Dawn

Chapter 8

“WHY HAVEN’T YOU killed me?” Kosar asked.

“I will.” The Monk was kneeling several steps away, concentrating on something on the ground. He shielded the object of his fascination from Kosar. The thief did not like that.

“I killed you,” Kosar mumbled. His vision swayed as his head lolled on his shoulders. Stay awake. Stay awake!

“I fell. I survived.” The Red Monk’s voice was like gravel being poured into a grave. Kosar guessed it did not have much cause to talk.

“Last Monk I killed was a woman.”

The demon ignored him. Its shoulders flexed, and it moved its body to the side, as though to shed some moonlight on whatever it was doing. Kosar strained against his bonds, trying to see past the robed figure. But the knots were tight, he was woozy, and seeing would do him no good.

Whatever the Red Monk had planned, Kosar would be helpless.

He closed his eyes and rested his chin on his chest, trying to control the waves of faintness. Pain had spread through his head and neck; muscles ached, bones ground together. But Kosar knew that none of this mattered. He was going to die, and for some reason the Monk was taking its time.

I know you, it had said.

Kosar was almost certain that this demon had killed A’Meer.

His sword lay beside the Monk, still stained with Breakers’ blood. Kosar wondered, after all the killing it had done, whether it could ever feel right in his hand again. If only he had the chance to find out.

“Kill me quickly,” Kosar said. He bit his lip and looked up, the pain bringing him back from the edge of unconsciousness. He would look death in the face.

The Monk breathed heavily, coughing now and then, spitting blood that bubbled on the ground as if it were sap from the Poison Forests. It seemed unconcerned at the several crossbow bolts buried in its body.

“You sadistic fucking piece of Mage shit,” Kosar spat. “Did you kill her the same way?”

The Monk paused, raised its head and turned to look at Kosar. Its face was not as red as it had been, though its eyes still reflected darkness. It turned back to its work.

Kosar struggled against the torn clothing the Monk had used to tie him to the broken machine. The cloth was still wet with blood. The Monk had stripped it from the Breakers it had slaughtered.

His head thumped, his chest and sides hurt and Kosar struggled every step of the way as unconsciousness took him somewhere less painful.

“BRING IT TO life,” the Monk said.

“What?” Kosar surfaced, pulling back from the Monk standing before him.

The Monk clanged the machine with his sword. “Give it life. Wake it. Use it against me.”

Kosar’s head slumped back against the machine. He closed his eyes, fighting dizziness and pain. “Not right now,” he said. “Maybe later.”

“You can’t,” the demon said.

“I will. As soon as you turn your back.”

The Red Monk sat down again, shifting soil and sand and rocks with the swords.

Now, Kosar thought, knowing it would do no good. Now come to life and kill the Mage-shitting thing. Come alive now, now! He shook his head and suddenly felt clear, strong and aware. “So what are you looking for, you piece of Mage shit? You’ve lost, failed. Magic is back, and the Mages have it, and it’s the fault of you and yours. So what are you looking for in the bloody dust?”

The Monk rose, turned and stepped toward Kosar. It held something in the palm of its hand, a squirming insect that seemed to hate the weak moonlight. “The truth,” it said.

“What’s that?”

The Monk ignored his question.

Kosar aimed a kick at the demon’s hand, but it moved aside and came in close, too close to kick again. He could smell it now, sickly sweet rot and body odor, the stench of something that never cleans itself, takes no care.

“Fuck off,” Kosar said.

“I need to know,” the Monk said. In one quick movement it brought a knife from beneath its robe and thrust it into Kosar’s neck.

Kosar went stiff with shock. He could feel the knife in him, an alien object that felt much larger than it actually was, and even after the Monk withdrew the blade it felt as though it were still there, turning in his flesh with every breath he took. He gasped.

And then the pain kicked in. It overrode every other ache in Kosar’s body. His bleeding nose was forgotten, the injury to his hand from the fight in the machines’ graveyard, the stab wounds to his shoulders…

The Monk watched for a second, eyes flicking down to the wound then back to Kosar’s face. Then it dropped the insect onto Kosar’s neck.

He felt it. Even through the intense agony he felt the intimate contact of its tiny legs crawling up his neck, against the flow of blood, against the pain. It reached the wound and invaded his body. It was much worse than the knife, because this thing was alive. It delved and probed, passing into the rent the Monk had made and tearing its way deeper. And Kosar found himself silently begging dead A’Meer to come and take him from this terrible agony and carry him into the Black.

Then the insect stopped moving, and everything changed.

Kosar felt it growing within him. It was as though he were shrinking and the insect expanding. He was moving away from the world, sinking somewhere darker, and yet the suffering was still there. This was not unconsciousness; this was him being driven down and forced back. He fought, but there was very little fight left in him. His throat began to rattle. His mouth opened and he growled, as if attempting to speak a language he had never known.

“Why do you have those wounds on your fingertips?”

Fuck you, Kosar thought. “I’m a thief,” he said. He could not help himself. He tried to bite his tongue to prevent himself from speaking more, but the thing inside him would not allow it.

The Monk smiled. “Good.” It retreated a few steps and sat down, groaning as it did so. It plucked a bolt from its neck and threw it aside. Blood ran from the wound, but only a dribble. It cricked its neck and lowered its hood, revealing the bald scarlet scalp. The huge bonfires cast flickering shadows on its head.

Kosar strained at his bindings, but he could no longer feel his arms. They belonged somewhere else. The thing inside him was huge, larger than him, bursting out and becoming the center of everything he knew and believed. It had swallowed him, and when the Monk began asking its questions, the insect regurgitated the answers from Kosar’s stiffened mouth.

“Who are you?”

“Kosar.”

“Where are you from?”

“Trengborne.”

“The village where the boy came from?”

“Yes.” The insect squeezed, white fire consumed Kosar’s bones. “He wasn’tfrom there, but helived there.”

The Monk regarded him for a while, stroking the side of its nose with the tip of Kosar’s sword. “The boy had magic?”

“Yes.”

“He used it?”

“It used him.”

The Monk nodded, musing on this. “Where is he now?”

“The Mages took him.” Kosar did not have to fight against the truth in this case; hewanted to tell it. “They took him, stole the magic, and they have it now.”

The Monk looked away, simmering.

Kosar bit his lip. Fresh blood flowed into his mouth but the pain was immaterial. It lifted him nowhere, purged nothing from his body except for more blood. He looked to the sky to see why it was darkening, then at the fires, and he realized that his vision was fading. About time, he thought.

“Where were you going?” the Monk said.

“To…to…” He fought, but the insect crushed him down. “To Hess.”

“Why?”

“To tell the Mystics about Alishia.”

“Alishia? Who is she?”

“She has something…” Kosar closed his eyes and raged against the thing controlling him. He thought of A’Meer and her determination, her pride, and he thought about how Rafe had changed in the space of a few days. But his mouth opened, his throat flexed and he could not swallow the words. “…something of magic within her.”

The Monk stood and came forward, holding the sword out before it. “You cannot lie to me.”

“I can’t lie.”

“Then there’s still a chance,” the Monk said. “Where is Alishia?”

Still a chance?

“Going…to…Kang Kang…”

The Monk turned and walked away, its shadow dancing behind it. It sheathed its sword and threw Kosar’s aside.

It sees something of magic as a chance?

The Monk disappeared beyond one of the huge fires. Kosar felt the insect rip itself away from his spine and claw from the wound in his neck, saw it tumble down his chest and land in the dust. It was on its back, legs flailing at the night, and a hundred thin white tendrils swirled around it, licking at the air as if trying to find nerves once more.

With all the strength he could muster, Kosar lifted his foot and brought it down onto the struggling beetle.

He came back to himself in time to feel life fading away. The Monk left me to die, he thought. At last…at last…

BUT DEATH IS no easy escape, and the pain of life brought him around once more.

Kosar had no idea how much time had passed. The great fires had burned down somewhat, so it must have been several hours, but the moons still hung in the sky, it was still twilight…and the Monk was still there. It sat at a distance, close to one of the fading fires, its cloak hugged tight around it and its hood lifted back over its head. It had its back to Kosar. It seemed to be asleep.

He was still tied against the broken machine. His chest was tight and sore, and he stood on shaky legs to ease the pressure on his shoulders.

I should be dead, Kosar thought. He swallowed, wincing at the pain that slight movement brought. He turned his head left to right and felt something on his throat, something in him, and for a second panic rose again. But he could still see the remains of the crushed insect on the ground beside his foot. It had burst when he crushed it, spilling a puddle of his blood merged with its own.

Something ran past him. He held his breath and did his best to keep still, tracking the shadow as it darted low across the ground. It was a sand rat, large as a small sheebok, scaly tail waving at the air as it buried its long snout into one of the dead Breakers.

Kosar looked at the Monk, but the demon seemed unconcerned.

The sand rat pulled back and took something from the body. It hurried back past Kosar, glancing at him as it ran by with the Breaker’s heart in its mouth.

Kosar slumped against the machine and cried out at the bindings chafing his wrists. They had rubbed the skin raw, drawing more blood and tightening each time he moved against them.

“You!” Kosar called. The Monk lifted its head, staring into the fire as if believing the call had come from there. “Haven’t you killed me yet?”

The Monk stood slowly. Kosar noticed several arrows and bolts on the ground by its side, evidently picked from its body while it had been sitting beside the fire. Its red robe bore many darker patches. Their rage keeps them going, he thought. Perhaps now they know they’ve lost, they’ll just die away. But the Monk shrugged its robe higher onto its shoulders and pulled its hood lower over its face, and when it started out for Kosar it was with purpose.

I told it about Alishia, he thought in despair.

The demon walked past the bodies of several Breakers, paying them no attention. Its feet kicked through sandy soil darkened with blood. When it came to within a dozen steps of Kosar it paused, raised its hands and lowered its hood slowly, as if uncertain of its actions. It looked above Kosar at the machine. It looked down at the puddle of blood at his feet. It looked anywhere but at his face.

“I haven’t killed you,” it said. “I saved your life. Clasped the wound shut. Stopped the bleeding.” Its voice was rough and low, and Kosar saw the terrible scars on its face and neck for the first time. “I am Lucien Malini,” it said.

Kosar was taken aback. Was he still unconscious? Was he dreaming? He swung his hand forward and imagined a sword cleaving this monster’s head in two-revenge for sweet A’Meer-but his arms remained tied to the machine.

“You have a name?” he asked.

“Everything has a name. Even the Mages.”

“Then why tell me? You killed the woman in those woods, didn’t you? Before the machines’ graveyard?”

“Yes. We fought and I killed her. And then later…when I went back…I saw her…”

“If you let me down from here, I’ll kill you.”

The Monk raised its eyebrows, forehead creasing into a scarred frown.

“Do you believe I’m telling the truth?” Kosar asked. “Don’t need your filthy truth beetle for that, do you? I’ll wipe the name from your lips and stamp it into the bloody dust. Then I’ll cut you open and sit close by, so I can watch the sand rats eat you slowly. You’ll end up as sand rat shit.”

“The woman ended as more,” Lucien Malini said.

“What do you mean?” Kosar could not help the question, though he did not want to engage in this demon’s banter. But it said there’s still a chance.

“She went,” the Monk said. “I returned to her and she went. Disappeared. Before my eyes.”

“You returned to her?”

“I had seen defeat, and I sought revenge on her corpse.”

Kosar closed his eyes and the world swayed around him. He had no wish to imagine what the Monk’s revenge would have been, yet the images forced themselves upon him, crowded out in moments by the mimic’s presentation of A’Meer’s final breaths. A whispered word, or a gasp for air?

When the world steadied and Kosar opened his eyes again, the Monk had come close.

“Leave me alone, demon!” Kosar whispered.

The Monk reached out and touched his throat. Its fingers were rough and a flame of pain circled Kosar’s neck. Something shifted there and his head was jerked to one side, pulled by a subtle movement from the Monk’s hand.

“Leave me!”

“If I leave, you may bleed to death.”

“Then let me bleed to death. Or are you toying with me? Maybe you’re taking your revenge on my body because A’Meer denied you that?”

The Monk stood back and stared at Kosar, as though looking for truth in its victim’s face. “I don’t want you to die,” it said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I put clasps in your throat. Sand rat teeth hold your wound together. I want you to live.”

Kosar tried to turn away but felt the obstructions in his neck. They pulled at him, stretching skin and holding the sides of his wounds together. There was no fresh blood running down his chest. And the Monk asked no more questions.

“Why?” Kosar asked.

“You spoke my words in your sleep,” the Monk said. “When I sat by the fire, taking arrows from my body, I heard you repeating my words. As if you could not believe them.”

Kosar spat at the Monk. He was weak and his mouth was dry, and the bloody spittle landed on the ground between them. “Your kind don’t believe in hope.”

The Monk came forward again. Kosar kicked out but the demon simply slapped his leg aside. It seemed unconcerned at his struggles. Kosar saw it close up; deep, black eyes, the fresh wounds and older scars, the ragged teeth in its mouth, nose split in some fight. Surely there could be no hope in a thing like this?

“You’ll sleep,” the demon said. “I’ll have time to think. And when you wake, we will talk some more.”

It pressed something into Kosar’s mouth, a sweet plant mulched and mixed with something more meaty. Try as he did, Kosar could not keep from swallowing. And once he’d swallowed the first speck he opened his mouth and welcomed some more. It took him away, soothed his pain, made A’Meer fade for a time into a shadow of a memory rather than a raw, bloody loss. As he felt the Monk loosening his wrist ties, Kosar stared into the failing fire and saw sunlight once again.

WHEN HE FOUND the Elder Mystic sitting alone in a square on the outskirts of Hess, O’Gan thought he had discovered an ally.

He stood at the edge of the square, hidden from view in the shadow of a giant wellburr tree. He liked the feel of the tree’s bark against his shoulder. It had been here for several thousand years, weathering storms and reveling in sunlight, sucking water from the ground that seeped in from the inland sea of Sordon Sound. It had grown up alone in a wild landscape, witness to histories that O’Gan could not imagine and would barely believe. When its seeds fell they were carried away by the Elder Mystics and planted far afield, taking all the history of the tree with them to give to the fledgling plants that might sprout several centuries from now. Sometimes, those carrying them were given visions when their palms were pricked by the seeds’ spiky skins. And sometimes those visions gave stories that were told on the Temple, bizarre tales of histories that did not belong to the Shantasi. This land had been a stranger to them when they arrived many centuries before, and there were those who believed it was a stranger to them still.

He leaned his head against the skin of the tree and closed his eyes. His mind was still affected by the Janne pollen, blood still trickled from his nose and he sensed a comforting warmth somewhere within the tree’s ancient trunk. It was the certainty that a greater mind than his was pondering events. He sighed, and an echo from centuries before bled through the bark and made him open his eyes.

The Elder Mystic was sitting on the edge of a stone water fountain. The water seemed black in the weak light. It rose in three single sheets, parting as it reached its zenith and then splashing back down. The splashes sounded like nothing at all.

The Elder trailed one hand in the water, swirling it back and forth like a paddle. She remained where she was. Even with her eyes closed, O’Gan was certain that she traveled nowhere.

Her other hand held the hilt of the knife buried in her stomach.

“Elder!” O’Gan said. He stepped from the shadow of the wellburr tree and crossed the small square to the fountain. They were alone. The square was on the western outskirt of Hess, its air heavy with scents from the Mol’Steria Desert farther west.

The Mystic raised her head and turned to look at O’Gan. She seemed surprised to see anyone here. She was very old, her pale skin wrinkled into leathery folds, her black hair streaked with silver as though it caught light from the life moon.

“O’Gan Pentle,” she said. “I heard you were still at the Temple.”

“I was. I saw something. I came down, and everyone was fleeing or…or dead.” He looked at the knife in the Elder’s stomach. Her hand was clasped firmly around the hilt.

“Death is the only escape,” the Elder said.

“Elder Darshall, I don’t understand.”

The Elder shook her head, winced, and her hand made irregular patterns in the water as she shivered with pain. “I did this,” she said, looking down at the knife. “But I lack the courage to finish it. I pull the knife up, empty my guts, twist it and pierce my heart, and I’m beyond their reach. Forever free, lost to the Black, and all the Elders’ wraiths will combine to chant one another down. No way the Mages can reach us in the Black. No way they’ddare. ”

“We can fight,” O’Gan said.

Elder Darshall shook her head. Her hand went back to drawing shapes in the water. “There is no hope.”

O’Gan sat before her on the edge of the fountain. The stone was colder than usual, its heat long since sucked away by the twilight. “Isaw hope,” he said. “On the Temple, hope came to me and showed itself!”

The Elder looked up, and O’Gan was shocked to see a smile on her face. “You young Mystics,” she said. “You’re always so filled with optimism. You don’t appreciate how much the past steers the present. Every breath you take pushes your body in a certain direction; through choice, and experience, and the way that breath informs your heart and mind. The things it plants there. The things it takes away. And likewise, every event of the past makes the present what it is.”

“I don’t understand.” O’Gan looked at the knife, the Elder’s hand, her leaking blood. He wondered at her uncertainty. Was it simply pain causing her to hold back, or fear of the Black? Or was it something else? “You can’t deny hope at a time like this.”

“I know what hope brings!” the Elder hissed. She leaned forward at O’Gan as if to bite him, and crying out when the movement shifted the knife in her gut. She moved back and looked down again, and sat there motionless for a while, concentrating on the knife.

If she does it now, she truly knows no hope, O’Gan thought.

Elder Darshall looked up at him and smiled. “You’ve been sniffing the Janne, even now.”

“If you’re seeing inside me, then you know I speak the truth.”

“You’re thinking about madness, that’s all,” Elder Darshall whispered. “You’ve seen phantoms in the dark. Things…perhaps sent by the Mages to finish us off. Who knows what’s out there now? Who can understand?” Her eyes drifted past O’Gan and became fearful, darting here and there as though following a bat’s flight.

“I heard of Elders killing themselves,” he said. “I saw Elder Garia, dead by her own hand.”

The Elder Mystic nodded. “Garia always was a braver soul than me. And she always understood the truth.”

“What truth? None of us know the truth. It’s the thing we always seek!”

Elder Darshall’s stare was loaded with the wisdom of her years. O’Gan forgot about the knife and blood, and her hand stirring the waters of the fountain. For a moment the whole world was in her eyes. “The truth that we Elders kept for ourselves,” she said. “The truth of the Mages, and what they did to us. And what they will do again.” She started to cry. Her tears shocked O’Gan because they were born of sorrow, not pain.

“Elder…let me help you.” He reached forward to touch the knife but the Mystic pulled back, hissing and almost slipping into the fountain.

“Don’t touch me! O’Gan, don’t touch me. Freedom of will is everyone’s right, and I have mine even now. You have yours also, though I think this darkness is driving you mad. But I’ll tell you. I’ll help you to decide your course of action.”

“I’m going to fight!”

“No. You’re going to kill yourself and join your ancestors in the Black. And I’ll tell you why.

“O’Gan, even the Mystics have a beginning. Before the Cataclysmic War the Shantasi examined and explored magic through their minds. We viewed magic as a philosophy rather than a tool, a way of life rather than a way to make life our own. And then S’Hivez went too far. He was banished, and he and Angel met and fell in love and the rest is known to everyone, but only in detail to a few. And nobody knows everything that happened during the Cataclysmic War. It was a short war but it was fought right across Noreela. Its main battles were along the path of destruction from Lake Denyah and the Mages’ Monastery, north across Noreela to The Spine. But there were other battles, and many of them have faded from consciousness because most were won by the Mages. History is written by the victors and survivors. But sometimes history becomes a part of the land.”

Elder Darshall’s head nodded forward and her hand paused in the waters.

“Elder?” O’Gan asked, fearful that she had bled to death.

“I’m thinking,” she said. “Remembering. Memories can hurt, you know that, O’Gan? They can physically hurt. I can still feel the agony from the first time I was pricked by a wellburr seed.” She sighed.

“After the Cataclysmic War, history faded into itself. Time began again. Noreela picked itself up and dusted itself off, and much of it remained where the War had left it: on its knees, bereft of hope, societies shattered and its people growing apathetic and resigned. Magic was gone. Machines lay dead across the land, many of them taking their decayed cargo of people with them. The bones of the dead mingled with the cores of the machines, and history soon became something of dreams more than reality.

“You know the stories, O’Gan…

“It took over a hundred years for the new Mystics to arise in Hess. I was one of them. I was one of the first. I was born after the War, and my path led me here, my parents herding sheebok from village to village. Hess was a ruin then-from the War, and a battle that few talk about anymore-but there were some who wished the Mystics to rise again. They could see beyond the next bellyful of food and mouthful of water. They could see beyond the absence of the old magic. They were few, and they refused to be slaves to history as our people were slaves so long ago.

“So they took us children from our parents with the promise of wonders, nurtured us and planted Janne seeds that had been harvested from plants destroyed during the Cataclysmic War. And soon, when the first of the new Mystics were barely in their teens, the Janne urged us to look to the wellburr trees for answers to old questions: What had happened to the Mystics during the War? Why were they never seen or heard from again?

“So we went to the trees, gathered their falling seeds…and they bit us.” The Elder trailed off.

“Elder?”

Darshall grunted, nodded. Her hand still gripped the knife. O’Gan could feel the tension there, as though every heartbeat urged the Elder Mystic to finish what she had begun.

Tell me first, he thought. Tell me why the Elders refuse to see any hope.

Darshall nodded again, and continued. “The pain was beyond compare. We were Mystics without magic. You’ve heard of the witches that still work in the land, mainly in the north? Witches with no magic…false magicians, using potions and chemicala to dupe the ignorant or fool themselves. We were similar, except that our minds were lessened by magic’s loss. Those Mystics who came before us had magic to dwell upon, while we only had its absence. So instead of examining what magic meant we spent our time looking for signs of what itcould mean. We searched for clues to its reappearance, signs in the stars, the way water ran downhill, the shape of a sand dune after a storm in the Mol’Steria Desert. We sat on the Temple and talked long days into longer nights, many of us secretly harboring jealousy for those Mystics that existed before the Cataclysmic War. We wanted their minds, their thoughts, their lives. We wanted to be able to immerse ourselves in the magic they had access to, view it from inside and out. We wanted our days and nights to be filled with magic, not its ghost.

“And then the wellburr tree…

“It all happened in one night. There were perhaps a hundred Mystics then, and a dozen of us had been chosen to harvest the seeds of a wellburr tree. That wellburr tree, in fact…the one you were hiding beneath, watching to see whether I would live or die. So we came here and set about our work.

“This square was not here back then. This was almost two hundred years ago, a little more than a century since the Mages were driven from the land. Much of Hess was still a ruin. The rebuilding began, but here and there remained pockets of destruction, and this square was one of them. There was very little here, only an open area of rubble and crushed buildings. And the stake at its center.

“The stake is what I need to tell you about. It’s what we saw. We were all aware then that these pools of destruction around Hess-untouched since the War, the only things still standing the stakes of wellburr wood buried deep in the ground-marked the scenes of a terror beyond compare. But the truth of it had vanished into the past, melted away with those Shantasi who survived the razing of Hess as they eventually succumbed to age, or disease, or simply lost their desire to live.

“We avoided these places. All of us, not just the new Mystics. Weignored them. They stank of age and time gone off, and sometimes things came up out of the ground, sniffed at the air and went back down. We never knew what they were. Occasionally we watched, but we left them to themselves. They never came out, and we never went in, and over time even the wellburr stakes began to rot away.”

Elder Darshall drifted off again, her hand stirring the waters of the fountain as if searching for something beneath its moon-slicked surface.

“Elder Darshall? The wellburr seed?”

She nodded. “The wellburr seed. It showed us. It gave us a glimpse of history. And ever since then, we’ve been trying to forget.

“We all had the same vision. Not only the Mystics whose palms were pricked, but those who were back at the Temple as well, waiting patiently for our return. That has never happened again. It’s as if the Janne our ancestors brought out of Shanti mated with the wellburr trees, and their offspring was this one single vision. A warning? A prophecy? Perhaps both.

“That night, six Mystics threw themselves from the Temple and died on the streets below.

“I was standing close to the trunk over there, and when I felt a seed’s spines enter my palm, everything turned white. For a while it was complete shock. The pain was so deep and sudden that it did not register, and I had time to look around and see the other Mystics around me looking the same way: eyes wide, mouths agape, hands closed around the seeds and dripping blood. I saw their pale faces turn dark as our blood changed and flowed faster. And then the pain surged in, and the world lost all direction.

“The wellburr tree put us there, in that old Mystic’s place. It was showing us the history it had experienced, making us a part of that past so that we understood. That’s why I want you to kill yourself. It’s too terrible. Too awful. And it will all happen again.”

Elder Darshall’s hand stirred the water faster, forming bubbles that burst in the light of the death moon. The fountain pool had turned a dull yellow now that clouds covered the life moon, and the Elder’s skin had taken on a similar hue.

“The stake?” O’Gan said. He was impatient to hear the rest of the story, yet he knew that an Elder should not be rushed. Even with a knife in her gut, this two-hundred-year-old Mystic let time go by at its own pace. “Elder? The stake, the Mystic, the wellburr tree?”

“I want you to kill yourself,” she whispered. And she finished her story.

“HE WAS CAUGHT by two shades.

“His name was Delgon, and he was helping to organize the defenses on Hess’ western flank. They had been expecting the Mages to send a battalion of their Krote warriors across the Mol’Steria Desert to attack New Shanti, but instead the enemy used their stranglehold on magic to raise sand blights against Hess. The defenders believed they were being hit by a sand storm to begin with, and that’s why Hess fell so quickly. By the time they realized the truth, the sand blights were already taking down buildings and crushing the Shantasi defenses to a pulp.

“Delgon fought on, regrouping close to here with some Shantasi warriors and their own machines of war. But another cloud of sand blights came in across Sordon Sound, picking up water as they came, and by the time they arrived they were so sodden that being caught in the open was like being struck by blocks of rock. The blights would breeze in and strip people to the bone in seconds. Delgon retreated, and was caught not far from here. The shades had been waiting. Immune to the storms, they entered Delgon together and carved their way into his mind.

“He fell, screaming. He watched his warriors rush past him, leaving him for dead, and then a sand blight ambushed them and shredded them within seconds. And then it moved on, ignoring Delgon because he was doomed.

“His mind was penetrated and laid open. The shades made it their home, finding life and experience and an existence they had never known…because they were not right. Not only the echoes of souls as yet unborn, these were shades aborted by nature because they werewrong. The Mages, of course, had put them to their own use.

“I felt Delgon’s pain, and then time passed and he was in the center of an area of ruins. He was standing with his back against a stake of rough wellburr wood, arms wrenched from their sockets and shoulders dislocated so that his hands met behind the stake. They had been melted together by some blast of unimaginable heat. The flesh had flowed, and on cooling his hands had merged together, the bones fused. The pain from that…Delgon could barely scream. Any movement jarred his hands. His shoulders were on fire.

“He was hungry and thirsty, and he had soiled himself.

“He realized then that the battle had ended. Hess was a ruin around him. The sand blights had gone, leaving behind the remains of a city blasted with the bloody remnants of its previous inhabitants. The ruins were black with dried blood. The sky was clear, and Delgon realized that several days had passed.

“The shades had gone, but they had left something of their eternal damnation inside him.

“Most of all, when he closed his eyes and imagined the scent of the Janne blooms, he knew that magic had left the land.

“I felt Delgon’s terror, and more time passed. His skin was burnt and crisp from long exposure to the sun. His vision was obscured by a gray haze, and he knew that the sunlight was making him blind. The pain in his hands had eased, but his shoulders felt as though someone was keeping a fire alight in them. Each slight movement aggravated the flames. He had slumped to his knees, his chest was tight, his stomach was distended from dehydration and an intense hunger he had never experienced before.

“And then the screaming began. He had believed himself to be alone, but the first cry came from behind him, back toward the heart of the city, and he recognized the voice of another Elder. It was quite obviously mad. Other screams started up then, spreading back and forth across Hess like echoes looking for a home. Delgon added his own voice to the cacophony. It was as if they had all believed themselves to be alone, and now the only way they could communicate was to scream.

“The screaming went on until nightfall, and as the sun went down and dusk hid the worst of the destruction, Delgon wondered again why they had all been left here like this.

“An execution, O’Gan? Or an offering?”

“I have no idea,” O’Gan said. “Something bad.”

“Something bad,” Darshall said, nodding. “Delgon could not sleep. Tiredness swamped him, but the pain kept him awake, and the certainty that something terrible would stalk through the red-strewn streets to eat him. Magic had gone, and he would die.

“So he stayed awake for three more days, watching the sun rise and fall on the screamed agony of the sacrificial Mystics of Hess. It was not until dusk of the fourth day that he realized he was already dead.

“I felt the pain he went through: the pain of being dead. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and I never, ever want to feel it again. I can barely think about it now…hardly talk about it…but imagine: you feel yourself rotting. You smell the rank stench of your flesh growing bad, your blood hardening in your veins, your eyes being pecked from your skull by birds. You feel the teeth of sand rats as they gnaw at your stomach, opening you up so that they can get at the organs inside. You feel your heart being ripped out…and you feel it being eaten from a hundred steps away, the dozen tiny mouths of a sand rat litter shredding it and fighting over every morsel.

“Then you feel the action of their stomach acids, the pain of being broken down and shit out and lying in the sun to dry…

“Eventually the weight of his torso ruptured the already weakened shoulder sockets and Delgon fell onto his face in the rubble. This was three weeks after the end of the War. The sand rats were shunning him now because he was too far gone even for them. But he felt the pain of decay in every part of his body. His wraith was trapped within a rotting corpse, unable to move, still attached to the land with all his senses even though his eyes were gone.

“He suffered there for a long time. Eventually he came apart, and parts of him went underground. Suddenly possessed of movement, his hands crawled from the weakened elbow sockets and retreated down into the dark, his feet shifted themselves in opposite directions, and still he felt every wound to his body, every rip and tear of flesh, every bone prised from its socket…he felt them all, and his wraith started to wander this place looking for escape. Even if there had been someone to chant it down to the Black, the Mages’ magic had set it adrift and given it its own appalling doom.

“S’Hivez had exacted his own vengeance upon those Mystics who banished him from New Shanti.

“Delgon’s body rotted away, but parts of it remained mummified. They shift here and there, peering aboveground on occasion and showing themselves to anyone who happens to be looking. There was no helping Delgon and the others, so we ordered that these places be paved over and a fountain placed at their centers. Small tribute to such suffering. A paltry symbol.”

She looked up, waved her hand around, dripping water into the dust. “His wraith is here now, and he still suffers the agony of death, and perhaps he always will. And we became the Elder Mystics. We swore that we would keep such unbearable truths to ourselves.”

“WHY?” O’GAN ASKED. “Why not tell us? Why hide that part of history?”

“We needed Hess to live again. Who would have wanted to dwell in a city haunted by such things?”

“So you’re giving in? Every Elder is giving in just because-”

“Just because?”Elder Darshall shouted, and the effort clenched her stomach muscles and extended the wound. She winced but continued through the agony, perhaps ashamed at feeling pain from something so negligible. “You have no idea, O’Gan,” she said, shaking her head and at last lifting her hand from the water. She stared at it for a few seconds, perhaps expecting it to be coated in Delgon’s blood. “You cannot imagine the pain…the time…every second an eternity.” She drifted off, still staring at her hand, mumbling something that O’Gan could not make out.

“I won’t just roll over and die!” he said.

“Heed my wisdom! It’s the end of the Shantasi.” Elder Darshall’s gaze went to her hand once more. “Mystic Delgon, guide my hand.”

O’Gan moved, but he was already too late. Darshall clasped the knife with her other hand and ripped upward, slitting her stomach, leaning forward as she turned her hands and angled the blade to the side. He caught her as she fell, smelled her insides and felt the warmth of the steam rising from her spilled guts, and he saw the instant that life left her eyes.

“I hope you’ll be at rest,” he said. “But it’s not the end until every last one of us is dead.” He laid her along the stone sill of the fountain and knelt beside her, chanting her down into the Black, trying to keep his mind from her story but all the time desperate to believe that she could no longer hear his words, see his pale face, smell his fear.

He left the square and headed back into the heart of Hess. He looked for shifting shadows on the way, but anything watching from the darkness kept to itself.

O’GAN PENTLE HAD been a Mystic for more than fifty years, but he had no idea how to command an army. That was the job of the Elders, passing orders down from the Temple to the upper echelons of the Shantasi forces, commanding them here, there, back toward the sea and out into the edges of the Mol’Steria Desert. True, he had trained warriors in his time and sent them into the world, condemning them to lonely vigils for absent magic. He often wondered where his charges were and what they were doing. Mystic he may be, but he had never traveled beyond the boundaries of New Shanti. He had read much about Noreela City, the Cantrass Plains and Long Marrakash, but he had seen none of it. The warriors he trained were destined to see the world, while he, a Mystic committed to the good of New Shanti, was tied to his land.

He had trained warriors, but that did not mean he could command an army.

They can’t all be giving in, he thought. They can’t all be killingthemselves!

He hurried through the streets of Hess, hating every sign of the panic that had spread through the Mystic city. The streets here were mostly deserted now, many inhabitants having fled eastward toward where the sun should rise. Clothes lay trampled into the dust. A chair lay on its side beside an ornate iron door, and beyond the open door O’Gan could see the insides of a wealthy home, tables heavy with precious statuettes and floors carpeted with rugs woven by Cantrass Angels. Whoever had fled this place never expected to return.

He could barely believe what was happening. The city was retreating without any thought of protecting itself, listening without question to the mad mutterings of the Elder Mystics and panicking at the sight of their public suicides. And why not? They were held in such high esteem, and if they viewed death as the only escape, what hope could anyone else raise against this catastrophe?

O’Gan craved news from the north. Poor A’Meer, perhaps she had been making her way back to Hess with news of magic reborn and recaptured by the Mages. And if that was the case, then other Shantasi warriors could be making that same journey even now, crossing the dangerous Mol’Steria Desert or sailing across Sordon Sound, to find Hess abandoned, its populace running like sand rats from the jaws of a desert foxlion.

“We’re not cowards!” O’Gan said. A man and woman huddled beneath a small lean-to darted away, startled from their hiding place. The man looked back at O’Gan, recognizing the garb but fearful of the barely contained rage in this Mystic’s voice. “We need to stand and fight!” The man put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and hurried her on. “You!” O’Gan shouted.

The woman stopped and shrugged the man’s arm from her shoulder. She turned, and O’Gan saw the cool determination in her eyes. “The Elders are killing themselves,” the woman said. “Mystic, I have respect for you, but I also respect their message. There is no hope for the Shantasi against the Mages, they say. How can we believe any different? It’s a new New Shanti today.” The woman lowered her head in brief deference to Mystic O’Gan and then hurried away with her husband.

“It is,” he said. “A new New Shanti.” He sat on a bench beside a tall hedge and rested his head in his hands. He needed food and water, but there were enough homes left open for that, and he would feel no guilt at the theft. He would need weapons too. His own roll of weapons was back at the Temple, but he would be able to find what he needed here at the edge of Hess.

He wished he could ask the advice of an Elder, but he already had their story. They were dying into history, hurried there by their own fearful hands. O’Gan, the dusk, the fight to come-that was the present.

Every moment wasted was one step closer to defeat.

O’Gan stood to prepare himself for the journey westward. There, he hoped, he would find enough of a Shantasi army to command.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn