Dawn

Chapter 12

ALISHIA HEARD THE voice of Hope the witch, mad and raving and filled with selfish intent, and everything around them was wrong. She closed her eyes and found sleep again, a place haunted by the stink of burning.

Blue flames danced all around her, and whichever way she turned she saw only smoke, and burning books, and tall book stacks simmering as the histories they contained came under threat as well.

There’s so much here, how can I ever find what I need? she thought.

WhatdoI need to know?

She was worried about Trey, because she had read of his danger in a book that burst into flames. She was worried about Hope because the witch was hauling her ever southward into Kang Kang. And she was worried about herself. She felt that she had been handed some great task, but she could not find her way through it. She was lost here in this burning library, adrift in a place she should know so well. If I’m to be told something, why do I have to go and find it?

“Whatever I have inside me is much deeper than this place,” she said, and she closed her eyes to see. But she could not. She probed with her mind, trying to discover the route back into that basement. Perhaps she had missed something down there? But she could no longer find the door. She dropped to her knees and scratched at the timber floorboards, using her nails to pry up a few loose splinters, widening a joint, prying and straining and finally snapping up a slat of wood as long as her hand. A burning page fluttered across the floor and slipped between the boards, and Alishia pressed her face to the crack to see where it went.

The page fluttered downward, barely touching the thick darkness below. She watched it for a long time, falling, falling, listening to the library destroying itself around her but never taking her eyes from that single falling sheet. And in the instant before it was snuffed out forever she saw shadows moving around it, closing in and starving the flame as though afraid it would reveal them for what they were.

Alishia sat back on her heels and gasped. So deep, she thought. So filled with things.

She stood and ran, an aimless sprint that took her into a warren of narrow passages. Around one corner she came across the worst destruction yet. Fire had eaten into the sturdy timber supports of a bank of shelving and much of it had given way, the fractured stumps of wooden columns charred and exposed like the library’s ribs. Several dozen shelves had fallen, and thousands of books had tumbled into chaos. Many of them simmered, some burned and a couple of hundred had been reduced to little more than a ghost of their old selves, ashen shapes that fell apart beneath the weight of Alishia’s gaze.

The librarian started climbing. It should have been treacherous but she seemed to find her footing easily, mounting the hill of books and standing at its summit to see what was on the other side.

In the library, a forest glade. She closed her eyes and frowned, feeling for an instant the movement of Hope carrying her ever southward. When she opened her eyes again she was still in her library, and before her lay the clearing. The trees all around were made of books, stacked up for trunks, twisted for limbs, torn for leaves. Between the trees and the actual clearing reality changed, blurring from ripped pages to rough grass. Here and there a plant showed both; a bush with twigs and leaves, book bindings around its base and genuine roots protruding above the paper-strewn ground.

At the center of the clearing lay a wide, flat stone. It was dusted with snow and the wind-perhaps birthed by the fires-had blown the fine flakes into lines, shapes and pictures etched into its surface.

I don’t know what that says. But with that thought came the realization that, were Alishia to go down into the clearing, its meaning would become clear.

She began descending the barrier of books, her feet stepping unerringly from one firm foothold to the next. She held her hands out from her sides for balance and thought of Kosar, the thief with the branded fingers, and how he walked like this to prevent his fingertips scraping on his clothing. I wonder where he is now? She glanced down at the books beneath her feet-perhaps one of them held his story, or part of it, or whatever the future may have for him-then stumbled and fell forward. She landed on her side in the strange clearing, sitting up quickly and looking back, terrified that she would be somewhere else entirely. But the library stacks still stretched back from this place.

The grass beneath her hands was cold and brittle. There was no daylight here, only the light of the fires, and it seemed to match the strange twilight existing in the real world. What’s real and what isn’t? Alishia thought. Thiscould be the real world. Everything else-Rafe, Hope, Trey, Erv the stable lad and my library that the Red Monk burned down-that could all be my imagination. Pages in my own book. Ideas I never wished to have. She stood, wiped her hands on her legs and realized that the snow coating the stone slab was actually ash.

She blew the ash from the carvings in its surface.

At first the images and etchings made no sense at all. They seemed to be a random collection of markings: strange letters and obscure symbols, pictures of creatures she did not recognize, numbers written backwards. She blew more ash away, making sure that she had uncovered everything in case the whole picture suddenly came together.

Something grumbled deep in the library and shook the ground; another stack of books tumbling to nothing. And another thousand people die, Alishia thought, disturbed by the idea but certain that it was true. High up where book stacks met in the haze of distance, a massive cloud of fire and smoke erupted, jumping from stack to stack and encircling the clearing like a crown of flames. Fire won’t touch this, she thought, tracing one of the etchings with a finger. As she followed the smooth carving, something stirred in her mind, a memory stretching its legs and unfurling. She frowned and closed her eyes, continuing to touch the same etching back and forth, and each completed circle made the thought stronger.

It was a memory of something she had never done. It belonged to something else. But it was becoming whole and clear, and she moved on to the next carved shape and began following it with the same finger.

Fire bristled high above her and several burning books struck the ground close by. One of them burst apart into a shower of flaming paper, and it took Alishia a few seconds to register the burn on her arm and the smell of singed hair.

“This fire can’t touch me,” she said, and as if to deny her words another burning page landed in her hair and set it aflame. She waved both hands and batted out the fire. She had scorched a couple of fingers, and her palm already held a blister the size of a tellan coin.

The rock called her back and she went. It was the knowledge she needed, and while the rock itself would always be here-wherever “here” was-she understood that her chance to read it would never come again.

Scared now, breathing harshly and feeling the baggy clothes hanging loose around her body, Alishia began to see what the rock had to say.

IT FELT AS THOUGH she was reading a book about the whole world of Noreela in the space of a few heartbeats, rather than the many lifetimes it should really take. She felt drowsy and sick with the information input, but ecstatic as well. Ideas floated through her mind, and they were like words in a sentence that had no clear meaning. Birth Shade needs a seed, she read, and everything else seemed to echo that thought, that image, building on the idea and giving it a history. She was filled with the joy of new life. Around the clearing were young trees and plants, budding flowers and a few fledgling birds and the fleeting shadows of ghost animals that would one day exist here. The stone slab itself was redolent with the memories of birthings, the antithesis of a sacrificial stone. Alishia could almost smell the fresh blood.

And though the images and name-Birth Shade-were there, she still did not fully understand.

I need help, she thought. That’s why I’m here, in this place that really isn’t inside my own mind. That’s why I’m exploring what Rafe left me with, because we need help, all of us, me and Hope and Kosar and Trey and the rest of Noreela. We need help or we’re lost forever.

She moved on to another shape, waving away drifting ash that burned when it touched her. She looked up at the cone of empty space above this strange clearing, and all around the towering walls of books were exploding into flames.

She traced more etchings, closed her eyes and thought, Death Shade needs an offering of pain. When she looked again the plants around her were withered and black, and skeletons of small animals shone in the firelight. Leaves rustled beneath her knees, dead and dry. The slab beneath her fingers was still bloodied, but now it was caked from sacrifice, strong blood that had sent a powerful message.

Alishia frowned, then suddenly cried as though everyone she had known was dead. But she could not move her hand away. To do so now would be like reading the history of the world and stopping three pages before the end.

I don’t have very long.

She wiped her eyes and moved on to the final shapes on the flat stone, excited and scared at what their reading would reveal. Birth Shade, Death Shade, she thought, but what does all that mean? Where’s the seed…and where’s the offering?

She traced her finger through the speckles of ash within the final shape’s smooth cuts, and when she came to the end everything changed again. The clearing around her became a moment in time, the plants alive and yet not shifting, small creatures pecking at the ground or grooming themselves with blood still in their veins, and thoughts frozen in their heads.

Her heart stopped.

Half-Life Shade needs the passion of life and the fearlessness of death.

Alishia fell back from the stone, rolled onto her back and stared up at the towering flames around the clearing. Her heart thumped again in her chest as if to remind her of life. She felt as if she had read a million books in one single sitting, but there was no great epiphany.

I’ve been reading the language of the land, she thought. Birth Shade, it tells me, Death Shade, Half-Life Shade. And though Noreela has spoken, it’s making no sense. She stood and screamed: “It’s making no sense!” And a shower of pages fluttered down around her head.

Alishia beat at the flames in her hair and on her clothes. Paper fell away, words blackening and disappearing before her eyes as though eaten by a shadow. “Shade?” she said. She wanted to save them all, but first she had to save herself. She dashed from the clearing and clawed at the slope of tumbled books, hoping that once back in the library she would be safe from the fire.

But what if this weight of new knowledge had made her more susceptible to damage? What if this place had suddenly ceased to be so welcoming? Perhaps she had been reading things never meant to be read-the language of the land wasfor the land, not mere people living upon it.

Alishia brushed a burning page from her back and rolled down the other side of the pile of books. She fell into a ball of flame, and the blue tongues stroked across her skin and seemed to salve her fresh burns.

She lay there for a while, listening to Noreela being unwritten word by word, instant by instant. What she had read in the clearing was important. But she knew that there was more yet to discover.

ALL OF HOPE’S talk of Kang Kang, the knowledge she held, the stories she had heard, the myths and legends that haunted squalid taverns and desolate rover camps, the screams of those who had been there dreaming about it still…none of it could have prepared her for being there.

She felt totally dislocated. Once she was a part of Noreela; now she was apart from it. This place was somewhere else. The feeling had been growing steadily, though to begin with she attributed it to hunger and thirst, the effort of rushing across the damaged landscape, the impact of her time belowground. It began as a feeling of growing apart from herself: her feet were a long way down, her hand holding the disc-sword impossibly far away. Each step took forever and sounded like thunder, yet still she had the sense of rushing headlong into Kang Kang.

The ghost of the dead Sleeping God was chasing her all the way. She felt it on her back, crushing her down far harder than the measly weight of this shrinking girl ever could. Alishia was fading away, a barely noticeable bulk that Hope shifted from left shoulder to right. The Sleeping God…even its breath would have melted her into the ground. Its ghost, its memory, its unrealized potential, Hope carried all of these with her.

Sometimes she thought she heard it scream.

Hope moved on, climbing the first of the Kang Kang foothills. In all her time as a whore and witch she had never managed to secure a map of this place. It was mentioned in Rosen Am Tellington’sBook of Ways -and Hope owned one of the few remaining original copies of that tome-and yet even that great mapmaker had found these mountains obscure and unreadable. Some of those who claimed to have been here spoke of mountains and valleys, lakes and towers, holes in the ground and the ruins of races immeasurably old and forgotten. Others spoke of fields of snow and glaciers with no identifying mark between one place and another. Yet therewere rumors of a map…whispers of a man who had come out of Kang Kang millennia ago with the lay of the land imprinted on his mind…

Hope believed none of it. Kang Kang was not a place to be mapped, nor even remembered. It was a place to avoid. Perhaps shades lived here, and tumblers, and mimics, and other things that no one should ever have to see. But this was not a world for people.

“No people,” she said, looking up at the long slope before her. The Sleeping God watched her back and Hope spun around, Alishia’s weight nudging her off balance and spilling her to the ground.

In the distance, two moons reflected from the stripped-stone landscape like a pair of staring eyes.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted. “You’re dead and gone! Failed me, failedus, and now you’re just a fossil!”

“It’s only in your mind,” Alishia said. The girl rolled away from Hope, sitting up and rubbing her shoulder where she had struck the ground.

Hope looked at her suspiciously. “We arrive in Kang Kang and you wake up?”

Alishia looked stunned. “We’re in Kang Kang already?”

“As if you didn’t know.”

“Where’s Trey?”

Hope glanced away, trying not to look at the disc-sword she had dropped but failing. Alishia followed her gaze.

“Trey?” the girl asked again.

“He left us. Fled back underground. Found a fledge mine, smelled his damn drug, and he betrayed us.”

“No,” the girl said.

“Betrayedyou!”

“No,” Alishia said again, her voice gentle but firm. She stared at Hope, and the witch did not like those eyes.

“We have to go on,” Hope said. “No time to sit and talk, things to do, a place to find, and you…look at you…you’re…”Is she really as small as I think? Hope thought. Or is this just Kang Kang trying to fool me again? She looks like a child. Or perhaps she’s far away.

“I’m learning.”

“Learning what?”

The girl looked away, up toward the mountains they had to pass through.

“You don’t trust me?” Hope said.

“No.”

Hope was not surprised. But neither, she discovered, did she really care. “It’s watching me,” she said. “The whole of Kang Kang, sitting here where it doesn’t belong, and it knows I’m coming and it knows you’re coming.”

“I know,” Alishia said.

“You know?” Hope stood over the girl, stooping to pick up the disc-sword. “What else do you know? What is it you’re learning? Is magic in you? Is it there now, ready to come back and fight? Give it to me!” She moved quickly, pressing the disc-sword beneath Alishia’s chin and resting her hand on the lever that spun the blade.

Hope, you stupid whore, what are you going to do now? Kill the girl? Take away any chance, any slight hope you may have of becoming what you’ve always dreamed of being?

“If you kill me, Noreela is dead.”

“I don’t care about Noreela,” Hope said. She thought of the petrified heart of the Sleeping God, once filled with such wonder. “Noreela no longer cares for itself, so why should I?”

“There’s more to the land than Sleeping Gods.” The girl was staring at her over the blade, no fear in her eyes.

“What do you know?”

“Some, but not enough.”

Hope shook her head and stepped away. “I don’tcare!” she said.

Alishia stood, and Hope saw how small she had become. She had the body and the height of a young teen, yet the attitude of someone with a whole world on her shoulders. Her eyes were those of someone ten times Hope’s age.

“Come on,” Hope said. “The longer we wait here, the more Kang Kang can plot against us.”

Alishia’s eyes drooped, she swayed, and Hope slapped her across the face. “Comeon!” she said. She grabbed the girl’s hand-it was hot, the skin of her palm bubbled as though burned-and pulled her up the slope.

THE GROUND CHANGED, as Hope knew it would, and she saw the first steam vent. It was the height of her knee, and emitting an opaque mist into the night. She veered away from it, walking across the slope for a while to avoid its exhaust. Alishia followed blindly behind her. The girl was stumbling and dragging her feet, but still she walked on, tripping now and then and sobbing.

Hope breathed in, felt the dry air turn warm and wet, and she had a brief, intense vision of a gigantic army marching toward a precipice a mile high. There were tens of thousands of soldiers there, many of them twice as tall as normal men, all wielding terrible weapons of death and destruction and illuminated from above by hovering globes of molten metal. She could smell the meat of them-rank and rotten, ready to be opened to the air-and hear their diseased breathing, and she had a very real sense that desperation drove them on. The cliff they approached was sheer, and she could see no way that they could climb it. From above, simmering through the night and making it suddenly daylight, great swathes of fire floated down and set the army alight.

Hope gasped and fell to her knees, spitting bitter saliva from her mouth and turning back to Alishia. “Did you see that?” she said. “Did youtaste that?”

Alishia was kneeling, drowsy and pale. “I saw something,” she said, looking around as though searching for a lost pet.

“It’s Kang Kang tricking us,” Hope said. “Trying to frighten us, kill our hope. Showing us what will never happen.”

“I think it’s already happened,” Alishia said.

Yes, Hope thought, it had a tang of memory to it. She looked across the hillside at the flow of steam rising from the vent, slick like oil. A breeze whispered down from the mountains and the steam changed direction, but it danced with the breeze as though playing with it. “Let’s go on.”

As they walked uphill they saw more of the vents. These were taller than the first, their bases thicker, the stream of substance pouring from their open necks wider. Hope kept as far away from the chimneys as possible, her breath so shallow that she became dizzy and disoriented. She waved the disc-sword around her head, shouting at phantoms, and she never let go of Alishia’s hand. If I let go she might blow away, she thought. She’s so small now, so shrunken. I can’t lose her. She’s my future.

The funnels venting from beneath Kang Kang-a gassy drug, poison, memories-became less frequent the higher they climbed. First line of defense, Hope thought, and she waited for the second to appear.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked. Alishia had gasped in pain whenever Hope grabbed harder to pull her on.

“I’m learning,” Alishia said. Or perhaps she said “burning.” Hope was unsure, and she thought that repeating the question might give Kang Kang another small victory.

THEY FOUND A ruin. It was a tower, upended and thrown back against a cliff of ragged stone. Its walls were cracked but still clung together, and its base sprouted into a tree of foundation; globes of footings, buds of ground piles. They defied gravity and threw a shambolic shadow against the cliff. Around the tower’s smashed head sat a jumble of giant rocks, as though the hillside had been impacted and shattered by something huge. One of the upside-down windows shone as the life moon reflected from some old thing inside.

“No one said it was always this way,” Hope said. She paused a few hundred steps from the ruin and stretched, hands on her hips and shoulders pulled back. Alishia stood by her side, breathing fast, swaying.

“This could be from before the Black,” Alishia said.

“Could be. Or it might have happened yesterday.” But Hope could smell the age of this place, and when the moons struck the tower, it reflected old light.

“I wonder who lived in there?”

Hope looked higher up the ravaged hillside, trying to see where the tower had tumbled from. But it all seemed wrong. It had not fallen here, it had been thrown.

“I wonder who died,” the witch said.

“We should go on.” Alishia aimed east to walk around the tower and the shattered ground before it. Hope watched her go and suddenly wondered what would happen if she did not follow. She could go up and into that tower, make a home in its upside-down world and spend the rest of her time exploring its inverted history. Perhaps she would find something of significance, perhaps not.

It’s of Kang Kang! she thought. Nothing good could have ever lived there. No calm hands laid those blocks, and no peaceful hand tore them down.

Hope closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, and as she exhaled she knew that there was something extra to the air of this place. Between blinks-when she thought her vision of the world was negated-she saw more than ever. Perhaps it was one of the legendary Children of Kang Kang, this giant shape stepping in and out of the fallen tower, in and out, as though unsure where it would find its final rest. Its outline was formed from a dozen bodies twisted together, arms waving and mouths gaping, eyes rolling and catching the reflection of an ancient death moon, as if the wraiths of whole families clung together for comfort.

Hope gasped and stepped back, keeping her eyes wide open. She hurried after Alishia, glancing at the uprooted tower as she went. When she eventually had to blink again, that shambling image was still there on the inside of her eyelid, weaker than before, fading with each successive blink, until those old wraiths were a memory once again.

SOMETIME LATER -Hope had no idea how long, because time here was skewed-they came to a wide crevasse in the land. It stretched along the skirt of the first of Kang Kang’s true mountains, a river of darkness. They would have to cross it to continue their journey. That, or walk east or west until the crack in the world ended. Hope thought that perhaps it would never end.

“It’s trying to stop us,” Hope said. She sank to her knees and dropped the disc-sword, pressing her hands to her face to make sure her tattoos had not entered into the betrayal. She felt them just below her skin, twisted into confusion and fear, and she could not deny them. “The whole of Kang Kang is after us.” She turned around and looked at Alishia where the girl stood behind her. Her eyes were hooded, their whites bloodshot and yellowed by the death moon. “Alishia?”

“We have to go on,” the girl said.

“Of course we do, but-”

“There’s no excuse not to go on,” she continued. “We have to get there, I have to get there, and a simple hole in the world can’t stop us.”

“I’ve been into one hole,” Hope said. She spat as far as she could, watching the spittle glint as it was carried into the ravine on the breeze.

“There’s more than shadows down there,” Alishia said, and her voice was suddenly filled with such fear that the hairs on the back of Hope’s neck bristled.

Alishia sank to her stomach behind Hope, pressing herself as flat to Kang Kang as she could. Hope followed her example. She tasted the grass of this place-bitter, as though its dew were blood-and smelled the ground, and she knew it was dying. Venting its memories. Giving them to the darkness as though it had no use of them anymore.

“What is it?” Hope whispered, and the question could have so many answers.

“Shade?” Alishia said. Hope turned around and looked at the girl, but she seemed to be unconscious again.

The witch looked ahead, wishing she had some chemicala to light the way. But she had used the last of her tricks in the machine, trying in vain to save Rafe.

She would not let them snatch magic from her again.

How can I stop them?

Kang Kang could do its worst, but she was attached to this girl as a mother to her unborn child.

What can I possibly do to protect us?

Whatever came up out of that ravine-and somethingwas coming, she was certain of that-she would fight it until her last spark of life guttered out.

Because I’ve got nothing else left. Noreela is dead, but the girl can give me magic for the final days of my life.

A hundred steps away a shape drifted up from the rent in the land, darker than the shadows around it and more animated. This blot of darkness had independent movement; it did not rely on clouds crossing moons. It twisted and writhed higher, and Hope averted her gaze.

Shade? Alishia had said.

Hope pressed her face into the ground and held her breath, eyes squeezed closed, skin creased, tattoos almost burning as they illustrated her terror like never before.

She attempted to lose her mind. Ironically, mad as she surely was, her mind stayed with her, muttering its fears and suspicions. Much as she tried to drift away-to think of nothing-the here and now grabbed hold of her and refused to let go. Time had its claws in her, and it was slowly dragging her toward the gaping maw of its mouth. And it had teeth. Alishia fading away was one of them; this shade, risen from the ground of Kang Kang, was another. It must surely be of the Mages, and if it saw her, discovered Alishia, then everything truly would be over.

Hope chewed at the grass, hoping that it might have some drug-like quality that would stifle her thoughts.

She heard Alishia’s breathing behind her, fast and irregular as though something pursued her in dreams.

The shade made no sound. It’s not of this world, Hope thought. Not even of Kang Kang. It’s from somewhere else.

She lay there, not daring to look up in case the movement attracted the shade, and waited for the end.

She waited for a long time. Perhaps she even drifted into an unsettled sleep, because for a while she was back in her rooms in Pavisse, fucking men and mixing herbs, telling fortunes and fulfilling deadly commissions. In all that sex for money, and poison for hate, there was an unbearable naivete that she so wished she could rediscover. She had been just another witch for so long, and finding that pathetic farm boy curled up in a doorway in the Hidden Districts had been the best of things, and the worst.

She started whispering into the soil of Kang Kang, an old spell that her grandmother had once told her. It had been passed down through the ages from ancestors who had used magic for real, and though now its words were empty it had always held power for Hope. It was from this spell that she had taken her name, because uttering it was another expression of hope for magic’s return.

Nothing changed. The words fell from her mouth and sank into the ground. And when she opened her eyes she was back on that bare hillside in Kang Kang, and the shade had gone.

ALISHIA TRIED TO hide. When the shape had risen out of the ravine something shifted deep in her subconscious, causing her to retreat from the waking world and find her dreams again. She heard Hope’s voice coming from far away, questioning what she was doing and asking what sought them. As if she didn’t know. She knows far more than she lets on, Alishia thought. She doesn’t need me to tell her.

In the burning library, she was no longer alone. There were no signs of an intruder, no smells, no echoes of something else walking these endless book corridors, and yet she knew that her mind was no longer all hers. Another presence was smelling this smoke from afar. Another consciousness perused these books’ titles, and Alishia had felt something like it before.

Shade? she thought. And then she ran.

She had to hide. If the shade found her it would know her, and it would tell the Mages, and the time between now and the end would be short. With all the Mages’ might and armies focused on destroying what little Noreela still stood for, one single person stood a chance. But if the shade saw the taint of magic Alishia carried, the whole emphasis of this war would change.

The burning library felt heavier and darker to her right, so she turned left, ducking beneath a tall book cabinet that had tilted to lean against another. She paused in there for a moment, wondering whether it would provide a safe enough place to hide. She ran her fingers along the book spines. Sixteen Heartbeats in the Fledge Seam, one was called. AndA Question for the Monk. AndOne Way to Appease the… The final two words of this spine had been scraped away, and the wound on the book looked new, the exposed card fluffy and white.

Appease the what? Alishia thought, and the book burst into flames.

From back the way she had come, she heard the sucking sound of flames being smothered. She ran. What smothers flames? Nothing. A vacuum. Emptiness.

Turning left, right, trying to lose herself in the hope that she would lose the shade, Alishia thought of Trey and wondered where he was right now. She paused for a heartbeat to look at book titles, but they gave her no clues.

Something’s playing with me, she thought. The idea that terrified her. This place was entirely random, a depository for every moment that ever was. And yet she had discovered that room beneath the library, books that related to her and those around her. And the woodland clearing; that wasn’t random. That was planned. Something’s steering me. Something’s alwaysbeen steering me, us, all of us. And it’s teaching me, and telling me, and making me know its language.

Alishia reached a junction and turned left, changed her mind, headed right. And then she paused and attacked the book stack before her. Their pages fluttered as a warm breeze roared along the corridor. The sound of flames being drowned followed.

It’s close, Alishia thought, and she scooped books from the shelves faster. Every binding she touched lured her in, but she resisted the temptation to pause and read. Though they might tell her much, their tales would hold her back, and then the shade would find her sitting among a stack of books, perusing the past of Noreela while it stole the future from her mind and took it away.

Some of the books she touched were warm, others cold. There seemed to be no rule dictating which burned and which did not.

The pile grew around her feet. After a couple of minutes she had cleared enough of a space to crawl into. She pulled herself through by grabbing hold of shelf supports and uprights, then pushed with her feet when she was far enough in for them to touch the shelves. She shoveled more books behind her, then found it easier to push at them instead. She was seeing rough paper edges now instead of imprinted spines; the books were facing the other way. Another corridor, she thought. Maybe one I was never meant to see.

One last shove and she fell out after a tumble of books. Another cough of flames extinguished, but this was from much farther away.

Alishia stood and looked around. She was in a space between stacks that looked like any other. To her right was flame; to her left, darkness. She chose that way.

Don’t think of why, just lose the shade.

The darkness was not complete. High above her, flames reflected from the haze of smoke, casting secondhand firelight down at her. It flickered in sympathy with its source, and book titles on the shelves beside her seemed to change second by second.

As she turned the next corner, Alishia saw a ghost.

The Red Monk sat amongst a drift of broken books. Some of the page edges around him were yellowed and smoking, but he seemed not to notice. His hand worked at each tome, prising the pages apart and scattering them like dead butterflies. He did not appear to be reading anything: spines, covers or the text inside. He simply tore and scattered. His hood was thrown back to reveal skin so old and thin it was almost transparent, but though Alishia could see through him she found only darkness.

“You burned down my library,” she said.

The Monk looked up and grinned. His teeth were black. His eyes were black. And there was no Monk there at all, only a void where something should have been-a shapeless hole that flexed and twisted in a confusion of movement.

Found! Alishia tried to turn but her body would not obey. Leave me alone, she thought, adding as much weight and menace as she could, hoping that the seed of magic she carried would aid her in avoiding this thing. But she felt weak and feeble, and she could do nothing as the first tendrils of something wholly alien kissed her mind.

She dropped to her knees and the shade vanished. It had barely touched her, its impact on her senses so slight that she wondered whether she had truly seen it at all. But looking around, realizing how this place now felt, she knew that whatever had been in here with her was now gone.

It saw something, she thought. It felt something. It knows.

She so wanted to go on searching, because there was more yet to be found. She reached out and grabbed a burning book, watching the flames caress the skin of her hand without harming her, and when she opened the tome it gave her a line that she had to obey.

Everything has changed. The witch needs to know.

ALISHIA WAS STILL unconscious behind Hope, eyes shifting as she dreamed. The witch looked around, hardly breathing, watching for shadows that should not move. The ravine was a line of darkness before her, but now nothing rose above it. Whatever had been there-a shade, a thing of Kang Kang, a trick of the eye-had gone.

“We have to move on,” Hope muttered. She leaned over Alishia, whispering into the unconscious girl’s ear, “We have to move on!” Alishia twitched but did not open her eyes. Hope nudged her, slapped her, started shaking the girl, seeing her face scraped against the ground but not caring.

Alishia woke then, eyes opening wide and head rising to look around. “Is it gone?” she asked.

“I think so.”

The girl sat up slowly, touching her face where a stone had scratched it. She looked at the blood on her fingertips. “We’ve been seen,” she said.

Hope gasped. “How can you be sure?”

“I can’t,” Alishia said, “notsure. Notpositive. ” She gazed past Hope as though searching the darkness for some errant memory.

“So why say it? To scare me? To frighten me into taking you back to Trey?”

“Whereis Trey?” Alishia asked, suddenly vulnerable and sad. It was strange to hear an adult voice coming from a body growing so young, and in that voice so much hidden wisdom.

“I told you, he’s gone. Back underground.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“He did! And if you want to reach the Womb of the Land you have to stick withme.” Hope stood and stared down at the girl, trying to read her eyes in the poor light.

“What are you doing, Hope?”

“I’m taking you. I’mhelping you.”

Alishia shook her head. “You’re doing only what Kang Kang allows.”

Hope could feel the hatred pumping from the land, strong and repulsive. It made her skin crawl, cooled sweat on her brow, thumped pain into her heels. The ravine pulsed before them, as though darkness was the rushing blood of the land. She listened, but heard no sound of movement from in there. For a few heartbeats her visions swam; spots on her eyes, or giants stalking them in the distance.

“Nothing here is as it seems,” Hope said.

Alishia stood, holding on to Hope’s arm for support until she could stand on her own. They went east, hoping to find a way across the black ravine in that direction. The witch moved several steps ahead. She listened to Alishia following her, and after a while their footsteps fell in time with each other. If Hope had not known better she would have believed that she was alone.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn