Dawn

Chapter 7

TIME LOST MEANING. It had started when day and night were stolen away, and now their bodies had begun to rebel. Hope would sit and mutter to herself when they paused to rest, cross-legged and staring southward like a figurehead on a long-lost ship, arms jerking with muscular spasms every time she tried to lie down. She cursed and spat and spoke in languages Trey could never know. But sometimes a sense of calm came over her and she watched Alishia. Always Alishia.

The girl would wake into confusion and disorientation, blinking in the dusk like a cave rat that had never seen the light. She ate a little, drank less and found it difficult to stand unaided. She said that her bones ached and her joints felt as though they were grinding together, and when Trey went to lift her she would cry out in pain.

The constant level of subdued light should have been a comfort to Trey, but he had never felt so disturbed. The fledge rage was strong in him now. When he walked with Alishia across his back, he thought of what fledge looked like, how it smelled and tasted, how it felt between blind hands down in the utter darkness of the mines. He was young and still learning, but older miners had told him how they could identify fledge from different seams through touch alone, how they could tell whether it was fresh or stale by the texture and moisture content and how they knew from the first touch on their tongues whether or not it was going to give them a good journey.

Trey so wished to travel with fledge, now that all he could do was walk. How he wanted to sit back and hover above his body, look down and see himself spread-eagled on the ground, launch his questing mind into the twilight to discover whole truths he had never even guessed at. He could dip down into Hope’s mind and see the volumes of danger of which Alishia had spoken. He could visit Alishia where she slept, troubled and in pain, and ask whether this was really the right thing to do. And he could move farther afield. Kang Kang lay ahead of them, and it pressed against him like a physical force, urging him to turn and flee the way he had come. It was an impassable wall of stone in a wide-open cave, immovable and daunting. He could explore.

With fledge he could do anything. He found himself sniffing for it with every breath he took.

Night, night, night. He looked at the witch and knew that she was turning mad. He looked at Alishia, twitching in her sleep and mumbling words he did not understand. And he looked at the sky, realizing for the first time ever how even he, a cave dweller, was influenced by the turns of the sun.

“SOMETHING UP AHEAD,” Hope said. “Something strange.”

“How do you know?”

“Can’t you feel it? The air’s different. There’s a constant breeze from the north, but it feels as though the ground’s moving instead of the air.” Hope looked ahead, toward the shadowy mountains of Kang Kang, and her tattoos squirmed like salted snakes.

Trey lowered Alishia to the ground, groaning as the tension in his shoulders gave way to pain. He kneaded at his cramping muscles and followed Hope’s gaze. The landscape ahead of them was a blank: no contours in the shadows, no hint of any features, no indication that there was anything there at all. Darkness lay thick across the ground. He sniffed for fledge, but found only a sterile odor, like the air in a cave after a flood. Cleaned. Purged. Empty.

“What is it?” he said.

“I don’t know.” The witch hefted his disc-sword and he reached for it. He closed his hand around the shaft and Hope looked at him, eyebrows raised. Then she smiled and let go. “Very well, fledger,” she said. She dipped her hand into a pocket and kept it there.

What does she have in there? Trey thought. He’d seen her ripping some plant and dropping it into her pocket. To feed something? Or to let the leaves dry?

Alishia rolled onto her back and her eyes snapped open, but when he knelt beside her Trey could see that she was still asleep. He waved a hand in front of her face, but her eyes did not flicker. He so wanted those eyes to turn to him and smile. But he had begun to fear that would never happen again.

“We should go on,” Hope said. “We’ll be in the foothills of Kang Kang before we know it. They’re closer.”

Trey had noticed that too. Though the repulsion he felt was still strong, the mountains had suddenly seemed to come close, pushing him away yet urging him in. He felt as though two forces were acting upon him, and he had no idea which one to obey. He stood and held his disc-sword in both hands, ready to spin the blade and take on anything that came at them from the dark.

“Hope,” he said, “we haven’t seen anyone. We’ve been walking for maybe two topside days, and we haven’t seen another living soul.”

“They’re out there,” the witch said. “Back in the small range of lead-rock hills we passed through, there was a band of rovers. They hid from us. Farther on-maybe half a day ago-we passed close to a village. They were lined against us, barricaded, ready to fight. I could smell the fear on them, and the stink of sheebok and land hogs rotting into the ground. They were farmers. Terrified. Scared of what we were and what we’d do if we found them. If only they knew our fear as well. There have been others too, hiding in shadows or lying low in the folds of the land. We’ve been keeping to the high places so we can see into the distance, looking for Kang Kang and keeping watch for threats. Most of the people around here are lying as low as they can.”

“I heard nothing,” Trey said. “I saw no one.”

“Neither did I. I smelled them.”

Trey thought of all the time he had spent trying to find the hint of fledge on the air.

“So what’s this?” he said quietly. “It’s like an open space of nothing. I see Kang Kang in the distance, but nothing in between.”

“Maybe thereis nothing,” Hope said.

“What do you mean?”

“The land’s been strange for so long now. Perhaps the Mages’ return has quickened the rot.”

“But there must be time,” Trey said. “We have to have time. This can’t be hopeless, can it?”

Hope shrugged and looked at the sleeping girl. “I don’t think Fate owes us anything,” she said. “We may make it to within five steps of our destination and then be killed in a rockfall. There’s nothing looking out for us, fledger. With Rafe, perhaps his magic watched over us, but not with this one. We’re more on our own than we’ve ever been. Can’t you feel that?”

Trey shivered, nodded, and his guts knotted with a sudden craving for fledge.

“We’ll go on,” Hope said. “We can’t stop here, not now. If you can carry her farther, we should go.”

Hope helped Trey lift Alishia onto his back, then she took his disc-sword and walked on ahead once more, marking their route, looking left and right, up and down, watching for danger or searching for something more. Alishia was heavy, but not as heavy as she had been. Her thighs were thinner, her face less well defined, and her stomach had become soft with adolescent fat. Still growing younger, Trey thought. She’s our limit. We go this way because of what she said, but we only have so long, because of her. If we get there too late…

He heard a thud and felt the ground shake. Hope paused and glanced around at him, then kept moving on. Trey followed. Another crash from somewhere in the near distance, like a giant footfall hitting the land, and again he felt the vibration through his feet.

“What is that?” he said.

Hope had paused again and was looking up at the sky. Trey followed her gaze and saw the shadows. At first he thought it was a huge storm cloud, and he would have welcomed a downpour of rain. It would be a novelty for him, and they were growing painfully short on water. But then he saw the shadows dropping out of the darkness-a mass that seemed to shun moonlight, swallowing it rather than reflecting-and he knew that this was not a rain of water.

The shadows spun groundward. They passed out of view, and seconds later came another series of thuds.

“Hope?” Trey called.

“This should be interesting,” she said.

“Hope, what is it?” But the witch had moved on again, running down through a narrow gulley and heading for a small hill that obscured the land ahead of them. Trey took a final look up, saw more shadows falling away from the mass of negative sky and followed.

“HERE,” HOPE SAID. “This is where we stop for now.”

Trey struggled up the small rise toward the witch. She was staring south. “What is it?”

“See for yourself.”

He saw the vague, massive cloud above the hillside; then Kang Kang, its highest peaks appearing above the line of the hill. And then as he drew closer to Hope he could make out the landscape that lay between them and the first of Kang Kang’s foothills.

There was very little left.

“What in the Black…?”

“The land has gone bad,” Hope said, as if that could explain it all.

In the distance, the land had been stripped bare. Trees, grasses and plants, all gone. Above them, a mile or two up, the stew of the land twisted and rolled endlessly overhead. Closer by, at the foot of the hillside they now stood upon, the closest extreme of the fallout area was marked by a giant wellburr tree lying on its side, roots exposed and branches snapped and crushed.

“Mage shit,” Trey said. “The land’s eating itself.”

Hope seemed lost for words.

The process must have started quite recently, because it was not yet complete. In several places the bared bedrock spewed broken columns of earth and stone skyward. Geysers of sand and gravel blasted up toward that cloud of land.

At the edges of the cloud, where the effect seemed to lessen, what went up was starting to come back down. The thuds they had heard and felt were trees and rocks falling back to Noreela, slanting away from the stripped landscape and forming a perimeter banking of refuse: timber and stone, soil and vegetation, thumping back down with murderous finality.

Trey saw a sheebok spinning end over end as it fell in the distance. Perhaps it was already dead, perhaps not, but it struck the ground and exploded, sending glistening tendrils of itself across a slew of bushes and trees.

“We need to move back,” Trey said, awed and aghast.

“We’ll be safe here.”

“How do you know? It may spread. It might expand faster than we can run, and then we’ll be sucked up intothat!”

“Not sucked,” the witch said. “Fall. Everything’s falling upward. It’s stripping the land to the bedrock. Taking it back down to the bare Noreela…taking all the hindrances away.”

“What are you on about?” Trey glanced at Alishia’s head resting on his shoulder, trying to see whether her eyes were open. He lifted his shoulder slightly, trying to gain her attention, but she was still asleep. “Alishia,” he whispered, but there was no reaction.

“We should stay here,” the witch said. “Keep one eye on what’s happening, wait for it to fade away.”

“Maybe it won’t,” Trey said. “Maybe it’ll keep happening until the rock and the ground are all sucked up. Who knows what it may uncover?” He thought of deep mines and the waking Nax and legends of Sleeping Gods, and he looked down at the heathers between his feet, wondering what mysteries their roots tapped in to.

“If it spreads, there’s little we can do,” Hope said. “We can only hope that it stops eventually, otherwise…”

“Otherwise we won’t even get close to Kang Kang.”

“We could go around it,” she said.

Trey looked east and west along the low ridge they stood upon, but both directions vanished into darkness. The cloud above them was huge, and he could discern no limits to the effect ahead of them. Perhaps it went on forever.

“We can’t just sit and wait,” he said. “Alishia is growing younger every minute.”

“Well, we can’t walk out into that!” Hope said, shaking her hand at the strange sight before them.

“You think this is the Mages, like the day growing dark?”

“For what it’s worth, I think not, no. This is the land turned bad as we’ve seen before. The Mages will be busy in the north, destroying whatever defenses the Duke can muster.” She spat at her feet. “That won’t take long. So there’s another deadline for you, fledger. Because the Mages won’t be busy forever, and sooner or later they or their spies will find out about Alishia and what she carries.”

“How could they find out?”

Hope shrugged. “Maybe they’ll catch and torture Kosar. Or perhaps their spies won’t be as obvious as you think. Shades. Wraiths. Other things.” She grinned at Trey then, a toothy grimace that made him turn back to the ruined land. The noise was a constant rumble, interspersed with occasional thumps and vibrations as something dropped. At the base of the hill, perhaps a mile distant, the collection of debris was growing taller and wider, forming a barrier between the normal ground and that beyond.

A hissing white explosion erupted way beyond the barrier, pouring skyward and losing itself in the boiling mass overhead. Trey wondered whether this was a sacred river, revered like that one beneath the Widow’s Peaks. The eruption quickly turned from white to brown as sediment was sucked up from under the bedrock. The water continued rising, bursting out from several other points and emptying itself skyward.

An hour later it began to rain, and Trey sniffed the water for any trace of fledge.

HE MUST HAVE closed his eyes. He was aware of the noises around him, and the heat of Alishia lying beside him on the dew-damped heather, but in his mind he was somewhere else. He was not sure where the other place was, but it felt safe and warm, insulated from the dangers he knew by the remoteness of memories. He could hear his mother singing softly in the darkness of their cave. He could smell Sonda’s skin and her breath as they passed each other in the home-cave, sharing a smile and averting their eyes. He could feel the faces of his fellow miners as they broke for lunch, hear their voices, wallowing in the good humor that came from facing the constant danger of the mine together. Trey was aware of his own breathing and the tickle of heather beneath his cheek, but it was only when he opened his eyes that all those feelings of safety and contentment vanished.

Hope had gone. Alishia still lay by his side, pale and warm, and he could see her eyelids flexing as she explored something unknowable in her dreams. Trey shivered and hugged himself, wishing he had fledge to touch Alishia and see if she was all right. Wishing he had fledge for himself. His heart beat fast, his breathing was shallow, and he felt certain that everything was about to change.

He stared up at the sky. The cloud was still there but it seemed to have calmed, its feathery edges being dragged close by its continuing swirling motion. Some shadows fell away and drifted down, but fewer than before, and the noise of things impacting the ground seemed less frequent. The cloud was a nothing against the darkness, a hole he could so easily fall into. There was no light below to give it any definition, and the moonlight above slid from it as though repelled by its unnaturalness.

Trey looked away, unnerved, wondering where Hope had gone.

He pulled his water canteen from his shoulder bag and poured a few drops into Alishia’s mouth. Her lips opened and her tongue protruded slightly, absorbing the moisture. Her eyes flickered open but seemed to see nothing. He leaned close and whispered her name, but there was no reaction.

Trey took one mouthful of stale water from the canteen and hid it away in his bag once more.

Still no Hope. He stood and walked a few steps along the ridge, looking down across the wide plains between them and the beginnings of Kang Kang. The ground was pale and gray, exposed rock casting back moonlight that slid beneath the cloud, and there were great swathes of shadow where darkness hid in hollows. He looked left and right along the hillside, back at the unsettling scene before him, and then he saw movement. It was like a beetle on the rough gray skin of an old pit mule, only it moved with more purpose.

Hope. She had somehow made her way through the great mountain of shattered trees and exploded rocks to start out onto the bared skeleton of Noreela. She moved carefully, glancing down at her feet yet seeming to concentrate on one single point somewhere ahead. The sky was heavy above her, still weighted with everything that should have been below, but the strange effect had ended. Trey could feel the unbearable pressure of it where he stood.

He almost called out to Hope, but realized that she was too far away. And he did not know what else could be out in the darkness, ready to home in as soon as it heard potential prey.

He rushed back to Alishia and scanned the ground around her. Hope had taken his disc-sword. Alishia stirred in her sleep and rolled onto her side, and Trey touched her to make sure she was still there.

She could have doped me, he thought. I was lying there both awake and asleep, and she could have doped me and made off with Alishia. He touched the librarian’s hair, her neck, her back, and she was sweating and shaking as her bones and flesh faded away. The old witch could have killed me.

The fact that she had left him alive brought Trey little comfort.

He managed to sling Alishia across his right shoulder and stand. He was amazed at her lightness. As he shifted her into a more comfortable position, she grunted and whispered something, but he could not make out the words. He paused, but she said no more.

“Not long,” he said. “I can move faster with you like this. And that Mage-shitting witch isn’t getting away this easily.” Whatever her motives, whatever her intent, Trey had no intention of being left alone with the responsibility for Alishia. Hope knew so much, and he knew so little.

For the first time in his life, he was afraid of the dark.

HOPE WAS WALKING on the bare skin of Noreela. There was no evidence of time here: no buildup of soil, no rotting vegetation, no animal bones or skeletons of the unfortunate victims of Kang Kang. She saw no living or dead things marring the sterile perfection of this blank slate of the land, and she could smell nothing but the tang of exposed soil. The rock beneath her feet was dry and utterly bare. And it was warm. She could feel the warmth through her shoes. It was as though Noreela were alive, and for the first time its naked body had been revealed.

Perhaps this was a wound. She stopped and looked around, wondering what the blood of the world would look like. Above her hung the combined mess of everything fallen from here. Yet she was not falling. This strange effect had ended. She feared that soon it would reverse itself. Like the River San, the unbelievable weight of ground and rock above her would fall. Death would be quick when it came, but there would be a dozen heartbeats when she knew it was coming, and she had no wish to discover which memories would haunt those moments.

She did not look up. This was nothing compared to what she thought she had seen farther on.

She focused on where the white shape had marred the shadows, feeling her way forward with cautious steps. Occasionally she glanced down, stepping across cracks in the ground that gushed an unpleasant heat, jumping where those cracks were larger, changing direction where they were too wide to leap. The darkness within was impenetrable, as if the ground were filled with black water to its brim. She hated the warmth that rose: it reminded her of the rank moist breath of her thousands of lovers. Every breath a sigh, every sigh an unrealized dream.

She had been sitting beside Trey and Alishia when she saw the movement on the rocky plain. She was old and her eyes were poor, but she knew instantly what she had seen. The realization hit her like a solid force, a knowledge that forbore any shred of doubt, and her path was clear. Her breath stuck in her chest as though awaiting her action. She started running down the slope of the hill, her heart beating with more power and confidence than she had felt in years.

Down to the first wellburr tree, over its shattered trunk and onward; she had quickly negotiated the hills of debris, sinking to her knees in upset soil, tripping over a tangled mess of vegetation, gashing her arm on the sharp remains of an exhumed machine.

To Hope, it was the moment upon which the future might pivot.

Every few steps she remembered that white shape, how it seemed to lift out of the ground and melt back in, lit from within and exuding light when all else was darkness.

Sleeping God, she had thought, and the very idea made her feel faint.

She went on. The incredible weight of the land above drew her gaze, yet she refused its lure. If she looked, it would fall. She kept telling herself that and, though absurd, it became the truth. If I look, it will fall.

She leapt a crack in the ground and felt a warm breath rise within her skirts.

This was the true lay of the land. The exposed surface was Noreela in its infancy, stripped down to the blank slate upon which everything had developed: flora and fauna, man and beast, god and demon, all casting their own special places and building upon the structure of rock that was the foundation of the land.

She glanced down at the rock beneath her feet, suddenly terrified that she would see some ancient message carved there. But there was only stone, smoothed from eons of weight.

There were hollows here and there, burrows stamped down or scooped out by forces unknown. Shadows sat within them, shifting as she hurried by, and she did not pause to see whether it was her skirts making that soft hissing noise as they moved across stone, or something else.

“Sleeping God,” she whispered, eyes wide in case her invocation called it back up. But the place where she had seen the movement remained as dark as everywhere else. She did not look aside for too long in case she lost her way.

The Sleeping Gods had gone to ground millennia ago, or so the stories said. They were formidable beings, demons or angels of the land that had supposedly shunned limitless power to wander the wilds, learning and teaching, creating and building but never controlling. They had taken their fill of Noreela and all it could offer and put themselves into the ground, ready to sleep eternally unless something of deep interest woke them once more. They had their worshippers and cults, and there were frequent exhortations that their time had come again. But no Sleeping Gods returned, and the cults would often wither and split to regroup again under different guises, in different places.

Since the Cataclysmic War, it was whispered that they would awake when magic returned to the land.

Hope had always doubted the veracity of that legend. When the Sleeping Gods went down thousands of years ago there had been magic, although probably none that would be recognized today. Why would the return of magic give them cause to rise from their ancient hibernation?

And yet…

There was always a chance, and chance is why Hope had given herself such a name.

She was closing on the place where she had seen the movement. She had marked the place well: deep pit of shadows on the right, a raised area of cracked rock on the left. Glancing back, she could just make out the barrier of fallen debris and the low hill beyond. From this distance she could not tell whether Trey was still there. There was no movement on the plain of rock, though she was aware of the shifting way above her. It shook the air, thrummed in her teeth, set her hair on end. If I look, it will fall.

She turned back, and for the space between heartbeats she thought the Sleeping God would be there before her, sleeping no more. She had heard a hundred descriptions of what they had looked like, and she was convinced that none of them did the Gods justice. Whatever she saw would be monumental and magnificent. It would strike at her heart with a sense of majesty, and perhaps there would be communication, an acknowledgment that she was the first living thing it had seen upon waking.

Nature going wrong will make everything right, she thought.

But there was nothing there, only the rock and shadows, and the outline of Kang Kang in the distance.

Hope slumped for a moment, confidence and optimism bled by the dusk. But then she went on, because shehad seen it-hadseen that shape lifting from the ground then sinking back down. Perhaps the weak moonlight had revealed it…but she thought that maybe it had lit itself for her.

They’re as big as hawks, descended from the Constructors of Noreela, wandering its ever-changing landscape for a million years, teaching and learning, spreading and absorbing history, looking for something beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

She had heard many stories, all of them different, all of them spouted by people who swore that they told the truth. One man, lying naked on her bed while she prepared him a stew of calming herbs, told her he knew someone who had seen a Sleeping God.

A cave in the Widow’s Peaks, and the God was down there, the size of ten men but with a mind so much larger, reaching much farther. It made its own darkness. My friend thought it was asleep. He touched it. He wanted some of its power for himself, thought he could just take it away. It drove him mad. He came out raging and he was never the same man again.

If he came out raging, Hope had said, how can you believe anything he said? The man glared at her, his whore, and she said no more.

Hope was close to where she had seen the shape rise and fall. It had curled out of the ground, like the spine of a sea creature parting the waters in the Bay of Cantrassa. The broken rocks to the left, the lake of darkness to the right…yes, she was almost there.

The size of a mountain, one book had said, their eyes lakes in the land, their minds beyond and above what we can know or understand. The Sleeping Gods once walked Noreela and harvested its forests, ate of its fields and meadows, preparing the land for their descendants. We are born of the Sleeping Gods, and like concerned parents they still keep one ear to our collective voice, one eye on our progress.

They would have come back by now if that were true, Hope thought. Three hundred years or three days ago, they would have come back. She slowed, her feet dragging on the bare stone, suddenly terrified of what she would find. She had heard so many legends of the Sleeping Gods, read so many stories. Lay there sweating while sailors from The Spine or Breakers from The Heights fucked her and whispered what they knew. None of them really knew anything, but she let them talk nonetheless, seeking evidence between the lines of their lies. Since the Cataclysmic War the folklore had become more diverse and myth-based than ever before. People read so little nowadays, and as Noreela regressed, so distances between places increased. Noreelans traveled less, and stories had farther to go. Each whisper changed a name or a place. Every telling exaggerated one part of the Sleeping Gods’ myth, and forgot another. They had existed, but beyond that nothing was certain.

They went down because they were shamed by Noreela…

They await better times…

They will awake upon the breaking of the Black…

Hope had everything to fear and little to gain, yet still she went on. Would a Sleeping God help her? Would it even recognize her as something other than an insect to be crushed beneath its heel?

She thought so. They were little more than myth now, but in many stories lay a common vein of hope. They were the good of the land gone to sleep, the promise of a better future, and their most devout followers believed that their return would cure all wrongs. They were hope personified, and she had always known their name.

She walked on, and fifty steps later, as she came to the rent in the land where she had seen the shape rise and fall, the boiling soup of Noreela swirling high above finally parted. Life and death moons streamed down, and she saw what filled the hole.

Hope fell.

TREY WAS STRUGGLING. Light though she was, Alishia lay awkwardly across his shoulder, her bony hip grinding into his neck. A couple of hundred steps from their makeshift camp he came to the first obstacle: a mass of undergrowth, tangled and stinking of something dead. He lifted his feet higher, tramped through the fallen plants, left hand held out for balance.

He was beginning to panic. Hope was leaving him. Much as he disliked the witch, he could not face this journey without her. She knew so much about the land, what had changed and what might happen next. Much of what she said could well be made up, but her confidence in this knowledge comforted him. Besides, he was a stranger up here.

He looked up and saw the mass of risen ground. It was so unnatural and wrong; it grumbled and groaned like a great creature woken from some ancient slumber.

Alishia mumbled and he almost tripped, stumbling a few steps to regain his balance. He found that he’d been holding his breath. He was doing that a lot lately, because breathing seemed to feed the fledge rage burning inside. His skin felt tight, his throat constricted, his mind pressurized and fit to explode.

He sucked in air and tasted nothing.

Trey could see Hope. She was a tiny shape beyond the barrier of fallen debris, hurrying across the silvered base-rock of Noreela. Caves down there? Trey thought. Fissures in the land? Fledge? But now he could smell nothing, only a curious neutral scent to the air, as though it were all new.

His mind wandered, drawn away partly by panic but mostly by the fledge rage. Imagination tore him sideways while he forged on ahead, and he saw flashes of red, shades of white and the unmistakable smear of blood spreading across the land.

A dream, not a vision.

Alishia muttered something about books of blood, as if she could see what he imagined.

Just a dream. No fledge, no traveling. Just a dream.

He climbed the trunk of the huge fallen wellburr tree, smelling its exposed roots. Then he tackled the mound of debris, slipping and stumbling, clawing at the ground with his free hand, finally sliding down the other side with Alishia still slung over his shoulder.

His leather shoes slapped onto the bare rock, footfalls heavy with Alishia’s extra weight. Behind him lay the chaos of what had once made up this land, fallen and smashed and broken, and ahead lay virgin ground, and Hope. She seemed to have paused, standing there like a frozen shadow. And then her shadow was illuminated as combined moonlight finally made its way through the debris and dust above.

Trey saw the glint of metal as she unsheathed his disc-sword.

And then Hope the witch fell forward and vanished from the world.

Trey fell to his knees and dropped Alishia to the ground. The fledge rage twisted his insides and churned his heart as his mind sought refuge somewhere deep and dark.

No travel, he thought, no fledge. But with the moons finally revealed again, Trey could do nothing to prevent night from flooding in.

THE WEIGHT OF what she saw pulled Hope down. The hollow in the rock was filled with something gray, textured, curved. The dip was perhaps thirty steps across, and a few steps below ground level the gray surface began, like a smooth, frozen lake that had lain there forever. It gave off a faint glow. It had been uncovered now, given to the moonlight. Given toher.

That’s what I saw move, Hope thought as she tipped forward, flexing up toward the sky, hauled back down by the power of the Sleeping God within. As she fell, she was not afraid. Air rushed past her face and smoothed her hair. She kept hold of the disc-sword, though she realized how pathetic and petty it would seem to the God. Whatever this thing may be-a distillation of all the stories told, or something else entirely-a sliver of metal was nothing compared to its magnificence.

As she struck the gray surface, Hope did not even close her eyes. I’ll be breaking in, entering its sleep. I’ll be wakingit!

The curved skin was thin, like a spider’s nest left for years in a forgotten corner. Hope went straight through with little more than a rustle, wondering how it had escaped the forces stripping the ground all around. But then, the power of a Sleeping God was unknowable.

She struck something hard, gasped as the wind was knocked from her, and for a few moments she lay there, keeping a tight grip on the shaft of the disc-sword. It connected her to the world she had just left behind. It was real. It had been wetted with Noreelan rain and scorched by Noreelan sun; it had tasted blood and soaked up the fledger’s sweat as he wielded it in battle. It held hints of fledge within its folded metal grain. She could not smell or taste anything, and the feel of the disc-sword was the only thing holding her in the world.

Moonlight touched strange surfaces for the first time in…how long? Hope had no idea. The life moon bled silver across the floor she had landed upon-too soft for rock, too hard for bone-and the death moon gave the air a yellowish tinge. Darkness seemed unwilling to seep away; it held on for a while, melting back like black ice under the weak touch of the moons. She breathed in deeply and smelled old air. It was not musty or stale, but it had been waiting to be breathed for a long time. It was weak in her lungs, and dark spots invaded her vision.

Hope raised herself onto her hands and knees, still clasping the disc-sword. Its blade scraped across the floor, like nails on a pane of smooth glass. She winced and wondered how far that sound would carry.

The witch looked up. She was a few steps below the strange skin she had broken through. The hole was ragged and wide, flaps of the gray surface swinging back and forth where they were still connected to their surroundings.

She was in some sort of tunnel, leading off to the left and right. It vanished into darkness in both directions, but she had the impression that it curved downward as well. The floor had the texture of old leather, and the ceiling above her was jagged with strange stalactites. She reached out and touched the wall beside her. It was damp, soft as soapstone, slick to the touch.

“A nest,” she said. “Somewhere to sleep. Somewhere safe and sound.” The impact of what she was seeing, and where she was, suddenly hit her. She gasped and found it difficult to breathe. Every lungful I take in, a Sleeping God has breathed out!

She wondered where it was. Was she within touching distance? Was it asleep even now behind these walls, beneath this floor? Everything that had happened since she met Rafe Baburn cowering in a shop doorway seemed so meaningless and irrelevant. The people she had encountered, the miles she had traveled, the Red Monks and the Mages-all of them were so far away that even their memory felt stale and faded. The Sleeping Gods were the paused hearts of Noreela, and she wanted to make them beat again.

They would rise up, spread hope, light the skies and crush the Mages like a puddle of shit beneath a sheebok’s hoof.

“It’s all here!” she said, and there were no echoes from the strange cave walls. Perhaps the Sleeping God was swallowing her words to discover how true she was. See everything, she thought. She was not ashamed. Everything she had done in her life-the good, the bad, the terrible-had been to seek out magic, to find the old lifeblood of Noreela in order to bring it back.

For you, a voice whispered. You did it all for yourself! She wanted to kill that voice until she realized it was her own.

Hope stood and moved off along the cave.

Moonlight seemed to stick to her. She carried it on her skin and clothes, and even when she could no longer see the rent in the ceiling, still the surfaces around her reflected silver and yellow. Life and death moons combined, as they always should, and she was pleased that the Sleeping God favored neither.

“Wake up,” she whispered. “We need you now…Ineed you. You can rescue magic. Magic! Hear me? Rise up!”

The only sound was the whisper of her dress on the floor. She paused and listened for any sign of the God, a heartbeat, a breath. But the heartbeats would be days apart, and the breaths would be allied to the rhythms of the land.

The rhythms are all fucked right now, her own voice whispered in her head, and she did her best to ignore it.

The old witch moved farther along the corridor. The light remained at a low level, though there was no evident source. She sniffed, and smelled nothing alive. But nothing dead, either. Only age.

Something brushed at her face and she waved her hand before her. She heard the spiderweb splitting and felt it against her palm, strong and thick. She held her breath and waited for the heavy impact of the creature on her face, but none came. In her pocket she held the sleeping gravemaker spider, ready to use it if the need arose. The web seemed old. It was thick with dust, and rattled with the bones of unknown creatures.

The tunnel curved sharply downward and Hope followed, disc-sword in one hand, the other cupping the gravemaker spider. Yet she perceived no real threat. This was simply another moment in time, not a pause before chaos. She stepped carefully down the sloping cave, aware of the distance she was putting behind her.

I’ll never get back up here, she thought, but she hoped that she would not have to. Once the God was awoken…

Hope had always looked away from herself, out into the world, seeking truths and lies that would help her. She was aware of herself at the center of things, but her attention was forever focused elsewhere. Now every moment was rich and relevant, each breath the most important she had ever taken. She was living for the present once again, and each heartbeat took her closer to the Sleeping God.

Wake, she thought, but nothing answered her call.

The floor leveled and Hope found herself in a large chamber. The walls exuded a subtle luminescence, as though set with fire-stones, but when she reached out and touched the surface to her left, it was cold. She pressed her hand to the wall, and the pale light shone through and showed her bones, and her veins crissing and crossing like a map of Noreela itself.

She pulled her hand away and heard a crackling behind her. She spun around, lifting the disc-sword and setting its blade spinning. Something brushed her face and at first she thought it was another web. But as she wiped dust from her eyes and moved back, she saw that the whole chamber before her was patterned with thin, delicate stems. Like the veins in my hand, she thought. They went from floor to ceiling, ceiling to walls, and some even stretched right across the chamber, twenty steps long. She reached out and touched one of the stems, and it crumbled into dust. She smelled her hand; there was hardly any scent at all. The dust was nothing more than gritty air in her nose.

At the other end of the chamber she could see an opening, and its shadows suggested that it led farther down. Deeper, she thought. It’s sleeping deeper, probably right at the bottom. Maybe thousands of years ago this place was a defense against invaders.

She tried to avoid as many of the petrified stems as she could, but still they broke around and across her, spreading their dust to settle quickly in the still air. Once through the chamber, she turned and looked at what she had done. There was a clear path across the cavern. Easy to follow, she thought. Hope brushed dust from her hair and entered the opening in the wall.

THE TUNNEL OPENED up into smaller caverns, narrowed, twisting and turning this way and that, but always heading down. She wondered how far it went. The Sleeping Gods had been gone for longer than anyone knew; it could be a whole new world down here.

Search though she did, she could discern no signs at all that she had been noticed. There were no held breaths, no rumbles of movement from far away, no sudden vibrations as something huge rolled awake or sat up. If the God had awoken, it was remaining quiet.

It’ll be hungry, she thought. She shook her head to clear the idea but it was there, implanted in her brain.

The ground went from leathery and hard to soft and moist, and she slipped and landed hard on her rump. She rolled, going with the lay of the land where it had suddenly shifted, trying to grab something but finding nowhere to hold on. She touched a ridge in the ground and it flattened; her fingers slid across a raised knot and it snapped off, turning to dust. She was sliding toward a long, low crack in the tunnel wall, one that looked small until she reached it and passed inside. The subtly glowing walls faded to black, and she discovered true darkness for the first time in her life. She was still slipping, holding the disc-sword close to her chest to prevent it from being snapped away, and she let out an involuntary screech. There were no echoes. She barely even heard herself.

And then she was out, falling into a cavern where the walls glowed brighter than before, the floor was covered with a bluish haze, and at its center a mass sat atop a raised platform like a statue on its pedestal.

As she struck the foot of the wall and rolled into the haze, she thought, That’s it?

But then her mind was no longer her own, and she thought no more.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn