Dawn

Chapter 3

AS HE APPROACHED another nameless village, Lucien Malini was hoping for a fight. Terribly wounded though he was from the battle at the machines’ graveyard, still he relished the prospect of wetting his sword again. His skin raged red.

The battle in the graveyard was a day behind him, and with every breath since then he had known that the Mages had won. Magic was back, they had taken it for themselves, and yet blood pumped through his veins, clotting around his wounds, drawing rent flesh back together, stiffening fractured bones, feeding on the rage that was stronger than ever before. In the constant, unnatural twilight that had marked the Mages’ return he felt a sense of cool defeat, but deep down Lucien still had a burning purpose driving him on. He had seen the dead Shantasi melt and flow across the ground, and the implication of what that could mean drove him on. His whole life had been directed toward one purpose. The fact that he still lived, weakened though he was, gave him a sense that could have been hope.

He moved on toward the village. It was a motley collection of huts and shacks-triangular constructions built low to the ground to weather the storms blowing in from the Mol’Steria Desert. No dwelling rose higher than his head, and it was only the contours of the land that prevented him from seeing right across the village. That, and the dusky light. It should be dawn-all of his senses suggested that-and yet dusk still clung to the sky. There were no smudges of the sun hidden behind the clouds, and the death moon sheened the land with a sickly illumination. In this light, Lucien’s blood was black.

The Mages’ first effect on Noreela, with the magic he had sworn they would never again possess.

From the village came the scrape of metal on stone. Lucien paused. He could see no movement, but the sound was shifting slowly from right to left. He tried to silence his breathing but could not; his injuries were too varied, their effects too harsh.

He could smell death here, but he could sense fear as well. It was manifest in the silence, the stillness, the way that no door opened even a crack as he approached the village from the west. In the light of the death moon the villagers would see him walking along the rutted road. They would see his sword, his torn cloak and the wounds that still seeped blood. Some of them might even know of the Red Monks, and the cause that drove their madness. Yet today…

“Failure tastes bitter,” Lucien muttered. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the road and ground it down into the dust. The scrape of his boot was loud in the eerie silence hugging this village.

Not even the sound of an animal, a bird, a plant shifting in the breeze coming in across the desert.

“I don’t fear you!” Lucien shouted, blood bubbling heavy and thick in his chest. He spat again, up at the sky this time, and welcomed the blood pattering down on his face. It gave him back his color.

The sound of metal on stone came again, from two directions this time, and below it he could hear something dragging across the ground, like an echo of his foot grinding blood into the dust.

“We can lose, but you can never win,” he whispered. And he still believed that. Through everything that had happened over the past few days, he still believed in his cause. He had to. If he lost faith now, his body would give in. His faith gave him power.

The first shape emerged from behind one of the low houses, crawling slowly into view. He could not tell whether it was a man or woman. In one hand it seemed to be holding a sword, and its legs were clad in metal. Each time it moved, it moaned.

Another shape crawled toward him out of the darkness. This one held two swords and wore a metallic mask, shiny in places and smeared with blood in others.

The Red Monk stood his ground and hefted his own weapon, but he sensed no fight in these things. They were not coming for him. They were simply moving, because to stay still was to submit to the pain of transformation. As the first shape came closer, Lucien saw that they were not holding swords at all.

Their hands had turned to metal. Legs too, and faces, flesh blurring to silver. And this close he could hear their moans more clearly, tell that somewhere behind that human sound of pain was an inhuman clicking and rattling as things inside milled together.

Lucien could see human eyes moving behind the metal facade of the second shape’s face. They held nothing sane.

He stepped back, avoiding these crawling monsters. They must have started changing before the Mages’ victory, yet still he blamed the magic. It was the cause of everything wrong in the land, and these travesties were more examples of a bad world growing worse.

Lucien dodged past the half-human things and ran through the village. Here and there he saw a glimmer of metal beside the low dwellings, but he did not pause. As he passed the outskirts he saw the remains of a huge old machine half buried in the ground, and the death moon reflected from fresh breaks in the various metallic limbs. Perhaps it had spread like a disease.

He ran, ignoring the screams of his wounds, and for a long time after he checked himself all over, searching for the first spikes of metal forming from within.

THREE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Jossua Elmantoz had helped force the Mages from Noreela and felt magic forsaking the land. Now, crossing the mountain range southeast of Lake Denyah, he knew that they were back. Magic had returned, changing the world into a constant state of twilight. The only explanation for this that made sense was that the Mages once again had magic for themselves. They had found the boy Rafe Baburn and extracted the seed of magic he carried; forced it to bloom to their own calling, twisted it once again to their own desires. The very thing he had spent his long life trying to prevent had happened. He had failed. The Red Monks were lost. They would die and fade into obscurity, reviled and cast as demons, when in reality it was this that they had been striving to prevent all along.

The end of Noreela.

Jossua walked on because there was nothing else for him to do. He still held on to hope, because without hope there was only death. But everything felt empty and pointless, each movement without meaning and every thought existing only to drift away and be lost to history. Nobody would know if he lay down and died in these mountains. He would become food for scavengers. Or perhaps the carrion creatures would eschew his old, rotten meat-too tough for them, too strange-and leave him to rot into whatever the land was becoming.

Noreela would change. The Mages were not here for control or power. This time, they came for revenge.

But his rage roared on. His anger at the Mages, his fury at his own Monks’ inability to halt magic’s path across the land-a boy, it had only beenone boy!-drove him onward. That, and the faintest idea that hope could never be fully extinguished.

Something slinked out of the night and came toward him, a wild animal stinking of old dead flesh and growling deep within its throat. Jossua paused and scanned the shadows; his eyes were bad, and dusk stole what vision he still retained. He saw a shadow within shadows, and when it moved it was huge.

The creature growled, and Jossua growled back.

Footsteps scampered away into the night. Jossua growled again, to himself this time, and he relished the sense of fury filling him, flushing his face with blood, singing into his sheathed sword and demanding that something wet its pitted metal.

He continued on toward Kang Kang. His aims were changed now, but his final destination must surely be the same. There was only one place left on Noreela where perhaps he could find answers, and where hope may yet dwell: the Womb of the Land.

And he had a map.

KOSAR HAD NEVER felt so wretched. His thoughts lay with A’Meer, and Rafe, and how he had let them both down. He should have remained in those woods with A’Meer, and perhaps together they could have fought their way to the machines’ graveyard, covering each other’s retreat. And Rafe…if Kosar had jumped at his legs and held tighter, or launched himself at the Mage, or fought with no regard for his own life, maybe then the boy could have been saved…

He knew that neither of these scenarios would have been possible, yet he played them out perpetually in his mind. He and A’Meer fighting their way through the woods, ducking sword blows from dozens of Monks, jumping from tree to tree and scoring hits without being wounded themselves. A’Meer’s face, grim yet determined. Blood splashed on her pale skin. Her dark hair loose from where a Monk’s sword had sliced through the band.

If they’d gone toward New Shanti instead of following Rafe’s suggestion that had taken them to the graveyard, maybe they would have survived. Kosar sighed. “The Mages would have found us in the open,” he whispered. “Come down on their hawks and cut us to ribbons. Or the Monks would have reached us first and slaughtered us out on the plains, or at the edge of the desert. At least back there, we had a chance.” He shook his head. What chance? A chance to follow chance just a little while longer, only to see it snatched away?

He looked up at the sky. The death moon hung full and heavy, and the life moon skimmed the horizon. Their combined light gave the land a dim illumination, bright enough for Kosar to examine his wounded fingers. They were still bleeding. He used to welcome the pain because it told him that he was still alive. Now the rest of his body hurt more.

“She’s asleep again,” Trey said.

Kosar jumped. He had not heard the fledge miner approach. “Good.”

“You’re being unfair to her.”

“She’s talking Mage shit, Trey. We’re beaten. Just look around; you can see that. You may be used to darkness, but we live in daylight up here, and we welcome it.”

Trey sat beside him, and Kosar welcomed the companionship. “Last time I traveled with fledge, Alishia exuded the same blankness as Rafe. There was something in her that pushed me away.”

“The same as Rafe?” Kosar asked, trying not to sound interested.

“The same. The two of them shared a lot without any of us knowing, of that I’m certain.”

“None of us know anything,” Kosar said, “other than the fact that the Mages are back. There’ll be a second Cataclysmic War, and this time Noreela will lose. They could be gone in ten days, leaving nothing behind but the bodies of every dead Noreelan.”

“Is that what you believe?” Trey said.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t give in so quickly, Kosar. There are the Shantasi! They’ll put up a fight, won’t they?”

“Against magic that can turn day to dusk?”

Trey was silent for a few moments, staring up at the sky as if to discern the truth in its darkness. “Well, I trust the girl,” he said. He rose to walk back to the lifeless machine, but Kosar stood and stopped him.

“If you trust her, tell her to show us something. Rafe brought that boat up out of the river; he cured A’Meer. Tell Alishia to show us something, and maybe I’ll believe as well.”

“It’s not like that,” Trey said. “She’s not like Rafe. She told me he was never born.” He shrugged Kosar’s hand from his shoulder and walked away.

Never born, Kosar thought. He did not understand. He wished A’Meer were here, someone he could truly talk to. He sat down again, but this time he looked south toward the mountains. He had been as far as Kang Kang’s foothills once, and he’d vowed never to go there again.

“Am I being a coward?” he whispered. “Can I be so wrong?” But the night remained silent, offering no easy answer.

RAFE WAS NEVER born, Hope thought. This girl was. And yet she says she’s growing younger. She watched the sleeping girl until Trey rose and went after the thief. Then she shuffled closer. She lay down so that she could feel the girl’s heat through her own clothes, and whispered in her ear, “What are you?”

Alishia did not answer, and gave no sign of having heard.

“What are you carrying?”

Still no response. Hope looked after Trey and Kosar, shadows against the darkness. They had their backs to her. The big thief had never trusted her, but she supposed he now believed there was no reason to keep up his guard.

The witch laid her hand on Alishia’s forehead. The girl was hot, and a slight shiver passed through her body. Hope closed her eyes and bade magic enter her, but there was nothing, no sense of power or promise or worth. She took her hand away and cursed.

But she’s growing younger, Hope’s inner voice chimed in, and she nodded. The big thief didn’t care, the fledge miner didn’t understand and Hope was the only one ready to deal with what this could really mean. I’ll take her wherever she wants to go, she thought, because there’s something of the boy in her. Because Rafe was never born. He was the offspring of the Womb of the Land in Kang Kang, just as the old prophecy passed down to her from her mother and grandmother had predicted. And now Alishia wanted to go there, and maybe it was the Womb she sought.

“I’ll take you,” she whispered in the sleeping girl’s ear. “With or without the fledger and the thief, I’ll take you into Kang Kang.”

Hope lay down beside the girl once again and breathed in some of her stale breath, hoping that Alishia’s exhalations would talk to her. But there was nothing.

TREY PAUSED AT the edge of the grounded machine and looked in at Alishia and Hope lying together. He was still unsure of the witch. She had seemed as concerned as any of them about Rafe’s well-being, but there were signs that she had her own interests at heart as well. He had passed her by several times on his fledge trips, never confident enough to touch on her mind but more than aware of the stew of emotions residing there. Hope was unsure of herself, confused, and her mind was in such conflict that its effects spilled into the air around her. Trey had sensed her confusion, and it worried him.

Now, with Rafe gone and Alishia looking like their final hope, the witch seemed to have found a cause once again. There she was, curled up before Alishia, eyes closed but mind still undoubtedly running away with itself. Trey wondered how he and Kosar figured in her daydreams.

The witch’s face flexed, her tattoos merging to cloud her skin.

“Are you asleep?” Trey whispered. Hope did not move, but that meant nothing. He stepped between two of the thick ribs and quietly hefted his disc-sword, slinging it onto his back. He had tried wiping Monks’ blood from the blade, but it had stained. The luster had gone from the metal, probably for good, and he hoped that he never had to face another Red Monk. Perhaps next time the blade would be less effective.

He knelt beside Alishia and touched her forehead. He moved her toward him slightly, away from the witch, holding her head up off the ground so that she did not scrape her face. She was warm. Her skin was slick with sweat. He put his ear to her mouth until he could feel the subtle caress of her breath, but she was silent in her sleep. Whatever was going on inside her head remained there, enigmatic as ever.

“Just tell us everything,” Trey whispered. “You need Kosar’s trust, and you can get that by showing him what you mean. You need Hope’s loyalty, and perhaps you’ll get that in the same way.” He glanced at the witch, and in the twilight her face seemed darker than normal. He moved his hand beneath her nose and felt for her breath, afraid for a moment that she had simply given up on life.

The witch opened her eyes and stared at Trey.

“Throttle me in my sleep, will you?”

Trey snatched his hand back. “Of course not. I was checking that you were all right.”

Hope’s face relaxed and she looked at Alishia. “Of course you were,” she said. “And I’m fine. I was trying to sleep, but my dreams won’t let me.”

“What do you dream of?”

“Kang Kang,” Hope said.

“What of it?” Trey looked past Hope, beyond the fallen machine at the dark peaks on the horizon.

“Alishia says that’s our aim, so I’m going to take her.”

“So am I,” Trey said, committing himself.

“It’s a long walk,” the witch said, sitting up. “And a dangerous one. Kang Kang’s nothing like the rest of Noreela.”

Trey tried to read the witch’s strange smile, but it barely touched her eyes. It was as if those tattoos swirling across her cheeks and dipping into her mouth had tightened, drawing her cheeks up into a grotesque parody of a grin.

“Trey?”

He looked at her, startled by her unaccustomed use of his name.

“We’re on the same side. We may have different ideas of what’s happening, and differing reasons for being where we are today, but we’re both here for Alishia and whatever she carries, and we’re both against the Mages. Anyone in Noreela must be against them, sane or otherwise. There’s no alternative. Do you understand?”

Trey nodded, not sure that he did. Was Hope trying to form an alliance with him, or simply confuse him more?

“I’m pleased you want to come to Kang Kang,” she said. “We can help each other. As for Kosar…I think he’s lost to us.”

Trey looked at the shadow of the thief. Maybe, he thought. Or maybe he’ll do things his own way as well.

“We need to go soon,” the witch said.

“We should wait until she’s awake. And I want to try Kosar one more time.”

“The thief ’s doubt and mistrust will cause us trouble,” Hope said.

“He’s the one who brought us this far.”

She raised her eyebrows but did not respond.

She thinks it’s her, Trey thought. She thinks she’sthe leader of this pathetic little gang.

Trey went back to Kosar, and all the way he knew what the answer would be. The big man barely glanced up. Even as Trey stated their aim and said they would be moving soon, Kosar only looked at the horizon and nodded. “I’ll not be going with you.”

“Where will you go?”

“Some corner of Noreela where I can be forgotten.”

Trey wanted to say more. He so wished he could think of something stirring and affecting that would make Kosar rethink his decision and join their continuing journey south-something about trust and loyalty, and pursuing any scrap of hope that might still exist. But he followed Kosar’s gaze and saw the landscape swathed in unnatural twilight, and he knew that it would not take long for the plants and animals to die.

“I don’t think such a corner exists,” he said. Then he turned away from the thief and walked back to Alishia and Hope.

WHEN KOSAR STOOD and looked back, the others were mere shadows. He could see Trey standing within the fake protection of the dead machine’s ribs, and on the ground at his feet Hope and Alishia seemed to be huddled together. There was an implication of ownership in Hope’s pose that he did not like. She had been the same with Rafe. We’ll have to watch her, A’Meer had whispered to him one night, and yet in that final, useless fight, Hope had been as strong as any of them.

He guessed that she missed Rafe more than anyone as well. With him had gone her lifetime of dreams and desires. It was no surprise that she was willing to hang on to any fragment of hope that remained, however false.

Is Alishia really something special? Kosar wondered, and he realized that, yes, she probably was. She was certainly no longer a normal girl, if she ever had been. But he no longer cared. A’Meer was dead, and day was night. Useless, he thought. He turned away from Trey, Hope and Alishia and looked east.

He wanted to be on his way. Hope put him on edge, Alishia disturbed him and Trey was somewhere he was never meant to be. The fledger had used the last of his fledge a couple of days before, and already he was showing signs of withdrawal. It was difficult to tell in this weak light, but his skin seemed to be growing a paler yellow, the whites of his eyes clouding with burst blood vessels.

Kosar craved his own company once again, and the idea of wandering Noreela seemed the only thing to do. He would explore, as he had done so long ago. He would find the corner of Noreela that Trey said would not exist, and perhaps he could live out his life there, hidden away from the glare of the Mages’ influence.

And if they burn the land? A’Meer asked in his mind. Send out armies, kill everything, spread disease?

Kosar shook his head. She had always been so practical. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’ll mourn you well enough, but don’t start talking back at me, A’Meer.”

It’s you doing the talking, just using my voice.

“And is that the voice of reason?”

Maybe.

He shook his head again and touched the sword at his side. “Fuck.”

A large bird passed overhead-a moor hawk, perhaps-and Kosar watched it drift away in the night. It had flown northeast. With no real idea of where he wanted to go, he decided to follow.

A’MEER’S VOICE REMAINED silent as Kosar took his first steps away. He expected guilt to crush him, regret to pick at his limbs and turn him around, but his steps felt fine, his legs surprisingly strong. Perhaps the last few days had welcomed him back into the life of a traveler once again.

He waited for the shout that would bring him to a halt, but none came. He did not look back. If he turned and saw Trey watching him leave he would have to return, try to explain once again why this was all so hopeless now that Rafe had gone and dusk had fallen. Kosar was a good man, and even though he was finding the going easy, he guessed that guilt was only a step or two behind. He had no wish to let it catch up.

The moor hawk had disappeared into the night but he heard it calling-a doleful, lonely cry. Kosar wondered who or what else could hear it. Trey undoubtedly, and Hope and Alishia if they were awake. But perhaps there were others out there, camping down under the oppressive weight of the night, and the sound of the moor hawk would surely make them feel more isolated and alone than ever. He wondered whether the Red Monks had followed the flying machine on foot, even though their purpose was gone. Perhaps any surviving Monks would be roaming the land, madder than ever before.

He walked on, and in time he was far enough away so that he would not hear Trey even if the fledge miner did call after him. There was scant comfort in this, but beneath that was a sense of betrayal that Kosar did his best to smother. The time would come for that, he knew. Perhaps when he was witnessing the Mages’ armies burning villages and towns, raining down destruction from their hawks, riding monstrous new creations across the landscape…Perhaps then he would truly taste his own bitter betrayal of the only people he could call friends. Or maybe it would take the imminence of death to bring home his true treachery. Perhaps he would be dying beneath the leather boot of a Krote, staring up along the length of a bloodied spear, before he would truly appreciate how unfair he had been.

I led them here, he thought, and he hated the idea of that. Kosar had always been a loner, not a leader. But Rafe’s damned magic had steered and coerced them down the center of Noreela, dangling free will and then snatching it away at every opportunity. They had been driven here like a horse guided by its rider, except that their rider had been acting through the mind of an innocent boy.

Now you’re talking Mage shit, A’Meer’s voice said. You led them, and you know it.

“My words, your voice?” he whispered. The night offered no answer. “Damn, A’Meer, I miss you so much.”

Kosar thought about where he could go, and as he began to examine the possibilities, each idea brought buried memories back to life-times and events he had not thought about in years. The experience was strangely comforting, and he enjoyed living these moments again. They were a distraction from the present.

If he carried on in this direction, he would soon come to the Mol’Steria Desert. North of that were the Mol’Steria Mountains and then Sordon Sound, the great inland sea that bordered New Shanti. He had never been as far as the desert, but A’Meer had often told him about it, sitting in the Broken Arm nursing a mug of rotwine as she relayed tales of sand demons and flaming trees, roads of glass and the huge, lumbering grinders that spent their unknowable lives turning rock into sand. It had all sounded so enchanting to him, the seasoned traveler, and he had promised A’Meer that he would go there one day. He’d seen an excitement in her deep, dark eyes as she talked about this place so close to her homeland. And though she denied it, he had always believed that she harbored a secret desire to go home. At the time, he had put her unwillingness to return down to some family problem, or an underlying wanderlust that she had yet to quench. Since then, he had discovered the truth.

Kosar paused and looked ahead. The dusk hid much of the land and turned the rest a pale silver, light from the moons splashing in seemingly isolated patches. There were rolling hills and hidden valleys, a landscape of shadows and shaded peaks, home to anything from a man to a herd of tumblers. The Mages’ army could be hiding within five thousand steps of where he was, and he’d have no idea until he stumbled upon it. And with that thought came the very reason he should not head for New Shanti: the Shantasi were the only people likely to raise a serious defense against the Mages, and New Shanti would become a battleground.

Kosar glanced behind him but saw no signs of pursuit.

If he went due east, he would walk into New Shanti across the plains, arriving eventually at Hess, the Shantasi Mystic city. Even before he knew that she was a warrior, A’Meer had told him about her youth spent out on those plains, patrolling the approaches to New Shanti along with others of her age. It was a rite of passage, ten thousand young Shantasi at any one time complementing the Shantasi army that made the plain its home. It was their most vulnerable point, and much of the year she had spent there had been in training for possible attack from the rest of Noreela. Kosar had scoffed at such an idea, but A’Meer had been grim-faced and serious. “Do you have any idea of where the Shantasi come from?” she had asked. Kosar had shaken his head, still trying to maintain his smile but failing beneath A’Meer’s glare. “Slavery,” she had said, and his image of the thousands of Shantasi children camped across that plain suddenly changed. Freedom was a luxury with a price. The Shantasi paid for freedom with their childhood.

Later, A’Meer’s revelation of her true nature-as a Shantasi warrior sworn to find and protect fledgling magic-had altered Kosar’s perception of her people even more. Now he imagined them as a fiercely independent race, lost and yet making their home here, on Noreela, and willing to give so much for the ground they had. A’Meer, he supposed, had scared him.

So that way lay New Shanti, and plains swarming with Shantasi youths willing to prove themselves adults. Their chance would come soon, Kosar knew. The Mages would be forming their armies and preparing to march. War was the only certainty in Noreela’s future.

Kosar turned away, a sickness punching at his gut. It was shame and self-loathing, but it was also a delayed reaction to what had happened. Fear, biting deep. Guilt, sinking teeth into his insides. He knew that it would never let go. He could walk forever and pass through Kang Kang, into The Blurring that many said lay beyond, and perhaps he would even reach a southern coast that no one had ever seen…but guilt would still be there, turning in his gut like a constant sword. A’Meer had died protecting what she thought was right, and now he was running away to save his own skin.

“No!” he said. Yes. There’s nothing heroic here. Nothing symbolic. It’s cowardice. I can’t face the dark future with others, so I’m trying to do it on my own.

Trey and Hope think they have a chance to fight the future, A’Meer’s voice said.

“They know nothing,” Kosar said. It felt strange talking to the dark, but it acted like a mirror, turning his words back on himself. He was talking to his own shadow, berating a solitary shape that stood here in the darkness while Noreela prepared to crumble. He touched his sword and felt sick at the thought of violence. Didn’t he have the right to be scared? He was a marked thief, and his fingertips stung as he touched the sword’s handle. Any success he’d had fighting the Monks had been a reflection of A’Meer’s bravery, skill and determination. He was just a useless wanderer. A middle-aged waster who could not even steal anymore because of his brands. No one trusted him.

A’Meer did, A’Meer’s voice said. And Trey, and Alishia, and Rafe. As for Hope…that damn witch trusts no one but herself.

Kosar closed his eyes and squeezed his fists, grimacing at the pain from his fingers but hoping it would drive A’Meer’s voice from his head.

“I’m just hearing things,” he said.

And then the ground began to move, and he was seeing things as well.

To begin with, he thought he had something in his eye. He lifted his eyelid and blinked rapidly, trying to expunge the hazing from his vision. Then he closed his eyes, and when he looked again the same effect was there: a blurring of the ground around his feet, as though the grasses and stones had lost their sharp edges. The death moon yellowed the scene and gave the undefined ground a creamy texture, and Kosar suddenly felt sick from the sense of movement.

He fell to his knees and vomited, and when he opened his eyes the ground was alive. It stirred beneath him, parting around the warm puddle between his hands, undulating as though the ground itself had turned fluid. He stood quickly, and for a few seconds he could make out the shapes of his hands in the soil before the shifting surface moved in to cover them.

“Oh fuck,” he whispered, because now he knew what these things were, and he remembered the last time he had seen them. They had presented a warning then, forming themselves as Red Monks into which A’Meer had fired several useless arrows. These were mimics. Knowing them, Kosar felt a vast, alien intelligence focusing upon him.

He wanted to run, but he was afraid of stepping on the mimics. Would he hurt them? Would they translate his fear into aggression? He closed his eyes and heard them shifting through grasses, passing over fallen leaves, moving around and beneath small stones, sending up whispers that seemed to blur the air as their bodies blurred the ground. His stomach still churned. He wished A’Meer were here with him.

Kosar tried to perceive a pattern or meaning to their movement. He could make out no particular direction. It was as though each mimic acted independently, fulfilling its own aim. Whatever communication might pass amongst them seemed to dictate no combined purpose. He wondered if they were eating or sleeping, talking or conspiring, and then the ground broke before him and a shape began to rise.

It formed so quickly that it was fully there before he had time to truly comprehend what he was seeing.

A’Meer stood before him. But this was not A’Meer as he had ever seen her. There was no smile on her pale face, no mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes, no sign that she saw or heard or recognized anything. The mimics had formed her upright, but this A’Meer was dead. Kosar had no doubt about that: her legs were gashed, her stomach and chest a mess of protruding flesh and bone, her throat gaping like a screaming mouth. Even her head was cleaved down to between her eyes. He could see her shattered skull and exposed brain. The mimics were meticulous in their detail. This was A’Meer as they had last seen her, lying dead back in the Gray Woods while he was probably still running up the slope to the machines’ graveyard. They had seen blood pulsing from her throat, and they copied that action now. They had seen her right eye ruptured and leaking onto her cheek, and that image repeated itself here. She was dead, his beloved A’Meer…and yet her mouth moved, as though she were trying to inhale one last time, or expel one final word.

“A’Meer,” Kosar whispered, though he knew it was not her. Still, seeing that image, her death hit home like never before, and Kosar started crying. Tears blurred the vision, and then the scene distorted some more as A’Meer came apart before him-flesh flowing, bone melting away-and sank back into the uniform mass of mimics shifting across the ground.

Kosar tried talking to them, asking what they wanted and why they had shown him this, but the mimics suddenly flowed to the east as fast as a man could run. The movement upset his senses and sent him tumbling to his left. He fell, rolled, and when he looked down, the ground was itself again. The mimics whispered away.

“A’Meer,” he said again, but no more thoughts were spoken in her voice.

Yet as the impact of viewing her death hit home, Kosar began to wonder what message the mimics had been trying to convey. By showing him a vision of A’Meer, what could they possibly have been trying to communicate? And why?

Before, they had revealed themselves to Rafe, the carrier of the land’s new magic. But he was simply Kosar. He did not understand. He could not attribute intelligence to such small things. Hive organisms, Hope had called them, their whole effect the sum of their parts. They had shown him A’Meer, dead and bleeding, her mouth working at the air…

“Final words?” he said. “Final wish?” Or perhaps the mimics themselves had manipulated her image for their own ends.

The darkness seemed deeper than before, and more filled with unknown things. Kosar had never been too proud to admit fear, and he was scared now-more of the things he did not know than of the things he did. Rafe’s marking by magic and his subsequent loss must have affected the land far deeper than Kosar could have imagined. The mimics’ appearance, and the fact that they seemed to be offering help, was as disturbing as it was shocking. He had never even heard of their existence before a few days ago. Now they were trying to send him a message.

What else could be stirring across the land?

He stared into the distance, and suddenly the blank twilight offered him a revelation: the mimics had cause to deal with him! Rafe was dead and gone, and yet they still bothered with a cowardly thief fleeing something he did not understand.

Something hecould not understand.

They still had cause to appear to him!

He started running back the way he had come. He had been gone for an hour, maybe two, and he hoped that they were still there. Don’t be gone, he thought. We need to talk. In the name of the Black, we need to talk now more than ever before!

Stomach aching from his bout of vomiting, hand still giving him pain, Kosar ran once again, feeling the weight of Noreela falling heavier on his shoulders the closer he came to the fallen machine.

THE OTHERS WERE gone. The space between the shattered ribs was devoid of life, as though the machine had stood here for a thousand years and its insides had long since rotted away. Kosar stood panting, just outside the circumference of ribs, staring at the emptiness within.

Gone! He had come unerringly back, navigating through the twilight by instinct alone. It had only taken him half an hour at most, but in that time Hope, Trey and Alishia had left, abandoning this site of Kosar’s betrayal and heading south for Kang Kang. He looked in that direction and saw its peaks on the horizon, low and distant and yet menacing even from here.

“Mage shit!” Kosar thumped a rib with the heel of one hand and it crumbled, sending creamy shards to the ground. So strong before, now so weak; he was amazed that magic could change so much. He circled the machine, trailing his hand along the ribs and the hardened skin that still hung between some of them, thinking about the short time this thing had been aloft and what it had been trying to achieve. At first it had simply moved them away from the danger: the Monks, the fighting machines, the Mages and their Krote warrior. But after that, when the danger had seemingly passed, it had turned south and continued on that course, so definite in its direction that it must have been intentional. Rafe had said that he needed to go to Kang Kang, and Kosar had assumed it was so he could hide. But perhaps there was something else. Maybe he was missing the simple truth, too eager to let fear and confusion cloud his judgment.

Now Alishia wanted to go to Kang Kang as well.

Kosar hung his head and tried to catch his breath. He was no longer a young man, and lately he had been doing a lot of running. Running, and fighting-and every waking second spent with those Red Monks trying to kill them. At the time fear had driven him on, but now that he’d had time to pause and reflect, his muscles had stiffened, his legs turned to planks of useless wood. He closed his eyes and kneaded his thighs, hissing with the pain.

“Damn you, Hope. Damn you, Trey.”

“Damnyou, Kosar!”

A blade settled on Kosar’s right shoulder and pressed to the side of his neck. He felt the tension in the blade, wound and ready to spin. “Trey!”

“Why have you come back?”

“I need to talk to you and Hope. I saw something-”

“You didn’t want to talk earlier.”

Kosar pushed the disc-sword from his shoulder and turned. “I wasn’t ready then,” he said. Trey was staring at him, and the fledger’s face was yellow as the death moon. “What’s wrong, Trey?”

Trey smiled. Then he leaned forward, laughter buzzing through him rather than bursting out. He was too tired to laugh properly. He stood after a while and wiped moisture from his eyes. The smile was a grimace now, and his shaking had turned into a shiver he could barely control. “What’s wrong, Kosar, is that the Mages have won. I’m starting into the fledge rage, which may last for days or even longer, and I’m nowhere near any fledge mine that I know of. It could well kill me in the end. You ran, and we thought you were gone for good, saving your own skin and leaving us out here in the dark. Alishia walked for a while, but then she collapsed, shouting about burning books and truth turning to ash, and I haven’t been able to wake her since. Hope is with her now…and Hope has her own reasons for being here, so I don’t trust her for a moment. I can still hear my mother’s cry. I can still smell Sonda’s blood, spilled underground. I can feel the Nax in my mind. And you ask me what’s wrong?”

Kosar reached out, then dropped his hands again. Trey stepped forward and rested his head on the thief’s shoulder, weeping, his thin arms snaking around Kosar’s back and hugging him tight.

Kosar closed his eyes and felt the fledger’s anger and hate and fear flowing into him, soaking his shoulder with tears, feeding his flesh with heat, filling his mind with a bitter shame that he thought might never go away. It was almost as bad as being in those Gray Woods again, having those things feeding on his darkest secrets and dragging them up for contemplation. Almost as bad. But not quite. Because Trey was a friend, and even though Kosar had abandoned him, now he had returned. Kosar hugged Trey, and realized that strength such as this went both ways.

“Trey, I saw something out there,” he said. “Mimics showed me A’Meer as she was when she died, and there’s a reason for that. Therehas to be.”

Trey stepped back. “You’re looking for reasons?” he said. “A couple of hours ago you wouldn’t listen toany reason.”

“No, not back then,” Kosar said. “I admit that I went, and that I had no intention of returning. Everything feels so hopeless…I thought we should part, be on our own. I can’t explain it without…”

“Without telling the truth: you don’t care.”

“I do care, Trey!”

“Really?”

Kosar looked away from the sick fledger and turned south. “Where are Hope and Alishia?”

“That way, not far. Alishia is weak. Whatever’s happening to her is bleeding her strength.”

Kosar glanced at Trey. “Andyou look terrible.”

“I’ve never gone a day without fledge in my life. And being up here seems to make it all worse. I can’t understand how any fledge miners manage to stay topside.”

“A lot of them get sick,” Kosar said. “Is there no mine around here that you know of?”

“If there is, how would I know? My home is hundreds of miles from here.” Trey dropped to his knees, sighing as he touched the damp grass. “So, are you staying?”

“I’m not sure,” Kosar said. “We need to talk, all of us. Hope knows of the mimics, and I suspect she may have an idea of what just happened-and why.”

“Did she talk?”

“Who?”

“A’Meer?”

“No.” Kosar shook his head, remembering the way her mouth was opening and closing as blood gushed from her wounded neck. Final words? Last wish? He glanced up at the life moon still rising above the horizon. He thought he saw something pass briefly across its face, or perhaps it was a fleck of dust in his eye. “Let’s go find Hope and Alishia.”

THEY AGREED TO build a small fire and camp behind a fold in the land. It protected them from a chill breeze that had come in from the north, and it would also partially hide them from prying eyes. There was the risk that they would be seen by anyone or anything approaching from the south, but they needed warmth and something hot to eat. Trey had found some fat grubs beneath the moss on the rocks that formed this natural dip, and he pierced them and went about cooking them over the fire. Kosar wondered whether the witch had used chemicala to start the fire, but she showed him the flints in her hand. I have nothing left, she had said.

Alishia lay on her side, pressed into the shelf of rock and covered with a blanket Hope still carried. The girl was very quiet. Her scalp was bleeding. She had fallen soon after leaving the machine and struck her head on a rock.

Hope sat close, brushing hair away from the wound.

Kosar told Trey and Hope of his experience with the mimics. Hope’s eyes were wide, her tattoos reflecting her interest.

“And there was only one image of A’Meer?” she said.

“Yes, only one.”

“And she was cut up, dead?”

“Yes.” Kosar stared into the fire, seeing a hundred strange dancing shapes within its flames. When he was a boy he had dreamed of living inside a fire, exploring the molten caves of wood and coal, but he had never considered what the heat would do to him. He sometimes wished he still possessed that childlike naivete.

“They went east?”

Kosar nodded. “It was like having the land pulled from under me.”

“I think today we can all feel like that,” Hope whispered. She looked down at Alishia and brushed the unconscious girl’s hair again, letting her finger trail through the drying blood. She raised her hand and tapped her finger against her lips, staring into the fire.

What is she doing? Kosar thought. The witch licked her lips and glanced up at Kosar, and for a second her mistrust was obvious.

“We need honesty now,” Kosar said. “More than anything we need to tell one another everything. Don’t you agree, Hope? If there is something that Alishia has, something she can do-”

“Didn’t you run away?” Hope said.

“I saw no reason to stay.”

“And now you do?” She touched Alishia again, lifted a strand of her hair. “Now you want to help this girl, instead of leave her-and us-to whatever fate may befall us?”

Kosar nodded. “The mimics came to me for a reason. That’s why I came back, Hope. And I came back to hear what you know of the mimics. You’re a witch. You pride yourself on such knowledge. I need to know why they showed me what they did, and what message they were trying to convey.”

Hope gave a smile that lit her face. “I think the message is obvious. You’re to go to New Shanti to tell the Shantasi about Alishia. Trey and I are to take her south, to Kang Kang.”

“And what’s in Kang Kang?”

“You think I know?”

“I’m sure you do.”

Hope looked down at the fire again, and Kosar wondered just what she saw in there. I see the echoes of childhood adventure, scorched away by the heat of the real world. What does an old witch see in a campfire?

“I can tell you only what I believe,” she said. “What I know for sure is so much less.”

“I’m sure your beliefs are educated,” Trey said.

“They are at that, fledger.”

“So,” Kosar said. “The mimics. Kang Kang. New Shanti.”

“All linked, and all coming together very quickly,” Hope said. She shifted and sat up, hugging her knees. She glanced down at Alishia, then back up at Trey and Kosar. Even now there was a scheming look in her eye, and Kosar looked away, unnerved.

“How so?” Trey said.

“The mimics-from what I know of them-can be everywhere,” she said. “They pop up here and there, but do they really move? I don’t know; nobody does. They’re as difficult to communicate with as the moons, or the Sleeping Gods. They’re part of Noreela, but no part that we’re used to. The mere fact that they’re intruding into our world, and our problems, makes it obvious that their presence is significant. That was no chance meeting, Kosar. They knew who you were, and they knew who A’Meer was to you. It was a very definite message they wished to convey.”

“For me to go to New Shanti,” Kosar said. He thought of the mimics melting down and flowing east, and there was no other meaning he could read into that.

“Why would they be interested?” Trey said. “If they’re so remote from us, why would they be bothered with Kosar running, A’Meer dying?”

“Noreela is their world as well as ours,” Hope said. “We’ve named it and farmed it and all but destroyed it, but they live here too. I suppose they know how the new magic has already been distorted by the Mages, and they can foresee the effect this will have on them as well as us.”

“They showed us the Monks,” Kosar said.

“They wanted Rafe to survive.”

“They wanted his magic?”

Hope shrugged.

“How can you read their message?” Trey said.

“It seems so obvious to me.”

“But you’re saying that they know about Alishia?”

“Yes.”

“Well, ifthey know about her, what about the Mages?”

Hope stared at Trey, then at Kosar, and in the shifting firelight her tattoos seemed to be twisting across her face like a hundred baby snakes. “Maybe they know also,” she said.

For a second the fire seemed to burn brighter, but Kosar put it down to a gust of wind from the north. Buried embers glowed hotter, flames wavered higher and a chill fingered his spine. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“What makes you so sure?” Hope said.

“Whatever may be happening to Alishia started before the Mages took Rafe. If they’d known then, they would have made sure she died too.”

“They didn’t have magic then,” Hope said. “They were still looking for it.”

“Well, they have it now,” Trey said. “Kosar’s right. If they knew about it, we wouldn’t be sitting here in the cold talking about this.”

Hope looked up as though expecting to be plucked from the ground that very moment. Kosar saw her tattoos picking up reflections from the life and death moons, and neither seemed to suit. She’s a strange woman, he thought, and as if in response she stroked Alishia’s wound again.

“Do you think her blood has power?” Trey said.

“What?”

“Alishia. Her cut head. You keep touching it, and I’m wondering if it’s because you think her blood has power.”

“Of course not, miner.”

“Then leave her alone!” Trey moved to the prone girl’s side and stroked an errant strand of hair from her face.

“Neither of you owns that girl,” Kosar said. Hope glared at him, and Trey glanced up with his doleful yellow eyes. Kosar smiled at Hope. “So, what’s in Kang Kang?”

The old witch sighed and prodded at the fire with a stick. Kosar saw his caves collapse and new ones form, and the future was a whole different story.

“There’s a place there,” she said, pausing as if unwilling to divulge any more. But the two men were silent, giving her time, and eventually Hope carried on. “It’s called the Womb of the Land. I heard about it from my mother and grandmother, but no one I’ve met since has mentioned it. Long ago, I began to think that maybe I dreamed them telling me of it, but the telling was so significant to what has just happened that it must be true.”

“Significant how?”

“It was a prophecy,” she said. “An old one, rarely spoken, and written in languages not used for generations. It said that the future of magic would emerge in a child unborn, one that came from the Womb of the Land in Kang Kang.”

“Birthed from the land?” Kosar asked.

“I assume that’s what it meant. I don’t know what this place looks like: a cave, a field, a lake. Rafe was never born, Kosar. He had no navel, and his parents were not his own.”

“And you think he was from Kang Kang?”

“Yes.”

“And now Alishia wants to return there,” Trey said. “To the land’s womb.”

Hope nodded. “And she’s getting younger.”

“Or so she claims,” Kosar said. “She’s been through a lot. The shade in her mind, ripping her up like that. How can we say what that did to her? How can we even begin to understand?”

“We have to take her,” Trey said.

Kosar moved closer to the fire, taking fresh comfort in his childish memories. But every speck of the fire seemed to move independently, each flame flickered a different way, and he wondered how close the mimics were, all the time. “I suppose our decisions are made for us.”

“They always were,” Hope said.

“She’ll never be able to walk that far,” Trey said.

“Then we carry her. Or drag her. Either way, we all have some walking to do.”

“I could steal you a horse,” Kosar said, but he knew immediately that would not be so easy.

“Not anymore, thief. And not out here. We’re within pissing distance of Kang Kang, and not many people choose to live here. Those that do must have very good reasons. And with the dusk, everyone will be on their guard more than ever.”

“You’re right.” Kosar nodded. “But I’ve been here before, and farther. These aren’t good places you’ll be going through, Hope. Why not come to New Shanti with me? The Shantasi will take us in, and then we can go to Kang Kang with protection.”

Hope shook her head. “The way’s clear, Kosar.”

“You always hated the Shantasi. You always shunned A’Meer.”

Hope looked away, and for the first time Kosar thought she looked ashamed. “I never really hated her,” the witch said. “The Shantasi wish for everything I wish for.” She stood and walked away, and Kosar let her go.

“You support this?” Trey asked.

Kosar nodded. “It seems the only way. The Shantasi are powerful, and I’m sure they’ll help. And Hope’s right; if we all go to New Shanti, we risk Alishia’s safety even more. If there really is hope, we need to keep it alight.”

“I feel so ill,” Trey said. “So tired and weak.”

“Perhaps in Kang Kang there’ll be fledge.”

“Perhaps,” Trey said.

And what will fledge from that place be like? Kosar wondered. Right now, that was something he did not wish to consider.

“Keep your disc-sword handy,” Kosar said. “There are tumblers in the foothills.”

“And what else?”

“I never went deeper.”

Hope returned, and an uncomfortable silence hung over the camp as the three tried to bed down. They were all exhausted, and they needed their strength for the journeys to come.

But none of them could sleep. Kosar looked to the sky and wondered whether it was day. Hope lay on her side and stared at Alishia, breathing in the sleeping girl’s stale breath. And Trey closed his eyes and shook, clearly trying to journey, seeking here and there for even a hint of the fledge that would keep him alive.

Time passed, but everything remained the same.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn