountered one of the Cantrass Plains’ shifting homesteads.

Lenora was astounded. She felt a flicker of admiration for the people who remained with this giant thing, trying to continue their ancestors’ lifestyle. The energy and effort expended in moving back and forth across the Cantrass Plains surely outmatched any benefit they may gain. Perhaps it was a way of keeping madness at bay, like a man clearing a glacier a snowflake at a time. There was no final aim in sight because it was impossible; it was the process that took time and diverted attention from more serious matters.

The homestead was battered and dilapidated. The remains of rope bridges hung at its sides, their treads long since decayed and fallen away. Deflated water sacs were home to large gray fungi. Its roof had cracked and crazed, and even from close to the ground Lenora could see that large slabs of rock were missing.

The machine’s legs had disappeared, and now its inhabitants pulled it on a carpet of logs.

A hundred people tugged on thick ropes, a hundred more pushed. Dozens of large cattle and a few bedraggled horses were attached in leather harnesses, whipped on by rovers standing on their backs. The machine moved minutely, creaking and cracking some of the logs underneath, and the people strained as they tried to find somewhere better. It was a monumental effort for minimal results, and Lenora wondered whether this same machine had been moving in the same direction for three hundred years.

She ordered the Krote army to halt and they watched for a while, amazed that none of the homestead rovers seemed to have seen or heard them. The light was poor, but the moonlight seemed to like these new machines of war, glinting from sharp edges and making their stony parts almost luminescent.

“How hopeless,” Lenora said.

The rovers pushing and pulling their giant, broken home were all heavily muscled, and yet they appeared tired and weak. Their feet were large and flat, their hands knotted into stumpy pads. Lights burned in a few of the homestead’s windows, and Lenora wondered at the hierarchy that allowed people to remain inside. The rulers, obviously. Tribal heads. Those with power or charisma, who could command the others to do their bidding.

The machine moved a step as they watched. Many people sank to the ground, while others dragged several stripped trees from the rear to the front. They placed them behind the harnessed cattle and horses, forcing them beneath the front edge of the homestead with heavy wooden hammers. Then they walked back to the rear and took up position again.

So here was the first real test. For three centuries the Mages had plundered the tribes and races of the huge land of Dana’Man and its neighboring islands, adding to their army, training it, instilling a hatred of Noreela-a land none of that army had ever seen and many had never heard of. Down the decades old warriors had died and new had been born, until a large proportion of the army was Krote through and through. Different toned skins, different hair, some tall, some short…yet all Krote. Bred to fight. Born to kill, and aid the Mages in their revenge.

Now Lenora would begin to see how dedicated this army could be. The battle for Conbarma had been a fight; this would be a slaughter.

Lenora turned around and spoke to the Krotes within earshot. “It’s a sad first challenge,” she said, “but it’s practice for your machines.” She nodded, and half a dozen warriors moved forward.

The rovers saw them at last. Some stood upright and dropped their ropes, rubbing their hands as if to massage some feeling back in. Others turned and ran behind the machine. The men and women whipping the cattle dropped their lashes, and the cattle relaxed, heavy ropes dipping into the grass, animals slumping to their knees and baying in pain and relief.

A few windows in the machine grew dark as the fires inside were extinguished.

Six Krote machines walked across a field of low, ropy plants, and the screaming began.

A hail of arrows dropped onto the advancing Krotes from atop the homestead, and they returned fire. A body fell to the ground, arms and legs thrashing. Another slid down the side of the huge structure and snagged on a rope, swinging there as blood darkened the stone below it.

The rovers who had been pushing the homestead ran, and two machines went in pursuit. One of them flailed its long metal arms, harvesting the people. The other machine coughed a wide spray of fire before it, lighting the dim scene. It stomped across its burning victims, crushing them into the undergrowth.

The other four machines reached the homestead. One Krote started slaughtering the cattle, using a crossbow to kill individual creatures while her mount fired a dozen spiked balls at a time from rents in its fleshy hide. A rover leapt from one of the horses and came at her, fearless and mad. The Krote let him get close before putting a bolt through his mouth.

More arrows were slipping from shadows as those within the homestead recognized that they were under attack. The Krotes went inside.

Lenora sat back on her machine and watched the display. Any anxiousness quickly melted away, and she felt a sense of satisfaction. These rovers had been battling to survive for centuries, and their history would be wiped out in minutes. It could be the same for all of Noreela. The timescales would differ, perhaps, but the result would be the same. In a few moments these rovers’ wraiths would be wandering with no one to chant them down, and their future would have been erased.

But that vision, Lenora thought, with no room for survivors of any kind. She shook her head. Symbolism. Angel was fond of it, and she had used its touch to show Lenora what she wanted for Noreela.

Lenora could sense the effort every other Krote had to expend to refrain from joining in. The stench of burning flesh filled the air, and it was a smell that most of them had not experienced for some time. There were some with her who had landed at Conbarma several days before-captains now, blooded with Noreela’s first blood-but most of these warriors had not seen battle since long before departing Dana’Man. Therehad been fighting there, when the Krotes launched expeditions east or west along the seemingly endless island and encountered primitive tribes and settlements. And there were more ferocious enemies the farther afield they went, leaving the shores of Dana’Man and venturing out into uncharted and unexplored waters. On those unknown islands were unknown things, and some of them had offered a challenge.

But never anything like this. This was a slaughter. And this blood, spilled so easily, smelled of triumph.

Lenora breathed in deeply, and the last scream of a dying woman drifted away across the Cantrass Plains.

Scattered fires illuminated the scene, giving a deeper darkness to the middle distance. Bodies burned, spitting and gushing geysers of bluish flame. The windows of the homestead flickered like blinking eyes. The rear of the old machine seemed to blur and slip, and a great section of it melted away from the rest, the glowing acid flowing thick with dissolved rock, metal and flesh.

Sweet revenge? a voice said deep inside, ambiguous, and Lenora was strong, she could listen. The future was filled with vengeance, and one would feed the other.

With the shade of her daughter whispering to her, she led the Krote army south across the Cantrass Plains.

LENORA KEPT HER eight hundred Krotes and their machines with her. They split into four groups, maintaining contact with one another by means of small flying constructs, several dozen of which had split off from some of the larger machines and formed themselves from air, earth and rock. There was a hint of the shade’s workings in these things, but they did more than simply flit through the air like bats. The first time one of them landed before Lenora on the back of her mount she cringed away, waiting for it to sprout arms and legs, a head or some other less obvious appendage. But it remained motionless, a thing the size of her fist with only a grilled opening at one end to mar its smoothness.

And then it spoke.

Since then Lenora and her captains had been in constant communication, though the landscape often meant that they were out of sight. They spoke of the battle to come with both eagerness and concern, but none of them considered anything farther ahead. None of them spoke of a time beyond war.

The ground trembled beneath them. The darkness parted for them, and closed again when they had passed. They slashed across the surface of Noreela, wounding it with their presence, and already there was blood drying on their swords.

JOSSUA ELMANTOZ HAD been walking forever. At first he had tried counting the days and nights, but the constant twilight had disturbed his perception of time to such an extent that seconds became minutes, and the only count he could rely upon was his own rapid heartbeat. It pummeled at his chest, speeding even when he tried to rest, as though keen to carry him ever closer to death.

He kept his hood up, rested his hand on the hilt of his sword, looked at the ground a few paces ahead of him as he walked on.

His moonlit journey across Lake Denyah had been strange. He had heard things he had never noticed out there before: creatures surfacing, hissing at the sky and sinking down again beneath the waves, leaving the spicy stench of something unknown drifting across the lake’s surface. None of the rising things seemed interested in him. One emerged a hundred steps from his small boat, a black shiny shape. He stretched out low in the boat so that he did not offer such a large target-joints complaining, old bones wishing he were still at rest in the Monastery-and watched over the gunwale as the serpent twisted and wailed like a pained wraith in the moonlight. The life moon sheened its oily skin, stroking head to tail as it raised various parts of itself from the water. Then it floated on the surface before sinking slowly beneath, leaving barely a ripple to hint at its existence. Jossua sat up again, staring after the serpent, and he knew why he had never seen its like before. That was not something of the Mages or the new magic, but it wasa thing coveting darkness. A creature of the night previously hidden away from the sun, emerging now because of the constant twilight. The Mages’twilight.

Perhaps there will be more.

He had continued on across the lake, sailing when the winds were in his favor, paddling slowly when they were not. He was a very old man, and he expected his heart to give out at any moment. But he was resilient. He had seen and been through much more than any other Monk alive, and experience had hardened his shade like petrified wood. His bones might be weak, his skin thin and his blood like water, but it was his single powerful obsession that drove him on. Even in this dusk, when color all but bled from the world, he knew that his face was a bright, angry red.

After Lake Denyah, he had entered into the mountain range of The Heights, a place that harbored many small, isolated settlements. The people who lived here rarely left, and knew little of what was happening elsewhere in Noreela. Jossua had not been here for over a hundred years.

The Heights was where he found the first body.

At first the corpse was simply a shadow amongst shadows, blending into the shaded landscape like any other rock, tree or deserted dwelling. But then the shadow showed its first hint of red.

The settlement he was passing through revealed signs of having been abandoned in a hurry. Front doors were hanging open, the streets were strewn with clothing, and here and there he found rotting animals that had been left tethered to stakes in the ground. He could make out the shape on the foot of the hillside now, distinct from other shadows, a shape he should recognize…

Walking through the village, he looked for clues as to what could have made the people flee. There was no indication that they had been attacked: no arrows in timber walls, dropped swords, bodies cleaved in two. There were no bodies at all, other than those of the trapped animals.

And that one ahead, on the hillside, something gleaming in one hand.

Jossua paused at the edge of the village, trying to gain a sense of what had happened. If there was danger in The Heights, he should know it for himself, because he had a long way yet to travel. Far too long, he thought, but he cast that idea aside. He had not been more than a dozen miles from the Monastery for decades, and now here he was embarking on a journey of three or four hundred.

I’ll be like that, he thought. That dead thing up there on the hillside. Left to rot into the ground. Purpose unfulfilled. My life ended as uselessly as it began.

He could still recall parts of his first journey across Lake Denyah, the glow of the Mages’ terrible power scorching the horizon, and the hundreds of people around him who would be dead within hours. Three hundred years ago, more lifetimes than he had any right to have lived. Yet here he was still breathing and thinking, and he had always believed there was purpose in that.

He always believed he lived for something more.

As soon as he left the deserted village behind, he knew that he was looking at a Red Monk.

Her hood had been torn away, along with most of her robe. The exposed skin was dark, and made darker by huge rents in her flesh. Dried blood was black in the moonlight. She had lost one arm and most of her other hand, her left leg was shredded like a gutted fish and her face was a mess of broken bone. The remnants of her hand were still curled around the hilt of her sword.

Jossua knelt beside the dead Monk, reached out, touched the back of her neck. He moved her cold head from side to side and lifted her hair. He was trying to see what had killed her.

Some of the wounds were from swords or slideshocks. Others were less easy to identify. The terrible trauma to her foot seemed to have been inflicted by something multibladed, or perhaps by teeth.

“What have you been through?” he said. But she had no answer, so Jossua stood and moved on, leaving the dead Monk to rot into the hillside.

He worked his way through the valleys of The Heights. He had neither the energy nor the inclination to climb mountains and traverse ridges. The valley was shaded from moonlight for much of the way, carved over time by the small rivers and streams that started high up and flowed eventually into Lake Denyah. He took water from the streams, rested by the rivers, and all the while he was amazed by the utter silence of this place.

Last time he was here, the mountains had been alive with noise. He hid himself away up on the mountainside, finding a small hollow in the ground sheltered from above by an overhanging rock and concealed from all sides by a growth of thick yellowberry bushes. From there he watched and listened, content to observe events rather than be a part of them.

Skull ravens had buzzed him, cawing into the sky as they touched on his mind and turned away. People worked on the valley floor, tending crops and hunting, building homes and damming streams to form fishing lakes. Their cattle bayed, wolves howled, children ran and laughed and screamed, and late at night the adults would sit around the village perimeter and light fires, keeping the darkness at bay and talking quietly amongst themselves. There was noise and activity, and Jossua had remained in his hiding place for seven days watching the village go about its business. The mountains were never silent. At night there were animals abroad, and the land itself seemed to breathe. There was still a rhythm to things even then, two hundred years after the Cataclysmic War had plunged the land into decline. The rhythm was upset on occasion, and the land sounded like an old man’s breath on his deathbed…but there was always more than silence. Perhaps it had been the sound of plants growing and dying.

Now the permanent twilight had started killing the plants. The inhabitants of these places had fled, and whatever once lived on the mountains seemed to be still, or dead. Magic’s withdrawal had mortally wounded the land; it seemed that it had taken magic’s reemergence to finally kill it.

A couple of miles farther on, Jossua found two more Monks, both of them dead, both bearing horrendous wounds similar to the first. He barely paused. He had known once the sun failed to rise that the Monks’ cause was at an end, that the Mages had returned to claim magic for themselves. And he had known what this would mean.

But seeing the results of defeat was harder than he could have imagined.

HALF A DAY later he saw another Red Monk. This one was still crawling.

Jossua paused for a moment, unnerved by this, the only living thing he had seen in over a day. Perhaps deep inside he had decided that he would never see a living Monk again. Days spent making his way across Lake Denyah and through The Heights had engendered a sense of isolation, which finding the Monks’ corpses had only exaggerated. Now something else was moving in this valley floor apart from him.

He knelt, tilting his sword so that it did not drag against rocks. The injured Monk was a hundred steps away, crawling so slowly that movement was barely visible. Jossua had spent long nights watching the moons vie for space in the sky, and he had often tried to discern their movements, wondering what it could mean that he only made it out if he closed his eyes for hours at a time. He had once believed that it displayed his disassociation from nature, an inability to perceive the tides of time which meant that he was remote from the land’s true beat. Events of great consequence shifted with the speed of a waning moon, and Jossua missed it all because he did not have the ability to see.

He looked at the ground by his feet, trying to decide whether the shapes and shadows of moonlight in the loose shale meant anything other than twilight. He shifted one stone with his foot and nothing crawled from beneath its shielding mass. He moved another and it hid only damp darkness. The shadows were motionless.

When he looked up again, the Monk had moved a step or two, one hand reaching out as if to grab water from the stream still a dozen steps away.

“You’re still alive,” Jossua whispered, not knowing what this could mean.

He approached the Red Monk. It was another woman, robe badly shredded and stained with blood and the muck she had been crawling through. There was little left of her face. Bubbles of blood formed where her nose had once been. Her hand clawed at the ground, found a hold, then pulled. The fingernails had been ripped out. She pushed with her feet. Her other hand was crushed and stinking of rot, and Jossua could make out fresh blade wounds where she had tried to amputate.

The bad hand would poison her blood, and she still had many questions to answer.

“Lie still,” he said. The Monk lowered her head to the ground and sighed.

Jossua raised his sword and brought it down just above the elbow of the damaged arm. He severed the limb with one strike, and the Monk twitched once and whined, the sound fading to nothing as her body grew still. He kicked the stinking arm.

Jossua knelt and turned her head. She still had one good eye, and he drew close and stared into it.

“I am the Elder Monk,” he said. “You must not die yet. I need to know what happened, and where, and when. You need to talk to me now.”

The Monk opened her mouth and hissed. Her tongue, gray and swollen, scraped at her teeth, flexing aside as she tried to speak. “Wa…wa…”

“Water,” Jossua said. He refilled his canteen from the stream, returning to the woman and letting a few drops touch her lips and enter her mouth. She barely moved, though her tongue writhed like a fat slug.

“Tell me,” he said. “Where have you come from?”

The woman took several deep breaths and pushed herself onto her side, looking up to the sky as though searching for the sun. “I saw the sun set,” she said, “and it never rose again.”

“Where was this?”

“Machines…graveyard…a place where they died, but I saw them live again.”

“And the Mages?”

The woman closed her eyes. “Took the boy from within a machine. Took him away. Darkness remained. That, and slaughter.”

“Where was this?”

“Gray…Woods.”

Jossua frowned and knelt back, trying to conjure a map of this part of Noreela in his mind. The Gray Woods lay to the east, a strange place bordering the Mol’Steria Desert. He had never been beneath the influence of their canopy, but he had heard the stories.

“You crawled that far?” he said. It was impossible. This woman would be dead within hours, and not all of her wounds were old and putrid. Some of them were new. He touched her chest and smelled his hand. Fresh blood, not rank.

The Monk shook her head, and her whole body started to jitter against the ground.

“What?” Jossua said. “What do you have to tell me?”

“Taken!” she suddenly screeched. “Taken and dragged andshredded!” Her good eye opened wide. It caught the death moon and shone yellow, echoing its shape and size in the sky.

“A tumbler?” Jossua asked.

The woman shook her head and snorted. Perhaps it was meant to be a laugh.

“Then, what?”

“No tumbler,” she said. “Monster. God. Demon!”

“But it let you live.”

The woman frowned and rolled onto her stomach, gnawing at drooping heathers.

“It let you live,”Jossua said. “Why?”

“Elder, we’ve lost,” she said.

“Do you have a message for me?”

“We’ve lost, we’ve lost…” She twisted her head, small stones crunching between her teeth.

Jossua stood. “That is no message at all.” He swung his sword and cut off the dying Monk’s head. For a second her jaw still worked, and he wondered at her final thought.

He left the body to cool and walked on. Monster…god…demon! He looked up at the hillsides and along the valley, but then went back to staring at the ground a few paces ahead. If something came at him from the dark, perhaps it was best he did not know until it arrived.

Then perhaps it would give him its message in person.

JOSSUA HAD THE stolen page from the Book of Ways in his pocket, ready to be referred to once he reached Kang Kang. Though even reaching that place was not a certainty.

He passed through the heart of The Heights and found more abandoned settlements. He discovered other things too, which he knew were signs of the land’s continuing decline. In one valley, a small forest had sprung up alongside the river. The trees’ leaves still shone bright and healthy in the moonlight, though they had not seen the sun for several days. As he drew closer, Jossua realized why. He had believed they would offer shelter for a camp, and perhaps food for his supper. But he wanted none of this fruit.

Wrapped in each trunk was the body of a small child. It was as if the children had been held there while the trees grew around them, and now they were part of the trees, their arms and legs jutting from the bark in imitation of the great limbs sprouting high above their heads. The trees pumped blood and the children seeped sap. They must have been old, though their flesh was still pink and ripe, and their eyes glittered in the moonlight, following Jossua’s progress as he paused and slumped slowly to the ground. Their mouths hung open, though no sound escaped their petrified throats. He could see the whites of their eyes like the inside of a burst wellburr seed. But these were like no trees he had ever seen before.

Jossua was tired, his old bones ached, his shoulder hurt from wounds received long before any of these children were born…and yet they disturbed him. There was something powerful about their stares, as though they knew much more than he, and he had to walk around the small forest and leave the valley before he could sit and rest in peace.

Monster…god…demon!

“Where are you?” he said to the night. “Come out of the shadows. If you’re demons, I’m just like you. If you’re gods, I won’t believe until you show me. If you’re monsters…well, I’ve taken meals with worse than you. You can’t bother me.” He thought of the mad Monk’s fear as she had spoken, and those fresh wounds cut through others gained days before in the Gray Woods. “You can’t bother me,” he said again, but repetition added no strength to the words.

Walking on, Jossua looked up into the strange twilight. No stars, no clouds, only moonlight smearing the heavens and battling for supremacy. The life moon seemed to be rising still, the death moon lower in the north, yet the color that persisted was the pale yellow of old fledge.

And at the thought of that buried drug, Jossua’s next breath brought a hint of its spice to his nose.

He paused and looked around. No fledge mines in The Heights, he thought. He snorted to clear his nose and breathed in again, but this time the scent was absent. Yet there was something in the night, a consciousness colliding with his own but trying not to make itself known. He looked left and right, searching for a sign, a shifting shadow or the glitter of unknown eyes watching from the vague distance. Nothing…and yet for the first time in days, he no longer felt alone.

He stood and spoke into the darkness. “If there’s meaning here, let me know it now. If this is just something looking for dinner, I’m old and tough, and I won’t go down without my sword opening you from arse to mouth.” Nothing responded, nor came at him from the shadows. He breathed in and sensed no fledge, and cursed his aged nose.

It was there, he thought. Just for an instant, but it was there. Because there were no fledge mines in The Heights did not mean that there was no fledge. It could be buried in deep veins never before found. Or perhaps fledgersdid know of its existence but for some reason had decided not to mine here. It was possible that a whiff of the buried drug would make it topside on occasion, especially in times as strange as these. I’m fooling myself, he thought. I’m making up stories where there are none, and making excuses for things I can never know.

Jossua walked on, glancing behind now and then, certain that there was now something else alive in The Heights other than him and those monstrous trees. The ground was breathing again, processes were no longer ended. But not all that lives is good.

Monster…god…demon!

“I think I know you already,” he said. And even Jossua’s bad old flesh felt a thrill at such presumption.

SOMETHING HAD BROUGHT those wounded Red Monks to The Heights. They had fought a battle in the Gray Woods-a fight that had involved the Mages and stabbing, clubbing things that could only have been machines resurrected from their deaths. They could not have come this far on their own, not bearing such terrible injuries. And something had given them fresh wounds bringing them here.

“A sign for me,” Jossua said to the dark.

An hour later he saw another Monk, his body wrecked with terrible wounds both old and new. He put him out of his misery without asking any questions.

I’m following a trail, Jossua thought, and the message will lie at its end.

IT TOOK ANOTHER day to leave The Heights and find the end of the trail. Jossua guessed at the passage of time, estimating it from the periods between food and toilet rather than anything to do with the sky. Time was paused for Noreela, and it was only inside that Jossua felt it moving on. I’m too old for this, he kept thinking. The idea seemed to provide the impetus to go farther.

He saw three more Monks, two of them dead. The living one was sitting against a rock beside a dry riverbed, holding his sword in both hands and staring ahead as if challenging the death stalking him. His wounds were many, but most of them were old. He had lost a lot of blood but retained his red rage, hood still raised, robe pinned to his body by several snapped blades.

As Jossua approached, the Monk’s attitude remained unaltered. The sword was still, his eyes open and dry. He was mad.

“I am the Elder Monk,” Jossua said, but the Red Monk did not seem to hear. Jossua reached out and passed his hand before the seated man’s unblinking eyes. Yet he was still alive, because Jossua could hear his ragged breathing, feel the heat flaring from him as though the red rage were fire.

Jossua clasped one of the broken blades and jerked it from the man’s flesh. He shook once, but did not utter a sound.

The Elder looked at the blade. Short, curved, snapped at the base, it looked more like a tooth than a man-made weapon. I’ve never seen a blade like this before except…

“Except on a machine.”

The man still did not blink.

“You’re dying,” Jossua said. Silence. He looked at the various wounds across the Monk’s body. The man was sitting in a darkened circle of soil where blood had leaked and dried. The robe hid much, but Jossua had no reason to reveal this Monk to the night.

“If you’re in no pain, I’ll not kill you,” he said. “Though there’s no use for you now. Do you know that? Do you see? Were you there when the Mages came and defeated us?”

The Monk remained still and silent and Jossua left him that way, a living statue looking westward as though trying to see his way back to the Monastery.

Jossua was being watched all the way. Each breath he exhaled was taken in by something else, examined by an intelligence he could not understand. His footsteps played the beat of an alien heart, and there was always something beyond the next outcropping of rock, hidden in the darkness just out of sight, concealed behind the next mountain. The land no longer felt dead, but what life existed was strange and foreboding.

Jossua had felt this way before, and not so long ago. He was in the presence of something both terrible and great. Though he was the Elder Monk, and had seen much in his long life, still he knew his place. He walked with his head bowed, and not only because he did not wish to see.

The mountains shrank into hills, the valleys grew wider, and Jossua felt the things following him move closer. Standing in a wide fields of dead yellowberry bushes, he felt the vibration through his feet that signaled the end of his time alone.

“I know you,” he said, but there was no bravery in his voice.

Only fear.

THE SCENT OF fresh fledge accompanied a movement in the ground. Fifty steps away, on the hillside that showed no sign of harboring anything but rock, a wide swathe of yellowberry bushes waved, whispering in the dusk. Then they were tugged belowground, twigs and dead leaves bursting upward as though taken in and spat out by whatever was rising.

It was the loudest noise Jossua had heard in days, and he expected the land to object. But the Nax were more of the land than anything he knew. Noreela’s heart beat in tune with their own slumbering souls, and they had been here longer than he could imagine. They were ancient as the rock, old as the mountains, and he had often wondered how complicit they were in each small step Noreela took through time. He had come to the conclusion long ago that humanity meant little to the Nax, sleeping their time away in fledge seams far below the surface of the land. Here and there were ghastly stories of miners disturbing their sleep-fledge demons, they called them-but Jossua doubted they would be disturbed if they did not desire it. Perhaps they were like the moons, existing on a different timescale to humanity, passing through life so slowly that their movements could never be properly discerned, their meanings and intentions subject to myth and legend rather than understanding.

Jossua still felt dread whenever he recalled his recent meeting with the Nax. Deep below the Monastery, time had stood still. And his question to them-had they driven the Mages out three centuries before-remained unanswered.

Now they were back.

The Elder Monk sank to his knees and bowed his head. He did not wish to see. He did not want to know. There was no true darkness aboveground, and when the Nax emerged he would see them, take in their forms while he felt himself observed and touched and smelled.

They’ve been doing that for days, he thought. Steering me and guiding me to this place for a reason I cannot begin to understand.

He listened to the sounds of tearing undergrowth lessen to nothing, and then soil and rocks tumbled into the ground. Fledge fumes drifted across the mountainside and Jossua breathed in, the drug’s fresh touch providing a brief, vivid series of images:

The Monk lying dead, head parted from her body by my sword, and in her chest the bolts from a resurrected machine; another Monk, one I never saw, walking west through The Heights on stumps instead of legs, my face in his mind and the words of defeat on his tongue; theone I left sitting against a rock, propped there still with his sword held out in front of him. Heart racing. Red rage scorching his face. Hunger and thirst closing in, blood thinning, wounds seeping, rot spreading, and he would decay to nothing whilst still staring ahead at something so terrible he can never let it go.

And then a voice answered his visions: We are the Nax.

Jossua opened his eyes.

Shadows rose before him. He could make no sense of them and for that he was glad. Their presence was a negative on the world, voids rather than shadows, places that should not be filled but were. They were so wrong that Jossua could barely see them.

Priest, the Nax said.

“Elder Monk,” Jossua whispered.

Priest…Monk. What do you learn of the Nax?

Jossua thought back to his few brief years in Long Marrakash before the Cataclysmic War, training as a priest and learning the myths and legends of the land. “I…I can’t remember,” he said.

Priest…the Nax…what do you know?

Jossua squeezed his eyes closed against the Nax, tried to hold his breath, but the tang of fledge oozed through his skin and touched his mind again. He remembered-a rapid recall that played like the pages of a turned book. “You’re fledge demons,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “Sleep in the seams of fledge. Rarely seen, never survived. Sometimes the digging machines woke you, and the machines stopped and the miners working with them vanished. Then you go deeper. The fledge preserves you. Perhaps you are the fledge.”

The vision came to an abrupt end and Jossua opened his eyes, shocked. The shadows before him drew back, letting in moonlight. Jossua gasped. The Nax, he thought, unable to do anything but stare at the thing standing before him, poised above the ground in a place it was never meant to be. It dripped yellow dust, as though shedding the death moon’s light.

You know nothing of the Nax, the shadow said, and it uttered something that may have been a laugh.

Jossua tried to stand and move away, because he did not think his heart could survive this. There were other shadows on the hillside, other Nax prowling the dark and shedding the death moon’s light as soon as it touched them.

“What are you?” Jossua whispered.

We are waiting, the Nax said. You wait with us. In Kang Kang there is hope.

“The Womb of the Land?”

The Womb is protected.

“What can I do to help?”

Unprotect.

“How?”

Learn our language. And suddenly his audience was over, and the Nax had somewhere to take him.

Jossua felt something grab him around both legs. The touch was nothing he could identify. Solid and soft, sharp and blunt, it was as though the shadows had taken hold.

Will they keep me here forever? he thought, and then the shadows pulled.

He fell onto his back, reaching out behind just in time to prevent himself from being brained. Still, the breath was knocked from him, and he was dragged up the hillside toward where the Nax had emerged. They took no care over him at all: his robe was ripped from his back, undergarments snagged on rocks or spiky plants, and the jarring impacts soon caused Jossua to cry out in pain.

Monk, the Nax said, voice full of derision.

The Elder Monk clamped his mouth shut and weathered the pain as he was dragged up the hillside. He looked up at the unnatural sky and thought of the Mages, and realized then that the Nax were acting because of what the Mages had done. Filled with mockery though they were, the fledge demons still had cause to guide Jossua here, to them.

They spoke of Kang Kang and the Womb of the Land.

They spoke of hope.

“You need me,” Jossua said, his voice shaking with the multiple impacts his body was enduring. The Nax did not respond. The pain became something else-an experience from another life, remote from him now-and as the moons vanished and true darkness took him, Jossua found a smile.

THEY TOOK HIM deep. To begin with, he felt the remnants of the yellowberry bushes scratching at his body, then there was only darkness and the impact of rock and stone. His skin and flesh were scored away. He found himself surrounded by fledge, the smooth, sandy drug soft after the sharpness of rock on his body. The Nax moved quickly, darting left and right, powering through the fledge and hauling him after them, taking him deeper and deeper. Jossua felt the weight of the world changing around him. The land above weighed down, the mass of rock sucking the blood from his body, draining him, stripping his bare wounds of loose flesh and filling him with fledge, more than was safe for a man one-tenth his age, and yet he smiled at the Nax, pleased that he felt no smile in return. They terrified him, but they needed him. In that he found comfort.

The Nax dragged Jossua until he faded from consciousness, carried away on fledge visions that made no sense to a dying man.

JOSSUA ELMANTOZ WAS over three hundred years old. He did not know how or why he had remained alive for so long, but he believed that it resulted from his purpose in life. It was his destiny to remain alive on Noreela to prevent the Mages’ return. To do this, magic had to be kept away from the people and places of Noreela.

He had never considered the possibility of failure. He was confident in his task and those who helped him: the Red Monks, mad and strong and so committed to the life they led that they thought of little else. If commitment had been a force of nature, the Red Monks would have been unstoppable.

I’m a monster, Jossua had once thought, but only once. That had been a long time ago when he was a hundred years old. I’m a monster. But perhaps it takes a monster to defeat one. And so he had continued to gather other monsters to him, converting them and making them even more monstrous than he, and the Red Monks had waited in their Monastery like a blood bubble ready to burst. Their craze and madness became their life force, a throbbing insistence that death was no easy answer, and slowly their flesh and bones and blood took on the same stubborn defiance against the Black. We’ll all be chanted down in the end, Jossua had once told the assembled Monks, and it will be the greatest death chant Noreela has ever heard.

And now here he was, his body broken and wallowing in fledge, his mind sent to see the truth of things, and the Monks’ final song was barely even a whimper. Its echoes had passed across the land without touching a blade of grass or turning a sand rat’s head. The Red Monks’ wraiths were loose and mad, awaiting their elusive rest knowing that their whole lives had led to failure.

CLOSE TO DEATH, perhaps Jossua found life for the first time.

His body lay broken and bleeding beneath the foothills of The Heights, Nax sitting about him like shadows. So many open wounds let in so much fledge that his mind soared, passing through a mile of rock with no effort at all, and when he burst out into the Mages’ dusk he reveled for a while, suddenly free of the decrepit vessel that had kept him chained to Noreela for so long. He was old and wise and mad, but with fledge driving his soul skyward he rediscovered that seed of youth, a naive curiosity that had somehow survived the centuries. For the first time in a hundred years he could remember the face of his fiancee as she cried him away to the Cataclysmic War. She had been so proud being betrothed to a novice pagan priest, and he had shunned her as he left. Perhaps he had been afraid, knowing that he would never return. Or maybe at that moment he had already found his purpose. The cruise down the River San had been like being born again, leaving behind the safety of normality and emerging into this new life of war, battles against the Krotes, everything that had followed. He wondered what had happened to his fiancee. She must have grown old thinking that he was dead. Perhaps she married, had children. And that thing she had placed in his hand, the cool metal of a brooch or other lucky charm…he had opened his hand without looking and let it sink into the water, drowning his past.

Spinning high over The Heights, Jossua tried to imagine where that charm was now. It would be buried in silt after so long, unseen from above, unknown from below. Waiting there for someone to find it again. Perhaps it would take ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, and when it was eventually discovered there would be stories built around it, tales that could never be true because there were a billion different stories in Noreela, and he did not even know the truth about himself.

He sensed something to the east, a flicker in the stillness of the night. He floated that way and drifted lower to the ground, and there he found a dead Monk, his wounds home to insects and other crawling things. The Monk’s wraith hovered over his corpse, mad and moaning and terrified of the mind that approached.

Don’t be scared, Jossua thought, and the wraith stilled. I’ve come to chant you down.

He had no idea whether it would work. But he stilled his floating mind and shut himself off from the world, and as he imagined the words of a death chant he sensed the wraith fading to Black.

HE MOVED ON, traveling farther from his body with every second that passed. He found more Monks, all of them having died on their journey toward the Monastery. Their wounds were terrible, and their tenacity impressed him. He calmed their wraiths and chanted them down. Every few minutes he opened his mind to his own body and felt the agony of gaping wounds, content in the pain because it meant that he was still alive. He had never used fledge, and he spent an occasional panicked moment thinking that he too had become a wraith craving the Black.

The Nax wanted me, he thought. They sought me; they needme. There is more to my life than this.

He went farther, passing over a gray forest where things screamed and plotted, and he rose higher than ever to avoid their touch. There were many dead Monks down there-he could sense their wraiths wailing, staining on the gray like blood splashes on ash-but he could not bring himself to tend them. He could not save everyone. Whatever mad things inhabited those woods had the Monks for themselves, and Jossua would not think of them again.

He cast backward and felt his body beneath the ground, coughing blood into the fledge seam. The Nax were still there, heartbeats so far apart that they may as well have been dead. Waiting. Guarding him. And every now and then something would reach out and touch his skin, ensuring that his heart still beat and his blood flowed.

Jossua journeyed on, and soon he sensed a concentration of confused wraiths ahead of him, every one of them a Monk. He slowed, rose higher and then smelled something that almost made him turn around and flee the way he had come.

Down there in a large depression in the land, magic had happened, and it had left a residue of itself in the ether.

Jossua moved on, gliding up a slope and emerging above the bowl in the land. And there were the machines, still and dead yet scarred with fresh scrapes and scars. They were clean of vegetation. And there were Monks, hundreds of them lying dead and dismembered across the ground. He went to them, chanting all the while and feeling their wraiths slip gratefully away to the Black.

JOSSUA CHANTED LONG and hard, and with every Monk that left the world he felt more and more alone. Am I the only one left? he thought. I was the first, many years ago. Am I now the last? The awfulness of what had happened here pressed in on him, crushing his mind to a small, defensive point that he was terrified would blink out at any moment.

I’m still alive, he thought, and he felt the Nax touching his body a hundred miles away.

I still have purpose. They called for him and he left, chanting down the last few wraiths as he fled.

I will not yet admit defeat.

He felt the mockery of the Nax, stroking his rent flesh and reeling in his mind as though they controlled the drug. He prayed to the Black that whatever it was they were holding him for, he would find out soon.

THE NAX TOOK him out of the ground. He did not know how long he had been down there-it could have been a hundred weak heartbeats, or perhaps it was days. They dragged him as they had on the way down, but this time they cleaned fledge from his wounds as they went. He felt a hot fluid scorching his opened flesh, his face, his hands, and when a few crumbs of fledge fell into his mouth the fluid entered there as well. It was bitter and boiling, and he spat and gagged as more flowed in. He was forced through the vein of fledge without being able to absorb any of it. The Nax wanted him with his mind attached.

My body is almost dead, he thought. What good is a body like this to them?

Monk, the Nax said, and again he could hear the amusement in their voice.

“You need me,” he said. In their silence, he found some measure of victory.

They emerged into the freshness of endless night. Jossua was dragged across the hillside, the Nax hanging on to one of his feet with a slick, warm touch. He looked up at the moons hazing the sky and wished he were up there again.

You’re a lucky Monk, the Nax said.

Lucky? Jossua thought, but the Nax said no more. Lucky? He should have been dead, but somehow they kept him alive. Flesh and skin had been scoured from his bones, his insides were open to the night and his mind was trapped once again in this ailing, weak, pathetic body. He had seen the Red Monks’ defeat and failure-he had smelled magic and sensed the Mages-and now he was lucky.

Lucky?

But the Nax would not be drawn. They paused by a stream and retreated into shadows, hidden away from the massive sky. They left Jossua out in the open. He could feel the coolness of grass beneath his back, though now it was faded and dry.

Noreela may be dead already, he thought.

JOSSUA ELMANTOZ -A few heartbeats from death, cold from blood loss, pleading with the Nax to tell him what he was meant to do-heard the thing before he saw it.

It was strange how darkness had silenced the land so much. Even night creatures seemed to find no comfort in this endless dusk. But when the rumbling began in the distance, some animals made themselves known. Something small scrambled over his ankle. He felt its scaly tail scrape across a deep gouge and then it touched his other leg, passing over there as well, fleeing quickly from the approaching sound. Another animal passed close by, and in the distance there were growls and cries as things twittered their fear into the dark. They all fled east to west.

The rumbling grew closer, a series of impacts interspersed with brief moments of silence.

Tumbler, Jossua thought.

Do well, the Nax said in his mind, and for the first time ever he heard something other than mockery in their tone.

The tumbler came out of the darkness and rolled Jossua Elmantoz into its hide.

IS THIS THE BLACK? Jossua thought. The Black isn’t supposed to hurt.

He could sense wraiths all around. They feared him, and he was not sure why.

Am I dead at last?

Not quite dead, a voice said. No use dead.

Who are you?

Flage. I’m of the tumbler that has you, though you are not yet of the tumbler. The mind has chosen me to rise up and speak with you.

I don’t understand.

The voice uttered what could have been a laugh, and it chilled Jossua to the spiritual core.

You’re different, Flage said. I’m here to tell you why.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn