Dawn

Chapter 19

HOPE FOLLOWED ALISHIA, following the path. Sometimes the girl tired and Hope carried her, slung across both arms or resting over a shoulder. Other times the girl seemed to be the strong one, forging barefoot through the thickening snow, climbing ever higher. The path guided them, and Alishia seemed happy to allow that. Whatever she had seen-wherever she had been-Hope had no choice but to let the girl’s trust carry them forward.

Many things in Kang Kang were strange, but the path wended its way between them. It was almost as though the path was outside Kang Kang, a tributary of normality carrying them through this place that should not be. They heard, saw and smelled things that defied explanation-the cries of children where there were none, great trees rooted in nothing, fruit stinking of blood hanging on those same trees’ branches-but the path was always there, true and straight. Even covered with snow it was still the obvious route.

Hope had to tear and tie up Alishia’s dress when it started to tangle in her feet. Her top as well, twisted tighter beneath the coat that could not be so easily adjusted. She became chubby around her stomach and cheeks, even though Hope had not seen her eat anything for some time. Her voice changed, but not the words. Alishia still spoke like an adult, and sometimes she repeated the things Hope had heard her muttering whilst asleep, the language of the land that she pretended not to understand.

She knows so much, Hope thought. I’m due what she knows. It’s coming to me, as I’ve always known it should. She stared at the back of Alishia’s head as they walked higher into the mountains. Occasionally the girl turned and smiled at the witch, and Hope always smiled back. She could feel the tattoos flexing beneath her skin, the coolness of Kang Kang seeping up through her shoes and into her bones, the windchill penetrating her clothing in an attempt to freeze her old woman’s heart. But it had been frozen long before now, and her obsession kept her warm.

They walked across the sides of mountains, along ridges, down into valleys that held reservoirs of darkness and unknown things. Hope heard sounds from the darkness at either side of the path, growls, something chomping on something else, mournful tears. She ignored them, as did Alishia. That was Kang Kang trying to distract them from where they were going.

Then why is it also leading us? Hope kicked at the snow covering the path, finding only pebbles and stones underneath that told her nothing. Alishia paused ahead, turned around and waited, urging Hope on with a quick wave of her small hand.

“Not far,” the girl said.

Hope’s breath froze in her chest. “We’re almost there?”

“Not far,” Alishia said again. She frowned and looked at her bare feet, her large coat flapping at her shoulders as wind blew down from heights they still could not see.

“Lead on,” the witch said. Alishia nodded and started walking again. She tilted her head to the side now and then, and at first Hope thought she was trying to prevent the ice-cold breeze from entering her ear. But then the girl paused at the summit of a long ridge, tilted her head and stared skyward.

“Not far at all,” she said.

Hope did not want to disturb her. Whatever she was following, whatever led her, Alishia seemed to trust.

WALKING ALONG ONE ridge, Hope heard something high in the sky. It started as a whistling, thumping sound, like flying things slapping at the air with heavy wings. More buzzing things? She thought not. She searched for the source of the noise but saw nothing. It seemed to come from far away, but it was growing closer. Got to hide! she thought. Got to protect.

And then certainty struck her like a tumbler. “Alishia! It’s them…!”

Alishia paused and tilted her head. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she smiled.

The noise changed. Screeches underscored the thumping of wings, and then cries, and the sounds of impacts that echoed from Kang Kang’s solidity. They were still far away, but Hope sensed the change from controlled to alarmed. A splash of blue flame lit the sky briefly several miles to the southwest, spilling across the dusk like liquid fire, and for a heartbeat Hope saw many dark specks silhouetted against it. Chasing these specks were shadows that seemed even darker.

She felt the vibration of something striking the ground. More screams, more impacts, and a hundred heartbeats later the sounds faded across the hills. Hope blinked and exhaled her held breath, and it was as though nothing had even happened.

Alishia had already started walking again. Hope hurried to catch up. Whatever had flown flew no more. Hawks? she thought. Machines?

WHEN THE PATH began to fade away, Alishia feared that they were finished. Perhaps it had always been just another trick of Kang Kang, to lead them this far into the heart of the mountains and then leave them at the mercy of whatever might dwell here. She walked on anyway, determined to retain her confidence before the witch. Something rumbled higher up the mountainside, like a giant stomach contemplating food.

The snow began to clear.

A voice spoke in her mind, muttering words she did not know, and she gave those words to the air. The witch was glaring at her-she could feel her mad gaze simmering the air behind her-but Alishia carried on. Speaking the words was different from having them spoken to her, and Alishia hoped that soon she would understand.

She crested a ridge, looked down into a valley and knew exactly where those words came from.

“We’re here,” she whispered. She heard running footsteps behind her and the witch was at her side, kneeling in the thinning snow and looking down into the valley before them.

“Too soon,” Hope said. “Not where it should be!”

“Perhaps it moved…” A voice spoke once more in Alishia’s head, and this time she understood. “We can go down,” she said. “They’ll allow that, at least. But at the mouth of the Womb we have to stop and wait.”

Hope could barely talk. “Wait…for what?”

“The offerings.”

The witch was shaking her head, denying what she was seeing. But Alishia looked with a child’s eyes, and she could believe.

THE VALLEY WAS bare of snow, green, lush with vibrant grasses and shrubs, spiked here and there with clumps of trees that grew two hundred steps high, their trunks forty steps around at the base.

“I can see,” Hope muttered. “And they’re not here.”

A breeze blew across the valley and rustled its grasses, sending a wave from one side to the other. At its base a stream flowed, heading south and disappearing into the darkness of a ravine at the far end. The stream’s source lay on the valley slope below them. A hole in the ground, hooded with a slab of rock and centered in a wide splash of bright blue flowers. Alishia had never seen those flowers, but she had read of the mythical birth-blooms that midwives had once carried as a sign of their profession.

“I can see,” the witch said again. “It’s done. It’s happened; we’ve won!” She grabbed up a fistful of wet soil, pressing her fingers together until it seeped from her hands, muttering under her breath and frowning when nothing happened.

“Are you so hungry for magic?” Alishia said.

“Yes!” The witch stood and thumped the disc-sword on the ground.

“Nothing is won,” Alishia said. “If only it could be so easy. So fair. But I don’t think anything will be easy or fair ever again.”

“But it’sdaylight down there! I can see the colors of grass and flowers, and the trees, and the stream flowing into the distance…”

“And behind us?”

Hope glanced back into the darkness they had traveled through. The truth dawned. “It’s not really daylight.”

“Not really. Something from the Womb, perhaps. Or the Shades of the Land.”

Hope looked dejected, and angry. “And where are they, these Shades? Are they who you speak to when you slink off?”

Alishia shrugged and looked away, disturbed by Hope’s antagonism. “Somethingwhispers to me,” she said. From the library, she thought, but she did not want to say that aloud. It was a special place, and she did not wish it tainted. “As for the Shades…I think we’ll see them soon.”

Alishia stepped from darkness into light, but it was not as comforting as she had hoped. There was no sun heating her skin, no blue sky above. This was not daylight, but simply an absence of night. The light rose from the grasses and flowers, the trees and ragged shrubs, simmering in the air and presenting the same blank sky as the twilight that had fallen across Noreela days ago. The sense of it silenced Alishia, and even Hope fell quiet as they walked down the steep slope toward the Womb of the Land.

When they arrived, Alishia sat down amongst the birth-blooms. They smelled gorgeous. She closed her eyes to rest.

When she opened them again the Shades of the Land made themselves known at last.

ALISHIA SEEMED TO die. One moment she was there before Hope, sitting down in the long grass and flowers and sighing as she took the weight off her legs. Then she fell back to the ground with a grunt.

Hope dashed to her side, cradled the girl in her arms, shook her, breathing stale breath into her mouth in the hope that it would bring her back.

But the girl was still and limp, and when Hope pressed her head to Alishia’s chest she heard nothing inside.

SHE WAS BACK in that vast, endless library, but so much had changed. It was a silent place this time, with no tumbling book stacks or rampaging shades to steal away the peace. And all the flames had gone, because all the books were burned.

Alishia walked between two cliffs of shelving. She looked up, unable to see the top because of the gently drifting haze of smoke high above. Where the shelves had once been stacked with books, there was now only ash. A few pages remained here and there-the dregs of memories to yellow, crumble and finally fade away-but this place was no longer a library at all.

Alishia released one single sob and walked on.

She turned left and right, following the corridor between stacks and never once finding a whole book. Her feet kicked through drifts of ash. Some of them came up to her knees, and she wondered at the countless forgotten things around her. She could never know them, because ash cannot be read.

She realized that she was crying. A few tears dropped to the floor and darkened, sinking down and forming small pits in the ashen surface. She moved on, wiping her face because she did not wish to leave anything of herself behind.

She reached a reading area, with leather chairs and a low table piled with burnt books. She was not surprised to see a young man sitting in one of the chairs. She thought she recognized him. Someone from Noreela City, perhaps? A visitor to her library, someone she had regularly passed in the street? He smiled at her. Everything about him was familiar, yet just out of reach.

“We thought it would be easier for you if we presented ourselves like this,” the man said, and she almost knew his voice. “Please, take a seat.”

Alishia sat down, perfectly at ease. The man was quite young-perhaps the age she had been when this began-and his clothing was unremarkable. There was a constant smile on his face, but she noticed that it seemed not to touch his eyes. They were dark, and deep. She felt as though she could lose herself in there. They reminded her of that place beneath the library floor.

“I’m frightened,” she said, no longer at ease.

“Don’t be. We’re not here to hurt you.”

Alishia looked around, expecting to see more people stepping from the charred shadows.

“We’re all here,” the man said, touching his chest.

“You’re the Shades of the Land,” Alishia said, and the man nodded. “The Birth Shade,” she continued, “and the Death Shade, and the Half-Life Shade.”

Again, the man nodded. “You’re a wise young girl.”

“I’m not as young as I appear.”

“Obviously. Strange. But we accept that, because it is.” He stood and walked around the reading area, kicking casually at a pile of ash. “Human history has turned to smoke,” he said, “and there’s no future to be written. Not here. Not as things stand.”

“I’m here to change that,” Alishia said. “The Mages can’t win. There was a boy, and they took him, and now there’s me, and I have something of what he had…but not the exact same thing. I think I have a seed for something new. Something fresh.”

The man still walked, looking down at his feet. Dust rose around him as he kicked through the ash. If he kept kicking perhaps he would obscure himself completely.

“We guard the Womb,” he said. “We tend it. We are the soul of the land.”

“You have to let me in.”

“Haveto?” The man looked up. That smile, so beatific yet still not touching his eyes.

Alishia fought hard not to avert her gaze. “I’m important,” she said.

The man nodded. “Your sort are always so filled with self-importance. Always sosure that you’re the only things of worth. Noreela is so much more than the humans who live upon it, you know.”

“Like the tumblers? Nax? Evil things.”

“Differentthings.” The man sat down before Alishia once more. “There are spirits of the air; a whole world folded beneath the surface of Sordon Sound; a great, mad mind south of Kang Kang; people living much deeper than any fledge mine, so deep that they have no concept of the surface. There’sso much I could show you and tell you, if only you could take it all in.”

“I can!”

He shook his head. “You’re still too human.”

“But it’s the whole of Noreela under threat from the Mages! You’ve guided and protected me this far…haven’t you?”

The man inclined his head but did not reply.

“Why bring me this far and then-”

“Surely the witch brought you?”

“She brought me, and sometimes I brought her. But I think she’s taken with her lust for magic.”

The man touched his chin and stroked it, as though unused to having skin. “You’ve been through this place,” he said, indicating the silent, dead library around them. “You’ve read the language of the land, and you read it well. You’re intelligent. You know what we need.”

“Sacrifice.”

The man laughed out loud, shaking his head. His eyes were still dark. “Offerings, Alishia. Or keys. You have been helped, now help us. Not a sacrifice. We’re Shades, not gods. You see so much black and white, with no shades in between. There is no true darkness or light.”

“The Mages. There’s nothing other than evil in them.”

“They’re human. They were normal people, once. One was a Shantasi Mystic; the other became his lover.”

“Why are you doing this?” Alishia asked. She felt tears threatening, and she bit her lip to hold them back. She had no wish to show weakness before this…soul. I’m talking to the land itself, and I’m speaking its language, and I’m too proud to cry for Noreela.

“Because things are so different. The Womb has birthed many times before, but it has never been seeded from outside. We have never let anythingin. Yet events roll, and new things happen, and new magic will arise from this. Anevolved magic. And we are responsible. We’re the soul of the land, after all.”

“But why the offerings? Why can’t you just help me?” The first tear slipped from Alishia’s left eye.

The man watched the tear trace a path through the grime on Alishia’s cheek. She felt his gaze upon her, touching her skin, and the pressure of his presence was too great to bear. She started to shake, and he backed away, merging into the shadows between two blackened book stacks. He became little more than a shadow himself.

“Because of that tear,” he said. “Because humans suffer. And in suffering, you may at last find your soul.”

And then he was gone, and Alishia was left alone in her void of burnt memories.

HOPE SAT BENEATH the false daylight and held the dead girl on her lap. The valley containing the Womb of the Land was silent compared to the rest of Kang Kang. Gone were the grinding of rocks, the hushing of shadows rubbing together, the breath of the wind and the calls or cries of things killing or being killed. An occasional breeze stirred the long grass and sent waves across the slopes, but it was virtually silent. Even the shifting grass chose not to whisper. The only definable sound in this strange valley was the sobbing of an old woman.

If she truly had seen the Mages passing them by back there in Kang Kang, then they had not yet found this place. She didn’t know whether that was even important anymore.

She had been to see the entrance to the Womb of the Land. It was unremarkable; a cave, a small stream running from it. She had carried Alishia in her arms, and even thirty steps away she knew that she would not be able to enter. The shadows in there were too solid. She threw a stone and it disappeared inside, but she heard no echoes. She dipped her toes in the stream. But she would not drink of that water.

So she had moved away again, sat back down, and now she waited for what would happen next.

Alishia moved. Hope held her breath, grasped the girl tighter and looked down. The girl’s face was still slack and pale, mouth hanging slightly open, but one of her eyelids had raised to reveal the dark half-moon of her pupil. Her eye turned, centered on Hope. Her lips twitched. Another adult tooth fell from her mouth, and a single tear left her eye. It ran a clear path down the girl’s dirty cheek.

“You’re alive!” the witch said. She hugged the girl to her, breathing in Alishia’s breath and looking around to see if the world looked any different. But we’re here! she thought. We’re at the Womb of the Land. Surely everything will change now? Surely the magic will come back and everything will be better? But the very idea of that felt impossible. How could anything really be better, ever again? The witch felt the power of the girl in her arms, radiating out in waves now that she had returned, but Hope herself was still a false witch without charms or tricks. She was the last of her line, destined to die cold and alone. Even if Alishia fulfilled whatever vague destiny she had discovered, Hope would be no part of it.

She remembered rising from the pit of the dead Sleeping God and lashing out at Trey. A moment of violence, a flash of red in her mind, and since then she had cast it deep, not wishing to dwell on the fate of the fledge miner. Out of every bad thing she had done in her life, that act had damned her forever.

“Do what you came here to do!” Hope said. Even though her voice was low, still it sounded loud in this narrow valley. “Do it! We’re here, we’re at the Womb, it’s over there behind us and I cansee the darkness inside.”

“We wait,” Alishia whispered. “We can’t get inside until…”

“Until what?”

“I’ll know when.” Alishia tried to sit up in Hope’s arms but the witch held her tight.

“It’s right there!” Hope said. But she looked into the cave mouth thirty steps away, and its darkness suddenly seemed more solid than any of the rocks surrounding it.

“Be content with waiting and they’ll let us,” Alishia said.

“The Shades of the Land?”

“Yes, them.”

Hope helped Alishia sit up in her lap, and for a while she knew what it would have been like to have a child of her own.

HOPE SPOKE LITTLE, and for that Alishia was glad. The girl was weak and frightened, her bones ached, her muscles knotted and cramped and her scalp itched as her adult’s hair turned into the hair of a child. I’m getting smaller and smaller, she thought, and for the first time she truly contemplated the eventual end of the process. Would it hurt? She hoped not. But the parting words of the Shades stayed with her. And in suffering, you may at last find your soul.

They remained there for some time, waiting for something to happen. Hope found the berries in her pocket and they ate them. They were sweet and sickly, but they both relaxed when the fruit seemed to fill their bellies and take away the cramps.

Alishia drifted in and out of a sleep so deep that it bordered on unconsciousness. She expected to find herself in that giant, dead library again every time she closed her eyes, but she did not return. When she awoke she could not recall any dreams.

As her mind drifted to Trey and what might have become of him, she heard the sound of something approaching the valley ridge.

“Whatis that?” Hope said.

It sounded like many feet hitting the ground at the same time, impacts gentle, their progress rapid. It began as a scratching in the distance, and within a few heartbeats it was right above them, threatening to force its way from the darkness surrounding the valley and birth whatever made the noise into the light.

The witch stood and brandished the disc-sword, but Alishia knew that it would have no effect against whatever was to come.

“It could be the Mages,” she said. “Or it could be something come to save us all.”

On the valley ridge above them, a shadow emerged from the surrounding dusk of Kang Kang.

THEY’RE COMING. The words were whispered along the line from the east, and Kosar heard them and passed them west. They’re coming.

The sounds of the battle in the north had ended an hour before, replaced by the dull, solitary whistle of wind finding channels between rocks. Snow danced across the foothills of Kang Kang, whipping into spirals here and there when the breeze became trapped. Some of these flitting figures seemed possessed of a strange purpose, and Kosar wondered exactly what he was seeing. Snow wraiths? Or wraiths in the air revealed by the snow? None of them came close to him, and they all faded away after a few heartbeats.

“I can’t see anything in this snow,” Lucien said.

“We’ll see them, I’m sure. They won’t be sneaking this way. They’ll becharging. ” Kosar placed his hand flat against the ground. “Can you feel that?”

“What?”

“The ground is shaking.”

“Noreela is afraid,” Lucien said, and for some reason the comment gave Kosar a boost of confidence. If the land itself is afraid, perhaps it will do something to help.

A few moments passed and Kosar stared north, down the hillside and across the plains that ended at the fiery horizon. There was still no movement, and he began to wonder what the Mages’ dark magic could do. Would it make the advancing Krote army invisible? Were they even now crawling carefully up the slopes before them, reaching out, probing with swords until they held every Shantasi warrior a slice from death?

The ground shook some more, and now there was a rumble to accompany it.

“That came from behind!” Lucien said.

“No!” Kosar turned, hefting his sword as though expecting to find a Krote standing behind him. Shantasi all across the hillsides were doing the same, breaking cover and finding new shelter that protected them against an attack from uphill instead of downhill. “This can’t be them!” Kosar said.

“Then what-” Lucien’s words were swallowed by the thunder of what came over the hilltop above them.

Tumblers. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred, pouring over the crest of the hill and bouncing down toward the remnants of the Shantasi army. Some of them were larger than any Kosar had ever seen, the height of three men, and they trailed spiked whips and barbed limbs behind them, slapping at the ground to adjust their downward path.

Scores of Shantasi shouted and turned to run down the hillside. Many more stood their ground and prepared to fight. Kosar knew that both courses of action would be hopeless.

“They’ve got the tumblers fighting for them,” he said. This was the end. These things would snap up hundreds of Shantasi, then they would turn and come back up, then down again, crushing the warriors onto the hides and piercing their bodies with hooks and spikes. They would join the dozens of other corpses already carried by these ancient things, and their steady decay would match that of Noreela.

The lead tumbler reached the first of the Shantasi…and passed them by. Others followed, some of them bouncing over the shapes crouched on the hillsides, others swerving to avoid warriors standing ready to fight.

“Maybe they’re running from something,” Lucien said. “Something happening in Kang Kang.”

Hope, Alishia and Trey, Kosar thought, but then another idea hit him. “More Shantasi weapons!” he said.

Lucien shook his head. “No one controls the tumblers. Not even the Shantasi, with their weird ways. Even in a time of magic the tumblers were always their own.”

“You’re an expert?” Kosar said. “Don’t tell me…you read about them at the Monastery.” He crouched down as a tumbler came close, thundering past faster than any horse could run. He caught a whiff of old rot and aged bones, and then it was away, leaving a pitted trail in the sprinkling of snow where its hooks and spikes had dug in. His heart thumped in his chest. He actually felt thrilled. “What are they doing?” he shouted at Lucien, raising his voice above the cacophony of the tumblers’ charge.

Lucien raised his head above the rock. “We’ll see,” he shouted back. “They’re heading north!”

The last of the tumblers passed by and continued down the slope, dodging Shantasi and plowing furrows in the damp ground. The bones crushed into their strange hides flashed yellow and white in the moonlight. They rumbled north across the plain, and minutes later Kosar saw the first blossoming explosion of a Krote machine meeting its end.

“In the name of the Black, they’re helping us!” Kosar said. Shouts rose up from the Shantasi scattered across the hillsides, cheers and calls, and metal gleamed as swords and slideshocks were waved in celebration.

“They’ll still get through,” Lucien said. “The Krotes will sweep the tumblers aside, and they’ll get through.”

“But every second counts,” Kosar said, and he laughed. Actually laughed. And it felt so good, he did it some more.

LENORA LED THE charge, riding her machine hard toward the first low hills of Kang Kang. She expected the second Shantasi attack to come at any moment. If they had any sense of war at all-and she knew that the Shantasi had found cause to fight many times through their history-they would have a second line of defense between here and Kang Kang, probably upon those first low slopes. They would have had longer to dig in and prepare defenses, and they would have seen the signs of their First Army’s destruction. Anger and fear gave a soldier more power. Hate drove him or her harder. This coming fight would be more vicious, but Lenora was not afraid of that.

Shewas afraid of failing to fulfill the task given her by the Mages.

And the more it spoke, the more she was afraid of that voice. It was telling her truths she did not wish to hear. The more it spoke, the more she felt her determination bleeding away. Is this the life I’ve missed? it said. Is this all you have become?

But I’ve become powerful, Lenora thought.

You’ll become nothing.

And Lenora remembered Angel’s vision of the lake of blood, with nothing left of Noreela.

She was suffering. To drown the discomfort, she sought the pain of others.

Her machine ran, untiring and eager to do her bidding. She thought, Left, and the thing veered to the left, dodging a small hillock with an ancient ruin scarring its summit. Right, she thought, and the machine curved right, leaping a dry streambed and landing so gently that Lenora barely felt it touch the ground. It’s like a part of me, she thought. But the shade of her daughter, that was the part of her missing, the part she should be pursuing. I don’t want you, she thought. AndI’ll come to find you soon…Leave me alone…Stay with me. Her thoughts were as chaotic as war, as random as an arrow striking her or missing altogether. Peace was something she feared she would never find, even when all the fighting was done.

And then she saw movement to the south.

Ducianne rode alongside her across a wide, flat expanse of dried marsh. “What in the Black is that?” she shouted.

Lenora knew. She had seen some once before in Robenna, years before she became pregnant. One of them had taken a child from the village. Even then, she knew that they were too different to ever understand.

“Tumblers,” she said.

“So let’s take them!”

“Ducianne!” Lenora shouted, but Ducianne goaded her machine on, riding directly at the advancing wall of tumblers that streaked toward them. They jumped here, rolled there, twisting and turning their routes to confuse the Krotes. But the Krotes’ blood was up. All of them were tainted by battle, some of them bearing wounds, a few carrying the stumps of arrows buried in arms or shoulders. It would take a lot to panic them now.

“Ducianne!” Lenora shouted. “Attack together. Not on your own!”

Ducianne turned on her machine and grinned, pulling back slightly so that she fell back in line with Lenora. Other machines rode up beside them, forming a long, snaking line that advanced quickly southward.

“Don’t be so keen,” Lenora called.

“Well, I-” Ducianne shouted, and the first of the tumblers struck the front of her machine.

The joint impact was tremendous. The tumbler was crushed flat and shattered, lifting high over the front of Ducianne’s mount and sweeping her from its back. Lenora glanced around in time to see her friend ripped apart, torso and head spilling in different directions amidst a rain of old bones, torn vegetation and new blood. The machine was split as well, its ruptured parts rolling onward in pursuit of Lenora, finally exploding in a geyser of blue flame as the magic that held it together failed and faded. Lances of cobalt light probed out, sparking here and there where they impacted the ground, and a ball of fire burst from the machine’s dying heart.

Lenora faced forward again, and sadness at the loss of her friend was cut short by what she saw: a field of tumblers coming at her, stretching left and right as far as she could see.

The two main forces of machines and tumblers met. The sound was tremendous, a mixture of machines roaring, tumblers thumping at the ground, Krotes screeching and fireballs and other ventings finding homes. The ground shook and the air sang with the tunes of war. Very soon the two opposing lines had disintegrated, turning into a pitched battle that spread quickly across the dried marsh.

Lenora swerved left to avoid a tumbler and drove straight into another. She tried to pull her machine up short but its momentum carried it on, front legs extended to ward off the huge rolling thing. When they struck, Lenora was thrown forward. She grasped one of her machine’s forelimbs, swinging around and kicking out at the tumbler. It started squirming and flexing, whipping at her with hooked limbs, but her machine unleashed a dozen spurts of flame from slits above its eyes. The tumbler’s limbs were severed and fell burning between the battling giants.

Lenora took the opportunity to scramble onto her machine’s back, ordering it to reverse as she did so. It tried, shaking with the effort, but was held tight. She leaned forward and hacked with her sword. The tumbler squirmed some more, trying to drive its barbs and hooks into the machine but failing to penetrate deep enough to take hold. Lenora sliced through its remaining limb, reaching farther and stabbing at its hide. She saw the bones of dead people in there, one recent skeleton smiling at her with leathery lips and waving a loose forearm.

Fire, she thought, leaning back and closing her eyes. The machine breathed fire and the tumbler lit up, rolling back and trying to extinguish its burning side by crushing it into the ground. And more. The machine coughed again, and the tumbler was aflame, crackling and spitting as its ancient insides ignited.

Lenora did not wait to witness the tumbler’s demise. She rode to the giant machines bearing the cages of the dead, instructing their riders to release the cargo. Wooden limbs were lowered, ropes cut, metal chains severed, and a thousand dead Noreelans tumbled from their incarceration. They rolled from the body pile, rising dozens at a time and moving forward into battle. They passed by any Krote or machine they met, bearing down on tumblers already in their sights. Some carried swords and knives, others had fashioned clubs from thigh bones or spears from sharpened sticks. None of them possessed weapons that would hurt a tumbler.

But Lenora had not released these dead to attack the tumblers. She wanted tosmother them.

She rode back into battle, dodging past the stumbling dead. Several tumblers ahead of her lit up from the inside as blue fireballs penetrated and exploded, their bone cargoes silhouetted against the flames. Inside, the bones were shattered and scattered, but those on the outside were more complete. Some of the tumblers seemed to scream, but the sound felt the same as the voice of Lenora’s shade: in her mind, deep down. Wondering whether she was the only one to hear, she screamed back.

Lenora saw the first of the dead crushed into the ground by a huge tumbler. Several of them remained squirming in the dirt, but a couple were pressed onto the thing’s hide, its barbs and spikes jutting from their already rotting bodies. There was little blood. The thing rolled on…and then stopped. It started to shake. Its limbs whipped back across its own body, hooking into the moving corpses and tugging away, as if to remove them. But they were stuck fast.

Through the shouts and shrieks of the battlefield, over and above the unremitting whisper of her daughter’s shade, Lenora heard the tumbler scream.

It seemed to go mad, darting this way and that, skidding across the ground when the dead Noreelans were beneath it, but it could not scrape them from its outer skin. They were tattered now, barely recognizable as human, but the damage was done. As the tumbler came toward Lenora, stopped and turned away again, she saw a dozen nebulous shadows flung from it, thrashing through the air, landing, little more than a heat haze on the twilit battlefield. But the air was thick here-misted blood, smoke, the stench of the dying-and these shapes soon took form. Diaphanous, ambiguous, the mad wraiths darted away from the tumbler. One of them struck a machine and seemed to disappear. The machine paused. Its Krote rider stood, looked down and shouted, as if angry. And then the machine flipped onto its back and crushed the Krote, its flaming legs thrashing at the air like those of an overturned beetle.

Yes, Lenora thought, this is when the fighting gets bloody.

ALISHIA LOOKED AT the things coming down the slope toward them, and what they carried, and she was the little scared girl she so resembled.

“I can’t look,” Hope whispered beside her. “I can’tsee. ”

“What do you think we’re seeing?” Alishia asked, though she already knew. She knew because Trey was there, suspended between these things like a baby borne by multiple mothers. He was naked, his skin smooth and soft and yellow.

“I don’t know,” Hope said, “but they must be gods.”

Alishia looked at the things carrying Trey, but she could not make them out properly. She was not even sure how many there were. They seemed to shy away from the light, like a shadow fading the instant a lamp was lit. There but not there, a trick of the light and a truth of the dark. What shecould see was terrible, but perhaps only because she expected it to be so: ragged wings, long limbs with reflections of hooks, blades and nails, and faces that seemed to exude pure sunlight.

“Oh no,” Alishia said.

“What?” Hope was hiding her eyes, and she glanced up at Alishia kneeling beside her.

Alishia ignored the witch. Here he comes, she thought. The man I saved, and look at him now. Look at him. An offering if ever I saw one. He appeared to be dead, carried by the Nax from wherever Hope had murdered him, because surely they knew what this was all about. The Nax were gods, weren’t they? Gods and demons both, more powerful than thought and more dreadful than the worst of nightmares.

Trey had feared them, and now he was with them.

They came closer, and as they brought Trey nearer, Alishia could see the gaping wounds across his arm and chest. The cuts pouted pale and fleshy, bloodless, flesh yellowed by fledge.

“Trey?” Alishia called, her voice incredibly loud in this place that held its breath. He gave no reaction. He floated down to them, carried by the shadows of the Nax.

“Don’t look!” Hope screeched, and something laughed.

They reached the rock overhang above the Womb of the Land and made their way around it, bringing the naked, motionless fledge miner down the slope to where Alishia and Hope waited.

Alishia was suddenly cold and terrified, certain that this was happening and mortified by that certainty. She felt something probing at her mind and pushed it away; its tendrils were cool and utterly inhuman, and she had no wish to bear something like that.

Hope groaned beside her, pushing her face into the ground.

“Trey?” Alishia said again. She stood and stepped forward, trying her best to ignore the things that carried him. She knew that if she really scrutinized them they would manifest before her and allow her examination, but she did not know why. Because I’m human? Because I’m me? They had brought Trey here, and they must have their reasons. She only hoped that their reasons were in harmony with her own.

Trey opened his eyes. They were pure yellow, with no pupils or whites remaining. Alishia could not believe that they could see, but he turned to her and smiled, the creases at the corners of his eyes caked with fledge. He opened his mouth to speak but exhaled only a whisper of the drug.

Alishia felt something else prodding at her mind and she smiled, closed her eyes and let him in.

Trey!

Alishia…the witch, Hope, is that her down there?

It’s her.

She attacked me. She’s dangerous, and mad!

I know, Trey. She tried to calm him, mentally stroking his brow. She’s mad, but she always wanted what we need.

What’s happening?

I’m waiting to go in, but I don’t know when. But if we have time, I think everything will be all right. That’s what it’s down to now: time.

Time, Trey said, and his voice drifted away.

He withdrew from her mind and smiled again, reaching out for Alishia’s hand. She squeezed, and he was cool.

The things lowered him to the ground and moved away, fluttering across the grass, climbing the slopes and merging back into the dusk beyond the valley. Against her better judgment Alishia watched them, and it was only as they passed from light to dusk that she perceived their true form.

She shivered, and Trey squeezed her hand again.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” he said, voice hoarse and dry. His teeth were yellow, his tongue sat in his mouth like a fist of fledge and his eyes closed as he rested back on the ground.

Alishia knelt by his side and touched his face, turning him to her. “Trey.”

He opened his eyes again and looked at her. “Another hillside, and this time I’ve found you. You really are just a little girl.”

“I am,” she said, her voice tinged with an age of unrealized wisdom. “Trey, can you cast? Can you travel? Can you tell me what’s happening in Noreela?”

He sighed. “Now that they’ve gone, I think I can do anything. I’m more fledge now than man.” His head tilted back, and Alishia let him rest.

She put her hand on his chest and looked down his naked body. So strong, she thought. Perhaps I would have known him. And then his heart started beating faster than should have been possible, and his eyelids were rolling as he went away.

HOPE TRIED TO approach Trey, but Alishia kept her away with a simple look. You’ve harmed him once, that look said, how dare you come to him again?

The witch walked toward the entrance to the Womb of the Land, squatting and staring into the impenetrable darkness. Her thinning hair drifted around her brows now and then, as though stirred by a breath from the cave.

It was only a few minutes later that Trey woke, sitting up and crying out, his good hand reaching out to the darkness as if to ward it off. “They’re coming!” he shouted.

“Trey!” Alishia tried to calm him, but wherever she touched he flinched away, never meeting her eyes, staring into a distance she had no wish to see.

“They’re on their way!” he said again. “They know, they’re searching for this place, circling Kang Kang andsearching. ”

“The Mages?”

“Yes, them. ” He looked at Alishia then, his yellow eyes filled with tears. “Not long, Alishia,” he said.

She put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him to the ground, and she felt his heart slowing as she sat beside him. “There’s water here, and food,” she said, touching his lips.

“I need neither.” His breath smelled of caves and fledge.

“What else did you see?”

“So much. But all fragmentary. I traveled, and I saw so much. All of it bad, Alishia. Noreela awash with blood. People dead, and living, and many in between. A war. Men and women fighting machines and dying, and…other things fighting as well. For the machines or against them, I couldn’t tell. Some things I can’t see.” He frowned and closed his eyes, trying to remember or forget. “But I sawthem. I don’t know how near or far, but they’re above Kang Kang and coming this way. Every heartbeat brings them closer, and theyknew I was seeing them. Theyknew !”

“By hawk?”

“A flying thing. Like a hawk but so much bigger.” Trey’s heart was slowing even more, and Alishia moved her hand on his chest, trying to rediscover its beat.

“I can’t get into the Womb, not yet. There are Shades guarding it.”

“The Shades of the Land?”

“How do you know?”

“You have such an innocent mind. Like Rafe. I slipped in, just for a moment, and saw.”

“Then you know what the Shades ask for. They want us to suffer. They say that way, we’ll find our soul.”

“I’m an offering,” he said.

“It’s the Half-Life Shade that wants you, Trey. You’re all fledge now, and…” His heartbeat had reduced to a few per minute, weak flutterings as though a bird were trapped in his chest.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that one. Another. Take me down.”

Alishia dragged him down the hillside. He moved through the grass easily, as though fledge smoothed the way. Every time he exhaled, a haze of the drug blurred his features. Another, he had said. The Birth Shade? Was he changing into something else? Was it too much to believe that Trey was becoming much more of the fledge than any fledge miner had ever imagined?

Alishia stared hard at him, but he was still all there.

He could never be a Nax, she thought.

At the mouth of the cave Hope scuttled away, as though afraid of this naked yellow man. Alishia glared at her, then sat beside Trey, resting her hand on his chest once more.

“I should have died days ago,” he whispered without opening his eyes. “This wound runs deep, touches the heart of me. And then theytook me deep. The Nax saved me for this, but even so much fledge can’t hold me back forever.”

“What do you mean?” Alishia was crying now, because sheknew what Trey meant, and she was about to lose her newest, greatest friend. There was no sign of movement in the cave mouth, but an awareness grew in there, as though it were an eye suddenly opening to the world.

Something came closer.

“I hope I can help,” Trey said. “There’s so much more to Noreela, Alishia. I saw times from before time! The Nax showed me, and I don’t know why.”

“Because memories are important,” she said, thinking of the library and the burning pages falling around her like dying butterflies.

“Even though they can’t last?”

“Especially then.”

Trey closed his eyes and smiled. “I remember you,” he said. Alishia felt one final flutter in his chest, and then his heart was still.

“Trey,” she whispered, to speak his name one more time. This moment was how she wanted to remember him: brave and wise. And this final page of his life was new and fresh, untouched by the scourge of the Mages.

She cried. Her tears fell on his yellow skin and washed nothing away.

“He’s dead?” Hope said. She stood behind Alishia, her shape casting no shadow across the prone fledger.

“Yes,” Alishia said.

Hope started to say something but turned away, and Alishia sensed her retreating across the hillside.

The librarian sat with the dead miner for some time, never taking her hand from his chest. She did not feel him cooling. She sensed no change. The only difference was that his chest was still, not rising and falling, and the smell of fledge began to grow stale without his breath to renew it.

An hour after Trey died, the Womb of the Land changed. The Death Shade came, making the cave mouth darker than ever with its presence. It rose from the depths, becoming denser with every moment that passed, and Alishia remained with Trey instead of moving away. She feared it, but she was the reason it had come.

There was increased movement in the small valley. The grass began waving with no sign of a breeze, and several trees that dotted the hillsides flexed their branches as if stretching after a long sleep. Alishia saw Hope crouch down in fear as a cloud of green leaves sailed past her head, several of them becoming entangled in her wild hair. The witch thrashed at the leaves, cursing and screaming.

“Come and take him,” Alishia said. The cave suddenly seemed closer than it had before. Or perhaps it had grown.

There was no great unveiling, no giant Shade emerging. Trey simply rose a handbreadth from the ground and flowed toward the opening into the land. His hands and feet dipped to brush through the waving grasses, but Alishia had the sense that the Shade was taking him with caution and love. He passed into the cave. The Death Shade swallowed him, and Alishia’s final image of Trey was his pale yellow skin obscured from sight forever.

“Back below where you belong,” she said. Then she stood and walked away, her bones aching, heart fit to break.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn