Dawn

Chapter 20

I HAD NO WISH to ever be close to you again, Flage said. He had risen from the depths of the tumbler, and Jossua Elmantoz had sensed him coming. Jossua was blind and deaf and dumb, but this new sense of unbeing gave him greater sight than ever before. Much that he saw was loneliness. As the first Red Monk, he was used to that, but it had never quite felt like this. This was a solitude of the soul that he could barely stand, a sense of abandonment by not only other people and beings, but the land itself. He felt so far removed from everything he had believed in that he struggled to keep hold of his own mind. He imagined his life as a book and he kept reading it, again and again, so many times that he lost count. Every time it finished he started again, realizing that the true end was yet to be written.

I’m dead, but not finished, he kept thinking, and then Flage rose up.

Not dead, Flage said. Not like me. Your wraith and your shade are still together.

I don’t understand…

And were you meant to? Monk! All you understand is murder and death.

You know so little, Flage. What were you? A farmer?

A rover.

I’ve killed rovers.

I’m sure you have, Flage said. He moved away, his voice growing faint, and Jossua called out to him.

I’m so alone!

Flage laughed. We’d have you, if the tumbler mind asked. But it doesn’t ask. It doesn’t really want you, either.

Why?

There are reasons. I don’t understand them, but I know them. Enough to tell you that you won’t be here for very much longer. We’re almost somewhere.

Where?

Somewhere. Now leave me be, Monk. I hope you’re cold out here. I hope you’re lonely. Flage left, still talking as his voice faded to nothing. I hope you find all the pain you’ve given…

Jossua sensed the vastness of unknown space surrounding him, and he could still feel the impact of his broken body on the ground as the tumbler rolled onward. But he was alone once more.

Almost somewhere, he thought. But nothing came to tell him where.

KOSAR AND LUCIEN had joined a small group of Shantasi on a wide, flat rock. Most of them remained standing, still clasping their weapons, looking north at the strange battle out on the plains. Several more huge explosions had lit the scene. Most were true fire, but a couple of them gushed cool blue flame at the sky, like a fountain of ice rising from broken machines. The battle was a mile distant, but the fires provided enough light to make out individual combatants, both machine and tumbler.

A few minutes ago, one of the machines had disappeared within a swirling, twisting shadow, and Kosar had heard several of the Shantasi saySerpenthal. “The one you killed must have been a baby,” he said to Lucien. He was sure the Monk’s complexion paled.

They continued watching, but though many fires marked the demise of machines, still there was a growing awareness that the rolling forms of the tumblers were becoming fewer. They’re all fighting, one Shantasi said. They’re dying, another answered. Kosar guessed that both were correct. The tumblers were fighting and dying, and although every second gained would help Alishia and the others, the Krotes would be on them very soon.

“What else can Noreela throw at them?” Lucien asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The tumblers. The serpenthals. What else? The land seems to be helping itself.”

Kosar nodded, watching another giant flower of fire rise from the darkened landscape. Another machine dies, he thought, but the idea brought little comfort. “When we were traveling with Rafe, the magic helped us.”

“At the machines’ graveyard.”

“Then, and before. Alishia isn’t the same, but perhaps that help will be there again when we need it most.”

“You’re relying on that?” the Monk said.

Kosar shook his head, not looking at Lucien. “We can’t rely on anything but our willingness to fight.” He looked around at the Shantasi warriors, their commanders organizing them into smaller platoons and spreading across the hillsides in readiness. A hundred Shantasi started down toward the plain, ready to spring an ambush on the first machines that approached. “Going to their deaths,” he said, “and we don’t even know what’s happening in Kang Kang. We’re fighting for a sliver of hope, and we’ll die for it.”

“Better that than die for nothing.”

Yes, Kosar thought. A’Meer died under your sword for what you’re ready to fight for now.

“Something’s coming,” a Shantasi said. It was O’Lam, the big woman who had first tried to shoot Kosar and Lucien from the desert beast.

“Machines?” Kosar asked.

“Don’t think so. Mage shit, this dusk is so fucking annoying.”

Kosar smiled. A’Meer would have spoken that way.

“Something coming toward us from the battle. Slow. Perhaps Krotes on foot, or something else.”

“Krotes on foot we can fight,” Kosar said. He squinted, still unable to see anything.

O’Lam looked at him and smiled, stroking her cheek with the tip of her sword. “Krotes on foot make me wet.” She laughed, and Kosar laughed with her. Yes, just like A’Meer!

“Whatever it is, it’ll be here soon,” Kosar said. “Who knows what else the Mages have made to come at us?” O’Lam did not answer, and Kosar guessed she was probably going over the same possibilities in her own mind.

“Perhaps the damage is already done,” Lucien said.

“Meaning?” Kosar asked. He was aware that the Shantasi warrior was paying attention to the Monk too, her face pale and grim.

“The Mages are here. This Krote army had traveled the length of Noreela. Who’s to say what has happened? Perhaps there’s not much of Noreela left.”

“Are you always so fucking upbeat, Monk?” O’Lam said.

Lucien did not answer, and Kosar looked at the fires and explosions in the distance. There was a huge conflagration to the east, and it seemed to be growing all the time. Tumblers being burned, perhaps. Or something else. He knew little, standing here in the foothills of a place where no one should go, ready to fight a foe no one had ever seen. Please, in the name of the Black, I hope you’re going to do something soon, Alishia.

But right then the prospect of success, of victory, of this endless dusk giving way to daylight, seemed so very far away.

A FEW MINUTES later, they discovered what was coming toward them from the battlefield. Refugees. They watched them stagger across the dying land, and as they came closer Kosar could see their vacant expression, eyes wiped clean by whatever terrible things they had seen.

Many of them carried weapons.

“Where do they come from?” Kosar asked. “No villages out there, not this close to Kang Kang. And they don’t look in very good shape.”

“Perhaps the Krotes brought them,” O’Lam said. “Prisoners who escaped when the tumblers attacked.”

“We should go to help them,” Kosar said, but O’Lam touched his arm.

“No. They’ll reach our front line soon. Then we’ll see how much help they need.”

They watched the shapes climbing the slope, walking on at a steady pace. And it was only as they reached the first Shantasi line that Kosar realized what was so strange. They all walked alone.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Something’s wrong!”

The refugees reached the Shantasi and the attack began.

The first warriors were taken by surprise, and three fell beneath the weight of the attackers. Several more fought back, using swords and slideshocks on the first group of refugees, cutting them down and then backing away before the main body of people reached them.

The men and women they had cut down stood again-minus arms, slashed across the chest, one of them missing his head above his mouth-and continued their relentless walk.

“What in the fucking Black is that?” O’Lam said.

Kosar could only stare. The dead walked on, and it took him several more seconds to realize that the refugees wereall dead, cursed back to life and driven on as fodder to weaken the enemy. “This is only the first,” he said. “There’ll be much worse than this.”

“You’ve seen the Mages before, haven’t you?” O’Lam said. “I heard you talking with Mystic O’Gan.”

Kosar nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen them.”

“What were they like?”

“In all the world, friend, that’s the one thing you never want to know.”

The fighting had begun in earnest now, and the walking dead were starting to make their way up the hillside. There were hundreds of them, perhaps as many as a thousand, and those not immediately engaged marched on until they found an enemy to fight. There was no apparent strategy or method to their attack, but their power lay in their numbers and senselessness. If they lost one arm, they would heft a sword with another. Kosar saw a woman lose her left leg to a Shantasi throwing disc. She pulled herself upright and hopped forward once again. It would have been amusing were it not so grotesque, and he was pleased when the same warrior took off her other leg with a slideshock.

The woman fell and started pulling herself along the ground.

Many of the dead quickly lost their weapons, dropped from senseless fingers or left lodged between an unfortunate Shantasi’s bones. Yet still they came on, overpowering warriors by numbers alone. The dead did not move very quickly. They could walk but not run, turn but not leap, and the Shantasi had the advantage of Pace. But the dead were also difficult to keep down, and one mistake would cost a warrior dear.

One group of Shantasi retreated a hundred steps and hunkered down, taking bags from their shoulders, lifting flaps and directing a dark cloud of something at the walking dead. From this distance Kosar could not make out what the cloud consisted of-flies, gas? But when one of the Shantasi fired a burning arrow into its midst, the effect was staggering. The air lit up, a fireball that swallowed many of the dead and expanded dangerously close to the Shantasi lines. When the flames receded, many of the dead had fallen, burning into the ground. They still moved. Fanning the flames of their own demise.

“How much more do you have?” Kosar asked.

O’Lam did not turn to him. “Some,” she said.

Kosar shook his head. “It’s hopeless. We’re fighting magic with swords and burning flies.”

“No, we’re fighting what the Mages can make of magic. They keep it to themselves, selfish. Don’t give their army true access. That was their downfall three hundred years ago, and perhaps they’ll do the same now.”

“Perhaps?”

O’Lam shrugged. “We’ll soon see.”

Several Mourners that had come with the Shantasi army started chanting, approaching perilously close to shambling corpses and doing their best to send them down into the Black. Some succeeded; others did not. Kosar saw at least one Mourner fall, in need of chanting down himself.

When the first of the dead reached them, Kosar and Lucien stood their ground. They stayed close together in case they were rushed, and Kosar hefted the sword A’Meer had given him, sad that it would be tainted by flesh corrupted with bad magic.

“Every death for you,” he said, kissing the blade.

A man came at him, ragged and dirty and bearing a terrible dry gash across his throat. As he lunged, Kosar realized just how badly the man stank. He must have been dead for some time.

Kosar dodged aside and lashed out, lodging his sword in the man’s ribs. The man fell, turning as he did so, and the blade slipped from Kosar’s hand. He went for the sword but the man struck out. He caught Kosar across the arm and raked his nails down to his hands, ripping through the thief’s brands. Kosar screamed.

Lucien darted in and cleaved the man’s skull in two, hacking at the twitching body until it could move no more. He stood on the dead man’s back and tugged Kosar’s sword free, handing it back to the thief.

Kosar nodded his thanks and stared past the Monk. “Behind you,” he said. The Monk turned and went to work.

It was a short, vicious fight, but not very bloody. The little blood that did leak from these enemies was thick and black with corruption. Kosar recognized many of them as northerners, and from their clothing-well made, colorful-he guessed that some were from Noreela City itself. And what of that city now?

A few of them were from the Shantasi’s First Army, freshly dead and risen again. At least in death they seemed to have lost their Pace, so although the fight was a mental challenge beyond anything the Shantasi thought they would have to face, they still had the better of their dead friends.

Don’t let me see O’Gan, Kosar thought, over and over again. Please don’t let me see him. Not me, not him.

Kosar grew tired very quickly. His old wounds hurt, and he received several new ones to add to the pain. He kept a tight hold on his sword, and several times he and Lucien found themselves fighting back to back. The dead Shantasi seemed to aim for them, as though targeting the Red Monk’s cloak, and Kosar found himself fighting men and women who had been on his side a few hours earlier. Freshly dead, still they possessed ease of movement and strength in their limbs, and they retained much of their fighting skill. But they were far slower than before. He maintained his concentration and tried to keep his fear at bay, and soon the pile of body parts before him was as high as his knee.

And it moved. Torsos flexed, limbs twitched. He nudged Lucien and moved sideways, finding fresh ground.

The Monk fought hard, and even though Kosar heard him take several wounds, they barely slowed him.

He was almost starting to feel confident about the fight when he heard the first cry rise up: “The Krotes are here, the Krotes-” The voice was silenced. Dashing away from the dead attacking him, looking down the hill, Kosar saw a sight that seemed to still the blood leaking from his wounds.

The hillside was alive with machines, and awash with dying Shantasi.

ALISHIA FOUND HOPE shivering beneath a tree two hundred steps from the Womb of the Land. The old witch was staring at the ground, eyes wide, hands clasped together at her chest, her hair still bearing a few windblown leaves. She glanced up at Alishia’s approach, and then down again.

“Trey’s been taken in,” Alishia said.

Hope held her breath. “Inside there?” She looked along the hillside at the cave.

“He’s part of my misery,” the girl said. “Misery is humanity.”

“Then it’s time to go inside! See what’s to be done. I’ll go with you and-”

“You will never go in there with me,” Alishia said quietly, and even though she spoke with a little girl’s voice, the witch recoiled in fear.

“I brought you all this way,” Hope said.

Alishia shook her head. “I can’t argue with you. I don’t have the energy.”

“But I-”

“What’s that?” Alishia held up her hand and stilled Hope with a glance. She had heard something, a rumble from far away or a whisper from closer by. Perhaps the Nax were still out there, trailing around the lip of the valley.

“I hear nothing,” Hope said.

Alishia let out her held breath and breathed in again, and as she did so the sky shook. A single, thunderous explosion thumped down into the valley, invisible but for the shock wave that preceded it. Grass flattened, trees cracked, soil and stones jumped as if pushed from below, and Alishia felt her eardrums and eyeballs squeezed. She fell onto her side with a groan and tried to bring her hands to her ears, but her arms would not work.

“In the name of the Black, not again,” Hope said. Her voice was pure fear. Alishia followed her gaze up the hillside.

A giant flying machine sat on the valley ridge, its grotesque head and the tips of its wings protruding from the darkness. It edged forward, as though testing the strange light in the valley. When it found that the light did not hurt, it launched, flexing its wings, stepping from the valley edge and gliding down just above the hillside. Upon its back sat two figures, humanoid yet so much larger in Alishia’s eyes.

“It’sthem!” she said.

“They have magic,” Hope whispered, and Alishia was disturbed by the awe in her voice. What would the witch do? she thought. What would she give up for a touch of what they have?

The machine lifted higher above the ground and drifted across the valley, flapping its huge wings once to lift it over the clump of trees beneath which Alishia and Hope sheltered. Alishia closed her eyes as the thing passed them by. Though there was no sun to block out, still its shadow touched them.

“They’ll find us in minutes,” Alishia said. “They’ll take me and kill me.”

“Then bring it up!” Hope said. “Let the magic in you find itself! Give me something to fight them with and I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”

“If I could touch the magic, don’t you think I’d have done so before now?”

“To protect yourself from me?” Hope said, leaning closer.

Alishia shook her head. “You may be mad, but I’m not sure you’ll ever be a danger to your one and only hope.”

Another explosion came, thumping through the valley and shaking leaves from the trees above their heads. Alishia and Hope rolled on the ground, clasping their ears, squeezing their eyes shut, trying their best not to shout in pain. Perhaps that was what the Mages were trying to do: flush them out.

Alishia pressed her face into the ground and groaned.

The flying machine came again, flapping its wings this time and moving much faster across the valley. Its wing tips scored the ground. Daggers of blue light leapt from its sides and rear, piercing the ground and sending up geysers of soil and molten rock. More fear, more pain, to make Alishia and Hope flee their precarious hiding place.

“Don’t move!” Alishia said. Hope lay beside her, hands pressed to her face. Blood seeped between her fingers.

The machine landed close to the Womb of the Land, its settling surprisingly gentle for something so large. Its wings rested down and touched the ground, taking on its contours and imperfections as they molded themselves to rocks, trees and dips. The Mages stood and walked down the wing closest to the Womb. Neither of them took their eyes from the cave. They carried no weapons, but Alishia knew that they needed none. As Hope said, they had magic.

“Now we’ll never get in there!” Hope whispered. Her nose was bleeding, and a dribble of blood leaked from her left eye. Her tattoos had turned red, as if echoed below the skin by burst veins.

“Neither will they,” Alishia said. But the witch is right. With them there, I can never get inside. And something…

“Alishia,” Hope said, and for the first time the librarian heard a gentleness to the witch’s voice. “You’re growing younger.”

“I know,” Alishia said, but even then she knew what the witch meant. She was regressing faster. Drifting back through the years of her youth, breasts shrunken to hints of themselves, stomach bulging with a little girl’s fat, eyes wide, teeth small, and in her mind everything she had learned of the land over the past few days seemed to be growing larger and more intricate with every breath she took. “Hope, I think I’ll have to be there soon.”

Hope crawled closer, and the witch seemed to be growing. “I could go,” Hope said. “I could offer myself to them. Pretend to help. Say I know where you are. Maybe they’ll touch me, give me something of what they have in exchange.”

“You can’t.”

Hope was looking at the ground close to her face, frowning, her eyes flitting left and right as she turned over whatever dark thoughts she had.

“Hope, that’s not the way,” Alishia said.

The witch looked at her. “You’re afraid for me, or of me?”

“Both.”

Hope nodded and looked along the hillside at the resting machine. “Perhaps you’re right to be,” she said.

The Mages were approaching the entrance to the cave now, and they appeared to be holding hands. Where their skin touched, a pale blue light danced, streaking up their arms and tangling with their hair. There was no companionship or affection apparent in their touch; they did not look at each other. And as they came within a few steps of the cave, the light between them started to grow.

“They’re going to seal the cave,” Alishia said. She closed her eyes and thought of Trey being taken inside, and even with everything she had learned she had no idea what was within that place. A simple cave, perhaps. Or something far more.

“Something’s coming out.” Hope touched her hand.

The darkness of the cave mouth was expanding, extruding into the weird light of its valley. Its edges were vague, the shape constantly changing, but it grew as it came, as though all the darkness from beneath the ground were forcing upward. As it projected farther, the shadow split in two.

The Mages took one step back and then lifted their clasped hands in unison, ejecting a splash of blue light that struck the two shapes where they were still joined at the ground.

The land vibrated with the impact. For the briefest instant, the two shadows were lit from the inside, and Alishia did not understand what she saw. How light could reveal deeper darkness, she did not know. For the moment they were lit-surprised by the blast of magical light, perhaps, or simply absorbing it as best they could-the Half-Life Shade and the Birth Shade seemed larger than everything else. They dwarfed the valley, made a mockery of the expanse of Kang Kang, and they drove Alishia’s newfound knowledge of things down to a speck of inexperience. For a moment they were everything, and then the magical light faded and the Shades fell upon the Mages.

“Come on,” Alishia said. “We can’t stay here. We have to move closer to the Womb, and when the chance comes I can go inside.”

“But the offerings,” Hope said.

“Maybe I can slip by without them knowing.” But Alishia knew how foolish this idea was. The two remaining Shades might be fighting the Mages, but their prime purpose was defending the Womb of the Land. It was Noreela’s potential, as were they. I’m the offering for the Birth Shade, she thought. I can think of nothing else. Yet the Half-Life Shade? Hope? How can she be that? She’s an old witch without magic, but she’s very much alive.

Alishia darted from cover and moved low across the hillside. She sensed Hope following her, and for once she took heart from that. Perhaps the witch really did have goodness at the heart of her, hidden away by decades of bitterness.

The two Shades danced in the air above the Mages, hiding the sorcerers from view much of the time. Their darkness pulsed and changed, spurts of shadow spinning out and turning like a whirlpool, sucking in the light and expanding some more. Fingers of darkness probed the air. Others dipped down to the ground far from the fight, searching cracks and dips, stealing behind rocks, and Alishia was certain that the Shades were seeking her out.

She ducked behind a fallen tree and held her breath, closed her eyes, expecting the human manifestation of the Shades to speak to her again. He remained silent.

Hope dropped down beside her. “I can’t see them anymore!” she said. “Maybe they’re defeated. Maybe the Shades have crushed them down!”

“I can’t believe it would ever be that easy,” Alishia said. Another jarring explosion agreed with her, thudding up into her hip and shoulder and shaking her insides.

“Mage shit!” More blood spurted from Hope’s nose. Her left eye had become totally bloodshot, turning this way and that as though fascinated with this new take on the world.

“Come on,” Alishia said, readying to stand again. The witch grabbed her arm and held on tightly.

“Don’t run blind, Alishia,” she said. “You don’t know what’s happening, or what to do when you get there. Wait.”

“For what?”

Hope shook her head, exasperated. “Don’t you think the land will provide? Those Nax arrived with Trey, and that was far from coincidence.”

“No one pretends to know the Nax,” the girl said. Her own voice fascinated her-so young, so full of wisdom.

“And yet they intervene,” Hope said.

“And you?” Alishia said. “When you cut Trey down, did you think you were serving the land?”

Hope shook her head. “Only my own madness.”

Something screamed. The sound began deep, rising so high that Alishia thought her skull would break. The fallen tree they were resting against shook and split along its length, spitting a shower of dead beetles and wood slugs down onto Alishia’s head and shoulders. She bit her lip to prevent herself from crying out. The beetles were light as a breath, their clear wings spread from their resting position on their backs as though they had tried to fly from death.

“The fight’s moving,” Hope said, looking over the top of the cracked trunk.

Alishia shook her head and brushed at her shoulders as she knelt beside the witch. The dead creatures fell apart at her touch. Like old, dry books caught in a fire.

The Mages had retreated back to their machine, and were now standing on its back fending off the two Shades of the Land. The Shades attacked from either side, flashes of darkness darting out like negative lightning. The Mages held handfuls of blue light, and every time the Shades came at them they used the sickly illumination to cauterize the darkness into a light ash. The air around them was thick with it, and it had begun to coat the machine around their feet like a layer of fresh snow.

The Shades moved like mountains, and the Mages fought back.

One of the Shades changed tactics. Instead of attacking the Mages, it assaulted their machine, melting across the ground and sending tendrils of shadow beneath the construct, then expanding again, lifting the machine up. It pumped more of itself under the machine, shrugging off the thing’s defenses: fireballs faded, arrows passed through and molten metal spattered on the hillside and steamed back to solid.

The Mages almost lost their footing. The female jumped and landed again, screaming a curse as she unleashed a stream of blue fire directly between her feet into the machine.

It exploded. Whether or not the Mage had intended this, the effect was devastating. The machine’s shell came apart under a ball of fire, chunks of metal and stone, flesh and bone spinning up and out into the air, streaming blue flame and smoke behind them. The two Mages went with it, visible for the first couple of seconds but then engulfed as their clothes and hair ignited. The ground beneath the machine erupted as though pushed from below, and soil and rock were powered out sideways.

Alishia and Hope ducked as the first of the debris struck the other side of the fallen tree, sending timber splinters carving over their heads. A wave of heat stole their breath, and the fringes on Alishia’s dress began to smoke. Hope patted at them, hissing as the skin of her palms blistered.

The roar of the explosion rumbled back and forth across the valley.

Alishia looked again. Hope grabbed at her but she shook the witch off. “I have to see where they went!” she said.

The entire slope below the Womb of the Land was ablaze. Green grass was black, lush trees were bare trunks, their leaves fluttering through the air, smoking and bursting alight when the heat finally dried them to nothing. The small stream had vanished, steamed away to nothing.

A ball of smoke and fire boiled into the sky. The construct was in pieces across the valley. Some of them burned, others seemed to be melting into the ground, disintegrating into their constituent parts of flesh, stone, metal and other material. Alishia scanned the ground around the site of the blast, hoping against hope that she would see the Mages burned to a crisp: charred bones cracked and coming apart just as their monstrous machine broke down into nothing.

The Shades had vanished. The Womb of the Land was as dark as ever, shunning the blazing fires that should be lighting its insides. I’ll be there soon, Alishia thought, and she hoped that they heard.

Something shifted before her, less than thirty steps away. At first she thought it was part of the machine, warping and cracking under the tremendous heat, but then it stood.

And laughed.

The laughter extinguished the flames licking at the Mage’s eyes. Its tongue flipped out and lapped up the remaining fingers of fire. It ran its hands down the length of its burnt and disfigured body, and wherever they touched flesh was renewed. The Mage rebuilt itself touch by touch, and by the time it reached its eyes, Alishia was already turning away.

“There you are,” the Mage said, its feminine voice as out of place as a shadow inside fire. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. You-and this place-have taken alot of finding.”

Something struck Alishia from behind. She fell and rose again, and heard a scream as the ground rolled away beneath her.

HOPE REMAINED HUNKERED down beside the fallen tree. Dead beetles dusted her legs. The dried husks of wood slugs fluttered around her feet in the wafting heat from the blaze.

She hugged herself, trying to crush away her fear.

The Mage screamed again, a venting of rage and frustration that set Hope’s tattoos squirming and lifted every remaining hair on her head into a filthy halo. She wanted to scream herself, but that would give her away. And then she’ll be here, Hope thought, the Mage, that madwoman, and she’ll have me for her vengeance. So she bit into the fleshy part between her thumb and forefinger, tasting blood and concentrating on the pain rather than the scream.

The tumbler had come in from nowhere and snatched Alishia away. Three more followed, the last one running across Hope’s foot. Its spikes and barbs missed her, its weight held up on other whiplike limbs. It had left her alone.

She bit harder and closed her eyes and the Mage shrieked one more time, the sound receding as she ran after the fleeing tumblers.

Hope risked a look. Alishia! The girl was visible, pressed onto the side of the lead tumbler, her loose dress flapping in the breeze as the thing bounded down the hillside and across the base of the valley.

Alishia, she’s gone, all that potential stolen away!

The girl spun around and around as the tumbler rolled, but it did not crush her into its hide.

Of all the ravages of fate, all the whispers in the Black, why this and why now?

The other three tumblers slowed as the female Mage ran after them with unnatural speed. Her hair streaked out behind her, yellow and beautiful, and her feet pounded clots of mud from the ground.

Because they’re trying to help?

Hope caught her breath and dropped her bleeding hand from her mouth. She closed her right eye and saw red through the left, as though viewing a cloud-streaked sunset. The Mage neared the first tumbler and it swung around, reversing almost instantaneously to come at her. She barely broke her stride. A stream of blue fire burst from her chest, coughed up and out with a sound that reverberated around the valley. The tumbler rolled away, on fire. It struck a tree and became entangled in the vines that drooped from the lower branches, and soon the tree was an inferno.

The tumbler carrying Alishia disappeared behind a swathe of thick smoke, and the Mage gave chase.

Hope looked back at the Womb of the Land. The cave entrance stood dark and indifferent within a wide expanse of burning debris. As smoke drifted toward the darkness it changed direction, blown left or right by the cave’s invisible exhalation.

Where is he? She remembered the male Mage from their fight aboard the flying machine, in those final moments when she had still believed that Rafe had a chance. Unlike the female Mage, he had worn his monstrosity with pride. “Where are you?” She scanned the remains of their giant machine, eyes chasing shadows thrown by the flames. “I could help them,” she whispered, testing the words in her mouth. She did not like them, nor what they intimated, but she had said and done many bad things in her life.

Nothing moved. Hope climbed over the fallen tree and started picking her way across the hillside, dodging the remains of the machine, stepping over a pool of jellied blood, skirting a scorched circle where something had melted into the ground.

Icouldhelp them, she thought. If it gave me what I want, I couldhelp them. She paused and looked to the sky. “But what in the Black would that make me?”

The voice that responded in her mind surprised Hope to a halt. A liar. The voice of her mother.

“There’s more to this than me,” Hope said, louder than she’d intended, and it was as if her words held the power to change.

Something else came into the valley, and initially Hope thought she was seeing reflections thrown onto drifting skeins of smoke. But then from the corner of her eye she made out bloody red smudges flitting through the air, drifting low to the ground as they made their way out of the darkness and into the light.

A shape appeared before Hope. It rose from a squat beside the entrance to the Womb’s cave: a ragged skeleton, unhindered by vanity or the need to reflesh its burnt self. The male Mage.

He roared a challenge, and the Nax flew directly at him.

WITH THE CONSTANT spinning, bumping movement of the tumbler, Alishia passed out. Her senses faded, though she was still aware of where she was and what was happening. She could smell no fire, yet still it burned. She could not hear the angered screeches of the Mage chasing her down the hillside, but she knew that she was there, reclothed in flesh and filled with more rage than ever before.

Alishia thought that the Shades might take this opportunity to talk to her, but the man did not appear. She searched for the library but she could not find her way.

Hold on tight, a voice said in her mind. The end is almost here, and we have what you need.

Who are you?

I was Flage. Now I’m one of many. And you are the hope we still have.

I don’t understand…

That doesn’t matter. Almost there. Hold tight. We have everything you need.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn