Dawn

Chapter 2

ALISHIA KNEW THAT she was dreaming, yet she could feel the books coming to life.

Her stroll through the library seemed to last forever. She could not recall where she had begun, and she had no inkling of where she was going. There were only walls of books. There was no ceiling, only hazy heights where the weird light that suffused the air at ground level faded away into a colorless dusk. Beneath her feet there was the ground: stone and dust here; worn timber boarding there. She had passed through one book-formed alley where the ground was comprised of uprooted grave markers laid flat. She had knelt and touched the carved stone, but the engravings had been in a language she did not know, all the names strange to her. Beside these markers, the book spines revealed intimate histories of the unknowns buried there. A Moment on the Road for Shute, one read. A Thought in a Cave at Whimple, said another. She had run her fingers along the worn spines, but she dared not remove a book and start reading in case she became trapped in one moment forever.

Sometimes the stacks were built straight and tall, and they converged in the distance until it almost looked as though they were touching. Perhaps if she walked fast enough she would reach a point where the walls met, spines converging, pages overlapping, and then she would become one more tome of history in this vast place.

At times, the giant shelves seemed ready to fall. They curved left and right, tilted outward or inward, and on several occasions she found herself moving through a tunnel of books, stacks meeting just above her head, histories propping one another up, and she wondered what would happen were she to remove a book. Would it cause a whole wall to tumble down upon her? Would it start a fall throughout the library, burying her and re-sorting history into a random mixture of old books and new, good and bad? Would it destroy order?

She thought not. And dwelling on this she realized that therewas no order around her, only assembled chaos. The books were not sorted into sections; they were random. There were occasional groupings-such as those applying to the owners of the grave markers-but as Alishia fingered her way along the assembled spines, these soon blended into other areas, other times. A kiss became a turning wheel became the one-hundred-and-seventeen-thousandth stolen thought of a skull hawk’s life. This was history built as it had been made, like a collection of random thoughts in a mind too huge to contemplate.

And they were coming to life. Alishia had known this for a while-in the confused memory of her walk through this place, the exact instant of knowing was obscured-but it did not frighten her, and it did not surprise her. All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages. She had often lain awake in her room at the edge of Noreela City and tried to imagine one book in her own darkened library, what it looked like at that moment with no one there to view it, how the words read with no one there to read them. Its pages would be closed and the spaces between leaves dark and inscrutable, but the words were still there, telling their truths and hinting at so much more. Sometimes she believed that true magic could only take place with no one there to see it. Her own interaction with a book would change it, and someone else reading it would alter it yet again. That idea had always disturbed her, yet she kept it alive. Like a person, only a book could ever really know itself.

She walked past a wall of books with instants in time on their spines, illustrated with hastily drawn pictures from a child’s hand. The books seemed to shift in her view, as if rearranging themselves every time she blinked, though the spines always told the same story. She could feel the history behind the books, and she wondered whether she could remove one from the shelves and peer through the gap into a time she had never known. But in all this dreaming she had yet to open a one, and she felt that there was a special moment ahead. A special moment, and a special book.

Alishia moved on, and the books began to turn into something more. Their power spilled around them, exuding potential like slicks of light, hazing the air and causing Alishia to wave her hands before her face to find her way through. Her hands and arms disturbed drifting moments of history, and she suddenly knew them: a Mourner, chanting down the wraiths of a whole village and fearing something that lived in a hole in the ground; a man and woman journeying into the depths, passing through new cities and entering older places; a young boy standing on a cliff somewhere in the west and looking out at the forest of masts spiking the sea’s horizon. Each image was imbued with the emotion of the moment, and Alishia went from fear to excitement to angst in the space of several seconds. She closed her eyes and ran.

She crossed her arms and held her hands beneath her armpits, but experiencing these spilled moments was nothing to do with touch.

Alishia stopped then, dropping to the worn timber floor, realizing suddenly where she was: this was a dream, and she was floating in Noreela’s rich and varied history. She was awash with it. She could walk forever, but she would find no walls. She could try to climb the stacks, but she would not find their summits, because they probably rose endlessly. Every truth lay here, every event, every lie and deceit and murder and rape, every meaningless moment and whispered oath lost to the winds of time, and if she wandered forever, perhaps she would know it all. History tumbled down around her and became the air of this dream library, and each time she breathed in she knew something more.

Knowledge had always been Alishia’s drug, and she closed her eyes and breathed deep.

But something was wrong. Beyond her dream the world had changed forever; something bad had come into the land. She could remember seeing Rafe taken out of the flying machine by the Mages. She could still feel the blast of heat and light in her mind that his going had inspired, and she was beginning to realize that, in a very real way, she was a vital part of this dream library. Alishia could wander here forever and never find what she was looking for, but she was not simply a visitor. This was not a random dream brought on by recent events. She was the librarian.

She gasped and awoke back into the dream. Reality had been drawing her away, and a sensation of cold came in from somewhere. She stood and shook her head. To her left the alley between book stacks curved away, disappearing. To her right, it opened out into a wide reading area. There were several tables and a dozen chairs, all with worn wood and upholstery frayed by years of use…or neglect.

Alishia frowned, hating the idea of that. There were books lying open on tables, but she was not sure whether they had been placed there, or whether they had simply fallen from stacks and dropped open.

She walked into the reading area, and as she left the space between stacks she saw the shape sitting in the far corner. Cliffs of books rose on all sides, and the light here seemed subdued. She had no idea of the source of this light, but something seemed to swallow it. The book stacks were a deep red, as though smeared with blood that had long since dried. The floor was dusty, but the dust seemed to move. The shape sat in a deep, wide chair, almost swallowed by the soft padding, and in its lap rested a heavy book. The cover was made of polished wood, the binding sewn with horse’s hair, and the figure turned the heavy pages one by one.

It was not reading the book. It was staring at Alishia. Its eyes glinted as it blinked; she knew that it was reading her.

Get out of my library, she said in her dream, and her skin turned cold.

Already found what I need, a voice said. The figure was still turning pages. It was almost halfway through the thick book now, and it must have been sitting there for hours waiting for her. This nolonger means anything to me. It looked down at the book and its hands grew still, one supporting the tome, the other laid flat on the open page.

Alishia stepped closer and saw that the page was blank. She knew that they were all blank. Unlike everything else in the library, nothing came from this book, and it held no weight.

Where did you get that? she asked.

The figure looked up at her and something happened to the light. Its source-invisible and mysterious-shifted, and she could make out more of the thing’s face. Its features were rugged and beautiful, skin rough and attractive, and its eyes held the weight of ages. I brought it with me, it said. It’s a new history, whose truth is yet to be forged. It stood up, and cool blue flames seeped from the book in its hands.

Alishia stepped back. She felt coolness on her skin again, a tingle on her cheek and down her left arm. The fire flowed out from the book, flaring to the floor and seeping between old floorboards, lighting the space below. Alishia dropped to her knees and pressed her face to the pitted timber. It’ll spread, she thought, it’ll movedown there, it’ll flow, and everywhere and everywhen it touches will be destroyed. She looked through a knothole and saw the dark space beneath illuminated by the new blue fire. Shadows danced, and they seemed to be growing closer, rising quickly from whatever depths they had been banished to.

Alishia sat up and stared at the strange figure. How dare you! she said.

It shrugged. And then it threw the book.

The flaming tome of blank pages struck the book stacks and exploded. Each page drifted somewhere different, the fire writing its own fiery truth on the stark white blankness. The conflagration suddenly turned from cold blue to blazing orange. Books erupted into flame, fire licked its way between covers and into the dark spaces between pages, and old truths went up in smoke, casting ash into the air and disintegrating when her panicked gaze fell upon them.

No, she thought. This can’t be happening. I won’t letit happen again! This is my library, and there’s so much more to know…

A wall of books tumbled and spilled toward her, and the figure laughed as it ran away. The books struck her, but the impact did not hurt. Fire roared from their dry interiors and caressed her face, but there was no pain, and she walked through the flames to the space between stacks. She ran from the flames and they reached after her, though they had no effect.

As the librarian of this place, Alishia was after all still just an idea.

AS SHE BEGAN to wake up, Alishia could smell the mysterious scent of Kang Kang on the breeze. Floating somewhere between dream and reality she sensed the acidic tang, turned left and fell into a wall of shelving. She closed her fist around a spine and pulled out the book. It thrummed in her hand, begging to be opened, and she knew that its insides were crawling with the mysteries of that mountainous place. She was afraid of Kang Kang. She did not want to open the book. The smell hinted at memories that would come flushing back, but they were not her own. They were the memories of the land.

“Got to keep them closed,” she whispered.

“Open your Mage-shitting eyes!” a voice said. Alishia looked around, ducking low to avoid the smoke that was rapidly filling the library.

“Kang Kang,” she said, squeezing the book in her hand.

“Almost,” the other voice said. “I can smell its wrongness from here.”

The fire suddenly retreated, the smoke cleared from her lungs and Alishia sat up and opened her eyes.

“Ahh,” the second voice said. “The sleeper awakes.”

“Hope,” Alishia said.

The witch was sitting beside her, wild hair pointing at the dusky sky as if berating it. “I just know I’ll grow to hate the irony of that name.”

Alishia looked around. She saw Kosar sitting a few steps away with his back to them, head bowed. Closer, on her left, Trey was kneeling and smiling at her, though the smile was dark in his eyes. There was no Rafe. There was no A’Meer. Of course not. That was finished now. A’Meer was dead and Rafe was gone. She wondered how long ago the flame of destruction had been lit in the land.

She looked up and saw the death moon hanging heavy and fat. It gave light, but she did not like the feel of it on her skin: it reminded her of the light of those library flames. The darkness seemed false and unreal. Wrong.

“Where are we?” she said. “What…?” She trailed off, noticing the shattered ribs of the great machine that had borne them aloft. Beyond them, shadows lay close to the ground. They were no longer moving.

“We came down,” Hope said. “The machine faded and we came down.”

“My face,” Alishia said. She touched her cheek and it was warm, not cool. Her arm still tingled. She wondered whether she had been burned in her dream.

“Sorry,” Hope said, sounding anything but. “I slapped and shook you to wake you up. You were screaming and shouting, and there’s no saying what’s out there to hear. Besides, you’ve been asleep too long.”

“What’s too long?”

“Almost a day,” Trey said.

Alishia looked at the fledge miner, smiling, and was grateful to see the smile returned. His eyes were wider than she had ever seen them. She supposed this subdued light suited him well. “It was sunset when we left the machines’ graveyard,” she said. She looked up, and though she saw no sign of the sun smearing the horizon, still it did not appear to be fully dark. The weak light was flat and unnatural, like the light in the library of her dream.

“It’s about that time again now,” Trey said. “But…” He trailed off, sketching in the dust with his finger.

“They took Rafe,” Alishia said. “He’s gone. He’s dead.”

“He’s not dead!” Hope snapped.

Alishia closed her eyes and felt the weight of what he had left her. It was an alien presence in her mind, contained yet filled with potential. It shied away from the dark. The more she sought it, the farther away it seemed to go, as if scared of what it would see through her eyes.

“He is dead,” she said, “and the magic he carried has been stolen.”

“Hecan’t be dead!” Hope said. She shook her head and looked at each of them in turn; Alishia, Trey, Kosar’s back. “Itcan’t just end like this.”

“The Mages turned the sky dark,” Trey said. “We flew south for a while, then the machine just seemed to lose its power. It drifted lower. Its ribs started to crack and crumble. The ground shook. We dragged you into the center and sat there, and we landed here a little while ago.” He continued shaping dust and stones with his hand, as though building something new.

“But it’s dead,” Kosar said. It was the first time the big thief had spoken, and though he stood he did not turn around. He was staring out between two of the cracked ribs that had protected them for a while, silhouetted against the pale yellow light of the death moon. “It brought us down gently, but died the second it touched the ground. It’s not a machine anymore. It’s a lump of mud and rock that doesn’t belong here, andwe don’t belong here, either. I don’t think we belong anywhere in Noreela.”

“There’s always hope,” the witch said. Alishia did not like the look in her eyes. There was madness there, just below the surface, a madness that seemed to shift and shape the witch’s spiraling tattoos.

“Hope has gone,” Kosar said. He turned around and looked at Alishia, but there was no interest in his eyes. He came closer and sat beside Trey, his movements weary and slow. “If there ever was hope, it was in that boy. Rafe. That poor boy.”

“We can’t be so sure he’s dead,” Hope said. “Why would they kill him? Why would the Mages come so far just to take him away and kill him?”

“They wanted what he had inside,” Alishia said.

“Of course they did,” Hope said. “Magic. But by killing him-”

“It wasinside him, Hope,” Alishia said. “Not really a part of him. Disconnected, a thing waiting to be born, and they opened him up and took it out.”

“Opened him up,” Kosar said, staring down at his feet.

“And how can you know all this?” Hope said. Her voice was rising, aggression showing through, and Alishia knew that the witch was terrified.

“You know how I know, Hope. You all do.” She looked at her hands, held them up to the sky to catch some of the weak moonlight. “I’m getting younger,” she said.

“It’s thatthing inside you,” Hope said. “Thatshade. It’syou who ensured that he’d die, you know.”

“That thing’s not inside me anymore.”

“How can we know that?”

“Because I’m telling you.”

“And you expect us to trust you?”

“I expect nothing, but I hope you do.” Alishia closed her eyes. “I had a dream,” she said.

“What sort of dream?” Trey came close and touched her arm, and Alishia was so grateful for the contact that she almost cried. She smiled at Trey and leaned toward him, the movement speaking volumes.

“Bad dreams,” Alishia said. “As though I have something priceless that I can’t look after forever.”

“This is all so fucking pointless,” Kosar said quietly.

They fell silent, and in the distance Alishia heard a skull raven calling into the darkness. She wondered what it had found sleeping, whose dreams it may be stealing and whether there was a volume in her dream library that would contain the knowledge of its victim.

She relished Trey’s touch, yet something felt so wrong about her body. She wondered if he could perceive that simply by touching her. She was not hungry, for a start, and her throat was not dry, and she did not need to urinate. They said she had been asleep for a whole day. The dream felt like a lifetime, but her body seemed not to notice. She was growing younger, and the tide of time seemed to be changing with her.

“It’s not pointless,” Alishia whispered at last. None of them answered-Trey merely squeezed her hand tighter-so she went on. “I’ve dreamed, Kosar, of something vast and priceless and in danger. That something is in me, and it wasn’t in me before. And I just know it’s from Rafe. He knew he was going to die. Perhaps he’d known right from the beginning. And it was his last act of defiance to pass it to me, because he knew he was also passing along his last scrap of hope.”

“So magic is fucking with us,” Kosar said. “It seeds itself in Rafe, dooms him to die, then passes itself to you. But it kills A’Meer in the meantime, and leaves us to sit and rot here. Lets itself be taken by the Mages and twisted into whatever they want. That’s good. That’s all good.”

“Magic lets nothing happen,” Alishia said. “Rafe told us that. It was so young, so passive, it was fighting to stay alive. But there’s so much below the surface of things that we can never see or understand, and I think what Rafe passed into me was an idea. A knowledge that only I can carry.”

“Why only you?” Hope said, and the envy in her voice was obvious.

“Because I’m a librarian,” Alishia said.

Hope laughed. It was a horrible sound, loud and guttural. The skull raven called again in the distance, as if in response.

“Something’s wrong with me,” Alishia said. Trey shuffled closer until she felt the heat of his flesh. “Trey, something’s wrong, and I know it’s all going to end so soon.”

“It’s ended already,” Kosar said. “Noreela will change, that’s for certain, and anyone they do leave alive will have to change along with it.”

“But I’m trying to tell you, Kosar, that there’s hope in me.”

“What sort of hope? Magic?”

Alishia shook her head, but she knew that was neither right nor wrong. “Not magic, but a route there.”

“How do you pretend to know this?”

“It’s what I feel. It’s what Rafe told me before he was taken. I don’t know; this is all sostrange to me. All I know is I have dreams, and something unnatural is happening to me. There’s a reason behind that, and hope within it.”

Kosar stared at her for a few heartbeats, his eyes unwavering. “The land has turned stranger than ever, and now you’ve turned too. I don’t believe a word.”

“You’ve given up.”

The thief looked down at his hands, touching fingertips together as if welcoming the pain.

“Then perhaps I’ll go to Kang Kang on my own,” Alishia said.

“Kang Kang?” Trey said.

“It’s where the machine was taking us.”

“We were heading south,” Hope said, “but that’s not to say we were goingthere. Nobody wants to gothere. ”

Alishia tried to stand but her legs were weak, her muscles fluid. Trey was by her side, helping her up instead of telling her to sit down. She leaned against him, her arm around his shoulder, his around her waist, and looked south. The landscape faded into darkness, but even against the dark sky she thought she could make out the jagged teeth of mountains on the horizon. They were low down, barely visible, yet she was certain she could see Kang Kang. The sight made her cold, but still she heard its call.

“I need to be there,” she said. “There’s something there, a place where I’ll be safe, and maybe-”

“There’s nowhere safe on Noreela anymore!” Kosar said, standing and kicking at the ground. He turned away, passing between two shattered ribs of the failed machine and walking out into the long grass.

Alishia wanted him to stop and turn back, sigh, shake his head, admit that he may be wrong and she may be right. But he became a shade in the poor light, and just before he faded from view she saw him sit and merge with the shadows gathered on the ground.

THE MAGES MADE more machines.

Lenora’s concerns about their strength were unfounded, for each new act of creation seemed to make them stronger.

They dragged rock up from the ground with a flick of their wrists, molded it, dipped it into the sea or brought the water up onto the harbor to cool and cast it into shape. Some of the remaining hawks were slaughtered and their flesh and blood put to use, clothing the machines and lubricating the joints between the stone limbs. Angel used metal from the frontage of one building to cast one machine, giving it spikes and barrels to shoot forth stones and molded metal balls when it was brought to life. S’Hivez broke down a storage hut and used the timber to make a spiderlike construct that would carry its rider low to the ground, its many legs making it fleet. The stench of magic hung across the harbor. Each time a machine was completed a nervous Krote was called forward, connected to that machine as Lenora had been attached to her own, and then they mounted and rode along the harbor wall. Unnatural silhouettes were splayed across the water, cast by the weak light from the taverns and other buildings along the harbor.

The creation went on for a long time. Angel and S’Hivez made the first few machines together, merging ideas and raw materials to make several similar constructs: four legs, tall as a Krote, fire vents and slots that could eject sharpened discs. Then Angel suddenly jumped into the harbor, sinking beneath the water and raising a wave that crashed against the mole. When she lifted herself back out on a column of steam, she drew a ruined ship up from the depths along with her. Its timbers bent to her will: its rusted metal twisted and shed its coating. Ropes and chains swirled about her head, and she clothed her new machine in a dead hawk’s hide. It seemed a mess, but when she motioned a Krote across and joined her with the new machine, its ropes began to whip and its chains to flail.

The Krote stood on the thing’s back and urged it toward a timber house at the harbor’s edge. In the space of a few heartbeats, the house was in ruins.

As Angel moved on to another creation, the waterfront was soon lit by various fires as the Krotes experimented with their weapons of war. A couple of buildings erupted into flames, but mostly the warriors kept the fire to themselves, learning how to manipulate their machines’ limbs, bodies or other parts-juggling flame, swiping with cutting things, becoming accustomed to the poison vents in their mounts’ hides or the places where discs and arrows could be loaded and ejected. The whole scene was cast onto the water as grotesque, dancing shadows.

Lenora walked her own machine amongst her Krotes, already comfortable with how it felt beneath her, and how she could touch its most basic mind with her own. But this was far different from the hawks, she realized. This thing was not really alive. It had not evolved or grown out of nature: it had been created, and it had no purpose other than to follow her bidding. It would not require food or water, sleep or rest. Lenora thought back to the final days of the Cataclysmic War. The Mages’ machines had been mighty, but there had been something missing from them that was already evident in these new constructs: a spark of consciousness. The war machines of old, driven by magic though they were, had relied on their riders to initiate every move, gears and magical power routes cast into their bodies and often subject to fault or damage. Now these new machines were part construct, part animal. They had the stone and metal, flesh and blood of the old machines, but these conjoined elements were more than just building blocks; they made the machines whole.

The Mages had twisted their new magic even further than before.

WITH EVERY KROTE now riding a new machine, Conbarma was in ruins. Much of the harbor had been torn up, buildings were leveled, traces of hawk flesh lay across the ground and the sky itself seemed to be burning from the fires erupting around the town. The Krotes were reveling in this new experience, and the Mages seemed content with that.

Lenora maneuvered her machine in front of a tall, striding thing and questioned the Krote sitting high above her. “Have you seen the Mages?”

“No, Mistress.”

Lenora frowned and looked around. The fires lit the sky and deepened shadows. Every Krote was now mounted on his or her machine, and there was no sign of anyone walking.

“Mistress…I never knew it would be like this.”

Lenora looked up at the Krote. He was young, tall and dark-skinned, only slightly scarred by battle. “Whatdid you think it would be like?”

He shook his head. “I had no idea. I’d heard all the stories, read the histories, but this is suchpower. ” He lowered his voice and leaned closer, as if that would hide his next comment. “How can the Mages give all this to us?”

“They’ve given us nothing,” Lenora said. “Only a taste of what they have. We control the machines, not the magic that made them. Never forget that.”

“But I canfeel it!”

“Neverforget that!” Lenora said again, harsher than she had intended.

The young Krote’s eyes flickered down, then he looked at her again and nodded. “Mistress.”

“Now go on your way. I’ll be issuing a call to meet soon enough. Practice with your mount. Get its feel, discover its movement and limitations, if it has any.” She examined the machine, trying to make out details in the flickering light. “It’s tall, so it should be a good runner. And those legs are barbed and sharp. You’ll be able to cut down our enemies like fields of corn.”

“I’ve never seen corn,” he said.

“You will.”

She saw the Mages then, emerging from between two squat stone buildings farther along the harbor. They watched the Krotes, and though they were illuminated by various dancing fires, still there was a darkness between them, darker than twilight and immune to the fires shining from a dozen different angles. Even from this far away, Lenora could see the twinkle of Angel’s eyes, but the shadow hanging at her side gave away nothing.

Lenora steered her machine their way, walking slowly to match their pace. S’Hivez stared up at her, his expression unchanging, and it took only heartbeats for her to avert her gaze.

“It’s quite an army we’re building here,” Angel said.

“Unbeatable,” Lenora said.

“Of course.” Angel nodded and stared at her lieutenant. Her face was young, the skin barely marked by time, and she seemed to glow with some inner truth only just discovered.

What the fuck isthat? Lenora thought. The air between the Mages seemed to belong somewhere else. It was dark and calm, untouched by fire or moonlight, but flowing with its own particular threads of illumination.

“A soul unborn,” S’Hivez said. “Aborted by nature and cast aside.”

“It’s a shade,” Lenora whispered. The thing held no real shape, though occasionally it seemed to find form for a few heartbeats. Each form was familiar but unrecognizable, as though Lenora was viewing dreams long forgotten.

“It’s part of a shade that we’ve brought into the world,” Angel said. The shadow slipped around her shoulder and down her front, pooling at her feet. “We’re leaving this with you, Lenora. Soon S’Hivez and I must go, but there’s a lot more work to be done for our main army’s arrival. There are plans to be made, and machines to be built, and-”

“Why are you going?” Lenora said.

“Don’t question our actions,” Angel said, her voice low and even.

Lenora looked down at her hands. The machine settled slightly below her, as if it too was cowed by the Mage’s words. “Mistress.”

“We have our reasons, just as we have reasons for leaving this shade. It has a touch of our magic. Just a touch, but enough to draw up machines and carry on our work.”

“I could do it,” Lenora said. The Mages were silent, so she continued. “I could give life to the machines, make our army. With magic.” Her words terrified her, but to have even ahint of what they had, anecho…

I could help my child, she thought. Her daughter’s shade, floating out there somewhere, abandoned and never alive. What I could do with that!

S’Hivez growled.

“We’re here to fight a war with Noreela,” Angel said. If she knew what Lenora had been thinking, she gave no sign. “If we hand magic to any living thing, that thing becomes our enemy.”

“I would never-”

“You wouldn’t be able to help yourself.” Angel and S’Hivez started to walk away, leaving the shade flexing its shadows across the ground.

“Is that it?” Lenora said.

Angel glanced over her shoulder and smiled. “Almost. Watch.”

The Mages parted and paused at the entrance to a road leading into the heart of Conbarma. The Krotes had seen their approach and quietly moved away, giving the Mages room to work. There was a sense of anxiety in the air, a promise of change.

Angel and S’Hivez knelt and pressed their hands into the ground. The rock there quickly began to glow, radiating burnt orange spears of light which arced across Conbarma and sizzled out in the darkness. They crawled backward on their knees, increasing the distance between them and enlarging the spread of boiling rock. The surface broke into liquid, and a bubble rose to the surface and burst, sending molten stone pattering down around S’Hivez. He seemed unconcerned, and if any of the lava touched him, it caused no wound.

Farther back, farther, and when the Mages eventually stood and brought their hands from the ground, they left a pit of fire fifty steps across. Angel glanced back at Lenora and smiled. “From here, the shade will raise machines,” she said.

She and S’Hivez left the lava pit and approached an area of open ground where the mole was rooted into the mainland. It was here that Angel had first touched Noreelan soil after three hundred years in exile, only two days before but seemingly an age ago. How slowly time passes, Lenora thought, without day or night to mark it.

The Mages touched the ground again, but this time they hauled rocks up and out without melting them, piling them around the perimeter of the excavation, deepening the hole with every touch. It took only a dozen heartbeats and then they moved back again, S’Hivez’s shoulders sagging as if the effort had tired him.

Angel came back to where Lenora still sat astride her machine. “And that,” she said, “is the flesh pit. It needs filling, Lenora, before the shade can get to work. It has a touch of magic, but still it needs raw materials.”

“Will that thing listen to me?” Lenora asked.

“Shades take no orders from anything alive. But we’ve ensured that it knows its purpose.”

Lenora looked at the shadow low to the ground, like a wound on reality. “You control it?” she asked. Is that what my daughter is now? she thought.

“We gave it a promise,” Angel said. “There are many like that one, and they will work for us across Noreela. We’ll give them what they crave, in time.”

“Life?”

Angel grinned, and her smile was one that Lenora wished never to see again. “Is there an element of personal interest in this conversation?”

“My interest is to serve you, Mistress.”

“Then build me my army, Lenora, and do to Noreela what it did to us so long ago.” Then Angel and S’Hivez departed, melting away into shadows cast by looming buildings.

Lenora steered her mount between two burning houses. She found a curved alley, emerging into a shadowed courtyard lit only by the sickly light of the death moon. The place seemed undisturbed since their landing here a couple of days before. There was a long table that had been set for a meal, though the food had never been served, and birds or other creatures had tumbled the bottles of rotwine that had been opened and left to breathe. Yet even here there was evidence that Noreela had moved on. It was apparent in the way the moonlight struck the plates, shadows stalked from beneath the table and plants drooping from wall baskets seemed to be shedding their tiny leaves. A few floated to the ground as Lenora watched, fluttering at the air like dying beetles. Noreela belonged to the Mages now, and the dusk they had brought down across the land was their first brand of ownership.

Lenora stepped from her machine and walked to a chair that had been tipped over. She righted it, sat and began to shake. Her skin was warm, her head clear, and yet she could not prevent the shivers passing through her from toes to scalp, left hand to right. She sat on her hands and bent low, as if presenting less of a target would fool the shivers into leaving. She mumbled a plea to the twilight, trying to ignore the smells of heated flesh and fresh magic that wafted in from the harbor. Such stenches flashed old memories in her mind: the beaches of The Spine, Noreelan war machines cutting down Krotes left and right, the wounds she had received and the gouge to her shoulder delivered by a machine walking on legs of fire. Her flesh burning…the magic, ripe and rich in the Noreelan that sought to kill her, its sickly sweet smell…

“Oh by the Mages, what’s wrong with me?” she whispered, and her tears startled her. She shook her head and watched them speckling the ground.

Not long to wait, a voice said.

Angel knew of her lost child; perhaps she had known forever. Did she suspect that Lenora would betray their cause for her own petty revenge? Was that why the Mages had given her their army, as bribery to stay?

Was she really that important to them?

“Iwill avenge you,” she said. Though her voice was quiet, it was firm. “But not yet. I have duties.”

It’s cold, I hurt, I can never have you back, the voice said, and there was the truth, that muttered phrase from a thing that had never had the chance to live.

“I can never have you back, either,” Lenora said. “Not even if I go to Robenna and kill everyone there, all the descendants of those bastards who whipped me from the village, poisoned me and slaughtered you in my womb before you’d even drawn a breath or given me a smile. I can never have you back.”

But I can feel better, the voice whispered.

Lenora nodded. “And so can I.” Her memories of Robenna were so vague as to be little more than faded dreams, but there was one image that presented itself to her again and again: a house on stilts, a stream running beneath it and a tall man in a white robe standing on its balcony, watching her being whipped with poison-tipped sticks as the villagers drove her out. Pregnant out of wedlock: that had been her crime. The man watched, and perhaps it was only her fervent dreams of revenge that put pity in his eyes. He had been the village chieftain, and the father of her child.

“I need no fucking pity,” she said to this silent courtyard, over three hundred years and four hundred miles away. And she closed her eyes, imagining the man’s robe turning red as he was hacked to shreds.

A NOISE FROM the harbor shocked her from her daydream. Lenora stood and looked around, glancing at shadows as they seemed to dart away. Dreams, fading into the Mages’ dusk.

Another roar sounded, so deep that it vibrated the ground at her feet. Her machine did not move, but two of its eyes glittered as it watched her. She ignored them-there could surely be no expression there-mounted and urged it upright. The shakes were gone now, and her eyes were dry. Perhaps dreaming of revenge could melt away the tears.

She steered the machine from the courtyard, through the alley and out between the two burning buildings, and then she saw what had made the sound.

Both Mages stood on the mole that stretched out across the mouth of the harbor. They were constructing another machine, but this was larger than anything they had made yet. Twice the size of the largest hawk Lenora had ever seen, it seemed to float above the choppy waters, held upright on thick columns of steam. Angel and S’Hivez worked their hands into and around the rock, twisting and molding it to their needs, pumping fresh magic into this miraculous creation. The rock dipped and a roar of steam sent ripples across the harbor. It rose again, the Mages went back to work, then the surface of the water began to bubble and burst as dozens of sea creatures were sucked from beneath. Fish, octopus, a foxlion, shelled creatures and something five times the size of a Krote with more teeth than skin-they all flapped through the air and landed on the red-hot machine, melting into it as the Mages manipulated their flesh and scales, bones and teeth, adding to their creation every second.

Wings sprouted from its sides, one pointing inland at Noreela, the other stretching above the wilder waters beyond the mole. Eventually, with the machine complete, Angel and S’Hivez cast it down into the waters to cool into its final shape.

When it rose again, they mounted its huge back, and it lifted them high above Conbarma.

“There’s so much left to do,” Lenora muttered.

The monstrous flying machine flapped its wings, sending clots of flaming feathers groundward.

“Where do I start?”

It rose higher and higher, and soon it was simply one shadow among many. Even the light from the moons failed to reveal its bulk.

Now we are both alone, her child’s voice whispered, and Lenora shook her head.

“Mistress?” a Krote said.

Lenora looked at her warriors mounted on their machines of war. They looked intimidating, terrifying, lost.

“Mistress, what now?”

“Now,” Lenora said, “I need you to find a stock of rotwine and food. Post sentries at the town’s perimeter, but the rest of you will drink and eat with me, and we’ll plan the days ahead.”

Lenora smiled, suddenly eager for the fight. And quietened the voice in her mind, telling it there was all the time in the world.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn